In the annals of English history, few events carry the acute, nation-defining drama of the Second Battle of Lincoln. Fought on a grey May morning in 1217, it was not merely a clash of arms but the violent culmination of a crisis that threatened to extinguish the nascent Plantagenet dynasty. At the heart of this struggle, a remarkable trinity of individuals stood against the tide of rebellion and foreign invasion: an aged knight of legendary repute, a powerful royal bastard of formidable talent, and an unyielding sixty-year-old widow defending her ancestral post. This is the story of William Marshal, William Longespée, and Nicola de la Haye—the unlikely alliance that preserved the throne for a boy-king and redirected the course of English history within the very walls and streets of Lincoln.
The Kingdom on the Brink: Magna Carta’s Failure and the French Invasion
The crisis had its roots in the disastrous reign of King John. His military failures abroad, exorbitant financial demands, and tyrannical governance had alienated a powerful faction of his barons. The summer of 1215 saw a fragile peace brokered on the meadows of Runnymede with the sealing of Magna Carta, a revolutionary document intended to subordinate royal power to the rule of law. Yet, the charter was a peace treaty that pleased no one. Within months, John, having secured papal annulment of the agreement, was once again at war with his own subjects.
The recalcitrant barons took a fateful and desperate step: they offered the crown of England to Prince Louis, the son and heir of King Philip II of France. In May 1216, Louis landed in Kent with a formidable army, and the kingdom was torn asunder. The French prince was acclaimed in London and swiftly gained control of the south-east. King John, though a deeply flawed monarch, was an energetic and ruthless military commander. In the autumn of 1216, he marched north to relieve the sieges of Windsor and Lincoln, waging a brutal campaign of reprisal across East Anglia and Lincolnshire. It was during this campaign, on 12 October 1216, that his infamous baggage train—laden with the crown jewels, treasure, and state records—was swallowed by the treacherous incoming tides of The Wash.
Demoralised and suffering from dysentery, a broken King John staggered to the Bishop of Lincoln’s castle at Newark-on-Trent. There, on the night of 18 October, he died. His death left the royalist cause in a perilous state. His heir, Henry, was a mere nine-year-old boy. With a foreign prince controlling the capital and much of the country, the Plantagenet enterprise seemed destined for collapse. It was in this desperate hour that the kingdom’s fate came to rest on the shoulders of three figures whose strengths, loyalties, and histories were as diverse as they were essential.
The Three Pillars of the Royalist Cause
William Marshal, Earl of Pembroke: The Greatest Knight
If any one man could hold the fractured kingdom together, it was William Marshal. By 1216, he was a living legend. Born around 1147, a landless younger son of a minor baron, Marshal had forged his reputation in the tournament fields of France, becoming the most celebrated and feared knight of his age. His life was a testament to loyalty and martial prowess. He had served Henry II with unwavering faith, protected the young Henry the Young King, fought alongside Richard the Lionheart on crusade and in Normandy, and even managed to retain the trust of the suspicious King John.
Now, at seventy years of age, when most men of his station were long retired or dead, a council of loyalist barons at Gloucester looked to him as the only figure with the prestige and authority to save the realm. On 11 November 1216, he was appointed Rector of the King and the Kingdom—Regent in all but name. The contemporary poem chronicling his life, L'Histoire de Guillaume le Maréchal, captures the weight of this moment. The Marshal, accepting the burden, is said to have declared it was a task he undertook for the sake of his soul, to defend a land to which he owed everything. He possessed no significant estates in Lincolnshire, but his duty as Regent made the fate of every shire his own. His was the strategic mind, the unifying symbol of chivalric honour that the royalist cause desperately needed.
William Longespée, Earl of Salisbury: The Royal Bastard
Commanding the royalist forces in the field alongside the Marshal was a man of royal blood, albeit from the wrong side of the blanket. William Longespée (long-sword) was the illegitimate but acknowledged son of Henry II, likely by his mistress Ida de Tosny. As King John’s half-brother, he had been a stalwart of the royal court, a trusted military commander, and a recipient of vast patronage. His marriage to the great heiress Ela of Salisbury had made him Earl of Salisbury in his own right, catapulting him into the upper echelon of the magnates.
Longespée’s path through the crisis, however, was not as straight as Marshal’s. He was one of the royalist captains present at Runnymede, but when Prince Louis landed, Salisbury was among the prominent figures who, for a time, defected to the French side. The chronicler Roger of Wendover suggests this was a pragmatic decision based on the seeming hopelessness of John’s cause. Yet, by early 1217, Longespée had seen the tide turning. Perhaps disillusioned by the arrogance of the French, or persuaded by the renewed royalist vigour under Marshal, he returned to the fold. This brief flirtation with rebellion did not diminish his military value. He was a seasoned commander in his prime, a man who understood both the rebel mindset and the brutal realities of combat. His presence at Marshal’s side provided the royalist army with dynamic, front-line leadership.
Nicola de la Haye: The Indomitable Dame of Lincoln
The final, and perhaps most extraordinary, member of this trio was Nicola de la Haye. While Marshal and Longespée represented the national leadership of the royalist cause, Nicola embodied its local, unyielding resilience. Her story is intrinsically tied to the county of Lincolnshire and its greatest fortress. The de la Haye family held the hereditary constableship of Lincoln Castle, a position of immense strategic and political power. Nicola had inherited this right alongside her husband, Gerard de Canville.
She was no stranger to siege warfare. In 1191, during Richard I’s absence on crusade, she and her husband had defended Lincoln Castle against the forces of the future King John himself. After Gerard’s death in 1195, Nicola, a widow now in her sixties, fiercely defended her and her son Richard’s hereditary rights. King John, who had once besieged her, came to recognise her formidable character and unwavering loyalty. In an act of profound trust, recorded in the Patent Rolls for 1216, John not only confirmed her as castellan of Lincoln but also appointed her Sheriff of Lincolnshire. For a woman to hold such a powerful secular office was almost unheard of, a testament to her exceptional ability and John’s desperate need for trustworthy agents in a hostile region. As the rebel barons and their French allies consolidated their hold on eastern England, Nicola de la Haye and Lincoln Castle became the final, isolated bastion of royal authority in the shire.
The War’s Shadow on the Lincolnshire Landscape: The Barony of Brattleby
For the lesser landowners of Lincolnshire, caught between these great political and military forces, the war was a terrifying and ruinous affair. The small manor of Brattleby, located just seven miles north of Lincoln and part of the historic Barony held by the Bishop of Lincoln, offers a window into the chaos. The Domesday Book of 1086 records Brattleby (“Brotelbi”) as a holding of the Bishop, a status it retained through the Plantagenet era. The men who held the land as tenants of the Bishop, figures like the Bussey family recorded in the later Book of Fees, would have found themselves in an impossible position.
Their immediate overlord, Bishop Hugh of Wells, was a complex figure. He had been present at Runnymede and was named in Magna Carta as one of the king’s counsellors, yet his sympathies were fundamentally royalist. However, with French-backed rebels under Gilbert de Gant, who styled himself Earl of Lincoln, controlling the countryside, fealty to a distant king offered little protection. Rebel and royalist foraging parties—little more than armed gangs—would have stripped manors like Brattleby of their grain, livestock, and valuables. The lord of Brattleby would have faced a terrible choice: declare for the rebels and risk the King’s ultimate vengeance, or remain loyal and suffer the immediate consequences of rebel occupation. Many, no doubt, simply tried to keep their heads down, pay whichever armed band was at their door, and pray for a swift end to the conflict. For them, Nicola de la Haye’s stand at Lincoln Castle was not an abstract strategic move; it was their only hope for the restoration of peace and order.
The “Fair of Lincoln”: The Battle for England
By the spring of 1217, the strategic situation had become critical. The rebel army, commanded by the French nobleman Thomas, Comte du Perche, and the English rebel leader Robert Fitzwalter, marched north and laid siege to Lincoln Castle. Gilbert de Gant’s forces already held the city, but Nicola de la Haye defiantly held the fortress, smuggling a message out to William Marshal to alert him of her plight. The Marshal knew this was the decisive moment. A royalist defeat at Lincoln would sever the loyal North from the Midlands and likely prove fatal.
Gathering his forces at Newark—the very place King John had died—Marshal assembled a relief army of some 400 knights and a larger number of sergeants and crossbowmen. He was joined by William Longespée and the formidable Ranulf de Blondeville, Earl of Chester. Crucially, the papal legate, Cardinal Guala Bicchieri, was also present. In a masterstroke of political and psychological warfare, Guala excommunicated Prince Louis and his followers, and declared the royalist campaign a crusade. Soldiers in the Marshal’s army stitched white crosses to their tunics, transforming them from royal soldiers into a holy army fighting to cleanse the land of heretical invaders.
Marshal’s battle plan was a model of tactical genius. The rebel army was concentrated within the city walls, focused on the siege of the castle which stood in the north-western corner of the upper city. A direct assault on the main southern gate would be costly and predictable. Instead, The Marshal, despite his age, declared his intention to fight in the vanguard. He split his forces. A small, elite contingent of crossbowmen led by the ruthless mercenary captain Falkes de Bréauté—a man described by chroniclers as "bloodthirsty and shameless"—was dispatched to the castle’s postern gate. Nicola de la Haye’s garrison would open it, allowing Falkes’s men to pour in, securing the castle and firing down into the besiegers’ rear, creating chaos and a vital diversion.
Meanwhile, the main army under Marshal and Longespée undertook a gruelling march around the city to the west, climbing the ridge to approach from the north where the city’s Roman-era walls were weaker and less well-defended. At around nine o’clock on the morning of Saturday, 20 May 1217, they stormed the North Gate.
The fighting that followed was brutal, close-quarters combat in the steep, narrow streets between the cathedral and the castle. The Comte du Perche, caught completely by surprise by the attack from his rear, rallied his knights to meet the royalist charge. Roger of Wendover’s chronicle provides a vivid, if partisan, account. William Marshal and William Longespée, fighting at the forefront, carved a bloody path through the rebel ranks. The key moment of the battle came in the melee around the cathedral. The Comte du Perche, fighting fiercely, was surrounded. He was offered the chance to surrender but, as a proud French nobleman, allegedly refused to yield to any Englishman. In the ensuing struggle, he was killed by a sword thrust through the eye-slit of his helmet.
With their commander dead, the rebel army’s morale shattered. Panic set in. Many barons were captured inside the city, their escape routes cut off. Others fled south, only to be cut down by a detachment of Marshal’s forces that had secured the southern gate. The rout was total. The battle was over by late afternoon. So much plunder—horses, armour, fine cloth, and coin—was taken from the captured rebels and the sacked houses of the city that the royalists mockingly dubbed the victory the “Fair of Lincoln.”
Aftermath: A Kingdom Saved, A Dame Sidelined
The Battle of Lincoln was the death knell for the French invasion. Deprived of his ablest commander and a huge portion of his baronial support, Prince Louis’s position became untenable. After a final naval defeat off the coast of Sandwich in August, he agreed to terms. The Treaty of Lambeth, signed in September 1217, saw Louis renounce his claim to the English throne in exchange for a substantial payment and a safe passage back to France.
The victory cemented William Marshal’s place in history. He had not only won the war but also secured the peace. In November 1217, he oversaw a new reissue of Magna Carta, stripping it of its most radical anti-royal clauses but confirming its core principles. This wise act of statesmanship helped to reconcile former rebels to the rule of the young Henry III, laying the groundwork for a more consensual form of government. Having saved the kingdom, the old knight finally retired, dying peacefully in May 1219. He was buried in the Temple Church in London, where his effigy can still be seen today.
William Longespée continued to serve his young nephew, Henry III, with distinction. He took the cross and campaigned in Gascony and the Holy Land before returning to England, dying at his castle in Salisbury in 1226. Rumours, likely unfounded, suggested he was poisoned by the justiciar Hubert de Burgh.
For Nicola de la Haye, the aftermath was more complex and tinged with the harsh realities of male-dominated power politics. Immediately after the victory she had made possible, William Marshal temporarily transferred the constableship of Lincoln Castle to the Earl of Salisbury. While framed as a reward for Longespée and a necessary measure to place the strategic fortress under the command of a major magnate, it must have felt like a bitter slight to the woman who had held it against all odds. It was a stark reminder that even a woman of her proven calibre could be sidelined. Nevertheless, her power was not entirely extinguished. She was reinstated as Sheriff for a time and eventually retired to her estates at Swaton, dying a wealthy and respected dowager around 1230. Her legacy remains inseparable from Lincoln Castle, a symbol of extraordinary fortitude in an age that rarely allowed women such a stage.
The victory at Lincoln brought immediate relief to the war-torn shire. For the tenants of the Barony of Brattleby, the end of the fighting meant a return to predictability. The fields could be sowed without fear of marauding soldiers, and rents and dues would once again flow to their established lords rather than to opportunistic rebels. The "Pax Marscalli"—the Marshal's Peace—was not just a high-political concept; it was the tangible return of order and prosperity to the English countryside. The triangle of force—the aged statesman, the royal warrior, and the steadfast dame—had held the line, ensuring that the future of England would be forged not by a French prince, but by the Plantagenet dynasty they had so audaciously saved.
Sources & Further Reading
Primary Sources: L'Histoire de Guillaume le Maréchal (The History of William Marshal), ed. and trans. A.J. Holden, D. Crouch, and S. Gregory (Anglo-Norman Text Society, 2002-2006). The primary contemporary source for the life of William Marshal. Roger of Wendover's Flowers of History, trans. J.A. Giles (London, 1849). A key chronicle for the events of John's reign and the minority of Henry III, containing a detailed account of the Battle of Lincoln. The Book of Fees (Testa de Nevill), Part I: 1198-1242 (London: HMSO, 1920). Provides details of land tenure in Lincolnshire, including tenants of the Bishop of Lincoln. Rotuli Litterarum Patentium in Turri Londinensi Asservati, Vol. 1, 1201-1216, ed. T.D. Hardy (Record Commission, 1835). Contains the royal letters patent confirming Nicola de la Haye’s appointments. Domesday Book: A Complete Translation*, ed. A. Williams and G.H. Martin (Penguin, 2003). For the earliest post-Conquest status of Brattleby.
Secondary Sources: Asbridge, Thomas. The Greatest Knight: The Remarkable Life of William Marshal, the Power Behind Five English Thrones (Simon & Schuster, 2014). An excellent and highly readable modern biography. Carpenter, David A. The Minority of Henry III (University of California Press, 1990). The definitive academic study of the period, with exhaustive detail on the First Barons' War and the Battle of Lincoln. Crouch, David. William Marshal: Knighthood, War and Chivalry, 1147-1219 (Routledge, 2002). A scholarly analysis of Marshal’s career and the world he inhabited. Hill, J.W.F. Medieval Lincoln (Cambridge University Press, 1948). A classic and still indispensable study of the city's medieval history. Holdsworth, C. J. "Nicola de la Haye," in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford University Press, 2004). Wilkinson, Louise J. Women in Thirteenth-Century Lincolnshire (Boydell Press, 2007; Royal Historical Society Studies in History, New Series). Contains an excellent chapter on Nicola de la Haye’s life and career, placing her in the context of female power in the region.