Battle of Lincoln 1217: The Woman Who Held the Castle That Saved England

The Battle of Lincoln 1217

The Battle That Nearly Erased England

On 20 May 1217, the fate of England came down to one woman holding a battered castle against a French invasion. It's a story that should be far better known — and on its 808th anniversary, it deserves to be told properly. It's also the story at the heart of my novel Lady of England, the third book in my Nicola de la Haye trilogy, which will be published late 2026/ early 2027.

By the spring of 1217, the situation for the nine-year-old King Henry III looked desperate. King John was dead. Prince Louis of France had landed with an army, rebel English barons had welcomed him to London, and much of the south-east had fallen. The Plantagenet dynasty appeared to be finished. Three fortresses still flew Henry's colours: Dover, Windsor – and Lincoln Castle.

Lincoln Castle was held by a woman.

"The Woman Who Saved England": Who Was Nicola de la Haye?

Nicola de la Haye defended Lincoln Castle and saved England from a French invasion

Sharon Bennett Connolly called Nicola de la Haye "the woman who saved England." It is not an overstatement.

Nicola was the hereditary constable of Lincoln Castle, a widow managing her lands and garrison in her own right, who had also been appointed sheriff of Lincolnshire – the first of only a very few women to hold such a role in medieval England. She was no mere decorative figurehead. When French and rebel forces captured the city of Lincoln in early 1217, she locked the castle gates and refused to yield. While siege engines battered her walls, while supplies dwindled and soldiers died in the infirmary, she kept the garrison together through military competence and sheer force of will.

The Historic Lincoln Trust puts the stakes plainly: if the royalists had lost the Battle of Lincoln, England would have become part of France. Some historians rate this engagement alongside the Battle of Hastings and the Battle of Britain in its significance for English history.

In Lady of England, Nicola is not a figurehead or a symbol. She is a woman in her late sixties who has spent decades maintaining stores, repairing walls, managing tenants, and keeping difficult men in line — and who now faces the greatest test of her life with a half-ruined castle, an exhausted garrison, and no certainty that help will come in time.

What Was the Battle of Lincoln 1217?

The Second Battle of Lincoln — also called the Battle of Lincoln Fair — was fought on 20 May 1217 during the First Barons' War. It was the decisive engagement that ended Prince Louis of France's bid for the English throne and confirmed Henry III's reign. William Marshal, regent to the young king, marched from Newark with around 400 knights and 317 crossbowmen to relieve the siege of Lincoln Castle.

The plan that turned the battle was audacious. Peter des Roches, Bishop of Winchester, had slipped secretly into the castle beforehand to reconnoitre with Nicola, identifying a blocked gate in the north-west city wall that could be cleared. On the day of battle, while the Earl of Chester launched a diversionary assault on the city's north gate, Falkes de Bréauté led his crossbowmen through a castle gate – a postern, or the west gate that faced onto the open countryside – and took them straight up onto the ramparts. From there, they rained bolts down on the French cavalry in the streets below, killing horses and breaking formations. Then Falkes burst out of the castle's main gate and into the surrounding streets, forcing the French to rush men from the city walls to meet this new threat from behind them. That movement stripped the city's defences long enough for Marshal's knights to break through from outside.

The castle was not merely a refuge. It was a weapon. And it only functioned as a weapon because Nicola had held it.

Falkes de Bréauté: Brutal, Loyal, Indispensable

Falkes de Bréauté is another central figure in Lady of England. He was one of King John's most feared military commanders: ruthless, efficient, and deeply resented by the baronage. At Lincoln, his tactical entry into the castle and his sally from its gates were decisive. In the novel he is not softened into an easy hero. He is a man who has done terrible things in service of a king he loved and who must now reckon with what that service has cost him and others.

In one pivotal scene, Falkes tells the royal council what history too often forgets: without Nicola's garrison holding Lincoln Castle, there would have been no Battle of Lincoln. The castle was the key to the entire campaign.

What Were the Consequences of the Battle of Lincoln?

The French commander, Thomas, Count of Perche, was killed in the fighting between the castle and the cathedral. With their leader dead, French and rebel forces fled south.

Louis, besieging Dover when the news reached him, abandoned the siege and rode to London, and within months, the Treaty of Lambeth forced him to renounce his claim to the English throne and leave England for good.

Magna Carta was reissued as part of the peace settlement, cementing the constitutional principles that would shape English law for centuries. Had Lincoln fallen, the Charter and everything it represented would likely have been lost. As historians have noted, Magna Carta — which forms the basis of democratic law across the world and influenced the United States Constitution — would have been erased from history had the battle gone the other way.

The Battle of Lincoln and Magna Carta

Lincoln Castle holds one of only four of the original copies of Magna Carta

The Battle of Lincoln 1217 and Magna Carta are inseparable. John had agreed to the Great Charter in 1215, then repudiated it, plunging the kingdom into civil war. By 1217, the regency government around the young Henry was trying to restore legitimacy – and they did it by reissuing Magna Carta, presenting the boy king as a better promise than either John's tyranny or French rule.

For Nicola, the Charter was never abstract. Its promises about inheritance, widows, wardship, and lawful judgement were the language of her own life. She had spent decades defending an inheritance that men repeatedly tried to control through marriage, royal favour, or force. Lincoln Castle was not just stone and mortar. It was proof that a woman could hold what had been entrusted to her.

This thread runs through the whole of Lady of England – the slow, hard-won understanding that the Charter matters not as a document but as a promise to the people she can see from the castle walls: the garrison families, the tenants, the orphans, the villeins whose names history never recorded.

How Lady of England Brings the Battle of Lincoln to Life

In Lady of England I wanted to show the Battle of Lincoln not as a clean chivalric triumph but as the brutal, chaotic, street-by-street struggle it actually was. Crossbow bolts finding the wrong targets in the glare. Horses screaming in the square below the walls. Men too exhausted from three months of siege to feel much beyond grim relief when the enemy finally broke. Nicola stands on the hoardings and watches the city she loves being torn apart by the army that has come to save her – because victory at Lincoln was not clean.

The aftermath became known as the Lincoln Fair, a bitter irony. Roger of Wendover recorded that women of the city threw themselves into the River Witham with their children, escaping the victorious royalist soldiers who were intent on pillage. The boats, overloaded and unsteered, capsised. The precentor of the cathedral lost eleven thousand marks of silver. A battle that saved England from French rule brought horror to the people of Lincoln, and the novel does not look away from that.

The battle is the culmination of everything that precedes it: years of endurance, political betrayal, bereavement, and the daily labour of keeping a castle and its people alive. When the walls finally hold, it means something because the reader has lived through every week of the siege alongside Nicola, Falkes, and the garrison soldiers whose names history forgot.

Why Nicola de la Haye Deserves to Be Remembered

William Marshal is rightly famous. The greatest knight of the Middle Ages, he held England together through one of its most dangerous crises. But the story of Lincoln 1217 is incomplete without Nicola de la Haye.

She held the castle. She held it as a woman in her late sixties in a world that repeatedly tried to take from her what was hers. She held it when the city around her was in enemy hands, when the walls were crumbling, when the garrison was exhausted and the stores were running low. She held it for a child king, for her family's inheritance, and for the principle that lawful authority still mattered.

On 20 May, the anniversary of the Battle of Lincoln, I think most of all of Nicola on the ramparts: old, tired, battered by loss — and still refusing to yield.

Because sometimes history turns not on the person who charges in at the last moment, but on the one who has been holding the gate all along.

Lady of England, is the upcoming third book in the Nicola de la Haye trilogy. Lady of Lincoln, the first in the series, is available now.