to him or his immediate successors may be attributed the Norman walls
and chapel, whose foundations still exist on the north and east sides
of the castle yard.

The De Lacys held Pontefract until 1193, when Robert died without
issue, the castle and lands passing by marriage to Richard
Fitz-Eustace; and the male line again became extinct in 1310, when
Thomas, Earl of Lancaster, married Alice, the heiress of Henry de Lacy.
Henry's great-grandfather was the Roger de Lacy, Justiciar and
Constable of Chester, who is famous for his heroic defence of Chateau
Gaillard, in Normandy, for nearly a year, when John weakly allowed
Philip Augustus to continue the siege, making only one feeble attempt
at relief. Thomas, Earl of Lancaster, who was a cousin of Edward II,
was more or less in continual opposition to the king, on account of his
determination to rid the Court of the royal favourites, and it was with
Lancaster's full consent that Piers Gaveston was beheaded at Blacklow
Hill, near Warwick, in 1312. For this Edward never forgave his cousin,
and when, during the fighting which followed the recall of the
Despensers, Lancaster was obliged to surrender after the Battle of
Boroughbridge, Edward had his revenge. The Earl was brought to his own
castle at Pontefract, where the King lay, and there accused of
rebellion, of coming to the Parliaments with armed men, and of being in
league with the Scots. Without even being allowed a hearing he was
condemned to death as a traitor, and the next day, June 19, 1322,
mounted on a sorry nag without a bridle, he was led to a hill outside
the town, and executed with his face towards Scotland.

In the last year of the same century Richard II died in imprisonment in
the castle, not long after the Parliament had decided that the deposed
King should be permanently immured in an out-of-the-way place.
Hardyng's Chronicle records the journeying from one castle to another
in the lines:

'The Kyng the[n] sent Kyng Richard to Ledis,
There to be kepte surely in previtee,
Fro the[n]s after to Pykeryng we[n]t he nedes,
And to Knauesburgh after led was he,
But to Pountfrete last where he did die.'

Archbishop Scrope affirmed that Richard died of starvation, while
Shakespeare makes Sir Piers of Exton his murderer.

During the Pilgrimage of Grace the castle was besieged, and given up to
the rebels by Lord Darcy and the Archbishop of York. In the following
century came the three sieges of the Civ