And captain of the hold.”
The race has died out, as is the case with so many of the famous families of Northumberland; but coal sustains what a warlike lordship built, and Chipchase Castle is to this day as proud and stately a place as in the time of the noblest Heron of them all. There are grim stories told of what took place there in former rude times. Sir Reginald Fitz-Urse, says tradition, was starved to death in the dungeon of the keep, and another unfortunate knight, pursued by the swords of intending murderers, lost himself in the chambers of the castle walls, and never issued alive therefrom. The peel tower of Chipchase is almost as large as a Norman keep, and is more ornamented than was common in most structures of the kind. The more recent castle is held to be one of the noblest examples of Jacobean architecture that have come down to us.
HAUGHTON CASTLE.
Mr. Algernon Charles Swinburne, the poet, has recently reminded the world, through the medium of some Border ballads which but indifferently represent the dialect of Northumberland, that he is himself a Borderer. Long ago he wrote glowingly of “the league-long billows of rolling, and breathing, and brightening heather,” and of “the wind, and all the sound, and all the fragrance and freedom and glory of the high north moorland.” It is probably from Sir William de Swyneburn of Haughton Castle that he is descended. Haughton stands on the opposite bank of the river to Chipchase, and a brief space lower down. Here Archie Armstrong, the chief of a famous moss-trooping clan, was starved to death long ago—by accident, and not design, let it in justice be said. Sir William de Swyneburn was treasurer to Margaret of Scotland, and is credited with having had a great and insatiable greed for his neighbours’ lands. He was succeeded in his tenure of the castle by the Widdringtons, one of whom is celebrated in the ballad of “Chevy Chase.” It was he, indeed, for whom the poet’s
”——heart was woe,
As one in doleful dumps;
For when his legs were smitten in two
He fought upon his stumps.”
But there was a Sir Thomas Swinburne at Haughton in the reign of Henry VIII. He was Warden of the Marches, and it was through his neglect of a prisoner that Archie Armstrong came to his death. Haughton Castle has a fine look of antique strength, but is nevertheless, in the main, a modern building. The original castle was burned down at some unrecorded time, and its ruins were restored and made habitable in the early part of the present century. Close by, it is sad to say, a former owner had a paper-mill, where forged assignats were manufactured for the purpose of being passed off as the genuine French article during the Duke of York’s expedition to Flanders in 1793. To Sir William de Swynburn the people around Haughton are still indebted for the convenience of a ferry, for one which he established so far back as the reign of Henry II. plies in the old fashion—by an overhead rope and pulley—to this day.