MITFORD CASTLE, NORTHUMBERLAND.
THIS is one of the most remarkable of the Northumbrian castles. It is situated about two miles above and west of Morpeth, on the right bank of the Wansbeck, which here makes two very sharp bends, the larger and higher of which includes the castle, the church of St. Andrew, the new Hall, and the ruins of the old one. The church, the nave of which was long roofless, has been repaired, and is now in good order. It is the burial-place of the ancient barons and modern lords of Mitford. The chancel is early English; the nave rude but good Norman, with a pointed south door in the same style. The old Hall, of which a tower is standing, was a Tudor building, constructed by the Mitfords, in part from the materials of the castle. The present Hall, the Mitford residence, is modern.
What remains of the castle occupies the summit of a knoll of sandstone rock, rising about 70 feet, on the north side abruptly, and elsewhere more or less steeply, from a marshy meadow, which on the north, east, and west is encircled by the folds of the Wansbeck, and on the south by a sweep of a tributary stream, which joins the river just below the castle. Each watercourse flows beneath a steep and high concave bank, thickly wooded, and the result is a sylvan amphitheatre of great seclusion and much beauty.
The castle knoll, at its summit, is about eighty yards across, irregularly circular. Along its brow runs the enceinte wall of the place, much broken down, but which seems to have been about 20 feet high and 7 feet thick. It may be traced all round, save at one point on the south face, where it is encroached upon by a quarry opened for the materials of the new Hall in 1810. Towards the north the wall is tolerably perfect, though more or less riven, and without its battlements. The inclosure is now an orchard.
The northern portion of the area is somewhat higher than the rest, and has been parted off by a cross wall, creating an inner ward, of small dimension, semi-circular plan, and considerable strength. In this ward stands the Norman keep, a square of about 36 feet, but having its north side in two oblique faces, forming a salient. It has, therefore, five sides, a rare and certainly original departure from the usual Norman plan. The walls are about 7 feet thick, and the interior area 22 feet 6 inches square. This space is divided by a cross wall, north and south, into two equal parts, each barrel-vaulted, with a plain, round-headed arch springing from a plain chamfered abacus. The north face of each chamber is oblique, to match the exterior salient. Of these chambers, one has a loop in the north gable, and the other, in the corresponding place, two small stone spouts, about 3 feet from the floor, as though for the admission of water. Both chambers are ruined at the south end.
All the keep above the ground-floor walls is destroyed, and the rubbish conceals the exterior wall face, but the whole is clearly of excellent ashlar. From and within the west wall a small mural stair descends, turning the south-west angle to a door in the south wall, opening into the west vault. This door has a flat segmental arch. The outer entrance seems to have been in the west wall in the floor above the basement. It is said that an exterior stone stair is concealed by the rubbish. This keep stands upon the rock, here, perhaps, 20 feet above the rest of the area. It blocks up the triangular, or rather segmental inner ward, standing about 50 feet from one angle and 30 feet from the other. Its salient extends to within 10 feet of the northern, or corresponding salient of the ward, and its southern face is about 6 feet within the cross wall. In the curved outer wall of this ward, towards the north-west, is a very remarkable window recess, 8 feet broad and of the same height, to the plain Norman abacus, whence springs its round-headed arch, over which is a hood-moulding of the same pattern, the only attempt at ornament. The wall here is 8 feet thick, but as the outer 2 feet are not original, the window-case is gone. It was probably of two lights, and opened upon the cliff.
Close south of this window, in the inner face of the same wall, are a number of curious holes, irregularly placed, more or less rounded, as though half a soda-water bottle had been thrust into the green mortar. They occur at the joints, and the best marked are where three joints meet. They are certainly not putlog holes, being too irregular and too shallow.
The inner ward was entered from the outer by a small strong doorway in the cross wall, now much ruined, a few feet west of the keep.
The outer ward had probably a chapel on its south side; many graves, some covered with slabs, and one containing a stone coffin, having been laid open when baring for the quarry. In the west wall is a good plain Caernarvon-headed postern door of 5 feet opening, below a pointed relieving arch. The main entrance to this ward was on the east side, near the inner ward wall, and commanded by the keep. The gateway, said to have been 15 feet deep, is now a ruin, but it opened upon a small platform, a little lower than the ward, and defended by a wall, under cover of which the road wound up from below. Some broken ground on this side is said to indicate an ancient quarry, probably that employed when the castle was built.
On the north-west quarter was also a spur from the hill, but lower and narrower than the former one. This has been converted into a thin falciform bank, concave to the castle, by the cutting of a deep ditch in its rear, probably to provide a covered way to the postern, up which cattle could be driven with safety.
The castle hill seems to have been girt, a few yards from its base, by a wet ditch, in part artificial, which covered its north-west and south sides, and communicated at each end with the Wansbeck, which completed the circle on the east side. Whether there was a wall within the ditch is uncertain, probably not, but it was guarded towards the north-east by a gatehouse and enclosed space, in front of which, below the present bridge, was the old fosse-bridge, by the tenure of guarding which Walter de Swinhowe, in the reign of Edward III., held forty acres of land.
A knoll so defined as Mitford, so secluded, and so protected by a river and by marshy ground, was likely to have been a British camp as well as a Saxon or English dwelling-place, and there is high probability of the truth of the tradition that asserts the Barony of Mitford to have been held in the reign of the Confessor by John of Mitford, whose daughter Sybil is said to have carried it in marriage to Richard Bertram, a follower of the Conqueror, and of the stock of Baliol. The first recorded lord is, however, Roger Bertram, who held the Barony in 1155, and certified to its having been held by his father and grandfather. At that time the Barony extended over five parishes, and received payment of castle-guard from nine manors, itself paying scutage to the castle of Newcastle.
The Bertrams who, like the Baliols, bore an orle for their arms, retained Mitford for eight generations, when Agnes, their heiress, sold the estate, in 1275, to Alexander de Baliol, from whom it passed by various changes to de Valence, and thence with part of his estate to the Earl of Athol, one of his heirs general. There remained, however, in the district a family who bore the surname of Mitford, and claimed descent from a brother of John, whose daughter married the Bertram. Their representative, William, in the tenth generation, held lands in, and his son was actually of Mitford, and seems to have recovered the castle, and to be the direct ancestor in the male line of the present Mr. Mitford, of Mitford, and of his distant kinsman, Lord Redesdale.
The castle, though of no great magnitude, played, from its position and strength, rather an important part in Border warfare. William the Lion, who reigned from 1165 to 1214, dated a charter from hence, 28th December, 1215. King John is said to have burned the vill, though whether he took the castle is unknown. The public records, however, make him visit Mitford from Berwick in 1216, and stay there the 24th, 25th, and 26th of January, going on the latter day to Newcastle. Alexander, King of Scotland, failed to take the place in May, 1217, when he lay in leaguer before it for seven days. Local history is silent concerning it during the active reign of Edward I., but in the wild times consequent upon Bannockburn, a notorious Border freebooter, Sir Gilbert Middleton, made Mitford his stronghold, and here imprisoned Henry, Lord Beaumont, while his brother Lewis, Bishop of Durham, was shut up in Morpeth Castle.
The castle, by its present condition, affords evidence of the vicissitudes it has undergone. Still, ruined as it is, careful observation finds much from which its original plan, and even part of its details, may be ascertained. Its general plan, the keep, and the most part of the enceinte wall, are evidently original, and late Norman, probably the work of Richard Bertram early in the reign of Henry II. The postern is, of course, later, either early Edwardian or of the reign of Henry III. It is unusual to find so small a keep divided by a cross-wall, or to find any Norman keep with an original vaulted basement, though of this there is apparently an example in the late Norman Keep of Norham. The salient on one side is unknown elsewhere.
A good ground-plan and photographs on a large scale of the masonry are much needed, and a very moderate amount of excavation in the inner ward would probably throw light on the original structure of the keep. In point of recorded history the very complete account of Mitford, given in Hodgson’s “Northumberland,” leaves nothing to be desired; it is only to be regretted that a corresponding industry and critical acumen have not been brought to bear upon its architectural remains.