Marriott Edgar was the people's Poet Laureate.

While Alfred Lord Tennyson, official holder of the title, gave us the stirring and patriotic The Charge of the Light Brigade, Marriott Edgar produced the likes of The Battle of Hastings and The Magna Carta.

They may not have had the ring and bombast of Tennyson, but they were a damn sight funnier. Who can fail to be moved by the sorry plight of King Harold, shot in the eye but still in the saddle - "On 'is 'orse, with 'is 'awk in 'is 'and' - or Bad King John, bothered by barons, while eating shrimps for his tea? He also created Albert Ramsbottom, whose adventures involved being eaten (and later regurgitated) by a lion, being half drowned in the Mersey, and having an alarming encounter with a female ghost in the Tower of London, which he frightened off by slapping a slice of dripping toast in its face.

It's not a technique much mentioned in ghost-hunting manuals, but it worked for Albert.

He crossed my mind the other day when some ghost-hunters gathered at Bolling Hall to investigate its historic reputation for being haunted.

This came about during the Third Siege of Bradford, a fairly bloody business, but not without its comic side. So much so that Marriott Edgar, rather than Tennyson, should have been the man to immortalise it in verse.

If the defenders had failed, the city's occupants would have been put to the sword. But the weather, a bit of brass nerve and the intervention of the ghost of Bolling Hall all helped save them.

It started in 1642 when the English Civil War was barely under way. King Charles I was opposed by Parliamentary supporters in London and the South East but favoured in much of the North of England - except for the West Riding textile towns. Here, a fear of 'Popery' put the people at odds with their monarch.

In Bradford they were also stalled off because the King had sold the town to the City of London to pay off the debts he had inherited from his father, James I.

On June 18, Sir William Saville and his Royalist troops were driven from Bradford. It was a freakish sort of day. Saville was under orders to destroy the town and arrived with 700 horse and foot troops at Undercliffe. Then, unaccountably, they pushed off and went over to Leeds.

By the time they returned, Bradford was barricaded, but against cavalry, muskets and cannon, the town could put up only clubs, scythes and a few handmade pikes - shades of Dad's Army.

The bombardment, when it came, was savage - but then nature intervened. First a cannon exploded in the Royalist ranks. Then a wind sprang up, bringing driving snow (only days before Midsummer's Day). Disheartened, the besieging troops went away, leaving the 300 Bradfordians to tend their wounds. A lot of the male population had earlier been taken away by Parliamentarian commander Sir Thomas Fairfax to boost his forces. He saw Bradford as 'very untenable' and its fighting men as 'lacking the head, body and sinews of war'.

But one Captain Hodgson, of Coley, near Halifax, was more sanguine and brought armed men and muskets to boost the town. This was just as well, because a week before Christmas in 1842 the Royalists came back with a vengeance.

The Earl of Newcastle attacked on a Sunday, hoping to catch the population on its knees in church. But they were ready and had fortified the parish church (now the cathedral) by a means that has now passed into folklore. They hung sacks of wool on the tower to protect it from cannonballs, installed snipers and stood off the Royalists.

A foray by the King's men from Barkerend approached the church but its leader, a son of the Earl of Newport, got over-ambitious, moved too far ahead of his men and was cut off and captured. He asked for quarter and a man called Ralph Atkinson is said to have replied: 'I'll give you Bradford quarter' and killed him on the spot.

Picking the time when the artillery were reloading, the defenders rushed the Royalists. The battle turned in their favour and they drove the attackers back up towards Bradford Moor and off towards Leeds, harrying them along the way with clubs and muskets.

The victory brought spoils - horses, muskets and gunpowder fell to the defenders. It was the turn of the retreating Royalists to lick their wounds, which would continue to smart for half a year.

Then the Earl of Newcastle, with revenge in mind, would find himself with Bradford at his feet and at his mercy - and there was going to be precious little of that...

Next week: A bloody promise and a ghostly intervention

Converted for the new archive on 30 June 2000. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.