The autumn of 1191 found England teetering on a knife’s edge. King Richard I, the Lionheart, was thousands of miles away, his formidable energies consumed by the Third Crusade in the Holy Land. In his absence, the kingdom he had left behind was fracturing. It had become a volatile arena for the ambitions of two powerful men: the King’s younger brother, the landless and covetous Prince John, and the royally appointed Chancellor and Justiciar, William Longchamp, Bishop of Ely. Their struggle for control threatened to plunge the realm into civil war.
At the heart of this storm, presiding over one of the most strategically vital fortresses in the country, stood a figure of astonishing resolve: a noblewoman in her late fifties named Nicola de la Haye. As the hereditary castellan of Lincoln Castle, she was its commander. When Longchamp’s army appeared before Lincoln’s formidable Roman and Norman walls, he expected a swift surrender from a castellan whose husband was away from the city. He had profoundly misjudged his opponent. For Nicola de la Haye, a woman bound by oath, inheritance, and an unyielding sense of duty, there was no room for hesitation and no alternative to resistance. The fate of the castle, the balance of power in the kingdom, and her family’s very survival would be decided within its walls.
The Inheritance of a Constable
To understand Nicola’s extraordinary stand in 1191, we must first look to her lineage and the source of her authority. She was no mere chatelaine, holding the castle in a temporary, domestic capacity for an absent husband. The constableship of Lincoln Castle was her birthright.
The de la Haye family was of Norman stock, arriving in England in the orbit of the Conqueror. They established themselves in the Cotentin Peninsula in Normandy and were granted significant lands in Lincolnshire following the Conquest of 1066. The Domesday Book of 1086, that unparalleled survey of the conquered kingdom, reveals a Lincolnshire landscape dominated by powerful new lords. While the nearby manor of Brattleby, the focus of our heritage, rested securely in the hands of the Bishop of Lincoln, the lands surrounding it were a patchwork of fiefs held by the great magnates of the new order. The de la Hayes were prominent among them.
Nicola’s father, Richard de la Haye, was a major baron who had astutely navigated the turbulent civil war known as the Anarchy (1135-1154) between King Stephen and the Empress Matilda. By supporting Stephen and then prudently making his peace with Matilda’s son, the future Henry II, Richard cemented his family’s position. He served as the constable of Lincoln Castle, a role confirmed by both Stephen and Henry. This was a position of immense military and administrative significance. Lincoln was the key to controlling the north-east Midlands; its castle, established by William the Conqueror himself in 1068 atop a commanding hill, dominated the ancient Roman city and the vital trade routes of the Ermine Street and Fosse Way.
Richard de la Haye had no male heir. His inheritance, including the constableship, was divided between his three daughters. Nicola, the eldest, inherited the most prestigious portion: the barony and, crucially, the hereditary command of Lincoln Castle and its associated bailiwick. Around 1170, she married Gerard de Canville, a nobleman with his own respectable holdings. Crucially, the marriage contract ensured that Nicola’s rights were recognised. Gerard became constable, but it was jure uxoris – ‘by right of his wife’. The authority ultimately flowed from her. This legal and social reality set Nicola apart from many of her aristocratic contemporaries. She was not simply the wife of a powerful man; she was the source of his most significant power.
A Kingdom in Chaos: The Anarchy of 1191
The crisis of 1191 was a direct consequence of Richard the Lionheart’s character. A brilliant soldier but an absentee king, he viewed England primarily as a treasury to fund his crusading ambitions. Before departing in 1190, he established a council of regency to govern in his absence, with William Longchamp at its head as Chief Justiciar and Chancellor.
Longchamp was a man of humble origins from Normandy, fiercely loyal to Richard but arrogant, tactless, and politically tone-deaf. He flaunted his power, travelling with a vast retinue and treating the established Anglo-Norman aristocracy with contempt. The chronicler Richard of Devizes noted acidly that Longchamp “had two masters and served both, the pope and the king,” having also been appointed papal legate, a concentration of secular and ecclesiastical power that made the barons deeply uneasy.
Opposing him was Prince John. Depicted by many chroniclers as treacherous and opportunistic, John felt he had been short-changed by his brother. Richard had named their young nephew, Arthur of Brittany, as his official heir and had forbidden John from even entering England for three years (a command he immediately ignored). John began to present himself as the protector of English liberties against Longchamp’s foreign tyranny, gathering disgruntled barons to his side.
The flashpoint came in the autumn of 1191. Gerard de Canville, Nicola’s husband, had associated himself with Prince John’s faction. For Longchamp, this was an intolerable act of defiance from the constable of a key royal castle. Furthermore, Canville had allegedly engaged in banditry and disseised (illegally dispossessed) a rival of his lands. Using this as a pretext, Longchamp declared Canville a traitor, stripped him of his office of sheriff of Lincolnshire, and marched on Lincoln with a royal army to seize the castle. He intended to install a castellan of his own choosing and make an example of the Canville-de la Haye family.
When Longchamp’s forces arrived, Gerard de Canville was not in Lincoln. It fell to Nicola, now a woman of considerable age by medieval standards, to command the defence. Longchamp likely anticipated an easy victory, believing a woman-led garrison would quickly capitulate. He sent messengers demanding she surrender the keys. Nicola’s response was unequivocal. She declared that she held the castle not from her husband, but as her rightful inheritance from the king, and that she would not yield it to anyone but the king or his appointed heir. Roger of Howden, a contemporary and well-informed chronicler, records that she met the Chancellor’s demands in person, asserting her hereditary right and her loyalty to Richard. She would hold the castle, she insisted, until she saw the king or received his direct command. It was an act of profound courage, legally grounded and politically defiant.
The siege began. While details of the fighting are sparse, the strategic situation was electric. As Longchamp’s men invested the castle, word reached Prince John in Marlborough. Here was the opportunity he craved. Posing as the defender of a noblewoman’s rights against an overreaching minister, John raised his own army and marched north with startling speed. He seized the royal castles of Nottingham and Tickhill, presenting Longchamp with a checkmate. Suddenly, the Chancellor was caught between Nicola’s unyielding defence at Lincoln and John’s advancing army to his south. Faced with the prospect of being trapped and fighting a civil war he could not win, Longchamp backed down. He lifted the siege of Lincoln and agreed to a truce, which was brokered at Winchester in late September.
Nicola de la Haye had held firm for approximately one month. Her defiance had not only saved her family’s inheritance but had also served as the catalyst for Longchamp’s downfall. Emboldened by John’s success, the other great barons convened a council at Loddon Bridge near London, put Longchamp on trial in absentia, and stripped him of his offices. He was forced to flee the kingdom in disguise, an ignominious end to his regency. Nicola’s stand at Lincoln had, in no small part, redrawn the political map of England.
The Long Game: King John and Magna Carta
Nicola’s relationship with the Plantagenets remained complex and fraught with peril. When Richard returned from crusade and captivity in 1194, he was furious at John’s attempts to usurp his authority. Gerard de Canville, as one of John’s allies, came under suspicion. Canville was accused of treason for having sided with John and for having harboured thieves. He and Nicola were forced to pay an astronomical fine of 3,100 marks silver to buy back the King’s favour and, critically, to have their right to the constableship and the shrievalty of Lincolnshire reconfirmed. It was a classic Plantagenet move: punishing disloyalty with crippling financial penalties while ultimately recognising the strategic necessity of keeping powerful families in place.
When John became king in 1199, Nicola and her family remained central to the governance of Lincolnshire. John, for all his faults, recognised talent and loyalty when it served him. He knew from the events of 1191 that Nicola de la Haye was a castellan of formidable resolve. As his reign descended into tyranny and conflict with his barons, that loyalty would be tested to its limits.
The crisis culminated in 1215 with the sealing of Magna Carta at Runnymede. The charter was an attempt by the barons to place legal constraints on a king they viewed as arbitrary and extortionate. Many of the great families of Lincolnshire were involved in the rebellion. However, Nicola de la Haye and her son, Richard de Canville (Gerard having died around 1214), remained steadfastly loyal to the king. In 1216, as the situation deteriorated into the First Barons’ War and the rebel barons invited Prince Louis of France to take the English throne, King John made a remarkable appointment. In a move that demonstrated his absolute trust in her, he formally appointed Nicola de la Haye as Sheriff of Lincolnshire. For a woman to hold this powerful county-level office, responsible for collecting taxes, administering justice, and commanding the shire’s military levy, was almost unheard of. It was the ultimate vindication of a lifetime of service and strength.
John’s death in October 1216, at Newark Castle just south of Lincoln, did not end the war. The crown passed to his nine-year-old son, Henry III. England was now divided between loyalists fighting for a child-king and rebels allied with a foreign invader. Once again, Lincoln Castle, held by the now-septuagenarian Nicola de la Haye, would become the epicentre of the conflict.
"The Bravest of Women": The Battle of Lincoln, 1217
By the spring of 1217, the military situation for the royalists was dire. Prince Louis and his rebel allies controlled London and much of eastern England. A large Franco-rebel army under the command of the Comte du Perche and Robert fitz Walter marched on Lincoln. They quickly captured the city, but the castle—the strategic prize—held out. Inside, in command of the garrison, was Nicola de la Haye.
The besiegers threw their full weight against the fortress. They set up powerful siege engines, including trebuchets, which hurled massive stones against the curtain walls day and night. The garrison was small, and the pressure was immense. The anonymous chronicler of Bethune described Nicola as “a noble lady… who conducted herself with such bravery.” Yet, as the pounding continued and supplies dwindled, the situation grew desperate. Nicola knew she could not hold out forever. She managed to get a messenger through the enemy lines to the regent of the kingdom, the legendary William Marshal, 1st Earl of Pembroke, who was gathering a loyalist army at Newark.
The message galvanized the seventy-year-old Marshal. He knew that if Lincoln fell, the war was likely lost. On 20th May 1217, Marshal’s relief force arrived at the outskirts of Lincoln. What followed was one of the most decisive and unusual battles in English history. Marshal devised a brilliant tactical plan. He divided his forces, sending a contingent under his most ruthless commander, Falkes de Bréauté, to enter the castle through a long-disused postern gate on the western side. This was only possible because Nicola and her garrison still held the fortress.
While Marshal’s main army feigned an attack on the city’s northern gate, drawing the attention of the French and rebel commanders, Falkes’s men slipped into the castle. Once inside, they threw open a gate on the city-facing side of the castle and charged out, crossbows firing, into the rear of the besieging army. Simultaneously, Marshal’s main force broke through the North Gate and stormed into the narrow, winding streets of the upper city.
Caught completely by surprise between two converging royalist forces, the rebel army was crushed. The Comte du Perche was killed in the fighting near the cathedral, and the rebel leaders were captured almost to a man. The battle, which had swept through the city’s streets, turned into a rout and then a frenzy of looting, an event the chroniclers wryly dubbed the "Lincoln Fair."
The victory was total. Prince Louis’s cause in England was broken, and the future of the Plantagenet dynasty was secured. At the heart of this triumph was Nicola de la Haye. Her steadfast, month-long defence of the castle against overwhelming odds gave William Marshal the time and the opportunity to achieve his masterstroke. The History of William Marshal, a contemporary poetic biography, pays her tribute, noting she was a “lady, brave and of a great age” who had held her post with honour. She had faced invasion, held a castle, and saved a kingdom in chaos.
The Legacy of a Lincoln Dame
In the aftermath of the battle, Nicola de la Haye briefly shared the shrievalty with the Earl of Salisbury but was soon confirmed as sole sheriff and continued to serve as castellan. She remained a figure of immense authority in Lincolnshire, presiding over the shire court and administering the king’s peace. She finally retired from her public duties around 1226, passing the constableship to her son, and died peacefully around 1230. She was likely buried at the priory of Swineshead, which her family had patronised.
Nicola’s life story is a powerful corrective to the notion that medieval women were merely passive players in a world run by men. Through a combination of fortunate inheritance, legal reality, and formidable personal character, she exercised direct military and administrative power at the highest level. She defied a powerful chancellor, navigated the treacherous politics of King John’s court, and twice held the most important castle in her region against besieging armies, once as a middle-aged woman and once as a septuagenarian.
For the tenants of the Barony of Brattleby, living and working their fields just a few miles north of Lincoln, Nicola de la Haye was not an abstract figure of history. She was the great dame of the shire, whose actions at the castle on the hill directly shaped their world. The sounds of the siege of 1217 would have been audible on a clear day, a terrifying reminder of the great drama unfolding on their doorstep. Nicola’s story is woven into the very fabric of Lincolnshire’s history, a testament to the fact that in a moment of supreme crisis, loyalty, duty, and courage are not virtues exclusive to any gender. Her legacy is etched into the stones of Lincoln Castle, a permanent memorial to the woman who held it for her king and her kingdom.
Sources & Further Reading
Primary Sources: Domesday Book: A Complete Translation. (Penguin, 2003). For the 1086 landscape of Lincolnshire, including Brattleby (Bratelbi). Howden, Roger of. Gesta Regis Henrici Secundi et Gesta Regis Ricardi (Rolls Series, 1867) and Chronica (Rolls Series, 1868-71). A key contemporary source for the events of 1191. Devizes, Richard of. Chronicon de Tempore Regis Ricardi Primi. Edited by J.T. Appleby (Nelson, 1963). Provides a vivid, if hostile, account of William Longchamp. The History of William Marshal (L’Histoire de Guillaume le Maréchal). Edited by A.J. Holden, translated by S. Gregory (Anglo-Norman Text Society, 2002-2007). Contains the account of the Battle of Lincoln and praises Nicola’s role. Patent Rolls of the Reign of Henry III Preserved in the Public Record Office* (HMSO, 1901-). Contains records of Nicola’s appointments and retirement.
Secondary Sources: Carpenter, David. The Minority of Henry III. (University of California Press, 1990). The definitive modern account of the First Barons' War and the Battle of Lincoln. Connolly, Sharon Bennett. Heroines of the Medieval World. (Amberley Publishing, 2017). Includes a chapter dedicated to Nicola de la Haye. Hill, J. W. F. Medieval Lincoln. (Cambridge University Press, 1948). A classic and comprehensive study of the city and its role in national events. Morris, Marc. King John: Treachery and Tyranny in Medieval England. (Hutchinson, 2015). Provides excellent context for the political climate of John’s reign. Wilkinson, Louise J. Nicola de la Haye and the Lordship of Lincoln. (Society for Lincolnshire History and Archaeology, 2007). The only full-length scholarly biography of Nicola, and an essential resource. The Victoria History of the County of Lincoln, Vol. II. Edited by William Page (1906). Provides background on the religious houses and administrative history of the county.