Beneath Nottingham Castle is a network of tunnels dug into the relatively soft sandstone rock that the fortress is built on that dates back to at least the twelfth century and possibly much earlier. One of these tunnels, known as Mortimer’s Hole, leads from the southern part of the castle, where the upper bailey once stood, down through the rock to emerge at Brewhouse Yard, next to The Old Trip to Jerusalem pub outside the castle walls. This tunnel was normally only used by the servants to transport butts or tuns of ale from the brewhouse, where this staple part of the medieval diet was made, up to the castle butteries and storerooms. On the 19th October 1330, Prince John’s great-grandson, a seventeen-year-old boy who would soon become King Edward III, accompanied by a handful of men, used this passageway to sneak into Nottingham Castle undetected and stage a coup d’etat. Once inside the upper bailey, young Edward kidnapped Roger Mortimer, the Earl of March — who with Edward’s French mother Isabella had usurped the throne of England — and managed to spirit the captured earl away through the tunnels to ignominious imprisonment and death.
Once I had heard this story, and visited Mortimer’s Hole, I knew that Robin and Alan could use this secret tunnel to great effect. And I would urge any reader who visits Nottingham to take the tour of these spooky passages — and to have a pint in The Old Trip to Jerusalem afterwards.
Episcopal inquisition
In 1184, Pope Lucius III issued the Papal Bull known as Ad abolendam, in which he exhorted all Christian bishops, archbishops and patriarchs to actively seek out heretics and bring them to trial. If they could not prove their innocence, the Pope decreed, people accused of heresy were to be handed over to the lay authorities for their ‘due penalty’, which in the most serious cases could mean a fiery death at the stake. This bull was a response to the growing popularity of the Cathar movement (and others), and was an attempt to curb what the Church saw as an extremely dangerous heresy.
There is, of course, no record of anyone known as Robin Hood or the Earl of Locksley being tried for heresy at Temple Church, and indeed episcopal inquisitions, more common in the southern Christian lands, were seldom held in northern Europe. But this heretic-hunting institution did exist at that early date and I hope I may therefore be forgiven for inventing a trial, specially sanctioned by the Pope, that brings my pagan Robin Hood into conflict with the Church authorities and his enemies the Knights Templar.
It must be said that the episcopal inquisitions (an inquisition can refer to an individual court case or the investigative institution) as a method of curbing heresy were largely a failure: and one of the main reasons for this, or so Church militants claimed, was that, as Robin points out to the Master of the Templars, a confession made under torture was not admissible in court. It was not until 1252, and the Ad extirpanda bull issued by Pope Innocent IV, that torture was officially sanctioned as part of the inquisition process.