THE CASTLES OF ENGLAND AND WALES AT THE LATTER PART OF THE TWELFTH CENTURY (continued).

THE castles of the shires of Nottingham and Derby, of Yorkshire, Lancashire, and Cheshire, complete the tale of the fortresses south of the Tees and Lune. Nottingham, one of the castles ordered and possibly built by the Conqueror, on a rock high above the Trent, contained one of the grandest of the rectangular keeps. It was removed in the seventeenth century, and replaced by a building of about the same dimensions, but of very different character. At the foot of the rock were the two mounds thrown up in the tenth century to command the passage of the Trent, but these also have been removed. Another castle upon the Trent was that of Newark, the work of Alexander, Bishop of Lincoln, in the twelfth century. The very considerable remains include the front towards the river, an imposing mass of masonry, the effect of which is heightened by the great gatehouse upon its flank, a Norman work of very unusual size and splendour. The ground plan of this castle is nearly square, and may represent a Roman encampment. There was a castle at Worksop.

The oldest and most remarkable of the Derbyshire castles is that of Castleton or Peveril in the Peak, with its small but strong rectangular keep, built on the edge of the precipice, at the base of which is the celebrated cavern, one of the marvels of the Peak. Bolsover, now nearly all rebuilt, was also a Peveril castle. Of Sheffield, the castle of the Furnivals and Talbots, placed upon the junction of the Sheaf and the Don, nothing now remains. There seem to have been early castles, or perhaps fortified houses, at Codnor, a Zouch seat, Melbourne, and Gresley. Also Bogis and Hareston were Derbyshire castles in the reign of Henry II.

The wide expanse of Yorkshire contained much worthy of defence, and was inhabited by a race of men not indisposed to provide it. The mounds of York, both of the first class in bulk and elevation, were posted on either bank of the Ouse, here a deep and broad stream. Of these mounds, one stands on the junction of the Foss with the Ouse, above a tract of marshy ground, between it and the wall of the Roman Eboracum. Here the Conqueror placed his first castle, and in the keep and within the spacious area below he posted William Malet and his 500 knights and their followers. Amidst much of modern work the old walls may still be traced, and a very fine shell, though of Early English date, still stands on the summit of the mound. The other mound, the Bayle Hill, south of the river, and connected with the earthworks of the later city, was also fortified by William, but in haste and with timber only, which does not appear ever to have been replaced with masonry. The city is strongly fortified with walls and a ditch, and the celebrated gateways or bars contain each a nucleus or core of Norman masonry. Next to York in importance is Scarborough, the stronghold of William le Gros, Earl of Aumarle, and the citadel of Holderness. The castle may be said to contain the whole table top of a rocky promontory, defended on three sides by a precipitous cliff, at the foot of which is the German Ocean, while towards the land is a deep natural depression. The approach was over a narrow causeway, raised upon arches, broken in the centre by a drawbridge and bridge tower, covered at the outer end by a strong barbican, and terminating below a lofty rectangular keep, much of which still remains, and by the side of which was the final entrance, and probably another drawbridge. In the words of Robert de Brunne—

Scarborough is not only a strong castle by nature and by art, but is capable of containing several thousand men,—in fact, a small army. South of Scarborough, also upon the coast, but where the natural advantages of the cliff had to be supplied by enormous earthworks, was Skipsea, held and strengthened by Drogo, William’s Flemish lieutenant in that country. Aldbrough was also a Holderness castle, built by Odo of Aumarle, of which there remain only the mound and the wall.

Between Scarborough and York stood Malton, a seat of Earl Siward, and held by David of Scotland against King Stephen. The masonry is now gone, but the site is still marked by the Roman camp within or upon the edge of which the castle stood. North of Malton is Pickering, once the burh of the English Morcar, where are the remains of a shell keep upon the mound. Here the mound is central between and common to both wards. The general enclosing curtain is tolerably perfect, and the whole affords an excellent example of the manner in which the Norman architects dealt with an earthwork when the mound stood in the centre of an enclosure, instead of as usual upon one side of it. On the edge of the Honour of Pickering is Hamlake or Helmsley, the seat of the Barons de Ros before they inherited Belvoir, and where the remains of a very late rectangular keep stand on one side of a rectangular court, having two regular gatehouses, walls built against lofty banks, and beyond them strong and extensive outworks in earth and masonry. It is difficult to form an opinion upon the age of these earthworks. They impinge upon and are certainly later than a small Roman camp. At Mulgrave and Normanby were castles; at the latter are still parts of a rectangular Norman keep. Mulgrave stands on the sea cliff. It was the seat of the Saxon Wada and afterwards the Castle of Nigel Fossard and the Mowbrays. At Gilling some early vaults and walls are worked into the later castle of the Fairfaxes. Thirsk, Black Bourton in Lonsdale, and Malzeard, the “capita” of three Mowbray Baronies, all contained castles of some importance in the twelfth century. Of Malzeard and Bourton the earthworks are considerable. Tadcaster, a place of strength both in Roman and Danish times, possessed also a Norman castle, of which, however, only the mounds remain; and there is even less of Hugh PuisÈt’s work of Northallerton, surrendered to Henry II. in 1174, and ordered to be destroyed in 1177. Its earthworks are intersected by a railway. Of Tanfield, a Fitz-Hugh and Marmion castle, there are still some small remains.

The great castle of North Yorkshire is Richmond, so called by Earl Alan, who obtained in 1070 the possessions of the English Edwin, and removed the seat from the adjacent Gilling, where the earthworks long remained, to a stronger position on the Swale. The Norman Castle was built in 1071: it includes a large area, most part of which is defended by a natural cliff. The containing wall is mostly original, and within its substance is a curious small Norman chapel. The rectangular keep is placed at the weakest part of the circuit next to the town, and in front of it are the remains of a barbican. The well-known “Registrum Honoris de Richmond” specifies to which part of the castle the castle guard of each great tenant was due, and the Hall which the family of Scolland were bound to maintain and guard to this day bears their name. The town was also walled. Near Richmond are the scanty and late remains of Ravenswath, a Fitz-Hugh castle, and lower down the Swale was Bedale, the castle of “Le beau Bryan de Fitz-Aleyne,” now entirely gone, though the site is still pointed out. The warlike habits of the Lords are, however, represented by a curious portcullis closing the door of the belfry in the parish church. Middleham Castle, on the edge of its celebrated moor, was founded by Ribald, brother to Earl Alan, and ancestor in the female line of the great family of Neville, under whom the Norman keep received its handsome addition and gained its fame. Masham, a castle of the Scropes, is now a mere ruin. Drax seems to have been held by Ralph Paganel as early as the reign of Stephen. Merhall, in Weston, a castle of the Barons Lancaster, is reputed to have been demolished by King John. Killarby, Albruck-on-Tees, and Cawdwell were early castles, as were Armanthwaite, Bowes, Hatlesey, Sigston, and Whorlton. Of Gleaston, the moot-hill remains, which is thought to have been surmounted by a keep; and Hornby was also a Lonsdale castle. The passes of the Lune were, however, more celebrated for their defensive earthworks, due to the Danes or the English, than for Norman castles.

Coningsborough, on the Don, is no less from its position than its architecture one of the most remarkable of Yorkshire castles. Its grand cylindrical tower, supported by buttresses of great depth and height, is superior in design and workmanship to that of Pembroke, and almost rivals Coucy. It stands on the summit of a steep rocky knoll, and has been inserted into an earlier Norman wall, which is built upon the steep edge of the rock and encloses a court of moderate area. Upon the slope are the remains of the entrance and fortified approach, and at the base of the hill is a ditch, or rather a ravine, and on one side beyond it an outwork in earth. Probably the hill has been occupied as a place of strength from a very early time, but the masonry is the work of the Warrens Earls of Surrey, and is worthy of their greatness. Knaresborough Castle, on the Nidd, visited by Henry II. in 1181, occupies the top of a rocky promontory. Here the keep, though of Norman form and dimensions, is of Decorated date, and remarkable for the excellence of its details. The adjacent town has also been fortified, though apparently by a ditch and bank only. Pontefract, another celebrated Yorkshire castle, is also peculiar. Here the castle encloses a large and elevated platform of rock, scarped and revetted all round, and at one end of which, enclosing an earthen mound, is the circular keep. Much of its masonry is of the eleventh or the early part of the twelfth century. Its subterranean passages and chambers, of Norman date, are curious. Besides these, Yorkshire contains many other castles connected for the most part with great baronial families, and playing their part in the defence of the country against the Scots. Harewood, reputed a Danish seat, was the castle of Robert de Romeli; Skipton, also built by that family, contains some early parts, and has always been inhabited. Kilton was a castle of Cleveland, as was Castleton, where the Bruces fortified a moated mound. Burton was granted by the Conqueror to the same family, having been a seat of Earl Morcar; Danby was also a Bruce castle, and Skelton Castle, built in 1140, was the head of their barony. There was also the Archbishop’s castle of Cawood, and Crake, a castle of the Bishops of Durham, said to be mentioned in the seventh century. Baynard was a castle of the Lords Wake of Cottingham; Leeds Castle was besieged by Stephen in 1139; Wilton was an early castle of the Bulmers; Guisborough was founded in 1120; Sandal Castle, under the walls of which was fought the battle of Wakefield, was a late Warren castle, but the mound and earthworks are on a large scale and old. Yorkshire contained also a considerable number of fortified houses, some of which bore the names of castles, though whether of early date is uncertain; such were Ryther and Slingsby. There is said to have been a castle at Upsal, and one at Hilderskelf, in the grounds of Castle-Howard. Wressill and Sheriff Hutton in their present forms are very late, but the latter has an early history, and near the parish church are some remarkable earthworks, which it is thought mark the site of an early castle.

Yorkshire is rich in earthworks, and especially in moated mounds. Many have already been mentioned as having been incorporated into later castles; there are others of at least equal age and strength which do not seem ever to have been connected with masonry: such are Mexbrough, Castleton, Wakefield, Levington on the Leven, and others on the Lune. Some of these are known to have been the seats of English Earls and Thanes, and after the Conquest fell into disuse and decay, though at that period they were probably formidable.

Lancashire, in the castle-building age, was not recognised as a county, but was divided between the part then included in Yorkshire and the tract between the Mersey and the Ribble. This latter formed the great Barony of Roger of Poitou, a younger son of Earl Roger of Shrewsbury. His castle of Penverdant or Penwortham is named in “Domesday,” and its colossal mound is still called the Castle Hill, but the “caput” of the barony was the Castle of Clitheroe, the small but strong square keep of which stands on the point of a steep promontory of rock, and must have been nearly inaccessible to assault. Upon Earl Roger’s fall, Clitheroe came to the Lacys. The great castle of Lancashire is at Lancaster, well placed high above the broad water of the Lune, and within the area of a Roman castrum, whence it derives its name. Here, as at Carlisle, the railway is so laid out as to show the castle to great advantage. The castle is attributed to Roger of Poitou, but the Norman keep, a grand structure, ninety feet high, appears somewhat later, as is the Edwardian gateway, also a superb specimen of military architecture. Unfortunately, being a prison, the whole is closed against antiquarian visitors. There was a castle at Liverpool said to have been built by the same Roger in 1076. Merhull and Kirkby are Lancashire castles attributed to Gilbert Fitz-Reinfrid. There seems to have been a castle at Manchester, on the Irwell, just outside the old town, in Leland’s time, and one at Greenhalgh, and one near Rochdale, probably at Castleton, where was the burh of the English lord. At Halton is also a lofty burh, as usual near the church, indicating the site of the “aula” of the English lord, and of the keep of his Norman successor. Castlehead in Atterpole, near Cartmel, is also reputed an early castle. The castles of Holland, Hornby, Peel, Thurland, Ulverston, and Glaiston are probably of later date.

Cheshire, the palatine earldom of Hugh, named, probably by his posterity, “the Wolf,” standing upon the Welsh border, demanded and was supplied by many strong places. Chester, the seat of the earldom, represents the Roman Deva, the Castra Legionum; and the Norman castle, with a small and early rectangular keep occupying one corner of the area, stands on the verge of the river Dee. Near to Chester in Wirrall was Shotwick, of which the earthworks remain, and higher up upon the Dee was Holt. Beeston is almost the only remarkable fortress in the county. It stands on the platform of an inaccessible rock. The masonry is probably late, but the deep well may be a part of the Norman castle. All the fifteen barons of the palatinate, feudatories of Earl Hugh, had castles, but these, representing private estates, mostly continued to be occupied and became fortified houses. The sites and more or less of the remains are to be seen of Halton and Kinderton, the castles of William Fitz-Hugh and Venables; Shipbrook of the Vernons; Nantwich of Piers Malbanke; Malpas of Robert Fitz-Hugh; and Dunham of Hamo de Massy. There were also castles at Frodsham, Oldcastle, Uttersford, Pulford, Dodleston, Shockleach, Nantwich, Stockport, Burton, Ullerwood, Runcorn, West Derby, Northwick, Castle Cob, and probably some others. A large number of these sites are marked by moated mounds, and there are besides many similar mounds in the county to which masonry does not appear to have been added.

Thus, between the Thames and the Tees, the Bristol Avon and the Lune, the central parts of England contained at the close of the reign of Henry II. at the least 214 castles, of which about 17 had rectangular and 44 shell keeps. As to the remaining 153, nothing is accurately known, or they are found not to have belonged to either of the great types. Of these castles probably at least 180 stood on old English sites, and very few indeed can be said with certainty to have stood upon altogether new foundations.

There remain to be considered the castles of the northern counties, Westmoreland and Cumberland, Durham and Northumberland, for centuries exposed to invasions from beyond the Tweed, and fortified accordingly. In this tract were at least four castles of the first class,—Durham, Bamburgh, Norham, and the strongly-posted town and castle of Berwick; and of the second class Brough, Appleby and Brougham, Cockermouth, Carlisle, Prudhoe and Newcastle, Ford and Alnwick, and Warkworth. Besides these were others, some perhaps at times almost their equals in importance, but the continued incursions of the Scots were fatal to the English fortresses, as were those of the English to the Scotch, and thus many on both sides the border were again and again burned and levelled, until they were either not rebuilt or only represented by peel towers and castellets, which again were destroyed, so that of very many castles the names only are preserved.

The lake country of Westmoreland was strong and contained little to attract plunderers; but on its edge on the winding Eamont is Brougham Castle, with a pure Norman keep, bearing testimony to the power of the Barons Vipont, its early lords. It stands upon the side of a well-preserved Roman camp, as does Brough, another Norman castle, also with a rectangular keep. A similar keep at Appleby is still inhabited. Kendal Castle is probably an early fortress, though nothing remains of it but an encircling and not very early wall. Westmoreland is peculiarly rich in fortified manor-houses, some of which may be on old sites, though the greater number, like the castle of Penrith, belong to a later period. There were peels or castellets at Bewly, Hartley, Howgill, and Pendragon.

Carlisle is the citadel of Cumberland, and was for centuries the most important fortress in the North, playing a considerable part in every Scottish war. The name proclaims it to be of British origin, and its position led to its adoption by the Romans; and, indeed, it is said that the ditch of the southern of the two great lines of defence thrown up by that people divides the castle from the town. Cumberland bears many marks of Danish invasions, and in one of these in the ninth century Carlisle was laid waste, and so remained, until in 1093 William Rufus founded the castle and added the town to his kingdom. His successor raised the town into an episcopal city and completed what was needed in the castle. Patched and neglected as is the keep, still the principal features of the castle and the encircling walls are for the most part original. Rose Castle, the episcopal seat, higher up the river, is on an old site and in part old. Cockermouth, a castle of William de Meschines and the Lords Lucy, remains, and near it, towards St. Bees, is a fragment of Egremont, also built by De Meschines. Scaleby, on the most exposed frontier, a De Tilliol castle—though not of the eleventh century—is perfect; which cannot be said of Bewcastle, built by the Lords de Vaux. Naworth, still inhabited, was inherited by the Howards from the Dacres, who also probably gave name to Dacre, rather a strong house than a castle. Besides these there are or were strong places at St. Andrews, Askerton, Blencraik, St. Bees, Castle-Corrock, Corby, Cannonby, Dalby, Dilston, Down Hall, Dunvalloght, Drawdykes, Greystock, Horton, Harington, Hay-Castle, Heton, Highgate, Irton, St. John’s, Featherstone, Kirk-Oswald, Kyloe tower, Liddell Strength, Linstock, Lorton, Millom, Ousby, Rowcliffe, Shank, Triermain, and Wolsty. Many of these are dotted about the more exposed parts of the county; others are in the rear of the Roman wall.

The castle of Durham, taken alone, is rivalled both in position and grandeur by Bamburgh, but taken in conjunction with the cathedral and attendant buildings,

the group is without an equal. The main feature of the castle is the circular keep, a rebuilding of probably the oldest and most complete of that type in Britain. The lower ward also is spacious, and includes many buildings, some of them of early Norman date. The castle is posted upon the root of the rocky peninsula included by a fold of the Tees, and stands between the city and the grand old shrine and final resting place of St. Cuthbert. The older parts were probably built in the reign of the Conqueror, about 1088, when William, having banished Carileph, held the temporalities of the see; other authorities attribute the work to Bishop Comyn in 1072. The two chief castles of the Bishopric are Raby and Barnard Castle, for Norham is virtually in Northumberland. Raby, the celebrated seat of the Nevilles, is of Norman origin, as is Barnard Castle, though its fine round tower is later. In plan this castle much resembles Ludlow, to which its position is not inferior. It is named from Barnard de Baliol. Branspeth, also a Neville castle, is a noble structure, but of later date than Raby. Bowes has a late Norman keep. Besides these may be mentioned Lumley, Staindrop, Streatlam, Witton, Stockton, and Bishop Auckland. In the local quarrels the names also occur of Evenwood Castle, near Auckland, Hilton, Holy Island, and, better known from its later possessors, Ravensworth. The Bishopric was well fortified, and was besides intersected by the deep ravines of the Tees, and possessed the Tyne for a frontier.

“Foremost,”—the quotation is drawn from the writings of an author who, beyond any other of the present day, makes his own mark upon what he writes,—“in interest among the monuments of Northumberland, in the narrower sense of the earldom beyond the Tyne, stand the castles; the castles of every size and shape, from Bamburgh, where the castle occupies the whole site of a royal city, to the smallest pele-tower, where the pettiest squire or parson sought shelter for himself in the upper stage, and for his cows in the lower. For the pele-towers of the Border-land, like the endless small square towers of Ireland, are essentially castles. They show the type of the Norman keep continued on a small scale to a very late time. Perhaps many of the adulterine castles which arose in every time of anarchy, and were overthrown at every return of order, many of the eleven hundred and odd castles which overspread the land during the anarchy of Stephen, may not have been of much greater pretensions. At any rate, from the great keep of Newcastle,—were we not in Northumberland we should speak of the far greater keep of Colchester,—to the smallest pele-tower which survives as a small part of a modern house, the idea which runs through all is exactly the same. The castles and towers then, great and small, are the most marked feature of the county. They distinguish it from those shires where castles of any kind are rare; and the employment of the type of the great keeps on a very small scale distinguishes it from the other land of castles. In Wales the Norman keep is not usual; the castles are, for the most part, later in date and more complex in plan; and the small square private tower, the distinctive feature of the North, is there hardly to be found. Northumberland has much to show the traveller in many ways, from the Roman wall onward, but the feature which is especially characteristic is that it is the land of castles.”

Northumberland is said to have contained sixty castles, but this must include many fortified houses and castles of the private gentry. Alnwick, better known as the seat of the earls of Northumberland than from its builder and early lords, is a very fine example of a baronial castle. The keep or central ward includes an open court, entered by a Norman gateway encrusted by a Decorated gatehouse, and round which, incorporated with the curtain, were the hall, kitchen, chapel, and the lord’s lodgings. Most of the court has been rebuilt, but the old lines and much of the old foundations have been preserved, and the effect is probably not unlike that of the original Norman court. The concentric defences, walls, towers, and barbican are old, though not original. The castle stands between the town and the Alne, beyond which is the park. The builder seems to have been Eustace de Vesci in the late Norman period, before 1157. Three miles to the north is the tower of Highfarland. Warkworth, built by one of the Fitz-Richard family in the reign of Henry II., was much injured by William the Lion, who laid siege to it in 1176, but still retains large remains of the original work. Tynemouth, an island fortress, seems to have been a seat of Earl Waltheof; it was long afterwards a Percy castle. Prudhoe, a castle of the Umfravilles, built in the middle of the eleventh century, has a small Norman keep, and most of the original curtain wall. The additions include a barbican and a curious chapel over the gateway. The original castle was attacked without success by William of Scotland in 1174. The castle of Newcastle, high upon the bank of the Tyne and included within the walls of the town, was built by Robert Curthose in 1080, and is a very perfect example of a rectangular Norman keep, with a curious oratory within the fore-building and a great number of mural passages and chambers, so that in many respects it has the appearance of being half a century later than its recorded date. It is also well preserved, saving some injudicious alterations made many years since, and it is accessible to every visitor, being in the hands of the local antiquarian society, and under the safe and skilful protection of the historian of the Roman wall.

Bamburgh is probably the oldest, and in all respects the noblest and most historical of the Northumbrian fortresses. It was founded by the flame-bearing Ida in the sixth century, when it was enclosed by a hedge and afterwards by a wall, but most of its circuit was already fortified by a natural cliff of great height. The castle occupies the whole of this elevated platform of basalt, one side of which is upon the sea beach. The wall is built along the edge of the precipice, and rising above all is a magnificent square Norman keep of rather late date, somewhat altered indeed within and still inhabited, but retaining most of its original features, and altogether presenting a very grand appearance. Bamburgh, like Alnwick, has come under the wand of the enchanter, and any reference to it would indeed be incomplete which took no notice of the following passage drawn from the Saturday Review:—“At Bamburgh, above all, we feel that we are pilgrims come to do our service at one of the great cradles of our national life. It is the one spot in northern England around which the same interest gathers which belongs to the landing-places of Hengest, of Ælle, and of Cerdic, in the southern lands. It is to the Angle what these spots are to the Jute and the Saxon. The beginnings of the Anglian kingdoms are less rich in romantic and personal lore than are those of their Jutish and Saxon neighbours. Unless we chose to accept the tale about Octa and Ebussa, we have no record of the actual leaders of the first Teutonic settlements in the Anglian parts of Britain. The earliest kingdoms seem not to have been founded by new comers from beyond the sea, but to have been formed by the fusing together of smaller independent settlements. Yet around Bamburgh and its founder, Ida, all Northumbrian history gathers. Though its keep is more than five hundred years later than Ida’s time,—though it is only here and there that we see fragments of masonry which we even guess may be older than the keep,—it is still a perfectly allowable figure when the poet of northern Britain speaks of Bamburgh as ‘King Ida’s fortress.’ The founder of the Northumbrian kingdom, the first who bore the kingly name in Bamburgh, the warrior whom the trembling Briton spoke of as the ‘flame-bearer,’ appears, in the one slight authentic notice of him, not as the leader of a new colony from the older England, but rather as the man who gathered together a number of scattered independent settlements into a nation and a kingdom. The chronicler records of him that in 547 ‘he took to the kingdom’; but nothing is said of his coming, like Hengest or Cerdic, from beyond sea. And all the other accounts fall in with the same notion. Henry of Huntingdon, though he has no story to tell, no ballad to translate, was doubtless following some old tradition when he described the Anglian chiefs, after a series of victories over the Welsh, joining together to set a king over them. And all agree in speaking of Bamburgh, called, so the story ran, from the Queen Bebbe, as a special work of Ida. Whatever may be the origin of the name, it suggests the kindred name of the East Frankish Babenberg, which has been cut short into Bamberg by the same process which has cut short Bebbanburh into Bamburgh. Yet Bamburgh was a fortress by nature, even before Ida had fenced it in, first with a hedge and then with a wall. Here we see the succession of the early stages of fortification, the palisade first and then the earthen wall, the vallum, not the murus, of the Roman art of defence. But, whether hedge or wall, the site of Bamburgh was already a castle before it had been fenced in by the simplest forms of art. That mass of isolated basaltic rock frowning over the sea on one side, over the land on the other, was indeed a spot marked out by nature for dominion. Here was the dwelling-place of successive Bernician kings, ealdormen, and earls; here they took shelter as in an impregnable refuge from the inroads of Scot and Dane. Here the elder Waltheof shut himself up in terror, while his valiant son Uhtred sent forth and rescued the newly-founded church and city of Durham from the invader. Here Gospatric the Earl held his head-quarters, while he and Malcolm of Scotland were ravaging each other’s lands in turn. In earlier days a banished Northumbrian king, flying from his own people to seek shelter with the Picts, defended himself for a while at Bamburgh, and gave the native chronicler of Northumberland an opportunity of giving us our earliest picture of the spot. Baeda, without mentioning the name, had spoken of Bamburgh as a royal city, and it is not only as a fortress, but as a city, that Bamburgh appears in the Northumbrian chronicler. He speaks of ‘Bebba civitas’ as ‘Urbs munitissima non admodum magna.’ It did not take in more than the space of two or three fields; still it was a city, though a city approached by lofty steps, and with a single entrance hollowed in the rock. Its highest point was crowned, not as yet by the keep of the Norman, but by a church, which, according to the standard of the eighth century, was a goodly one. This church contained a precious chest, which sheltered a yet more precious relic, the wonder-working right hand of the martyred King Oswald. We read, too, how the city, perched on its ocean rock, was yet, unlike the inland hill of the elder Salisbury, well furnished with water, clear to the eye and sweet to the taste. We see, then, what the royal city of the Bernician realm really was. It simply took in the present circuit of the castle. The present village, with its stately church, is, even in its origin, of later date. But by the time that we reach the event in the history of Bamburgh which is told us in the most striking detail, the keep had already arisen; the English city had become the Norman castle. In the days of Rufus, when the fierce Robert of Mowbray had risen a second time in rebellion, the keep of Bamburgh, safe on its rock and guarded by surrounding waves and marshes, was deemed beyond the power even of the Red King to subdue by force of arms. The building of another fortress to hold it in check, the ?p?te???s??, as a Greek would have called it, which bore the mocking name of Malvoisin, was all that could be done while the rebel earl kept himself within the impregnable walls. It was only when he risked himself without those walls, when he was led up to them as a captive, with his eyes to be seared out if his valiant wife refused to surrender, that Bamburgh came into the royal hands.”

At Mitford is a very peculiar Norman keep still held by the descendants of its early lords. Bothal, the Ogle Castle, may be old, but its present remains are scarcely so, and this is also the case with Morpeth, a castle of the De Maulays.

Of Berwick Castle the remains are inconsiderable and are encroached upon by the railway station, but the adjacent town has a bank and ditch and a low tower or two or bastion, of its ancient defences, and within these is a citadel of the age of Vauban. Higher up and on the opposite or English bank of the Tweed is the grand episcopal castle of Norham, the special care of the bishops of Durham. Its rectangular keep is of unusual size, and though entirely Norman, of two periods. Parts of its containing wall are also original, as is the gatehouse, and about it are various earthworks, remains apparently of some of the sieges which it has undergone, and beyond these are the lines of a large Roman camp.

Norham, attributed to Bishop Flambard in 1121, was surrendered to Henry II. by Bishop PuisÈt in 1174, and was entrusted to William de Neville in 1177. Beneath the walls and within the adjacent parish church Edward entertained and decided upon the claims to the Scottish throne. Among the more considerable of Northumbrian castles were Ford, Chillingham, Wark, and the Umfraville castle of Harbottle. There should also be mentioned as occurring in border story, Aydon, Bavington, Belsay, Bellister, Birtley, Blenkinsop, Bywell tower, Burraden tower, Capheaton, Carlington, Chipchase, Cornhill, Cockle Park tower, Coupland, Dale, Duddon tower, Edlingham, Errington, Elsdon, Etal, Eskott, Farne, Fenwick tower, Horton, Houghton, Heaton, Hirst, Hemmell, Kyloe, Langley, Littleharle and Lilburn towers, Lemington, Newton tower, Ogle, Pontland, Simonsburn, Spylaw, Swinbourne, Shortflatt tower, Tarot, Tynemouth, Thirlwall, Wallington, Widdrington, Witton, Williesmotewick, and a few more peels and castellets and early moats, showing where strong houses formerly stood. The fact was, that for many centuries no owner of land near the Scottish border could live without some kind of defence, and a careful survey, while it might fail to discover traces of some of the above, would probably establish those of many as yet unrecorded.

It appears, then, that in the four northern counties there are at least 103 strong places, of which ten boast rectangular Norman, and one or perhaps two, shell, keeps, while of ninety-one little is known.

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