s remains. The base of
the great round tower, prominent in all the prints of the castle in the
time of its greatest glory, fragments of the lower parts of other towers
and some dungeons or magazines are practically the only features of the
historic site that the imagination finds to feed upon. A long flight of
steps leads into the underground chambers, on whose walls are carved
the names of various prisoners taken during the siege of 1648. Below
the castle, on the east side, is the old church of All Saints with its
ruined nave, eloquent of the destruction wrought by the Parliamentary
cannon in the successive sieges, and to the north stands New Hall, the
stately Tudor mansion of Lord George Talbot, now reduced to the
melancholy wreck depicted in these pages. The girdle of fortifications
constructed by the besiegers round the castle included New Hall, in
case it might have been reached by a sally of the Royalists, whose
cannon-balls, we know, carried as far, from the discovery of one
embedded in the masonry. Coats of arms of the Talbots can still be seen
on carved stones on the front walls over the entrance. The date, 1591,
is believed to be later than the time of the erection of the house,
which, in the form of its parapets and other details, suggests the
style of Henry VIII's reign.

Although we can describe in a very few words the historic survivals of
Pontefract, to deal even cursorily with the story of the vanished
castle and modernized town is a great undertaking, so numerous are the
great personages and famous events of English history connected with
its owners, its prisoners, and its sieges.

The name Pontefract has suggested such an obvious derivation that, from
the early topographers up to the present time, efforts have been made
to discover the broken bridge giving rise to the new name, which
replaced the Saxon Kyrkebi. No one has yet succeeded in this quest, and
the absence of any river at Pontefract makes the search peculiarly
hopeless. At Castleford, a few miles north-west of Pontefract, where
the Roman Ermine Street crossed the confluence of the Aire and the
Calder, it is definitely known that there was only a ford. The present
name does not make any appearance until several years after the Norman
Conquest, though Ilbert de Lacy received the great fief, afterwards to
become the Honour of Pontefract, in 1067, the year after the Battle of
Hastings. Ilbert built the first stone castle on the rock, and either