CLITHEROE CASTLE. A CAUTIONARY TALE

[Stanley]

A CAUTIONARY TALE

As I have often said, the research never stands still and every now and again I have to hold up my hand and admit to having made a mistake. It can be slippery stuff when you start to delve into things that happened a thousand years ago. I often have to rely on the work of historians in the past and take a lot of trouble to assure myself that I am reasonably sure they did good work and can be trusted. I am partially protected by having a rubbish detector in the back of my head and when it starts whining I take notice of it. I’m afraid to tell you it went off the scale today, I found that an eminent historian in whom I had always placed complete trust had led me up the garden path.
I’ve always believed that Henry de Lacy was ill in bed in his castle at Clitheroe in 1146 or thereabouts when he promised God that if he would restore him to health he would found a monastery in Barnoldswick. Most of that is correct but when I discovered today by chance that Clitheroe Castle wasn’t built until 1186 I had to take a deep breath and go digging. I realised that I had been in error all these years, the castle Henry was lying in feeling sorry for himself was not Clitheroe, it was Pontefract.
Of course, all this needed checking out so I went for a ramble in the undergrowth of the peerage in general and the de Lacy family in particular and I think I now have the truth. So here’s my latest (and hopefully definitive) version of the truth.
Ilbert de Lacy was one of the noble adventurers who joined William the Bastard of Normandy in his conquest of England in 1066. He was rewarded with the Honor of Pontefract where he built a castle in 1070 which controlled an enormous swathe of land right across the country. In essence, William (by then ‘The Conqueror’) gave him Yorkshire to play with and some adjoining lands as well. Ilbert died in 1089 but not before he had founded a dynasty which passed to his son Robert de Lacy.
There was a bit of a problem between 1121 and 1136 when I think the family backed the wrong faction in a dispute with the king and according to some sources were all banished from the kingdom. There may have been an interval of being in bad favour but it can’t have been permanent because by 1136 Robert’s son, Ilbert de Lacy the second, was once more Lord at Pontefract. He held it until he died in 1141 and then for some reason the Earl of Lincoln took over for five years.
Ilbert II had two sons, Henry and Robert. Henry, the eldest, regained the Lordship of Pontefract in 1146 and held it until his death in 1187 when brother Robert took the reins and lived until 1193. In 1193 Roger (Fitz-Eustace) de Lacy became Lord. The ‘Fitz’ in his name meant he was illegitimate and couldn’t carry the de Lacy line forward. As both Henry and Robert died without legitimate heirs this appears to have been the end of the de Lacy blood line.
Robert had evidently been carving out a land-holding for himself while Henry held sway at Pontefract because he became Lord of Blackburnshire. As Lord he would be looking for a handy place to establish a castle on the eastern extremity of his holding and a nice steep conical hill at Clitheroe must have looked just the ticket because in 1186 that was where he built Clitheroe Castle.
My major error was in thinking that Barlick came under the Honor of Clitheroe when in fact it was part of the Honor of Pontefract. One of the bases for this erroneous conclusion was the notation in the Domesday book that the vills were held by Robert de Poictou but it may have been that he actually held a far larger area right across Northern England and at some point part of his holdings passed to the de Lacy family. Even now I am not sure when this happened. When Henry made his Perambulation of the boundary of Barlick in 1147 to set out what he was granting to Fountains Abbey and made the mistake of appending Admergill which wasn’t his to give it looks as though he may have been pinching it off his brother Robert!
Anyway, all’s well that ends well and I feel a lot more comfortable with old Henry now that I have got him nailed down in the right place. It just goes to show, the time to get suspicious is when you are convinced you are right. Always a dangerous position for a historian.
As I often say, history is funny stuff, there’s such a lot of it. I woke this morning after a good sleep and my mind had evidently been at work on the topic overnight because the first thing that popped into my head as I brewed up was Ightenhill Manor. Yes, I know, I can hear you saying it, ‘funny blokes these historians!’ but this is how my mind works.
The more I considered Ightenhill the more I became sure that I remembered somebody falling out of a window! I’ve been interested in unexplained falls from windows ever since I heard about ‘The Defenestration of Prague’, an infamous incident in 1618 which triggered The Thirty Years War in Europe. (Don’t worry, we aren’t going into that!) and when I was at Pendle Heritage my friend Dr Ed Furgol did some serious digging into the incident which the standard works suggest may have happened at Ightenhill. ‘Henry De Laci's two sons died prematurely, one is reported to have fallen down the main well of Denbigh Castle and the second son to have fallen either from the parapet of Pontefract Castle or from a window at Ightenhill manor house. Henri De Laci's only surviving child and heiress, Alice De Laci married Thomas Plantagenet, Earl of Lancaster in 1294’ Ed’s conclusion was that we would never be sure what the correct version was but on the whole he favoured Pontefract because we could find nothing to suggest that Ightenhill was ever more than a single storey medieval building. Hard to die from falling out of a ground floor window!
That’s where the matter stands until someone pulls me up short again and points out my errors. When you think of Henry lying in bed feeling poorly, substitute Pontefract Castle for Clitheroe. That much seems certain.

SCG/28 October 2008
1102 words.
One pic attached. Caption reads: An engraving of Pontefract Castle as it appeared in the 17th century.