Pleshey Castle was the seat of Thomas of Woodstock, Duke of Gloucester, youngest son of Edward III and one of the most powerful nobles in England during the minority and early reign of his nephew, Richard II. In July 1397, Richard had Gloucester arrested at Pleshey and taken not to an English prison but across the Channel to Calais, where he was murdered in captivity within weeks, almost certainly on Richard's order, though no formal admission of that order survives. Richard had waited years to move against the uncle who had once led a faction that executed several of the King's closest allies. The arrest at Pleshey was the opening move in Richard's broader purge of his remaining noble opponents that year, and marks the moment his personal rule tipped decisively toward the autocratic style that would contribute to his own deposition two years later.
Shakespeare used the castle's abandonment as a deliberate image rather than a historical detail. In Richard II (Act 1, Scene 2), the widowed Duchess of Gloucester receives John of Gaunt at "Plashy" and describes it as empty and desolate, grief for her husband made literal in the emptiness of his house. It is a scene invented for dramatic purposes but resting on the real, documented fact of Gloucester's arrest and death, which Shakespeare's audience would have known as established history.
The traditions now attached to the site (footsteps, a sense of unease around the motte, occasional reports of a figure near the surviving fifteenth-century brick bridge) are consistently tied back to Gloucester's arrest rather than to any other historical layer of the site's use. That is unusual. Most English castles accumulate ghost stories from whichever period left the most vivid record, and at Pleshey that has remained, for over six hundred years, the same single afternoon in 1397.
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