Nottingham Castle

Exactly.

The article notes it is built directly into the porous sandstone rock underneath Nottingham Castle.

It has these cave-like rooms that feel secretive and medieval.

It's literally a cave.

In his films, Errol Flynn had extricated himself from a hundred impossible predicaments.

He had escaped a Confederate prison and the Spanish Inquisition, Nottingham Castle and Nazi Europe.

He had survived bandito ambushes and cutthroat plots, shipwrecks and crash landings and high-sea duels.

He was a close-call specialist, an artist of the narrow escape.

They lived in them.

Nottingham Castle, where I am, that was the main residence of Henry IV's queen, Joan of Navarre, for many years in the 15th century.

And they also actually defended castles.

You know, they looked after the castles they lived in.

Um, but Nottingham, yes, is important to, to John.

He bases himself there a fair bit, but Nottingham Castle during the medieval period is considered to be the center of the kingdom-

Yes

... geographically.

By their own admission, there's well over a thousand caves, they call them, in Nottingham.

many of them undiscovered many of them inaccessible to the general public but this is right on top of nottingham castle you can see the castle right on top here and just look at that folks like that's no weathering of rock like you can even see how it's streamed down right here oh my gosh sorry i got my daughter that likes to be a fan of the podcast here's my little gal ruby Get away, Daddy's doing a show.

Sorry about that, folks.

The studio's always busy here at the Questioning Everything studio.

wow see those lines and those little holes right there being exposed now look back at some of those bigger structures and you'll see those same kind of lines Those same little like air bubble holes all up and down those mountains and cliffs that people just supposedly carved, right? Let's take a look so I can show you what I mean.

We'll just go right back to Nottingham.

Good old Nottingham Castle.

Like you can see the little bubble marks and then you can see the lines.

Edward III felt that as a father he was no longer a mere boy, and could not continue to submit to his own degradation.

it was not difficult to find people ready and eager to enter into his plans a conspiracy was formed of which the queen and mortimer seem to have had dim suspicions They tried to avert the danger by keeping Edward with them in Nottingham Castle, but he succeeded in gaining over the governor of the castle, and a body of armed men was introduced at midnight through a subterranean passage.

They broke into the room where Mortimer was, and after a short struggle made him prisoner.

The queen, who was in the next room, burst in with agonized entreaties.

The castle.

It's meant to be the Nottingham Castle where, you know, Robin Hood and all them people go.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Get it.

Wicked.

And you need to get it from the base, because some parts are wicked.

Here's the, uh, I was just kind of, while you were talking, pulled up Nottingham Castle, just for grins and giggles.

Let's share that with you

It's going to make life easier for people to get to the city grounds.

Like so many people come up to Nottingham and the first thing they want to do, no, it's not Nottingham Castle.

Let's go see the world famous.

They want to go and take a picture.

Welcome to the Proper British History Podcast.

Now let's separate the history we can actually establish from the legend that grew around Edward Ree's thirteen thirty seizure of Nottingham Castle.

Picture an eighteen-year-old king standing on the edge of a crumbling stone keep in autumn thirteen thirty, with the weight of his mother's regency and the tyrannical shadow of Roger Mortimer pressing against every corridor.

The story tells us that Edward, backed by a handful of loyal lieutenants, slipped through a hidden passage, later christened Mortimer's Hole, to storm Nottingham Castle under cover of night, seizing Isabella's daughter and her lover in one swift raid.

But does the physical reality of a secret tunnel match the dramatic narrative found in chroniclers? If we ask what contemporary documents say, nothing about a hidden passage survives from the early fourteenth century.

No royal charter, not even the account in the calendar of the rebellion of thirteen thirty, mentions any clandestine route.

After Isabella's forced abdication in thirteen twenty-seven, her lover Roger Mortimer effectively ran the realm.

By thirteen thirty, the young king had gathered enough supporters, many from the rising baronial class, to challenge this dominance.