There was one dungeon under the Round Tower, which was reached by
passing down some winding steps, into which no ray of light ever
entered, as dark and dismal a place as could be imagined. Here Earl
Rivers and his fellow peers were incarcerated, praying for their
execution to end their misery. There was also a cellar for the storage
of food and drink, sunk some forty or fifty feet in the solid rock, and
capable of holding two or three hundred men, and this too was used as a
dungeon by the Royalists. Here the prisoners taken by the Royalist army
were confined, and many of their names appeared cut in the walls of
solid rock. The history of these places, if it could be written, would
form a chapter of horrors of the most dreadful character, as in olden
times prisoners were often forgotten by their captors, and left in the
dungeons to perish.
It was not without a tinge of satisfaction that we heard that the Earl
of Lancaster, to whom the castle belonged, was himself placed in one of
these dungeons after the Battle of Boroughbridge in 1322, and after
being imprisoned there a short time, where he had so often imprisoned
others, was led out to execution.
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