As the heat of the day subsided on 1 August 1323, a boozy evening started in the Tower of London. Members of the garrison, including the constable, Sir Stephen de Segrave, settled down to celebrate the feast of St Peter ad Vincula (in Chains), the patron saint of the Tower’s parish church. Unbeknown to them, though, one of their number had slipped something into their drink - a drug so strong that “all of them slept at least two days and two nights”. One of the most daring and ingenious escapes in the long history of the Tower was under way.
Alerted to the potion’s success, Roger Mortimer, formerly Lord of Wigmore in Herefordshire, crept out into the darkness through a breach in his cell “in a very high up and confined place… out of sight and hearing of the world” into the kitchen that adjoined the king’s palace. From there, by means of “ropes ingeniously arranged into a ladder” that had been secretly smuggled into his cell, Mortimer scaled the walls of the inner and outer baileys.
In the colourful retelling of the St Albans monk Henry de Blaneforde, “guided by an angel, [Mortimer] passed over both the first and the second walls, and with the
