Lucy of Bolingbroke: The Woman Behind Lincoln Castle's Lucy Tower

The Lucy Tower atop its motte, Lincoln Castle

She paid a king five hundred marks for the right to be left alone. She outlived three husbands, presided over one of the most strategically significant castles in England, and left such an indelible mark on Lincoln Castle that a tower still bears her name nine centuries later. Yet Lucy of Bolingbroke remains one of the least-known powerful women of the Norman era – overshadowed, perhaps, by the very castle she helped to shape.

Today, I’m bringing this important but forgotten woman back into the light (as much as I can).

Who Was Lucy of Bolingbroke?

Lucy of Bolingbroke, also recorded as Lucia Thoroldsdottir of Lincoln, was an Anglo-Norman heiress who died around 1136 or 1138. Her precise origins have been the subject of considerable historical debate, but the most widely accepted view among modern scholars is that she was the daughter of Thorold, Sheriff of Lincoln, by a daughter of William Malet, a prominent Norman lord who died in 1071. Through both lines she inherited a vast collection of estates centred on Spalding in Lincolnshire, a landholding so substantial it acquired its own administrative identity: the Honour of Bolingbroke. It is from this that she takes the name we know her by.

There is one further thread in Lucy's ancestry that demands mention, even if it cannot be confirmed. The Crowland Chronicle claims that Thorold of Lincoln (Lucy's father) was the brother of Godgifu, the noblewoman better known to history as Lady Godiva. If true, it would make Lucy the niece of one of the most legendary women in English history, and the granddaughter's generation of Leofric, Earl of Mercia, one of the most powerful Saxon magnates England had ever produced! Historians treat the Crowland source with caution, noting that the charter is now considered likely spurious and that it contradicts itself on the precise relationship. But the tradition exists, and so many times in history, tradition has shown to have some truth.

What this document does point to is something the broader historical record supports regardless: Lucy's family were English nobility, rooted in the great Saxon aristocracy of the East Midlands. Her father Thorold had been Sheriff of Lincoln before the Conquest, and her mother's line ran through William Malet, a figure with English maternal ancestry himself. Lucy was, in the most meaningful sense, an heiress of pre-Conquest England, and that’s precisely what made her so valuable to the Normans who came after 1066.

This is a pattern readers of this blog will recognise immediately. It’s exactly what happened with Muriel of Lincoln, Nicola de la Haye's grandmother, whose strategic marriage to the Norman knight Richard de la Haye transferred the hereditary legitimacy of Lincoln Castle from Saxon hands into Norman ones. The Normans were extraordinarily adept at using marriage to English heiresses as a tool of conquest - not by force alone, but by wrapping Norman ambition in the cloak of English legitimacy. When Ivo Taillebois married Lucy around 1088, he didn’t simply acquire a wife; he acquired her lands, her lineage, her father's sheriffdom, and the social authority that came with being connected, however tenuously, to the house of Mercia. The Conquest was legitimised, estate by estate, through women like Lucy.

What made Lucy exceptional, even by the standards of a period in which Anglo-Norman noblewomen wielded considerable indirect power, was the degree to which she held and exercised authority in her own right rather than simply transmitting it to the men around her. She appears to have been castellan of Lincoln Castle, the dominant landholder across Lincolnshire, and the woman whose name the castle's great tower would carry long after her death, so Lucy was not merely a conduit for Norman ambition, but a power in her own right - a woman who outlived three Norman husbands and, in the end, paid a king for the freedom to answer to no one else.

She was also a significant religious patron throughout her life. Spalding Priory, a Benedictine house and the primary religious institution of her family's patronage, was founded (or re-founded) in 1085 by Lucy and her first husband Ivo Taillebois, and she continued to endow it generously across the decades that followed. In the 1120s she and her third husband Earl Ranulf of Chester granted it the churches of Minting, Belchford and Scamblesby, and in 1135, widowed for the last time, she granted the priory her own manor of Spalding for the permanent use of the monks. The records show that she took care to bind her sons to honour those gifts after her death - a detail that speaks to a woman who understood perfectly well that her intentions might not survive her unless she made them impossible to ignore. That same year, she founded the Cistercian convent of Stixwould entirely on her own initiative, becoming, in the words of one historian, one of the very few aristocratic women of the late eleventh and twelfth centuries to achieve the role of independent lay founder.

Three Husbands, One Constant: Lincolnshire

Lucy married three times, and all three of her husbands predeceased her. Each marriage brought a powerful Norman lord into her orbit, and into her lands, but it’s notable that it was always her lands that formed the foundation. The Honour of Bolingbroke passed through her husbands by virtue of the marriage, not the other way around.

Ivo Taillebois

Ivo was her first husband, the marriage taking place around 1088. A prominent administrator under both William I and William II, Ivo took on extensive additional authority in Westmorland and Cumberland as part of the marriage arrangement, layering his influence over hers. He died in 1094, leaving Lucy a widow for the first time.

Roger de Roumare

Roger de Roumare (also recorded as Roger fitz Gerold) was her second husband, and with him she had a son, William de Roumare, who would later become Earl of Lincoln (this was set to be a controversial title, one that would cause Nicola de la Haye a headache in my novel Lady of England). Roger died in 1097 or 1098, leaving Lucy to navigate the great machinery of Norman land inheritance alone once again — and to do so, evidently, with considerable skill.

Ranulf le Meschin

Ranulf was her third and longest marriage, contracted sometime before 1101. Ranulf was a significant magnate in his own right, and when he inherited the Earldom of Chester in 1120, Lucy became Countess of Chester. Ranulf died in 1129.

Please, no more!

After three husbands, Lucy of Bolingbroke told the King she’d had enough

By 1130, the pipe roll records that Lucy paid King Henry I 500 marks for the right not to be compelled to remarry. It is a remarkable entry: a woman of her wealth and landholding was an asset the crown might use to reward a loyal magnate through a forced marriage, and Lucy chose to buy her way out of that possibility entirely. God only knows what she’d thought of the previous three marriages, but she wasn’t about to repeat it.

Her Sons and the Inheritance

Lucy's two surviving sons were half-brothers, and the inheritance she left them would drive some of the most turbulent events of the Anarchy.

William de Roumare, son of her second marriage to Roger, inherited most of the Lincolnshire estates, some forty knights’ fees, and would go on to become Earl of Lincoln under King Stephen, living at both Bolingbroke and Lincoln Castle, the great centres of his mother's power.

Ranulf de Gernon, son of her third marriage to Ranulf le Meschin, inherited the remainder, around twenty knights' fees, as well as succeeding to the Earldom of Chester when his father died. Born around 1099 at the Château Guernon in Normandy, from which he took his byname, Ranulf became one of the most volatile and consequential magnates of Stephen's troubled reign.

Betrayal and Trickery at Lincoln Castle

It was the pull of what his mother had held that drew Ranulf back to Lincoln again and again. Late in 1140, he and his half-brother William devised an audacious plan to seize Lincoln Castle. According to contemporary accounts, the two brothers waited until the castle garrison had gone hunting, then sent their wives in to visit the constable's wife (probably Muriel of Lincoln, grandmother of Nicola de la Haye and wife of Robert de la Haye) for a perfectly ordinary social call. When the brothers arrived shortly afterwards, apparently to collect their ladies, they were armed. They overpowered the skeleton guard, admitted their own men, and ejected the royal garrison.

NB. In Lady of Lincoln, I surmised that Ranulf was assisted by Ralph de la Haye, Muriel and Robert’s younger son, as he was later a signatory to Ranulf’s charters at a time when the rest of the Hayes were aligned to the Empress Maud. Ralph is also recorded as having fought on Stephen’s side, backing my theory.

The result of this trickery was the First Battle of Lincoln on 2 February 1141, one of the defining engagements of the Anarchy, at which King Stephen himself was captured outside the castle walls. It was, in every sense, a battle fought over Lucy's legacy.

King Stephen was captured at the First Battle of Lincoln 1141

Lucy and the Fortification of Lincoln Castle

The shell keep on the southwestern motte of Lincoln Castle, a shell keep in the shape of a polygonal, roughly 15-sided stone structure sitting atop the larger of the castle's two earthen mounds, is known to this day as the Lucy Tower. Its origins and its naming are bound up directly with Lucy of Bolingbroke.

Lincoln Castle's official history records that Lucy Tower, a permanent stone shell keep, replaced the first wooden keep on the earth mound built by the Conqueror in circa 1068. One source places her direct involvement earlier than the stone rebuild: in 1110, during a period when she was operating as one of the most powerful landholders and custodians the castle had known, she built a roughly circular stronghold on the motte for herself and her retainers. The stone replacement came around 1136, the very period of her last years as a widow, when she was operating with full independent authority, having paid the king for precisely that freedom.

The tower was originally one storey higher than it stands today, and it enclosed what would have been the constable of the castle's living quarters, built in timber against the inner wall. The east and west wings no longer survive. It is described architecturally as a late 12th-century structure with flat buttressing with roll-moulding on the set-offs, and its polygonal plan is characteristic of the shell keep form – a stone wall encircling the summit of the motte, replacing the earlier timber palisade, and providing far greater permanence and defensibility.

There is a scholarly wrinkle worth noting here: the historian Pamela Marshall has argued that the Observatory Tower motte – the second motte at the castle's southeastern corner – may also have been built by Countess Lucy, which would mean her building activity at Lincoln was even more extensive than the naming of one tower alone suggests.

I don’t believe that is true. It was known in Nicola de la Haye’s time as the New Tower, and the ‘Lincoln Tower Revealed’ project places its origins in the first half of the 12th century, when her son Earl Ranulf required another tower in addition to the ageing shell keep, the Lucy Tower. That same project showed the base of it was a gaol. There are references I’ve seen to ‘Ranulf’s Tower’ later on. The name ‘Observatory Tower’ is because of the Victorian turret you see today — prison governor John Merryweather used prison labour to "restore" the Observatory Tower, adding crenellations and the circular turret on top, ostensibly so that the castle grounds and prisoners could be viewed — though it may also be where he studied the stars at night.

The overall picture is, however, clear: Lucy shaped the physical fabric of Lincoln Castle in ways that outlasted every political upheaval the Norman period could throw at it.

The Lucy Tower After Lucy

In the centuries that followed, the tower that bore Lucy's name took on new and darker functions. By the Victorian era, as Lincoln Castle operated as a prison and place of public execution, the Lucy Tower's motte became a burial ground for executed criminals – their graves marked with nothing more than initials and a date of death. It is a haunting transformation: from the stronghold of one of medieval England's most powerful women to a silent cemetery.

The tower stands today as part of Lincoln Castle's 360-degree medieval wall walk, open to visitors who can climb the motte and look out over Lincoln's cathedral and the surrounding countryside — very nearly the same view Lucy herself would have had, standing at the centre of the power she had spent a lifetime building.

Lucy of Bolingbroke and the Long Line of Lincoln's Women

For readers of Lady of Lincoln, Lucy of Bolingbroke sits at a fascinating point in the castle's history. She was the woman who fortified the motte, who served as castellan/ constable, who paid a king for her independence — and it was her sons' desire to gain rights over the castle that helped bring about the First Battle of Lincoln, the very conflict that reshaped the political landscape into which Nicola de la Haye would later step, and where Lady of Lincoln starts.

Nicola was not operating in a vacuum. She was operating in a castle that another remarkable woman had already left her mark on—stone by stone, tower by tower. If you want to understand how Lincoln Castle became the fortress Nicola defended, it helps to understand the woman who helped to build it.

You can read more about the women who shaped Lincoln's history in my posts on Muriel of Lincoln and on the medieval women who defied every expectation their age placed on them (have a look at the blog, search medieval women).