Medieval Lincolnshire: (1154 – 1485)

The global wool engine and the rise of Boston (1154–1216)

A new royal family named the Plantagenets came to power in 1154. After the civil war turmoil at the end of the Norman era, they brought stability to Lincolnshire.

From this stability the county was in a prime position generate wealth and become rich.

Lincolnshire held one huge advantage over its rivals, millions of sheep grazing the chalk Wolds. Cistercian monks at Kirkstead and Revesby ran vast sheep farms here, worked day to day by lay brothers called grangers.

Ordinary fenland families kept flocks too, adding their own wool to the harvest every year. Together, it became one of Europe's most prized commodities, sought by luxury weavers in Flanders and northern Italy.

That wool had to leave the county somehow, and Boston became its gateway to the world. This small port on the tidal Wash grew into one of England's busiest harbours, at times even out-earning London in customs revenue.

Merchants from the Low Countries, the Baltic, and the Rhine set up permanent trading posts along the waterfront, swapping timber, iron, and wine for Lincolnshire fleeces. Small farms gave way to large, profit-driven sheep runs across the county.

Two shades of Lincoln-dyed cloth became famous right across Europe. Lincoln green was made by dyeing wool blue with woad, then over-dyeing it yellow with weld, while Lincoln scarlet, dyed with imported kermes, commanded an even higher price.

A Sheriff of Lincoln's household accounts from 1182 record both cloths being bought and sold in the city, proof of how established the trade already was.

Centuries later, that same fame worked its way into England's best-loved outlaw story. The earliest surviving printed Robin Hood ballads, gathered around 1500, dress Robin Hood and his men in 'Lyncolne grene'.

Robin Hood himself belongs to Nottinghamshire and Sherwood Forest, not to this county. But when the ballad-writers wanted their hero dressed in the finest cloth money could buy, it was Lincolnshire's wool trade they reached for.

The siege of Lincoln and the lost jewels (1215–1217)

Such riches made Lincolnshire a tempting prize once England itself collapsed into civil war. In 1216, during the chaos of the First Barons' War, King John (1166–1216) marched north to secure his hold on the county.

His journey ended in disaster. Crossing the treacherous mudflats of The Wash, his baggage train was caught by a fast-moving tide, and the crown jewels themselves were swallowed by the sea.

The following year, the conflict reached Lincoln Castle itself, besieged by French mercenaries and rebel barons.

It was defended by an elderly noblewoman, Nicola de la Haye (c. 1150–1230), whose garrison held the ridge until a relieving army finally arrived.

The royalist victory that followed permanently broke French hopes of ruling England. For ordinary people in the lower town, though, it brought a different kind of violence.

Victorious soldiers looted the merchant quarters along the River Witham, punishing anyone suspected of backing the rebels.

Raising the world's tallest spire (1192–1311)

All that wool money had to go somewhere, and much of it went straight up. In 1185, a powerful earthquake struck Lincoln, and bishops and master masons seized the chance to rebuild Lincoln Cathedral bigger than ever.

It became the largest building project the county had ever attempted, on a scale never before seen in Christendom.

The old Norman West Front survived the tremor largely intact, but everything else was rebuilt from the ground up. Millions of tons of local limestone were quarried, employing hundreds of stone-cutters, carpenters, and lead-workers across decades of building work.

The project reached its climax in 1311 with a colossal timber and lead spire rising from the central tower. At over 160 metres tall, it beat the Great Pyramid of Giza to become the tallest structure ever built.

It was paid for by three sources together, episcopal patronage from the bishop and his church, tithes (a mandatory ten-percent tax on fleeces and grain), and lay donations from ordinary worshippers.

For centuries afterwards, that spire gave Lincolnshire a landmark visible for miles across the flat, low-lying Fens.

The double blow of famine and plague (1315–1350)

Lincolnshire's golden century ended the way many golden centuries do, with disaster arriving in pairs. From 1315, years of relentless rain triggered the Great Famine, ruining harvests and killing thousands of sheep across the Wolds.

Wool production collapsed and starvation spread through the countryside. Within a generation, the trade that had made Lincolnshire rich had fallen apart.

Then, in the summer of 1349, came the Black Death. It tore through crowded ports and quiet farming villages alike, killing between a third and a half of the county's entire population within two years.

Whole villages on the clay lands were simply abandoned as the workforce vanished.

The peasants who survived found they finally had the upper hand, demanding higher wages and lower rents. The feudal system that had once bound them to the land broke apart for good.

Dynastic fracture and the early modern transition (1455–1485)

The last decades of the Medieval era dragged Lincolnshire into a different kind of fight, one between rival branches of the royal family.

Local noble families picked sides in the Wars of the Roses, Lancastrian or Yorkist, and used the chaos to settle old scores by force.

The tension finally broke in 1470 at the Battle of Losecoat Field near Stamford, where royal artillery scattered a rebel army so fast that the fleeing soldiers left the fields littered with discarded armour.

Years of unrest had already done real damage to the county's trade networks, and Boston's long boom was finally coming to an end.

Peace finally came in 1485, when the last battle of the war was fought at Bosworth, opening the way for the Tudor dynasty.

Lincolnshire came out of the Medieval era a changed county. Its great monastic wool empires were fading, but its people had spent three centuries learning how to survive whatever the world threw at them next.