She Didn't Wait for Permission
Biographies, WomeninHistory Rachel Elwiss Joyce Biographies, WomeninHistory Rachel Elwiss Joyce

She Didn't Wait for Permission

‍International Women's Day asks us to celebrate the women who refused to accept the limits placed upon them. Who pushed back. Who led. Who endured. And every year, we tend to look to the recent past — to suffragettes, trailblazers, and glass-ceiling-breakers of the modern era.

‍But what about the women who did all of that eight hundred years before anyone thought to name it?

‍Meet Nicola de la Haye. Sheriff of Lincolnshire. Castellan of Lincoln Castle. The woman who, in 1217, successfully defended one of England's most strategically vital fortresses against a French-backed rebel army: at the age of approximately seventy. She didn't wait for permission, and she didn’t expect plaudits: because no one was going to give it.

‍ What the Twelfth Century Said Women Were

‍The medieval world had very clear ideas about women's place in society, and those ideas were enforced from pulpit, court, and custom alike. Women were considered intellectually weaker than men, legally subordinate to their fathers and husbands, and spiritually suspect - daughters of Eve, prone to temptation and manipulation(!!!). Church fathers and contemporary writers were emphatic on the subject. Women should be silent, obedient, and invisible in public life.

‍I've explored just how relentless and inventive that misogyny was in my medieval misogyny series, including a look at the men who competed, with some enthusiasm, for the title of Worst Villain to Women of the 12th Century. It's a crowded field.

‍What Nicola de la Haye Actually Did

Nicola inherited the hereditary castellanship of Lincoln Castle from her father, and she held it through two marriages, through political upheaval, through sieges and civil wars, and with a grip that no one could prise loose. She administered justice, she negotiated with kings, defied a rogue justiciar who threatened the kingdom whilst Richard the Lionheart was on crusade, and she commanded garrisons and organised castle defences - incredibly well.

When King John's reign collapsed into civil war and a French prince threatened to take the English throne, Nicola was the one defending Lincoln.

She was also, at various points, told she was too old, too female, and too inconvenient. She resigned her position as castellan (constable), but was promptly reappointed, because no one else could do it as well as she could.

And one of King John’s last acts was to make her the first female sheriff in England - Sheriff of Lincoln.

‍This is the woman at the heart of my novel Lady of Lincoln: not a fictional heroine invented to fit a modern template, but a real woman whose story has simply been waiting to be told.

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Lincoln's Lost Castle: The Rise and Fall of Thorngate
EnglandAndAngevinEmpire Rachel Elwiss Joyce EnglandAndAngevinEmpire Rachel Elwiss Joyce

Lincoln's Lost Castle: The Rise and Fall of Thorngate

Everyone who climbs Steep Hill in Lincoln has seen Lincoln Castle. It stands where William the Conqueror planted it in 1068, high on the old Roman upper city, its twin mottes and curtain wall commanding the whole plain. It is one of the best-preserved castles in England, and it still does the Crown's work — the Crown Court sits there to this day.

Almost nobody knows that Lincoln once had a second castle.

Down by the river, at the vulnerable (from a defensive point of view) south-eastern corner of the lower city, there stood for perhaps two or three generations a fortress called Thorngate Castle — castellum de Tornegat. It was not royal like Lincoln Castle (which at one time housed the sheriff, the constable/ castellan, and the bishop). Thorngate belonged to a family, held in their own right, and it existed in a state of quiet tension with the great royal castle on the hill. And then, in the space of a decade, it was pledged away as a bargaining chip in a civil war and demolished so completely that today we cannot even say for certain where it stood.

This is the story of that lost castle: of the family who held it, the war that consumed it, the forced marriages and shifting loyalties tangled around it, and the arguments that still divide historians about where it was and who really controlled it. It is, in miniature, the story of the whole terrible period we call ‘the Anarchy’ — and, as so often, it is a story with a woman at its centre whom history has almost entirely forgotten.

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Muriel of Lincoln
Biographies, WomeninHistory Rachel Elwiss Joyce Biographies, WomeninHistory Rachel Elwiss Joyce

Muriel of Lincoln

Nicola de la Haye held Lincoln Castle against a French siege and saved England, and everyone remembers her name.

Almost no one remembers her grandmother.

Muriel of Lincoln didn't lead armies or defy kings in any spectacular fashion, but without her calculated survival and strategic positioning, there would be no Nicola, no legend, no castle defense that changed the course of English history.

This is the story of the invisible foundation upon which greatness was built.

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