- Pontefract Castle 14th Century
- 1372 On 11th July 1372, Edward III’s fourth surviving son, Edmund of Langley, married his elder brother John of Gaunt’s (lord of Pontefract) wife’s younger sister, Isabella of Castile. She was the daughter of the late King Peter of Castile meaning that Edmund and his heirs were now ‘reserves’ in line for the Castilian throne behind Gaunt.
- Pontefract Castle 17th Century
- 1645 On 11th July 1645, Nathan Drake, Royalist diarist, recorded: ‘ ….This evnings there was 2 boanfires made upon Sandoll Castle, wch we answered wth one from the Round Tower. This day the 2 men wch we sent out 10 daies since to Newarke Came againe to towne, & though they Could not get into the Castle to us yet they Showed forth such signes as we knew we had good newes towards us. This night 2 of those men we sent out 2 nightes before to Sandoll cami in againe.’
- 1656 On 11th July 1656, Mary Fisher of Pontefract, and another preacher, Ann Austin, were the first Quakers to visit the English North American colonies arriving in Boston’s Massachusetts Bay Colony on board the Swallow. Having already converted the island of Barbados’s Lieutenant Governor to Quakerism, their reception by the New England Puritans was decidedly more hostile and they were imprisoned for five weeks, undressed in public and examined for signs of witchcraft with their books and pamphlets burned, then deported back to Barbados. A 1658 mission ‘testifying to the Universal Light’ (her words) to the Ottoman Empire to explain Quakerism to Sultan Mehmed IV was received attentively and ‘he was very noble unto me and so were all that were about him’.