Original subtitles

DAN JONES: For me, a great British castle

is a fortress, a palace, a home.

And a symbol of power, majesty, and fear.

For nearly a thousand years,

castles have shaped Britain's famous landscape.

These magnificent buildings have been home

to some of the greatest heroes and villains in our national history.

And many of them still stand proudly today

bursting with incredible stories

of warfare, treachery, intrigue, passion and murder.

Join me, Dan Jones,

as I uncover the secrets behind six great British castles.

This time I'm in Lancaster Castle, in the heart of Northern England.

A castle which also houses one of the oldest jails

and criminal courts in the land.

Hundreds of people have died here at Lancaster,

not in battles and in sieges, but in the name of British justice.

JONES: It's not everyday you find an abandoned 19th century prison,

in the middle of a medieval castle.

There's something that feels eerily familiar about it though.

It looks almost like a 1970's sitcom.

Feels like I'm Ronnie Barker in Porridge.

Norman Stanley Fletcher,

you've pleaded guilty to the charges brought by this court.

It's now my duty to pass sentence.

For most of its history, imprisonment here was very real.

And this place was deadly serious.

The castle gained Lancaster the nickname of "The Hanging Town."

Although it began life as a bristling medieval fortress,

over the centuries,

the castle became one of Britain's busiest and most brutal prisons.

As well as a prison, the castle also contained a court

where people came to be tried, punished, and to die.

Today Lancaster Castle tells us the stories of more than

eight hundred years of crime and punishment.

And none is more famous than the trial that took place in the 20th century.

Following one of the worst terrorist attacks ever seen on mainland Britain,

the bombing of two pubs in Birmingham.

MALE REPORTER: The tavern in the town of Mulberry Bush

on the night of November the 21st, 1974.

Twenty-one people dead. More than a 160 injured

as the bombs went off.

In June 1975, one of the most notorious trials in British history

began right here at the Crown Port in the heart of Lancaster Castle.

MALE REPORTER: According to the Crown,

the men planted their bombs in the rotunda...

JONES: In the dock were a group of Northern Irishmen,

accused of carrying out

what was then the worst attack on British soil since the Second World War.

The Birmingham pub bombings which killed 21 and injured 182

were the latest in a string of bombings that had occurred across the country,

and they were suspected to be the work of the IRA.

MAN: Six people have been charged as a result of...

Like so many of the trials that took place here,

the case of the Birmingham Six would be controversial.

JONES: While they were on trial, the Birmingham Six

were held in Lancaster Castle cells.

The country was living in daily fear of terrorism.

But the Birmingham Six were innocent.

For three months they were taken back and forth from these cells

to the castle's courtroom, knowing that they had nothing to do

with the murderous attacks that had rocked the UK.

MAN: Within two days, four of the six men had signed confessions.

Confessions which they said were brutally beaten out of them by police.

JONES: These confessions would strongly influence the verdict.

As a result on the 15th of August 1975,

they were found guilty here at Lancaster Castle.

They were given a total of 21 life sentences for murder.

But they were not guilty.

They all served 16 years in British prisons

before their convictions were overturned in 1991.

The trial was one of the worst miscarriages of justice

in modern British history,

and it happened right here in Lancaster Castle.

JONES: The story of Lancaster Castle goes back over 2000 years.

The first people to build here were the Romans.

In 43 AD the Romans conquered Britain,

but in the North they had constant trouble from local tribes.

To cement their rule they built a vast network of forts,

including the one here in Lancaster.

In fact the name Lancaster,

comes from the River Lune and castrum, the Latin word for fort.

The remains of that ancient Roman fort,

still lie underneath the castle you see today.

This imposing tower with its curved walls,

was built in the 13th Century, from the remains of the Roman fort.

That's why it's known as Hadrian's Tower

after one of the most famous of the Roman invaders,

the Emperor Hadrian.

But the stone structure we see today,

began it's life nearly a thousand years after the time of Hadrian and the Romans.

It goes back to the time of the Normans,

invaders from France, who conquered England in 1066,

took the Crown and covered the kingdom with castles,

as symbols of their authority.

Here, on the edge of the River Lune,

Lancaster Castle looked out at the no mans land

that led towards Scotland.

This is the oldest part of Lancaster Castle.

It's the Keep, which is the strong central part of any castle,

where the Lord lived, or you ran for safety,

if the enemy managed to break into the outer gates.

As you can see, it's big, it's square,

and it's very hard to get into.

The original door wouldn't have been here,

it would have been up on the first floor.

And you'd have been able to set fire to a set of wooden stairs leading up to it,

if the worst happened.

And that would leave your enemy, down here, kicking his heels.

No one knows exactly who built The Keep.

One theory is that it was built by King David of Scotland,

who for a time in the 1140's

was granted control of the North of England,

and kept peace in this area.

Building a towering stone keep of this size

would have taken at least five years.

It's outer walls are almost 10 feet thick. It stands four stories tall.

By the 1150's, the castle was back in the hands of the English Crown

and began to appear in the records of the day.

But soon the castle was transformed.

This time by one of the worst rulers England ever produced,

the infamous King John, whose suspicion and paranoia often saw his enemies

tortured and starved to death in his castle's dreaded dungeons.

JONES: Lancaster's stone castle was originally built by the Normans

in the 11th century to keep peace in the north,

but a hundred years later, it underwent a major transformation.

When the power hungry King John came to the throne in 1199,

he set about enlarging the castle complex.

King John is remembered as one of the most treacherous, untrustworthy, sadistic,

incompetent, downright evil kings in all of British history.

This is the monarch who was forced to grant Magna Carta,

the famous bill of rights when his barons rebelled.

He's the bad guy from the Robin Hood stories.

His reputation is quite frankly awful and guess what?

It's all true.

Being a suspicious tyrant, John had a great love for castles

which he quite rightly thought he needed to protect himself

from his subjects and from his enemies.

Lancaster like many other castles in England benefited from his paranoia.

Just two years after visiting here in 1206 John began to spend the equivalent

of a million pounds in strengthening the castle's defenses.

John had a deep ditch dug on the south and west sides of the castle.

He replaced the wooden fencing with a huge stone wall.

He ordered the building of new fortifications

and work began on Hadrian's Tower

using some of the stone from the old Roman fort.

But even though John's castles were impressive,

they weren't necessarily nice places to end up.

Because as well as being reinforced to keep attackers out,

their interiors were used to hold the King's enemies.

During John's rule, Lancaster Castle

began to be associated with crime and punishment

and the emphasis was on the punishment.

John's treatment of his prisoners was notoriously cruel.

In 1203, his teenage nephew Arthur of Brittany

disappeared while locked in one of John's castles.

The rumor went around that John had got drunk one Easter,

bashed the kid's head in with a stone and thrown his body in a nearby river.

Later John had the wife and son of one of his great barons

locked up in another castle.

He ordered they were starved to death, and it was said

they died, insane with hunger.

When the cell door was opened, they were huddled together,

the mother having tried to eat her son's face.

If you ended up in one of John's dungeons,

the chances were, you weren't coming out.

JONES: The addition of the stone wall in the new tower,

meant that when King John died in 1216

he left behind a greatly extended castle, looked after by a Sheriff.

The Sheriff was an official the Monarch could trust,

and locals could fear,

and with the job of Sheriff came a castle.

As the King's deputy,

the Sheriff was responsible for collecting taxes, keeping the peace,

and organizing the assizes.

The twice yearly court sessions where visiting Royal Judges,

would come to town to hear serious criminal cases.

These were big public events,

so hosting the Assizes

made Lancaster Castle a very important place,

and it made the Sheriff, a very important man.

JONES: In 1362, England's King Edward III,

gave the position of Sheriff, and the title Duke of Lancaster,

to one of his sons, John of Gaunt.

John of Gaunt wasn't directly in line for the throne,

but he was a very rich and powerful man.

Either by birth or by marriage, he inherited vast tracts of land

between the rivers Ribbel and Mersey.

It was called the Duchy of Lancaster,

and it made him the wealthiest Lord in Medieval England.

Now in 1377,

when his nephew Richard II came to the throne,

John of Gaunt persuaded him to turn the Sheriff's job,

here at the castle, into a job for life, and to substantially increase its powers.

JONES: Richard II was aware that John of Gaunt's power

essentially made him king of Lancashire and a very real threat to the Crown.

In 1399, John of Gaunt died leaving everything to his son, Henry Bolingbroke.

Richard made a land grab seizing the estates, the castle,

and the Duchy of Lancaster.

In response Bolingbroke raised an army gaining so much support

that Richard was forced to surrender without a fight.

By the end of the year, Richard II was in the Tower of London

and Henry Bolingbroke was King Henry IV of England,

and it was King Henry who built this magnificent gatehouse

in memory of his father John of Gaunt.

It's 66 feet high, about 25 feet deep,

with these soaring semi octagonal towers

and the great iron spiked gate called a portcullis,

which in medieval times would be lowered in the event of an attack.

It's got to be one of the most spectacular gatehouses in England.

Ironically, Henry IV

did exactly the thing he prevented Richard II from doing.

He brought the Duchy of Lancaster under the control of the Crown.

That's where it remains, so here's your start of a ten.

Who is the current Duke of Lancaster?

MAN: At the massive John of Gaunt's gates are the old Norman Castle which...

JONES: Yes, it's the Queen.

As Duke of Lancaster, Queen Elizabeth II

controls more than 45,000 acres of land and holdings.

The Duchy is worth about half a billion pounds

with yearly revenues of around 60 million

and it all dates back to the middle ages.

During the 14th and 15th centuries

as a castle with a sheriff, a prison, and a court,

Lancaster was increasingly used to enforce law and order.

But here's the weird thing,

for most of the Medieval period prison wasn't the punishment.

You're only kept in prison to await your trial.

And the form that trial took could be very unpleasant

because it always wasn't a judge who decided your fate.

It could be your God, through the notorious trial by ordeal.

(DOORS CLOSING)

Barrister and historian Dominic Selwood explains.

Trial by ordeal was the ultimate trial because effectively

humans brought the case, but god decided the case.

So, in a trial by ordeal, the accused person would take an oath.

So now it's a very crucial part in the oath was

"I swear I'm innocent."

And it was done on holy books and on holy relics.

So the ordeal itself whether it was carrying a piece of hot iron,

putting a hand into a cauldron of boiling water

to take out a hot iron ball, was God interfering

in the physical world to say, yes, this person is telling the truth

or no that person's perjured themselves.

Tell us a little bit more about how a trial by ordeal would proceed.

So if we take probably the best known which is a trial by iron,

a space of nine of the accused person's feet would be measured out.

The iron would be heated up

and depending on the seriousness of the crime,

the iron would weigh different amounts.

They have to pick up the iron and run the nine feet

which could be done in about two seconds, holding the iron and then drop it.

His hands would then be bound up and then three days later

the binding would then be taken off.

If the skin was corrupted then he was guilty.

If the skin wasn't, then he was innocent.

JONES: Here in Lancaster during the Middle Ages,

most punishments would have been carried out in public.

From executions up on what was called Gallows Hill,

to being pelted in a stocks with anything from rotten vegetables

to dead cats and excrement.

In an age where there was no such thing as police,

punishment was about making sure that law and order

was seen to be enforced.

So, one of the most gruesome things I found at the castle is this,

the branding iron.

And here is how it works. This was used until the 19th century.

Your hand would be clamped here then this the iron would be heated

until it was red hot, taken out and used to imprint the letter M

into the palm of your hand now.

M stood for malefactor or evil doer.

And as well as this being a very painful punishment,

it was a visible sign that you had a criminal record.

There was no escaping your past when it's burned into the palm of your hand.

Castle historian, Colin Penny, has brought me to the bowels of Hadrian's Tower

to show me some of the nastier tools of punishment

from Lancaster's dark history.

But these handcuffs are tiny like little children's handcuffs.

Children were put in prison from the age of nine,

so they had to make handcuffs that would fit them and not fall off.

JONES: This here strikes me as particularly ghastly.

Tell us a little bit about what we've got here.

This is a skulls bridle and it was used to punish

women who had been found guilty of crimes such as fighting in the streets,

and this gives a fairly good idea of what it was like with this.

So you've got the bar here that went over the tongue.

This closed around the head and there's a loop here

through which a chain would be passed and of course every time

they pulled on this, the bar would move.

Solid metal would break their teeth. They would sometimes break their jaw.

Some versions had the spike coming out of the bar and every time that moved,

it would split the tongue.

(MUTTERING)

Yes, so now you are silenced.

(MUTTERING)

And if you imagine somebody pulling at the back here,

your whole head would go hack.

Oh!

I'm actually going to take it off because all joking aside,

that's absolutely horrendous.

JONES: I mean this is humiliating and painful to wear.

It's designed to silence individuals, but it's also designed

to silence political opinion, isn't it?

Yes, and religious ones.

JONES: Silencing dissent is a very large part of Lancaster Castle's history.

Many of its most infamous inmates were people whose main offense

was simply practicing the wrong religion.

By the 16th and 17th centuries that usually meant being a Catholic.

In 1534, Henry VIII made England a Protestant country

by setting up the Church of England.

Those who remained Catholics were seen as enemies of the state.

From the reign of Henry's daughter, Elizabeth I, onwards,

anti Catholic feeling intensified,

peaking during the reign of Elizabeth's successor, James I.

Between 1584 and 1646, 15 men were executed in Lancaster

for refusing to renounce their Catholic faith.

England was a Protestant nation surrounded by powerful Catholic enemies,

including France and Spain.

The Gunpowder Plot had been carried out by Catholics,

including Guy Fawkes,

who planned to blow up King James I in the Houses of Parliament.

So, England's Catholic population were regarded with great suspicion,

potential allies of enemies trying to invade us.

In this climate of fear,

being a Catholic priest was an act of treason,

punishable by the worst death imaginable.

One of the most tragic victims of England's growing anti-Catholic hysteria,

was a priest called Edmund Arrowsmith.

He was tried at Lancaster Castle in the summer of 1628.

Unfortunately for Arrowsmith,

he was tried by the famously anti-Catholic judge, Sir Henry Yelverton.

He didn't stand a chance.

Yelverton found him guilty of high treason

and sentenced him not only to death but to hanging, drawing and quartering,

using the dreadful words.

JONES: You shall there be hanged by the neck,

till you be half dead,

your members shall be cut off before your face,

and thrown into the fire.

Where likewise, your bowels shall be burned.

Your head shall be cut off,

and set upon a stake or pole.

And your quarters shall be set upon the four corners of the castle.

And so the Lord have mercy upon you.

Judge Yelverton then ordered that Arrowsmith was to be

chained up in the castle's worst cell, to await his horrible death.

But because many people in this area were still secretly Catholic,

the authorities couldn't find anyone to carry out the execution,

until eventually, another prisoner on a death sentence,

agreed to do the ghastly deed,

in return for his freedom and 40 shillings.

Everyone has a price.

Lancaster Castle was gaining a reputation for tough justice,

and dreadful punishments.

And enemies of the state could be lurking anywhere.

But soon, Lancaster's greatest fear

wouldn't be religious insurrection, or even rebellion.

It would be something very different indeed.

Witchcraft.

JONES: As a great British castle, Lancaster was designed for many things.

Originally built for keeping people out,

over time it came to specialize in locking people in.

Lancaster Castle became the most notorious prison in Britain.

Best known for the crimes heard in its courtrooms,

and the grisly punishments handed down within its walls.

(WHIP SNAPS, MAN SCREAMING)

Being tried at Lancaster was never pleasant,

and very often it was fatal.

Over the years, hundreds of men and women

left the castle to face the ultimate penalty,

death.

Until about 1800,

hangings happened on the other side of town,

on what was called Gallows Hill.

The condemned would leave the castle escorted by the Sheriff and his troops.

A crowd would gather to watch the spectacle as they marched through town.

And a tradition eventually developed,

whereby he or she was allowed to stop in the Golden Lion Pub

for a final drink before continuing on to their fate on the hill.

They'd be wheeled up here from the castle on the back of a horse and cart

as many as eight at a time,

while thousands of excited spectators gathered to watch.

When they got here, they'd see a permanent wooden structure known as a gibbet.

A noose around their neck would be attached to the gibbet.

Then the horse and cart would be driven away

and they'd be left to slowly choke to death.

There were more than 200 crimes which carried the death penalty

until the 19th century.

You could be hanged for stealing rabbits,

being in the company of gypsies for one month,

damaging Westminster Bridge, or impersonating a Chelsea pensioner.

Which to be fair, probably didn't happen that much here in Lancashire.

But there was one crime this area became really famous for,

witchcraft.

In the 17th century, Britain was gripped by a national terror of witches.

Lancaster Castle was at the center of the biggest

and most notorious series of witch trials in British history.

This is Pendle Hill.

In the 17th century, it was a forested area with poor roads and remote villages.

A place full of superstition and mistrust.

Home to people who scraped out a measly living

on the fringes of society.

And a chance encounter on a road here in March 1612

led to the biggest witch trial in English history

and the hanging of 10 people.

So here's the story.

There's this young girl called Alison Device

and her granny is known locally as a healer, or a cunning woman.

Now one day, young Alison is out begging by the side of the road

and she meets a traveling salesman but he won't give her the time of day.

So Alison curses him under her breath.

Later on the salesman collapses.

It was probably some kind of a stroke

but he blames Alison, and he calls her a witch.

Later, the salesman's son marches Alison, the so called witch,

straight to an ambitious, and very eager local magistrate.

But as soon as Alison is accused of being a witch, what does she do?

She rats on her grandmother and her mother and her brother and her sister

and her neighbors, the Chattox family.

If she's going down as a witch, then so are they.

This starts escalating.

Pretty soon any death or unexplained occurrence in the area

is being linked to these two families.

This is turning quite literally into a witch hunt.

This was the start of what became known as the Pendle or Lancashire Witch Trials,

that were held in the castle in 1612.

Although the belief in witches was ancient,

in England the fear of witchcraft was nearing its peak

in the first half of the 17th century.

Henry VIII had passed the first law that made witchcraft a specific crime.

But when James I became King of England in 1603, he really upped the ante.

James believed his enemies were using witchcraft to plot against him.

And he became so obsessed that he authored a book on the subject called Daemonologie

and created a new law which made witchcraft punishable by death.

Crimes included making a covenant with an evil spirit, using a corpse for magic,

hurting life or limb, procuring love or injuring cattle by means of charms.

Ronald Hutton is one of Britain's foremost experts in witchcraft

and its folklore.

JONES: Right, what is it about Pendle that produced witches.

Pendle around 1600 is a forest area

which means that people can squat here without being evicted.

It's rough, the people who live here are often semi-criminal.

They make a living by thieving, by offering magic as cunning craft.

When we talk about witches, what do we really mean?

A witch in this period is somebody who uses magic

to try and hurt somebody else.

Now what am I gonna do if a witch has put a spell on me?

I have the hot new state of the art response from the early 17th century.

Really easy. We need from you some of your urine about half way up,

some of your nail clippings, clippings of your hair.

And what we then do if we're in a hurry, we roast it over a fire.

And as your water boils, the curse is turned back on the witch.

JONES: The trial of the Pendle witches was to take place of course

in Lancaster Castle.

One of the reasons the trial became so notorious is that the clerk

of the court, Thomas Potts, published an account,

The Wonderful Discovery of Witches in the County of Lancaster.

Now among the defendants,

you have three generations of witches on trial.

You've got Alison, the original young girl

who is supposedly cursed, the traveling salesman,

and her brother, James, you have their mother, Elizabeth,

and the grandmother, Demdike.

Now, the real star of the Pendle Witch Trials

was another sibling, Alison's nine year old sister, Jennet.

And this book describes her as "This young wench."

Can you tell me a little bit about Jennet?

Jennet is clearly a badly disturbed child from a severely dysfunctional family.

And what happened in this court was her star moments.

She agrees to accuse her entire family of witchcraft.

She's so little she has to be put on a table in the courtroom

for people to see and hear her.

Once she starts her mother realizes that her daughter is sentencing

herself, the mother, to death and begins screaming.

Jennet proceeds to accuse the whole family of dealing with demons

and then implicates their friends in the same practices.

James, the King, had already written in his book on witchcraft

that the testimony of children should be accepted

because witchcraft is such a difficult crime to prove.

So this nine year old girl is the deciding bit of evidence

that sentences not just her family, but their friends to death.

JONES: One of the accused witches was found not guilty.

Another died while awaiting trial.

The remaining 10, including Alison Device,

were found guilty and sentenced to be executed by hanging.

This is the dungeon in the basement of the Well Tower

where the witches were kept waiting for their trial,

and eventual execution. It must have been horrendous.

Damp, it's dank, there's no natural light down here at all.

In fact, conditions were so brutal that Alison Device's granny,

the witch known as old Demdike, died down here waiting for her trial.

(CHURCH BELLS CHIMING)

JONES: On the 20th of August 1612,

the witches were brought along the time honored route across town.

It is said they stopped for their final drink

in the Golden Lion Pub

before being hanged in front of a large jeering crowd on Gallows Hill.

You can understand why Lancaster was starting to earn its nickname

of "The Hanging Town."

But it wasn't because the Sheriff was particularly cruel

or because the town's people were especially fond of killing each other

or casting magic spells.

It was because Lancaster Castle was the only place in Lancashire

to host the assizes, the twice yearly court session when judges arrived

to hold trials for everything from murder through to sheep stealing.

And when they arrived, Lancaster wasn't just the hanging town,

it was a boom town.

JONES: The court at the castle was of huge importance to the town

as the influx of judges, lawyers and clerks

brought in lots of money to the local inn keepers and merchants.

At 17th century Lancaster, crime really did pay.

The judges and the lawyers lived the high life.

Lancaster's privileged legal physician encouraged the building of some

magnificent Georgian properties, which still stand here on Castle Hill.

This house was the residence of Thomas Covell,

the keeper of Lancaster Castle during the 17th century witch trial.

Later, in the 18th Century, it became an impressive residence,

for judges visiting Lancaster Castle, to sit at the Assize Courts.

And by the 18th Century something else was starting up,

that would further increase the town's fortunes.

The Industrial Revolution.

Lancaster was at the epicenter of this major economic and social upheaval.

And what was good for Lancaster would be good for its castle.

Lancashire was really the birthplace of the Industrial Revolution.

Over the course of 100 years,

the growth of cotton mills and heavy manufacturing

led to an explosion in population,

particularly in newly thriving cities like Liverpool and Manchester.

Across Britain and Ireland, tens of thousands of people

were leaving the land, and flocking to the Industrial North.

And more people meant more crime.

More theft, more violence.

A new generation of dissenters and non-conformists.

Luddites, chartists, early trades union agitators.

And wherever these people were apprehended,

even as far away as Liverpool and Manchester,

where were they brought to be tried and imprisoned?

Lancaster Castle.

For the castle, the Industrial Revolution was good for business.

With its cells filled to bursting,

the coming century would see the castle extensively rebuilt.

And a new form of punishment was about to be dispensed.

Transportation.

Lancaster Castle has a grisly history of crime and punishment

going back over 800 years.

By the 18th Century it was doing more business than ever before,

as the growing population was accompanied by surging crime rates.

For those awaiting their fate inside the castle

the conditions were unimaginably squalid,

and had changed little from Medieval times.

There was little or no sanitation,

and men, women and even children were crammed in together,

along with the mentally ill.

The overcrowding and the filth were so bad,

they led to several outbreaks of disease,

probably typhus, which was known as jail fever.

One outbreak in 1783 was so bad,

that as well as prisoners falling sick,

the Governor himself, and several of his staff died.

But pressure for change was slowly growing.

In 1777, a prison reformer called John Howard

had published a book called The State of the Prison.

Howard had visited hundreds of prisons, including Lancaster,

and his damning report led to new laws about how prisons should be run.

Soon prisons had to provide male and female segregation,

better sanitation and ventilation,

and more communal spaces for exercise.

Much of Lancaster Castle had to be redesigned

to meet the new requirements.

In 1796, the old Medieval Hall of the Castle was demolished,

to make way for a new Crown Court and this Shire Hall.

They were both the work of the architect Thomas Harrison.

This fabulous 10 sided room with its vaulted ceiling,

gothic columns and arches,

became the venue for civil, non-criminal cases,

like bankruptcy and divorce.

But not all the money was spent on comforts for the judges and barristers.

This women's prison was built inside the castle in 1821,

and in its own austere way, I think it's grimly spectacular.

This new female penitentiary was built according to the latest,

labor saving design, the panopticon principle.

With cells radiating out from a central hub,

so the guards could watch all the inmates at the same time

without necessarily knowing that they were being watched.

This was also fairly luxurious.

For the first time prisoners had their own cells,

which is something that many in Britain's overcrowded jails

don't even have today.

In a Victorian age of innovation and invention

even the ancient practice of hanging was made more efficient.

And this resulted in a new venue for the executions at Lancaster Castle.

After 1800, hangings were moved from Gallows Hill

to this spot around the back of the castle.

Although still in front of jeering crowds who would gather to watch the awful show.

Soon, more Britons were being executed here in the renowned hanging town,

than anywhere else outside London.

This is now the Crown's Court jury room, but it was the drop room,

where the condemned waited before they were taken out to die.

The doors opened out onto the gallows,

the condemned walked out, and dropped.

Literally thousands of people would have gathered here,

in the grounds of the priory,

to witness this most public of ends.

Until 1853, the method of hanging used, was called the short drop,

a horrible way to die of slow strangulation.

This was later replaced by the relatively more humane long drop,

in which the victim fell much further,

the neck was snapped and death was instantaneous.

But radical change was in the air.

In the 18th and 19th centuries,

courts across England, including Lancaster,

began offering an alternative punishment for some hanging offenses.

Transportation, as it was called,

was forced banishment to an overseas penal colony,

by far the largest of which was Australia.

Sentences ranged from seven years to life.

Between 1788 and 1868,

160,000 people were transported to Australia.

Men, women and children, sometimes as young as nine,

Lancaster Castle still has records for many of those it dispatched,

halfway around the globe.

But I'm particularly fascinated by the story of two young brothers.

James and Leonard Cheatham,

sentenced to death in 1817, for stealing sheep.

Now, stealing sheep might not sound like a serious offense,

but these sheep were worth more than 40 shillings,

which made it grand larceny, a hanging offense.

However, the judge sitting here, in the castle,

commuted their sentence to transportation.

The brothers were sent to Sydney to become convict servants,

but they served their time, were given their freedom,

both married convict women, who'd also been transported.

How do I know all this?

Because their Australian descendant, Wendy Robinson, told me so.

Or to be more precise, Crown Prosecutor Wendy Robinson.

Incredibly, one of Australia's most successful criminal lawyers,

is descended from two sheep stealers,

sentenced in this castle, and in this very courtroom.

JONES: Tell me what this document is, Wendy?

ROBINSON: It's the indictment, upon which they were tried,

or the original would have been handed up,

and read out in this court at the commencement of their trial.

Down at the bottom here it says, "Leonard Cheatham, James Cheatham,

"they are to be severally hanged, by the neck,

"until they be dead."

Well, on the following Wednesday, the judge wrote a recommendation

to the region in counsel, for their death sentences to be commuted,

they were separately loaded onto different boats,

and sent to the colony of New South Wales, both of them arriving there in 1818.

How long were they sentenced to be in Australia for?

-Life. -For life.

-So they never came back to England? -No.

What did they do?

They worked as convict servants, eventually getting their ticket of leave.

And then, some years later,

they moved right out further,

as the colony had expanded, they gained on to the front phase and beyond

the known boundaries of the colony and there they raised sheep

and they raised lots and lots of sheep and they became famous for their wool.

What do you think about this courtroom and its importance in Australian history?

This is probably the most important courtroom in Australian history

so far as the numbers of people who were processed

through this assize, from that dock.

And a very large proportion of the New South Wales population

to this day are descendants from convicts who came through this room.

JONES: Through this very room, in this very castle.

What are you thinking when you look out at this court?

I think it's truly remarkable that it's still here and I can be here.

JONES: Many lives were destroyed here at Lancaster Castle.

But it seems to me it's also being the starting point

for countless new stories.

The last execution took place in 1910,

not in public, but in a purpose built private shed.

The prison closed six years later but was then reopened for category C offenders,

low security risk.

And in 2011, after eight centuries of locking people up,

Lancaster Prison finally closed its doors for good.

And then opened them, to the public.

But the Crown Court still operates here,

so the castle is still fulfilling one of its original purposes,

maintaining the rule of law in the mighty Duchy of Lancaster.

And thats why there has been a prison here for the best part of 850 years,

because as long as you've got crime, you need punishment.

And Lancaster Castle is very good at punishment.

Okay, guys, you can let me out now.

JONES: Guys?