Before Pontefract was Pontefract, two Anglo-Scandinavian settlements occupied the ground: Tanshelf and Kirkby. Both belong to the period between Eric Bloodaxe's death in 954 and the arrival of the Normans in 1068, when Yorkshire's place-names absorbed Danish suffixes like -by and Danish street-words like gate. Tanshelf appears in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle for 947, when King Eadred met the Northumbrian council here to receive their submission. Their loyalty did not last; a year later they voted Eric Bloodaxe their king instead. By the Domesday Survey of 1086, Tanshelf was substantial: 60 burgesses, 16 cottagers, 16 villagers, 8 smallholders, a priest, a church, a fishery, three mills. Archaeologists found graves beneath modern North Baileygate dating to around 690. The Osgoldcross wapentake met on what is now the market place to decide local cases - a meeting place older than the broken bridge that gave the town its name.

Ilbert de Lacy raised Pontefract Castle on the rock east of the town around 1070, and for the next six centuries the town's fortunes followed the castle's. King Richard II died there in 1400, probably murdered, certainly the last Plantagenet king to do so quietly. The town's motto, Post mortem patris pro filio - "after the father's death, for the son" - commemorates Pontefract's Royalist sympathies during the English Civil War, when the castle endured three sieges. By March 1649, after the third, the inhabitants had had enough. They petitioned Parliament to slight the castle so it would never again invite siege; demolition began the following month. The castle had been a magnet for trouble. Without it, Pontefract had to find a new identity.

It found one in liquorice. The plant grew well in Pontefract's deep, sandy soil, and by the seventeenth century the town was making small black discs stamped with the castle silhouette - Pontefract cakes. Two factories still produce them: Haribo in the old George Dunhill works, and Valeo Confectionery, formerly Tangerine. The liquorice plant itself is no longer grown here, but a Liquorice Festival is held every year. Sir John Betjeman wrote a poem called "The Licorice Fields at Pontefract" about a woman he glimpses among the leaves. Other notable Pontefractians range from the antiquary Francis Drake (1696-1771) and the engineer Jesse Hartley, who built Liverpool's Albert Dock, to the actress Helen Baxendale, the rugby league player Rob Burrow, and Yvette Cooper, MP for the constituency since 1997 and currently Foreign Secretary. In her maiden Commons speech, Cooper claimed Robin Hood for the Vale of Wentbridge just south of town.

Pontefract Racecourse, on the western edge of town, runs flat racing from late March to late October on a two-mile continuous circuit - one of the longest in Europe. The local coal mines that once defined the area mostly closed in the 1990s; the final pit, Prince of Wales Colliery, shut in August 2002. The Ferrybridge cooling towers loomed over the eastern horizon until they too were demolished. What remains is a market town that has been one for nine centuries - Wednesday and Saturday markets in the covered hall, the Town Council still meeting in the Sessions House, the three railway stations still on the Pontefract Line. The grammar-school architect John Poulson, born here in 1910, designed the Horsefair flats that dominate the eastern skyline. He also gave his name to the corruption scandal that brought down a Home Secretary in 1974, but in Pontefract he is mostly remembered for the library he built.