Leeds Castle, 1321: The Siege That Ended With Thirteen Men Hanged From the Battlements

Day 9 of 15. Yesterday's story was seven people burned alive on the Crown's orders in the middle of Maidstone. Today's is a week-long siege at one of Kent's best-loved castles that ended with thirteen men hanged from its own walls - and a queen who started the whole thing by simply asking to come in for the night.

In October 1321, Queen Isabella of France was travelling to Canterbury and asked to stay the night at Leeds Castle, near Maidstone. The castle's constable, Bartholomew de Badlesmere, was away - his wife, Margaret de Clare, was holding it in his place, and she refused the Queen entry. When Isabella's party tried to force their way in anyway, Margaret's archers opened fire. Six members of the royal escort were killed, and Isabella was forced to retreat and find lodging elsewhere for the night.

Edward II did not let the insult stand. According to Wikipedia's account of the siege, he raised a sizeable force - men aged between sixteen and sixty, including at least six earls - and brought ballistas to bear on the castle. Other contemporary chronicles describe the King calling up men from Essex and London as well. Margaret's allies among the rebellious barons never arrived to relieve her, and after an assault lasting somewhere between five and fifteen days, depending which account you read, the castle surrendered at curfew on 31 October 1321 - 700 Halloweens ago this year.

What happened next is where the sources start to disagree, much like Fairmeadow's muddled names yesterday. Wikipedia's account, citing the official Calendar of Fine Rolls, names the castle's seneschal, Walter Colepepper, and twelve other garrison members as hanged from the castle's own battlements. A contemporary Latin chronicle, the Annales Paulini, instead says the King ordered thirteen squires beheaded. The headcount and the names broadly agree - thirteen men, loyal to the Badlesmeres, killed on the King's order once the castle fell. Only the method is disputed.

Margaret de Clare and her five children were sent to the Tower of London, making her the first woman recorded as a prisoner there. She was held for over a year, released in November 1322 on a bond put up by her son-in-law. Her husband fared far worse: captured fleeing south after the rebel defeat at Boroughbridge in March 1322, Bartholomew de Badlesmere was tried at Canterbury and sentenced to death. On 14 April 1322, he was dragged roughly three miles behind a horse to Blean, then hanged and beheaded there. His head was displayed on Canterbury's Burgh Gate. Margaret eventually retired to a convent near Aldgate and died in the early 1330s; her son later had his father's conviction reversed and reclaimed the family title.

None of this features heavily in Leeds Castle's own telling of its 900-year history, which prefers its gentler nickname, the "Castle of Queens" - earned by six genuine medieval and Tudor queens who owned or lived in it, Eleanor of Castile among them. The castle drew over 600,000 visitors last year for its maze, dog collar museum and birds of prey displays, and is currently hosting its own "Horrible Histories Halloween" event, running to 1 November - a fitting irony for a castle whose real Halloween-adjacent history needs no exaggerating.

Source: Wikipedia, Margaret de Clare, Baroness Badlesmere, Wikipedia, Bartholomew de Badlesmere, and Leeds Castle, History of the Castle