Micklegate Bar & Guy Fawkes’ head on a stake

Micklegate Bar is the royal entrance to York. Throughout medieval times it was the scene of grand civic events including, during Guy Fawkes’ time, the greeting of King James I to the City. Micklegate Bar was also home to the severed heads of traitors and rebels, which were skewered on pikes and displayed above the gate, there to be picked clean by magpies and crows. One of the heads displayed here was that of Thomas Percy, the 7th Earl of Northumbria and leader of the Catholic rebellion of 1569 which was brutally put down by an army raised in York. The Earl’s head stood here, along with the heads of other leaders, for two years before it was secretly removed by his followers. In 1605 another member of the same Percy family was executed for conspiring, with Guy Fawkes, to blow up Parliament.