From the Chronicle of John Hardyng we find that Richard II. was imprisoned
at Pickering before being taken to Knaresborough, and finally to
Pontefract. The lines in his quaint verse must have been written between
1436 and 1465.

"The Kyng the[n] sent Kyng Richard to Ledis,
There to be kepte surely in previtee,
Fro the[n]s after to Pykeryng we[n]t he nedes,
And to Knauesburgh after led was he,
But to Pountfrete last where he did die." [1]

[Footnote 1: The Chronicle of John Hardyng, edited by Henry Ellis, 1812,
p. 356.]

There seems little doubt that the story of the murder of the king at
Pontefract Castle by Sir Piers Exton is untrue, but "nothing is certainly
known of the time, place, or manner of his death."

The records of the Coucher Book contain a mass of interesting and often
entertaining information concerning the illicit removals of oak trees from
the forest, hunting and killing the royal deer and other animals, as well
as many other offences.

At the forest Eyre, a sort of assizes, held at Pickering in 1334 to deal
with a great accumulated mass of infringements on the rights of the
forest, the first case is against Sir John de Melsa, Lord of Levisham, who
was, according to the jury, "in the habit of employing men to make and
burn charcoal out of browsewood and dry sticks in his woods at Levisham,
which are now within the bounds of the forest, and he exposes the charcoal
for sale, injuring the lord and annoying the deer, by what right they know