In the late spring of 1217, the future of England hung by the slenderest of threads. The kingdom was fractured by a brutal civil war, its capital and south-east occupied by a foreign army, and its throne held by a nine-year-old boy. The great project of the Norman and Angevin kings, the powerful, cross-Channel empire forged over 150 years, was on the verge of dissolution. The very concept of an independent English crown was at stake. The rebel barons, in their desperation to be rid of the tyrannical King John, had offered the throne to Prince Louis of France, who now controlled nearly half the country. The regime change seemed not just possible, but inevitable.
Yet, on a single day, Saturday, 20 May 1217, in the narrow, steep streets of Lincoln, this seemingly inevitable future was violently overturned. The event, known to contemporaries with grim irony as the ‘Lincoln Fair’, was not merely a battle; it was the critical turning point of the First Barons’ War. It was a clash that would secure the Plantagenet dynasty, expel a foreign invader, and, most consequentially for the centuries to come, rescue the core principles of Magna Carta from the ash heap of a failed rebellion, cementing them instead as the foundation of English governance. This is the story of how a veteran knight, a formidable lady castellan, and a ruthless mercenary captain saved a kingdom in the heart of Lincolnshire.
A Kingdom Divided: The Road to Civil War
The roots of the 1217 conflict lay in the disastrous reign of King John (1199-1216). His litany of failures was unprecedented. The loss of Normandy and most of his family’s continental empire by 1204 was a catastrophic blow to baronial wealth and prestige, and a personal humiliation for the king. His subsequent quarrel with Pope Innocent III led to a six-year interdict, during which England’s churches were closed and its spiritual life suspended. To fund his futile attempts to reclaim his French lands, John subjected his barons to a relentless and arbitrary campaign of financial extortion, using feudal rights not as a system of governance but as a tool for punishment and profit.
By 1215, the magnates of England, particularly a powerful faction from the north, had been pushed to breaking point. Their rebellion culminated in the tense meeting at Runnymede in June 1215 and the sealing of Magna Carta. The ‘Great Charter’ was not a declaration of universal human rights, but a deeply feudal document designed to put a legal check on an over-mighty king, demanding he abide by the established customs of the realm. It sought to regulate scutage (a form of military tax), protect inheritance rights, and guarantee that no free man could be imprisoned or dispossessed ‘except by the lawful judgment of his peers or by the law of the land’.
John had no intention of honouring it. He viewed the Charter as a humiliation extracted under duress and swiftly had it annulled by his new ally, the Pope. By the autumn of 1215, England had descended into full-blown civil war: the First Barons’ War. The rebel barons, led by figures like Robert Fitzwalter, who styled himself ‘Marshal of the Army of God’, faced a king who was a skilled, if brutal, military commander. Finding themselves outmatched, they took the fateful step of inviting a foreign prince to claim the throne. Their choice was Prince Louis, eldest son of King Philip II of France. He had a tenuous claim to the English throne through his wife, Blanche of Castile, a granddaughter of Henry II.
In May 1216, Louis landed in Kent with a formidable army and met little resistance. He was welcomed in London and quickly gained control of the south-east. For a time, it seemed John’s reign was over. And then, in October 1216, the political landscape was irrevocably altered. While campaigning in East Anglia, John contracted dysentery after infamously losing his baggage train—including the crown jewels—in the tidal estuary of The Wash. He died at Newark Castle on the night of 18 October, leaving his nine-year-old son, Henry, as his heir.
John’s death was a masterstroke of fortune for the royalist cause. The object of the barons’ hatred was gone. The rebellion was no longer a struggle against a living tyrant, but a war against an innocent child. This was a crucial shift in allegiance and propaganda. A small group of loyalist magnates acted swiftly. Just ten days after John’s death, they crowned the young Henry III at Gloucester Cathedral. Crucially, they formed a regency council under the leadership of one of the most respected men in Christendom: William Marshal, the 1st Earl of Pembroke. Now over 70 years old, Marshal was the epitome of the chivalric knight, renowned for his loyalty and prowess. He was supported by the astute papal legate, Cardinal Guala Bicchieri, who could wield the spiritual authority of the Papacy, and Peter des Roches, the Bishop of Winchester. Their first and most brilliant act was to re-issue Magna Carta in the king’s name, stripping it of its most radical clauses but retaining its core principles. The message was clear: the new regime would abide by the rule of law. The war was no longer about liberty versus tyranny; it was about loyalty to a native-born boy king against a French invader.
Lincolnshire: The Strategic Heart of the Conflict
By early 1217, the war had reached a stalemate. The rebels and their French allies held London and the south-east, while the royalists controlled the Midlands and the south-west. Lincolnshire, a county of immense strategic and economic value, became the decisive theatre. Its wealth derived from its rich agricultural land and, above all, the wool trade that flowed through its ports, particularly Boston. Control of Lincolnshire meant control of a significant portion of the kingdom’s financial resources.
At the heart of the county stood the formidable Lincoln Castle. Perched atop the steep limestone escarpment, it dominated the city and the surrounding flatlands. Originally built by William the Conqueror in 1068, it was a key royal fortress. Throughout the war, while the city of Lincoln below wavered in its allegiance, the castle remained a bastion of royalist power, thanks almost entirely to its hereditary castellan, a woman of extraordinary resilience: Nicola de la Haye.
Nicola was no stranger to warfare. She had inherited the office of castellan from her father and had successfully defended the castle for King John against a rebel siege in 1191. Now in her sixties, she once again found herself holding the fortress for the crown. Her steadfastness provided the royalists with a vital strategic anchor in an otherwise hostile region.
The land around Lincoln, including the small manor of Brattleby a few miles to the north, was a patchwork of shifting loyalties. The Domesday Book of 1086 records Brattleby (‘Brotelbi’) as being held by one Colbert, a tenant of the powerful Norman bishop, Odo of Bayeux. By the early 13th century, the tenurial landscape had evolved. The manor was part of the ‘fee of Amundeville’, a barony held by a family with lands spread across Lincolnshire and the north. The Amundeville family, like many others, was divided by the war. Elias de Amundeville is recorded as one of the rebel barons, and his lands were subject to confiscation. This meant that while the Lord of Brattleby’s personal allegiance is not explicitly documented, his feudal overlords were committed to Prince Louis. The local countryside was therefore a landscape of tension—a royalist castle looming over a region whose landowners were, in many cases, sworn to the rebels. This micro-conflict mirrored the wider civil war, pitting neighbour against neighbour and vassal against lord.
The Siege and the Relief
In the spring of 1217, the Franco-rebel alliance decided it had to eliminate the threat of Lincoln Castle. A large force under the command of Thomas, the Comte du Perche, a young and ambitious French nobleman, and Robert Fitzwalter marched north. They were joined by prominent rebel barons like Saer de Quincy, Earl of Winchester. They numbered perhaps 600 knights and 1,000 infantrymen. They easily captured the city of Lincoln, whose citizens were largely sympathetic to their cause, and laid siege to the castle.
Inside, Nicola de la Haye and her small garrison held out grimly, but they were desperately short of supplies and could not resist indefinitely. She managed to get a message out to the regent, William Marshal, pleading for aid. The royalist council, meeting at Newark, knew this was a decisive moment. To lose Lincoln would be to lose the north and, quite possibly, the war. Marshal, despite his advanced age, resolved to lead a relief army himself.
He mustered his forces at Newark, around 20 miles south of Lincoln. The royalist army was numerically smaller than the force besieging Lincoln, comprising around 400 knights, 300 crossbowmen, and a contingent of infantry. But it was led by some of the most experienced warriors in the realm. Alongside William Marshal were his son, William Marshal the Younger; Ranulf de Blondeville, the powerful Earl of Chester; and, critically, Falkes de Bréauté.
Falkes was the antithesis of the chivalrous Marshal. A low-born but exceptionally talented Poitevin mercenary captain, he had been one of King John’s most feared and effective enforcers. He was renowned for his ruthlessness, but his loyalty to the Plantagenet cause was absolute and his tactical brilliance was undeniable. He commanded the royal crossbowmen, the cutting-edge military technology of the age. The presence of both Marshal and Falkes symbolised the royalist cause: the embodiment of old chivalry and the practitioner of new, pragmatic warfare, united for the boy king.
On 19 May, the royalist army marched from Newark towards Lincoln. They approached from the north-west, climbing the escarpment to avoid a direct assault up the steep hill from the south. The Franco-rebel commanders in Lincoln were aware of their approach but made a fatal error in judgement. Confident in their superior numbers, and perhaps over-confident in their position within the walled city, they decided to continue the siege while sending out a party to observe Marshal's army. They failed to either meet the royalists in open battle outside the city or to secure all the city gates. The Comte du Perche is said to have boasted they would “drive the traitors before them.”
The Chaos in the Streets: The Battle of Lincoln
On the morning of Saturday, 20 May, William Marshal’s army appeared on the high ground north-west of the city. While Marshal prepared the main force for an assault on the city's North Gate, the royalist plan unfolded with tactical daring. Falkes de Bréauté, leading his contingent of crossbowmen and sergeants, was shown a long-disused and poorly guarded postern gate into the castle itself by one of Nicola de la Haye’s men. Under covering fire, he and his men slipped inside the castle walls, dramatically reinforcing the beleaguered garrison.
This was the turning point of the battle. Falkes’s men immediately mounted the castle battlements and unleashed a devastating hail of crossbow bolts down upon the besiegers in the castle bailey and the streets below. The chronicler Roger of Wendover described how the air was thick with quarrels. Simultaneously, the main royalist army, with the 70-year-old William Marshal at its head, charged the North Gate. It was broken down, and Marshal’s knights poured into the city.
The battle descended into brutal, chaotic street fighting. The narrow, steep lanes of medieval Lincoln, particularly the street now appropriately named Steep Hill, became a deathtrap for the rebels and the French. Hemmed in by buildings, their cavalry was ineffective. They were attacked from the front by Marshal’s knights and harassed from above by Falkes’s crossbowmen firing from the castle walls. Panic began to set in.
The decisive moment came with the death of the rebel commander. The Comte du Perche, fighting fiercely near the cathedral, was surrounded by royalist knights. Offered the chance to surrender, he proudly refused and was killed when a sword point entered his helmet's eye-slit and pierced his brain. With their leader dead, the French and rebel command structure collapsed. The battle became a rout. Rebel knights, desperate to escape, tried to flee through the South Gate, creating a bottleneck where many were captured. Robert Fitzwalter and Saer de Quincy were among the high-profile barons taken prisoner. Others, including many French knights, were cut down as they ran.
The aftermath was grim. The victorious royalists, particularly Falkes de Bréauté’s mercenaries, proceeded to thoroughly sack the city of Lincoln, which they regarded as treasonous. Homes were looted, merchants ruined, and citizens killed. It was this rapacious plundering that gave the battle its cynical name: the ‘Lincoln Fair’, a mockery of the city's famous commercial fairs where goods, and now lives and property, were there for the taking.
Forging Peace: The Aftermath and Magna Carta's Rebirth
The victory at Lincoln was total and catastrophic for Prince Louis. His northern army was destroyed, and many of his most important English supporters were now William Marshal’s captives. Louis, who had been besieging Dover, fell back to his stronghold in London, his cause fatally undermined. The final blow came three months later, not on land but at sea. On 24 August 1217, a fleet carrying vital French reinforcements and supplies was intercepted and decisively defeated off the coast of Kent in the Battle of Sandwich.
With his supply lines cut and his support in England evaporating, Louis had no choice but to negotiate. In September, he agreed to the Treaty of Lambeth (sometimes called the Treaty of Kingston). Here, William Marshal demonstrated that his political wisdom was as great as his military skill. Instead of seeking harsh retribution, he offered peace on remarkably lenient terms. Louis renounced his claim to the English throne and was given 10,000 marks to ensure a dignified departure. Critically, the English rebel barons were allowed to regain their lands upon payment of a fine. They were brought back into the royal fold, not permanently disinherited and left to fester in resentment. This policy of reconciliation was Marshal’s masterstroke, healing the political wounds of the civil war and securing a lasting peace.
Yet the most profound consequence of the Battle of Lincoln was what happened next. With the war won and the kingdom secured, the regency government once again reissued Magna Carta in November 1217, this time alongside a new Charter of the Forest which reversed the most egregious royal encroachments on common land. This was the version that began to enter the bloodstream of English law. It was reissued again in 1225 by Henry III himself, now of age, in return for a grant of taxation. By saving the Plantagenet throne, the victory at Lincoln had inadvertently saved the Charter. Had Louis won, it is highly unlikely that a French king, ruling by right of conquest, would have felt bound by a document forced upon a discredited English predecessor. Instead, Magna Carta was transformed. It was no longer a radical rebel manifesto, but a royal grant, a symbol of the king’s commitment to good governance and the law. It was the victory at Lincoln that allowed this transformation to take place.
The battle fought in the streets of Lincoln was a moment of profound reset. It ended a devastating civil war, repelled a foreign invasion, and ensured the survival of the Plantagenet dynasty. But more than that, it created the political space for the pragmatic wisdom of William Marshal and his fellow regents to lay a new foundation for English kingship—one based not on arbitrary power, but on a mutual contract between the ruler and the ruled, enshrined in the text of the Great Charter. The future of England was indeed rewritten that day, not in a royal chancery, but in the blood and chaos of a cathedral city’s winding streets.
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Sources & Further Reading
Primary Sources:
Domesday Book: A Complete Translation. Penguin Classics, 2003. (For the 1086 entry for Brattleby). The Chronicle of Roger of Wendover, in Roger of Wendover's Flowers of History, trans. J.A. Giles. London: Henry G. Bohn, 1849. (Provides a near-contemporary, albeit partisan, account of the battle). The History of William Marshal (L'Histoire de Guillaume le Maréchal)*, ed. A.J. Holden, trans. S. Gregory. Anglo-Norman Text Society, 2002-2007. (The biography of the battle's victor, offering invaluable insight into his character and actions).
Secondary Sources:
Asbridge, Thomas. The Greatest Knight: The Remarkable Life of William Marshal, the Power Behind Five English Thrones. Ecco, 2014. Carpenter, David. The Minority of Henry III. University of California Press, 1990. (The definitive academic study of the period, with a detailed analysis of the Battle of Lincoln and its political aftermath). Carpenter, David. Magna Carta. Penguin Classics, 2015. (Provides the best modern narrative of the Charter's creation, annulment, and revival). Morris, Marc. King John: Treachery, Tyranny and the Road to Magna Carta. Hutchinson, 2015. Prestwich, Michael. Plantagenet England 1225-1360. Oxford University Press, 2005. Stenton, Doris Mary. "King John and the Courts of Justice." Proceedings of the British Academy 44 (1958). Victoria County History: A History of the County of Lincoln: Volume 2*, ed. William Page. Archibald Constable & Co., 1906. (Provides background on the county’s social and political history).