The cathedral city of Lincoln offers a unique history dating from the first century BC settlement of Lindon/Lindum, Lindo (the Pool). The many faces of Lincoln are yours to explore, from Steep Hill leading to the ‘Uphill’ Cathedral Quarter with its beautiful cathedral dating from 1072, and the historic castle with its Medieval Wall Walk and precious original Magna Carta, one of only four of the 1215 issue in existence. The Stonebow and Guildhall invite you to step back in time and explore treasures and artefacts from sieges, battles and celebrations through the centuries. You can also follow Lincoln’s links to blockbuster films such as Lawrence of Arabia, The Da Vinci Code and The Dam Busters.
Yet Lincoln has darker side, including the castle’s grim prison history and chilling tales of lonely tombstones and remembrances of the hapless inmates. Sieges and bloody battles of kings and would-be kings are yours to re-live, along with their legacies of priceless artefacts, swords, charters and insignia.
Lincoln invites you to a feast of stunning architecture, ghostly tales, the arts, Lincolnshire wool and cloth and even its famous Lincolnshire sausages! Walk with heroes and villains, the bizarre and mysterious through the ages as you discover history on your doorstep. Whatever your interest, Lincoln is the place to delve into thousands of years of ‘Places, People and History’.
Lincoln Green
So prosperous had Lincoln become in the Middle Ages with its wool and cloth industries that by the end of the thirteenth century it was England’s third largest city. ‘Lincoln green/greene’, as popularised in stories of Robin Hood, brought enormous wealth to traders and weavers. To achieve the attractive olive-green colour, wool was first dyed with woad turning it a deep sea-blue and then re-dyed with yellow Dyer’s Broom. The two colours produced Lincoln Green, renowned for the high quality of the dye and its colour consistency and fastness. Dyer’s Broom remains in use today.
The more expensive Lincoln scarlet was produced by treating material with dye from the Mediterranean insect Kermes vermilio (vermillion). The process used crushed and dried adult female insects and was a skill well known to the Romans. As an import, Kermes vermilio was a far more costly dye than home-produced Lincoln Green. Scarlet cloth was accordingly seen as superior to green, and green was seen as superior to undyed shepherds’ grey cloth.
The story goes that when Robin Hood had occasion to be in court, he was clothed in scarlet denoting his elevated status. One of Robin’s Merry Men was Will Scarlet, who dressed in scarlet silk.
Edmund Spenser (1552–99) in his poem The Faerie Queene described Robin Hood:
All in a woodman’s jacket he was clad
Of Lincolne Greene belay’d with silver lace
The poem is in veiled praise of Elizabeth I (Gloriana), herself the ‘Faerie Queene’. It seems most appropriate that Richard Greene played Robin Hood in the long-running TV series The Adventures of Robin Hood in the 1950s!
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