In the turbulent annals of English history, few moments carry the sheer, nail-biting contingency of the spring of 1217. The kingdom, already fractured by two years of brutal civil war, stood on the precipice of a dynastic revolution. An invading French prince held London and the affluent south-east, while a nine-year-old boy, Henry III, was king in name only, his authority confined to a shrinking swathe of the Midlands and the West. The ideological and military struggle that had begun with Magna Carta was about to reach its bloody climax, not on some vast, open field, but in the steep, narrow streets of Lincoln. The battle fought there on 20 May 1217—known with grim irony to contemporaries as the ‘Lincoln Fair’—was no mere regional skirmish. It was a fight for the identity of the English crown, the future of the Plantagenet dynasty, and the very survival of Magna Carta as a foundational principle of governance.
The Seeds of War: A Tyrant King and a Failed Charter
To understand why a French army was besieging an English cathedral city in 1217, one must first understand the calamitous reign of King John (1199-1216). John was an able administrator but a deeply flawed monarch, possessed of a talent for avarice, cruelty, and political miscalculation that alienated almost every powerful faction in his realm. His reign was a triptych of disasters: the loss of the duchy of Normandy and the majority of his family’s continental empire to Philip II of France by 1204; a ruinous and humiliating quarrel with Pope Innocent III over the appointment of the Archbishop of Canterbury; and, finally, a campaign of relentless and arbitrary financial extortion against his own barons to fund his failed attempts to reconquer his French lands.
By 1215, a powerful coalition of disenchanted northern and eastern barons had reached breaking point. They renounced their fealty and marched on London, forcing the king to negotiate at Runnymede that June. The result was Magna Carta, the ‘Great Charter’. It was not, as is sometimes imagined, a document of popular liberty, but rather a reactionary feudal agreement designed to place defined limits on the king’s power, particularly his ability to raise funds and administer justice at whim. For the barons, it was a guarantee of their traditional rights. For John, however, it was a humiliation to be endured only as long as necessary.
He almost immediately sought and received a papal annulment of the charter from his newfound ally, Innocent III, plunging the kingdom into the First Barons’ War. The rebel barons, led by figures such as Robert fitz Walter, styled ‘Marshal of the Army of God’, realised they could not depose John without a viable alternative candidate for the throne. Their choice fell upon Prince Louis, the eldest son of King Philip II of France. The claim was tenuous, resting on his marriage to Blanche of Castile, a granddaughter of Henry II, but it was enough. In May 1216, Louis landed in Kent with a formidable army, and the rebels flocked to his banner. He soon captured London, Winchester, and much of southern England. King John’s cause seemed hopeless.
It was then that fate intervened. While campaigning in East Anglia, John, already suffering from dysentery, famously attempted to cross the treacherous tidal estuary of The Wash. His baggage train, laden with the crown jewels and a vast mobile treasury, was lost to the incoming tide. Demoralised and gravely ill, John struggled on to Newark Castle in Nottinghamshire, where he died on the night of 18 October 1216.
His death transformed the political landscape. The focus of baronial hatred was gone. In his place was an innocent child, Henry III, who was swiftly crowned at Gloucester Cathedral. Crucially, a regency council of immense capability formed around the boy-king, led by two remarkable figures: William Marshal, the 70-year-old Earl of Pembroke, widely regarded as the greatest knight in Christendom, and Guala Bicchieri, the astute and determined papal legate. Their first, and most brilliant, political move was to reissue Magna Carta in the new king’s name in November 1216. This single act began to drain the rebellion of its ideological force. It was no longer a war against a tyrant king, but a choice between a native Plantagenet boy-king who endorsed the Charter, and an adult French prince whose victory would inevitably lead to a redistribution of English lands to his foreign followers.
The Two Kingdoms of England and the Siege of Lincoln
Throughout the winter of 1216-17, England was effectively two kingdoms. Prince Louis held the capital and a network of castles across the south and east, while the royalists under Marshal controlled the West Country, the Midlands, and the North. The key to victory lay in controlling the heavily fortified castles that dominated the landscape. And few were more strategically important than Lincoln.
Lincoln Castle, a formidable Norman fortress founded by William the Conqueror himself, commanded the crossing of the River Witham and the intersection of two major Roman roads, Ermine Street and the Fosse Way. It dominated a rich agricultural region and a wealthy commercial city. For the community of our own Barony of Brattleby, lying just seven miles north of the city, the allegiance of Lincoln was a matter of immediate and vital concern. Brattleby’s manorial lands, held since the Domesday survey of 1086 by the great Abbey of St Mary in York, depended on the trade and security provided by the nearby regional capital. The chaos of civil war threatened their rents, their markets, and their physical safety.
The castle’s loyalty was guaranteed by its hereditary castellan, a woman of extraordinary resilience and courage named Nicola de la Haye. Now in her sixties, Nicola had inherited the rights to the castle and the shrievalty of Lincolnshire. She had defended the castle for King John against an earlier baronial attack in 1191 and had remained steadfastly loyal to the Plantagenet cause. In the spring of 1217, as Prince Louis consolidated his power, a powerful Franco-rebel army under the command of Thomas, the Count of Perche, Gilbert de Gant (a claimant to the earldom of Lincoln), and Robert fitz Walter marched north to capture this vital stronghold.
They took the city of Lincoln with ease, but Nicola and her small garrison retreated into the impregnable castle, defiantly refusing all calls to surrender. The French and rebel barons settled in for a siege, setting up their formidable mangonels and other siege engines in and around the grounds of Lincoln Cathedral, a sacrilegious act that would not be forgotten by the royalist clergy. Nicola, knowing she could not hold out indefinitely, dispatched a messenger to the regent, William Marshal, pleading for relief.
The Marshal’s Gamble
At his headquarters in Newark, William Marshal convened a council of war. He gathered a formidable, if outnumbered, royalist army. Among its leaders were Ranulf de Blondeville, the powerful Earl of Chester; William Longespée, Earl of Salisbury (Henry II’s illegitimate son); and the hawkish Peter des Roches, Bishop of Winchester. The decision before them was stark. Some counselled caution, but Marshal, even in his old age, was a man of action. He argued that to abandon Lincoln would be to cede the entire north and signal the end of their cause. He would lead the army himself to relieve Nicola de la Haye.
The royalist force that marched from Newark on the morning of 19 May 1217 was perhaps half the size of the besieging army at Lincoln. Chroniclers’ estimates vary, but they likely numbered around 400 knights and 300 crossbowmen, supported by a larger body of sergeants and foot soldiers. What they lacked in numbers, however, they made up for in purpose and divine sanction. As they prepared to march, the papal legate Guala Bicchieri formally excommunicated Prince Louis and his followers, declared the royalist campaign a holy crusade, and granted a full remission of sins to all who fought—and especially to those who might die—in the service of their boy-king. The soldiers, now styling themselves ‘the army of God’, fastened white crosses to their tunics.
Marshal’s plan was audacious. Arriving at Stow, a few miles northwest of Lincoln, the next morning, he divided his forces. He would lead the main body of knights and infantry in a direct assault on the city's old Roman North Gate, which the besiegers had left relatively unguarded, concentrating their efforts instead on the castle itself. A second, smaller force, comprised entirely of crossbowmen under the command of the ruthless mercenary captain Falkes de Bréauté, was given a more perilous task. They were to stealthily make their way to a small, blocked-up postern gate on the castle’s west side, break through, and reinforce Nicola’s beleaguered garrison from within. Everything depended on timing and surprise.
“The Lincoln Fair”: Carnage in the Cathedral Close
On the morning of Saturday, 20 May, the rebels at Lincoln were confident of victory. They had been battering the castle walls for weeks and believed Marshal’s army was still far away. The Count of Perche was reportedly playing dice when news arrived that the royalists were upon them. Even then, there was confusion. Some believed it was only a small raiding party. This fatal underestimation gave Marshal the crucial advantage he needed.
While the main army advanced on the North Gate, Falkes de Bréauté and his crossbowmen reached the castle undetected. With ferocious energy, they hacked and crowbarred their way through the sealed postern gate. Once inside, they fanned out along the battlements, joining Nicola’s own crossbowmen. From this elevated position, they unleashed a devastating storm of bolts down into the ranks of the besiegers concentrated in the Cathedral Close and the streets below. The surprise was total and the effect was catastrophic. Knights were unhorsed and soldiers fell in screaming heaps, their own siege engines now offering no protection from the deadly fire from above.
As chaos erupted among the besiegers, Marshal gave the order to attack the North Gate. With a thunderous crash, his vanguard smashed through the gate and poured into the city. The regent himself, despite his age, was at the forefront of the charge, his banner held high. As he reportedly declared before the battle, recalling his knightly prowess, “They will not be able to hold against us… I was ever to the fore in such a business, and I still feel young enough.”
The battle now descended into a brutal, swirling mêlée in the steep, narrow lanes between the North Gate and the cathedral. This was not the chivalric tournament of romance, but chaotic, close-quarters slaughter. It was this chaotic scene of looting and fighting that gave the battle its cynical name, ‘The Lincoln Fair’. Knights fought on foot, their horses useless in the confined space, hacking at each other with swords and axes. The royalist crossbows, both from the castle walls and within the advancing army, continued to take a terrible toll on the more heavily armoured but less mobile French knights.
The decisive moment came in the thick of the fighting outside the cathedral. The French commander, the Count of Perche, found himself surrounded. He fought valiantly but refused to surrender to an English traitor. A royalist knight, Reginald Crocus, thrust his lance through the eye-slit of the count’s helmet, piercing his brain. With his death, the heart went out of the Franco-rebel army. Panic set in. Those who could, fled. Some tried to escape through the south gate of the city, only to create a deadly bottleneck where many were trampled or captured. Others, including the principal English rebel leaders Robert fitz Walter and Saer de Quincy, Earl of Winchester, were taken prisoner. Gilbert de Gant, who had dreamt of being Earl of Lincoln, was also captured in the rout. A few hundred French knights made a desperate last stand before finally surrendering to William Marshal.
The battle lasted around six hours. By late afternoon, the royalist victory was complete. Marshal, ever the pragmatist, immediately took steps to prevent his jubilant but unruly soldiers from burning the city to the ground. He did, however, permit them to sack it—a customary and brutal reward for their service, and a harsh punishment for the citizens’ support of the rebels. The houses of the rebels and their sympathisers, particularly those of the wealthy Jewish community that had likely been forced to finance the rebels, were plundered without mercy. The cathedral itself was also reportedly despoiled by the crusading army, despite its official holy status.
The Aftermath: A Kingdom Secured, a Charter Revived
The military and political consequences of the Lincoln Fair were immediate and profound. It was a shattering blow to Prince Louis. His army in the north was annihilated, and most of his key English baronial allies were now Marshal’s prisoners. The psychological impact was immense; the momentum of the war had irreversibly shifted.
Louis, who had been unsuccessfully besieging Dover Castle, retreated to his base in London. Marshal and the royalists pressed their advantage. The final blow came three months later, on 24 August 1217, not on land but at sea. A French fleet carrying vital reinforcements and supplies for Louis was intercepted and decisively defeated off the coast of Sandwich by a motley English fleet under the command of Hubert de Burgh.
With his supply lines cut and his cause in England utterly broken, Louis had no choice but to negotiate. The subsequent Treaty of Lambeth (or Kingston) in September 1217 was a masterpiece of political reconciliation, guided by Marshal’s wisdom. Louis agreed to renounce his claim to the English throne and withdraw from the kingdom in exchange for a substantial payment of 10,000 marks, ostensibly to cover his expenses. Most importantly, the English rebels who had supported him were not subjected to vicious reprisals. With a few exceptions, they were allowed to return to their allegiance and buy back their confiscated lands. Marshal understood that to build a lasting peace, he needed to unite the baronage, not perpetuate division.
This policy of reconciliation was cemented by another, more formal, reissue of Magna Carta in 1217, alongside a new Charter of the Forest which dealt with grievances over the vast royal forests. These charters, confirmed and reissued again in their definitive form in 1225 when Henry III came of age, became the bedrock of his long reign. The victory at Lincoln did not just save the Plantagenet dynasty; it ensured the survival and centrality of Magna Carta. It created a new political consensus, where the king’s authority was implicitly understood to be bound by the law of the land as expressed in the charters.
For the landholders of England, from the great earls down to the abbots and manorial lords of places like Brattleby, the end of the war brought a return to stability and the rule of English law. The Abbey of St Mary of York could once again administer its Lincolnshire estates and collect its rents without fear of marauding armies. The victory at Lincoln affirmed that England would be governed by an English king according to established English customs, not by a French prince whose success would have ushered in a new and disruptive aristocracy. In saving the throne for Henry III, William Marshal, Nicola de la Haye, and the ‘army of God’ had, in a very real sense, preserved the political and legal identity of the kingdom. The bloody street brawl of the Lincoln Fair was the unlikely crucible in which the post-Angevin English monarchy was forged.
Sources & Further Reading
Primary Sources:
Domesday Book: A Complete Translation. (London: Penguin, 2003). For investigating land tenure in 1086, including Brattleby. The History of William the Marshal (L'Histoire de Guillaume le Maréchal). Edited and translated by A.J. Holden and D. Crouch. 3 vols. (Anglo-Norman Text Society, 2002–2007). A vital, near-contemporary poetic biography providing insight into Marshal’s actions and motivations. Roger of Wendover's Flowers of History*. Translated by J.A. Giles. 2 vols. (London: H.G. Bohn, 1849). A key chronicle source for the events of John’s reign and the First Barons’ War, including a dramatic account of the battle.
Secondary Sources:
Asbridge, Thomas. The Greatest Knight: The Remarkable Life of William Marshal, the Power Behind Five English Thrones. (London: Simon & Schuster, 2014). An excellent and highly readable biography. Carpenter, David. The Minority of Henry III. (London: Methuen, 1990). The definitive academic study of this period, with detailed analysis of the political situation and the Lincoln campaign. Carpenter, David. Magna Carta. (London: Penguin Classics, 2015). Provides the best modern analysis of the charter and its political context. McGlynn, Sean. Blood Cries Afar: The Magna Carta War and the Invasion of England, 1215-1217. (Stroud: The History Press, 2011). A detailed military history of the entire conflict, with a strong focus on the Battle of Lincoln. Morris, Marc. King John: Treachery and Tyranny in Medieval England: The Road to Magna Carta. (London: Hutchinson, 2015). A compelling narrative of John’s reign and the causes of the war. Pain, Nesta. The King and the Castle: The Story of the Magna Carta. (London: Eyre & Spottiswoode, 1963). Contains a useful account of the life of Nicola de la Haye. The Victoria History of the County of Lincoln*. Vol. II. Edited by William Page. (London: Archibald Constable, 1906). Provides background on the medieval history of the city and county.