After landing at Sandwich on March 13th, King Richard paused only to give thanks for his release at Canterbury Cathedral before surging north towards Nottingham, gathering troops as he went. On his arrival, the castle defied Richard and, despite the King riding around the walls in plain view wearing a light crusader’s mail coat with his personal standard prominently on display, the constables of Nottingham (Sir Ralph Murdac and Sir William de Wenneval) claimed that they did not believe it was the Lionheart himself but merely enemies of Prince John who were trying to eject them from the castle by tricking them into thinking it was the King.
And so battle commenced.
On the first day of the siege, after a particularly bloody assault, King Richard’s men captured the outer bailey of the castle, and later in the day the barbican of the middle bailey was attacked, but the fall of night meant they had to leave the barbican in enemy hands. The gatehouse that Alan of Westbury attacks in this book would have stood on the spot where the later, stone-built gatehouse now guards the entrance to Nottingham Castle. I imagined Alan and his brave men attacking the wooden castle walls roughly where the bronze statue of Robin Hood now stands. During the course of the battle, towards the end of the first day, the palisade of the outer bailey was burnt down, either torched by King Richard’s troops or by the defenders.
On the second day, Richard erected a gallows in the outer bailey just out of crossbow range and hanged several sergeants and menat-arms he had captured the day before as a warning of what would befall the defenders if they did not surrender. I have to confess here that Sir Ralph Murdac was not among those unfortunate men who were hanged — the historical Murdac was indeed once the sheriff of Nottinghamshire, and then a loyal follower of Prince John; he married Eve de Grey of Standlake Manor, and he was also constable of Nottingham Castle at the time of the siege, but it was not until about two years later that he was to die in unknown circumstances. My defence for this bending of the truth is that I think of myself as a storyteller, not a historian — and for the purposes of this story, and my future Robin Hood stories, my fictional version of the real Ralph Murdac had to die.
On the third day of the siege, after a severe battering from Richard’s newly constructed artillery, negotiations began for the surrender of the castle. The King was merciful and the knights of the garrison were all allowed to go free after suitable ransoms had been arranged. England was once again securely in King Richard’s hands.
Mortimer’s Hole
When I was researching and plotting this book, I found myself — or rather Alan Dale — in a bit of a jam. I wanted to have my hero locked up in the bowels of Nottingham Castle, awaiting certain death, and then for him to be miraculously rescued by Robin Hood; but I couldn’t for the life of me think how this could realistically be accomplished. So I went to Nottingham to have another look at what little remains of the castle and seek inspiration; and while I was there I came across, and took a guided tour of, Mortimer’s Hole. Problem solved.
Beneath Nottingham Castle is a network of tunnels dug into the relatively soft sandstone rock that the fortress is built on that dates back to at least the twelfth century and possibly much earlier. One of these tunnels, known as Mortimer’s Hole, leads from the southern part of the castle, where the upper bailey once stood, down through the rock to emerge at Brewhouse Yard, next to The Old Trip to Jerusalem pub outside the castle walls. This tunnel was normally only used by the servants to transport butts or tuns of ale from the brewhouse, where this staple part of the medieval diet was made, up to the castle butteries and storerooms. On the 19th October 1330, Prince John’s great-grandson, a seventeen-year-old boy who would soon become King Edward III, accompanied by a handful of men, used this passageway to sneak into Nottingham Castle undetected and stage a coup d’etat. Once inside the upper bailey, young Edward kidnapped Roger Mortimer, the Earl of March — who with Edward’s French mother Isabella had usurped the throne of England — and managed to spirit the captured earl away through the tunnels to ignominious imprisonment and death.
Once I had heard this story, and visited Mortimer’s Hole, I knew that Robin and Alan could use this secret tunnel to great effect. And I would urge any reader who visits Nottingham to take the tour of these spooky passages — and to have a pint in The Old Trip to Jerusalem afterwards.
Episcopal inquisition
In 1184, Pope Lucius III issued the Papal Bull known as Ad abolendam, in which he exhorted all Christian bishops, archbishops and patriarchs to actively seek out heretics and bring them to trial. If they could not prove their innocence, the Pope decreed, people accused of heresy were to be handed over to the lay authorities for their ‘due penalty’, which in the most serious cases could mean a fiery death at the stake. This bull was a response to the growing popularity of the Cathar movement (and others), and was an attempt to curb what the Church saw as an extremely dangerous heresy.
There is, of course, no record of anyone known as Robin Hood or the Earl of Locksley being tried for heresy at Temple Church, and indeed episcopal inquisitions, more common in the southern Christian lands, were seldom held in northern Europe. But this heretic-hunting institution did exist at that early date and I hope I may therefore be forgiven for inventing a trial, specially sanctioned by the Pope, that brings my pagan Robin Hood into conflict with the Church authorities and his enemies the Knights Templar.
It must be said that the episcopal inquisitions (an inquisition can refer to an individual court case or the investigative institution) as a method of curbing heresy were largely a failure: and one of the main reasons for this, or so Church militants claimed, was that, as Robin points out to the Master of the Templars, a confession made under torture was not admissible in court. It was not until 1252, and the Ad extirpanda bull issued by Pope Innocent IV, that torture was officially sanctioned as part of the inquisition process.
