Pontefract in Wakefield, The Historic Town

Pomfretians are proud of their rich and colourful history.

Local organisations from the Pontefract Heritage Group help us help us to appreciate one of the very best old market towns in the north of England.

Looking around the busy Pontefract town centre it was good to see so many streets and buildings with blue plaques, providing useful historical information. The Pontefract public library, located in Shoemarket as well as being a popular community resource, has a new information point, free internet access and research facilities for local and family history. Nearby, the small museum, housed in the former Carnegie free library building, provides an excellent introduction to Pontefract’s heritage. Here, in a compact setting, you can trace the story of Pontefract from its origins until recent times and there is an adjacent exhibition room and sales point. At the time of my visit there was a 1960s and an Old Photographs exhibition. The recent Council elections serve as a reminder that the first ever secret ballot took place here, in 1872. In the Pontefract museum’s reference room you can access thousands of images relating to Pontefract, Wakefield and the surrounding area and there is an upstairs room displaying Knottingley glass.

The annual summer Pontefract Liquorice Festival, with its imaginative programme of art, music and street entertainment is expected to attract thousands of visitors to Pontefract from Saturday 7 July when the Pontefract castle will host its popular re-enactment event. Guided tours, live music, events in the Valley Gardens and the National Liquorice Day itself, on Sunday 15 July, will be the climax of an extended 9-day festival.

For more information visit www.pontefractliquorice.co.uk or call at the public library.

Now one of the Five Towns of Wakefield District (with Castleford, Featherstone, Knottingley and Normanton), Pontefract appears to have come out of the depression and doldrums of the 1984/85 miners’ strike. When I visited on a Monday and a Friday the town centre was busy, there’s a modern bus station, a good range of shops, popular supermarkets such as Tesco and Morrisons; and of course the ever popular Pontefract market.

Despite pit closures, Pontefract’s long association with coalmining has not been forgotten. The Prince of Wales Colliery, one of the oldest and last deep mines in West Yorkshire, only closed a few years ago. In Pontefract, the Coal Industry Welfare Organisation still provides services for former mineworkers from a wide catchment area; and I know that their facilities are much appreciated.

Approaching Pontefract from the direction of Doncaster, via the A639, just before entering the old district of Carleton which means farmstead of the churls or ordinary freemen, I noticed a Welcome to Pontefract sign displaying the castle logo and my thoughts went back to the same image stamped on the town’s world famous Pontefract Cake liquorice sweets, a process done by hand until the 1960s.

I parked by All Saints’ church, its ruined part a reminder of Pontefract’s long military past when so much destruction was done here and at the castle towards the end of the Civil War; and then stood at The Booths, below the great rock outcrop where the remains of the Norman fortification rests. This is the original settlement, named as Tateshale (Tanshelf) in the Domesday survey of 1086. You can see the foundations of a small Anglo Saxon church, therefore pre-dating the castle, excavated in the mid-1980s, along with its cemetery containing over 200 burials. An impression of what this small place of early Christian worship may have looked like can be had by visiting Ledsham in North Yorkshire or, further afield, the complete Saxon church at Bradford-on-Avon in Wiltshire.

Pontefract, or should I say Pomfret, gets its name from the medieval French words pont freit or, in Latin, pontus fractus meaning broken bridge, apparently once located under the Knottingley Road at Bubwith Houses Farm.

It was one of the Conqueror’s lords, Ilbert de Lacy who capitalised on the strategic potential of the hill above Tanshelf when, in about 1070, he began the building of a great castle which protected the route through the Aire Gap and overlooked the Roman road from Doncaster to Catterick (A639). The honour (a term the Normans used for large lordships centred on castles) of Pontefract, with Tanshelf as its centre, stretched across the Vale York alongside its royal neighbour, Wakefield. Pontefract castle was strategically sited to protect the ancient route through the Aire Gap and was built – originally of earth and timber overlooking the Roman road (A639) from Doncaster to Catterick.

Walking through the castle ruins today a little knowledge and imagination certainly helps any appreciation of what, from 1399, became the leading royal castle in the north of England. A good guidebook is available from the Pontefract visitor centre, Pontefract library and Pontefract museum. You can read about the king’s cousin, Thomas, Earl of Lancaster who, after the Battle of Boroughbridge in 1322 was brought back in chains to his own castle where he was imprisoned. Thomas met a gruesome end, beheaded nearby but respectfully buried by the St John’s monks in their church, a shrine for pilgrims. John of Gaunt, Shakespeare’s Lancaster lived here and may have entertained Chaucer who described a white-walled castle. Edward IV came to Pontefract before the Battle of Towton. Perhaps the most tragic and notorious event in Pomfret castle was the imprisonment and murder of King Richard II, Shakespeare not mincing words about the incident in his play Richard III, writing ‘Pomfret, Pomfret! O thou bloody prison. Fatal and ominous to noble peers!…We give thee up our guiltless blood to drink.’

Although regarded by Cromwell as ‘one of the strongest inland garrisons in the kingdom’, Pontefract castle suffered three sieges by the Parliamentarians which also left the town in a parlous state, inhabitants successfully petitioning parliament for the castle’s demolition which began on 5 April 1649.

At the time of my visit to Pontefract I was fortunate to meet Paul Venton from the Pontefract museum service, who was doing a lunchtime cover for the custodian. He was most helpful in showing me several features, including a liquorice bush, growing near the entrance. Parts of the grounds were once used for its cultivation. We looked at the Round Tower, still impressive from a close angle and with similarities to Clifford’s Tower at York.

During the building and rebuilding of the castle a new, carefully planned late Norman town emerged, set away from the ancient centre with a distinctive street pattern which survives remarkably intact to the present day: Micklegate, Gillygate, Ropergate, Beastfair, Shoemarket, Salter Row, Finkle Street, Horsefair and a few others too; with, at its hub, the wide Market Place. The Georgians certainly appreciated both the practical and aesthetic potential of the long main street, placing a classical town hall at one end and, slightly offset, St Giles’s parish church and a large arcaded Butter Cross at the other. Many other buildings are of interest, including the brick-built Red Lion and the graceful, bow-windowed Barclay’s Bank. A real eye-catcher, however, is the magnificent mid-nineteenth century Market Hall.

Pontefract’s classical Sessions or Court House is also a most impressive architectural feature, a reminder of the continuing importance of Pontefract as legal centre.

The old Saxon town was not, however, totally abandoned, a new church was established, a precursor of the present All Saints’. Nearby once stood St John’s Priory, a Cluniac house established by monks from France in about 1090.

A century later it had an, albeit short-lived offshoot at Lundwood in Barnsley (Monk Bretton) and a new Norman town developed at Barnsley.

As one might expect in a market town there are many pubs and inns in Pontefract. Architecturally, perhaps the most extraordinary is the timber-framed Counting House Inn, looking to be of sixteenth century in origin, reached via Ream’s Terrace and Beastfair. The public house usage is relatively recent. It was disappointing to see so much mess and litter outside such an important building which may have served a shop earlier times.

For many thousands of people, ‘Ponte’ is for horseracing. A great deal of work has been done in recent years to improve and develop the course on the outskirts of Pontefract. This summer there are Ladies Days on 2 July, a ‘Red Shirt Night’ on 20 July (evening) and Family Days on 29 July and 19 August. Pontefract has the advantage of the longestcontinuous flat racecourse in the country, stretching well over two miles. Sad to note that the splendid silver gilt Pontefract Race Cup, dating from 1812 was recently stolen from Doncaster’s Cusworth Hall Museum.

The opening lines of John Betjeman’s poem
The Liquorice Fields at Pontefract are:

In the liquorice fields at Pontefract
My love and I did meet
And many a burdened liquorice bush
Was blooming round our feet;

Whatever your interests, Pontefract in Wakefield, old and new has a lot to offer.

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