In the annals of English history, a castle is rarely just a pile of stones. It is an argument made manifest, a declaration of intent etched into the landscape. No fortress demonstrates this more profoundly than Lincoln Castle. Perched atop its steep hill, dominating the ancient Roman city and the vast, wealthy plains of Lincolnshire, the castle was never merely a defensive structure. It was the physical embodiment of power, a mechanism for regional domination. To understand its story in the Plantagenet era, particularly around the pivotal year of 1200, is to understand that true control is not about walls, but about access and blockage. It is about who holds the keys, who is granted entry, and, crucially, who is locked out—or locked in. For the lords, knights, and humble tenants of surrounding manors, from the great estates of the Gant family to the smaller holdings of the Barony of Brattleby, the question of who commanded the castle garrison was a matter of immediate and existential importance.
The Norman Imprint: A Foundation of Control
To grasp the castle’s significance under the Plantagenets, one must first look to its Norman origins. When William the Conqueror marched north in 1068 to suppress the volatile rebellions that threatened his new-won crown, his strategy was one of overwhelming force and permanent occupation. He chose his castle sites with a predator’s eye for strategic advantage. Lincoln was a prize of the highest order. It stood at the crossroads of two of Roman Britain’s most important highways: Ermine Street, the great north-south artery, and the Fosse Way, which connected it to the south-west. Furthermore, the city commanded the Fossdyke Canal, a Roman waterway connecting the River Trent to the River Witham, giving it control over the vital trade routes that brought the region’s wool and grain to the wider world.
The construction of Lincoln Castle was a brutal act of political theatre. The Domesday Book, compiled just eighteen years later in 1086, records with chilling administrative precision that “166 dwellings were destroyed on account of the castle.” This was not incidental damage; it was a deliberate clearing of the pre-existing Anglo-Scandinavian urban landscape to make way for a symbol of the new order. The castle, along with the new Norman cathedral rising alongside it, physically and psychologically dominated the city below. William placed its command in the hands of one of his trusted followers, Thorold of Lincoln. The office of constable, or castellan, was thus established not merely as a military governor but as the king’s primary agent of coercion and administration in one of England's largest and most prosperous shires. For the local populace, the castle was a constant and intimidating reminder of their subjugation.
The Anarchy: A Trial by Fire
The castle’s strategic value was proven beyond all doubt during the civil war known as the Anarchy (1135-1153), a devastating conflict between King Stephen and his cousin, the Empress Matilda. The struggle for the English throne was, in large part, a struggle for control of the nation’s key castles, and Lincoln was at the epicentre.
By this time, the constableship of Lincoln had become a quasi-hereditary position, held by one of the most powerful magnate families in the country. The central figures were two ambitious half-brothers: Ranulf de Gernon, the 4th Earl of Chester, and William de Roumare, a claimant to the Earldom of Lincoln. In 1140, they felt their local dominance was being challenged by King Stephen’s stationing of a rival knight and his family within the castle. In a cunning move that perfectly illustrates the brief’s maxim of “who gets in,” Ranulf and William exploited social convention. As the chronicler Orderic Vitalis recounts, the Countess of Chester and her sister-in-law paid a seemingly innocent social call on the wife of the castle’s captain. While the women were engaged in conversation, Earl Ranulf, who had supposedly been waiting outside unarmed, burst in with three knights and seized the fortress from within.
Stephen, enraged by this affront to his authority, marched north and laid siege to his own castle. This precipitated the First Battle of Lincoln on 2 February 1141. The Empress’s forces, led by her illegitimate half-brother Robert, Earl of Gloucester, arrived to relieve the siege. In the brutal fighting that followed on the plain west of the city, Stephen’s army was overwhelmed. The king himself, fighting valiantly on foot after his horse was killed, was captured. The battle demonstrated a stark truth: control of Lincoln Castle could lead directly to the capture of a king and threaten the stability of the entire realm. For the next decade, Lincolnshire became a warzone as Stephen and Matilda’s factions fought for supremacy, with the castle as the ultimate prize.
The Age of John and a Castellan Named Nicholaa
This legacy of high-stakes conflict hung over Lincoln Castle as the Plantagenet dynasty cemented its rule. When King John ascended the throne in 1199, he inherited a kingdom, but also a network of immensely powerful and jealously independent barons. John, a ruler of considerable administrative talent but cursed with a deeply suspicious and tyrannical nature, was obsessed with controlling his castellans. He understood that a fortress like Lincoln, in the hands of a disloyal magnate, was a dagger pointed at the heart of his authority.
By 1200, the keys to Lincoln castle were held by one of the most remarkable women of the medieval period: Nicholaa de la Haye. Nicholaa was born into the heart of Lincolnshire’s elite. Her father, Richard de la Haye, had inherited the hereditary constableship of Lincoln and the extensive family lands, including the Barony of Brattleby, through his mother, Lucy of Bolingbroke, the same matriarch whose lineage connected the Earls of Chester and Lincoln. Upon her father’s death, Nicholaa became a great heiress, and through her marriage to Gerard de Canville, her husband became constable of Lincoln Castle and lord of its associated baronies jure uxoris (by right of his wife).
Their relationship with the crown was perpetually fraught. During Richard I’s absence on the Third Crusade, Canville had sided with Prince John in his rebellion against the king’s chancellor, William Longchamp. For this, Longchamp excommunicated Canville and besieged Lincoln in 1191, a siege that Nicholaa herself heroically withstood until relief arrived. When John became king, he did not forget their support, but neither did he fully trust them. The Pipe Rolls—the annual financial records of the Exchequer—show Canville and Nicholaa being subjected to immense financial pressure. John demanded huge sums for royal favour, for the inheritance of their lands, and for the confirmation of their offices. In 1205, upon Gerard’s death, Nicholaa had to pay a staggering fine of 3,000 marks to the king simply to retain her own inheritance and her right to remain a widow.
For John, this was standard practice. He used debt as a political leash, ensuring his powerful subjects were too financially encumbered to contemplate rebellion. For Nicholaa, it was the price of power. She held Lincoln Castle not as a passive inheritor, but as an active, politically astute governor who navigated the treacherous currents of John’s court. She was responsible for the castle’s maintenance, the payment of its garrison, and its judicial functions as the seat of the county sheriff—an office she would also eventually hold. The castle was the administrative and military hub for the entire shire. Writs were issued from its gates, taxes were collected under its shadow, and justice—or the king’s version of it—was dispensed within its walls. The lord of a manor like Brattleby would have paid his dues not to a distant king, but to the agents of the powerful castellan at Lincoln, whose authority was felt daily.
The Crucible of Magna Carta and Civil War
John’s reign culminated in the crisis of 1215. His disastrous military campaigns in France, which lost him Normandy and the ancestral lands of the Plantagenet empire, coupled with his relentless and arbitrary financial demands, united a powerful faction of barons against him. Many of the leading voices of the rebellion were northern barons, with a significant contingent from Lincolnshire, including Gilbert de Gant, who was made Earl of Lincoln by the rebels’ French ally, Prince Louis.
Forced to negotiate, John met the barons at Runnymede and sealed Magna Carta. The charter was, at its core, an attempt to place limits on the king's arbitrary power, much of which was exercised through his control of the justice system and his castles. Clause 50, for example, explicitly demanded the removal of the relatives of Gerard d’Athée, one of John’s hated foreign mercenaries, from their bailiwicks, including their command of castles.
While the charter did not name Nicholaa de la Haye, the principle was clear: the barons wanted key fortresses out of the hands of the king’s unconditional loyalists. Nicholaa, despite the financial pressure John had placed upon her, remained steadfastly loyal to the crown. When the peace treaty of Magna Carta collapsed within weeks and the country plunged into the First Barons’ War, Lincoln Castle became a crucial royalist bastion in a sea of rebellion. It was a point of blockage, projecting the king’s authority, collecting revenues, and denying the rich resources of Lincolnshire to the rebel cause. John himself visited Lincoln in his final, desperate campaign in 1216. From there he marched on his ill-fated crossing of The Wash, where he lost his baggage train and treasure. Days later, he died of dysentery at Newark Castle, leaving his nine-year-old son, Henry III, as king and England on the brink of collapse.
The Fair of Lincoln: The Battle That Saved a Kingdom
The royalist cause seemed hopeless. Prince Louis of France controlled London and most of south-eastern England, supported by a majority of the English barons. The fate of the Plantagenet dynasty rested in the hands of a small group of loyalists led by the venerable William Marshal, Earl of Pembroke, who was appointed Regent for the young Henry III. In the spring of 1217, the final reckoning came, and once again, it came at Lincoln.
A large French and rebel army, under the command of the Comte du Perche and the rebel Earl of Lincoln, Gilbert de Gant, laid siege to the city. The lower city fell quickly, but the castle, held by the now sexagenarian Nicholaa de la Haye, refused to yield. The chronicler Roger of Wendover paints a vivid picture of Nicholaa, “a woman of the most determined spirit,” personally directing the defence and refusing all calls to surrender. She was the immovable object, the ultimate gatekeeper, embodying the principle of “who never leaves.”
Recognising that the loss of Lincoln would likely mean the end of the war, William Marshal mustered a relief army at Newark. In a brilliant strategic move on 20 May 1217, he divided his forces. While a diversionary attack was launched against the Newport Arch on the northern side of the city walls, the main force, led by Marshal’s deputy, Peter des Roches, the Bishop of Winchester, found a gate on the north-west that had been blocked up long before and was only lightly guarded. They broke through, gaining access to the city and the castle precincts.
What followed was the Second Battle of Lincoln, known derisively by the victorious royalists as the “Fair of Lincoln” because of the ease with which they looted the city afterwards. The battle was a chaotic, brutal affair fought in the narrow, steep streets between the castle and the cathedral. The royalist crossbowmen, firing from the castle walls, wreaked havoc on the French knights below. The decisive moment came when the Comte du Perche, fighting without his helmet, was killed by a spear thrust through his eye slit. With their commander dead, the French and rebel forces panicked. Trapped against the city walls, their retreat was cut off. Many were captured, including almost all the rebel barons. Prince Louis’s English campaign was broken. The battle, and Nicholaa de la Haye’s heroic defence of the castle that precipitated it, secured the throne for Henry III and saved the Plantagenet dynasty.
The Long Shadow of Power
In the immediate aftermath of the victory, in a move that demonstrates the cold pragmatism of politics, William Marshal temporarily removed Nicholaa from the constableship, placing the Earl of Salisbury in command. The strategic importance of the castle was too great to be left in anyone’s hands without the Regent having his own man on site. However, Nicholaa’s loyalty and competence were undeniable. Within a month, she was not only restored to her position but was also appointed Sheriff of Lincolnshire, an extraordinary achievement for a woman of her time. She continued to manage her family estates, including Brattleby, and fulfilled her duties at the castle until she finally retired in 1226, dying a few years later in her seventies.
In the more stable reign of Henry III and his son Edward I, Lincoln Castle transitioned from a focal point of civil war to an established centre of royal administration. Its military role diminished, but its function as an instrument of control evolved. It became the permanent home of the county gaol, its walls a symbol not of military siege but of judicial incarceration. For the unfortunate, it truly became a place where you entered but might never leave. The great hall hosted the county and assize courts, where the king’s justice was dispensed, reinforcing the crown’s authority over the region.
The story of Lincoln Castle during the Plantagenet era is a powerful testament to the nature of medieval power. It confirms that a fortress is far more than its architecture. It is a tool of access and denial, the lock and key for an entire region’s political, economic, and military life. From the bloody imposition of Norman rule to the desperate struggles of the Anarchy and the climactic "Fair of Lincoln" that saved a dynasty, the castle was the stage upon which the fate of the kingdom was repeatedly decided. The chronicle of its castellans, most notably the indomitable Nicholaa de la Haye, is a story of ambition, loyalty, and survival, reminding us that the control of such a place was a constant, dangerous, and all-consuming contest for the very keys to the kingdom.
Sources & Further Reading
Primary Sources:
Domesday Book: A Complete Translation. (London: Penguin, 2003). The entry for Lincoln (LIN C2) details the 166 messuages destroyed for the castle. Orderic Vitalis, The Ecclesiastical History of Orderic Vitalis, ed. and trans. Marjorie Chibnall, 6 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1969-80). Volume VI details the capture of the castle in 1140-41. Roger of Wendover, Flowers of History, trans. J. A. Giles (London: Henry G. Bohn, 1849). Provides a near-contemporary, though often embellished, account of the events of John’s reign and the Battle of Lincoln in 1217. Magna Carta (1215). The British Library holds original manuscripts and provides extensive commentary. The Pipe Rolls*. These annual financial records of the English Exchequer are an essential source for tracking the finances and relationship between the crown and magnates like the Canville-de la Haye family. Published by the Pipe Roll Society.
Secondary Sources:
Carpenter, David. The Minority of Henry III. (London: Methuen, 1990). The authoritative account of the period 1216-1227 and the Battle of Lincoln. Carpenter, David. The Struggle for Mastery: Britain 1066-1284. (London: Penguin, 2004). Provides excellent context for the entire period. Hill, J. W. F. Medieval Lincoln. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1948). The classic and still indispensable history of the city and its institutions. Holt, J. C. Magna Carta. 3rd Edition. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015). The seminal work on the Great Charter and its political context. Morris, Marc. The Norman Conquest. (London: Windmill Books, 2013). An excellent narrative of the conquest and the castle-building programme. Victoria County History: A History of the County of Lincoln, Volume II, ed. William Page (London, 1906). Contains detailed histories of the county's religious houses and political history. Wilkinson, Louise J. Nicholaa de la Haye and the Siege of Lincoln*. (Lincoln: Lincoln Cathedral Publications, 1997; revised for the Lincoln Castle Magna Carta Vault, 2015). The key biographical work on Nicholaa and a superb, accessible summary of the 1217 siege and battle.