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,
“Half church of God, half fortress ’gainst the Scot,”
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 ἐπιτειχισμὁς, 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.