Pontefract Castle II was captured by Henry Bolingbroke's supporters in August 1399 and initially imprisoned in the Tower of London. Sometime before Christmas that year he was moved to Pontefract Castle (via Knaresborough) where he remained under guard until his death, perhaps on 14 February 1400. William Shakespeare's play Richard III mentions this incident: Various chroniclers suggest that Richard was starved to death by his captors, and others suggest he starved himself. A contemporary French chronicler suggested that Richard II had been hacked to death, but this is, according to the ODNB, "almost certainly fictitious". In 1536, the castle's guardian, Thomas Darcy,
Pontefract cake with a stamp, to form their traditional look (the workers who did this were known as "cakers" and were able to produce upwards of 30,000 per day), but now they are usually machinery formed. The embossed stamp was originally a stylised image of Pontefract Castle with a raven on the top bar, which is thought to have been in use for almost 400 years. When the first secret ballot in the United Kingdom was held in Pontefract on 15 August 1872, the ballot box used was sealed using a Pontefract cake stamp from Frank Dunhill’s factory, which shows the image