# Alnwick Castle

castle and stately home in Alnwick, Northumberland, England, UK; seat of the Duke of Northumberland, England, UK

England, United Kingdom

Palace · Fortification. 1096 CE

## Story

• Alnwick Castle was begun about 1096 by Ivo de Vesci on a crossing of the River Aln, and it is the home of Ralph Percy, 12th Duke of Northumberland.
• The Percy family have held it since 1307, or since a purchase dated 1309, and it was besieged by William the Lion and fought over in the Wars of the Roses.
• After the execution of the 7th Earl in 1572 the house stood largely empty, then was remodelled for the first duke and again by Anthony Salvin from 1852 and from 1854 to 1865.
• Garden excavations in 2000 and 2004 traced seven designs, and a 2006 cable trench found a stone-lined pit and a culvert outside the walls.
• A kitchen restoration opened in 2025 uncovered Victorian ovens hidden behind plaster and the original stone floor beneath later tiles.

## Visiting

The castle closes for the winter after an open season from the end of March to October, and the next opening is in March 2027. Castle grounds are open from 10am to 5pm, with last entry at 3:45pm. State Rooms are open from 10:30am to 4:30pm, with last entry at 4pm. The Great Kitchen is open from 10:30am to 4:45pm.
The Artisans Courtyard, the Postern Tower, and the Constable’s Tower are open from 10am to 5pm. The Fusiliers museum is open from 11am to 5pm, with last entry at 4:30pm. Online tickets cost £22 for an adult aged 17 to 59, £17.90 for a concession aged 60 or over or in full-time education, and £11.60 for a child aged 5 to 16. A family ticket for two adults and up to four children costs £64.20 online, and a single-parent family ticket costs £43.10.
Gate admission costs £24.45 for an adult, £19.90 for a concession, and £12.90 for a child. A family ticket at the gate costs £71.35, and a single-parent family ticket at the gate costs £47.90. Admission is free for a child from birth to four years. Online tickets are season passes, valid for 12 months from the first visit, with unlimited revisits during opening hours.
Tickets bought at the admission office can be upgraded to an annual pass at no extra cost on the day. Children aged 16 and under are not allowed to enter unless a responsible adult accompanies them. A carer ticket is free on arrival when proof of entitlement is shown. Northumberland residents receive 25 percent off the gate admission price when they show proof of residency and photo identification.
Booking tickets online saves 10 percent. Historic Houses members receive free admission on showing a membership card. English Heritage members receive 15 percent off admission on showing a membership card. National Trust membership is not accepted for admission.
A castle ticket does not include admission to the neighbouring garden. Visitors who show a valid travel ticket for public transport receive 20 percent off admission at the gate. A Max card gives discounted admission and is shown at the gate. A complimentary ticket must be presented for admission on arrival.
There is no rainy-day refund of tickets, and tickets bought ahead remain valid as season passes. State rooms or other areas may be closed on a particular day for a private event, for filming, or for conservation.

## History

Alnwick Castle is a castle and country house in Alnwick, Northumberland, guarding a road across the River Aln. It is the seat of Ralph Percy, 12th Duke of Northumberland, who lives in part of it with his family. After Windsor, it has been called the second largest inhabited castle in England, and also one of the largest inhabited castles in the United Kingdom. The building, stables, and riding school were designated in the highest grade on 20 February 1952, and the park and garden on 1 January 1985.

It is not a world-heritage inscription.

The first parts are credited to Ivo de Vesci, a Norman lord from Vassy in Calvados, in about 1096, after the Norman Conquest had planted castles across England. William II gave him the lordship of Alnwick and lands at Malton. His daughter Beatrix married Eustace Fitz John and died about 1130 at Knaresborough, giving birth to their son William. The castle was first mentioned in 1136, when David I of Scotland captured it and it was called very strong.

One account places his occupation of Alnwick, with Carlisle, Wark, Norham, and Newcastle, at the end of January after Stephen’s coronation on 22 December 1135. By 1138 it is described as a strong stone castle with a shell keep and two baileys of about seven acres. Another account says it was rebuilt in stone in 1157.

William the Lion, who had lost the earldom of Northumbria in 1157, is said to have besieged Alnwick in 1172 and again in 1174. The battle account instead puts an invasion in 1173, turned back from Newcastle and Prudhoe, and the siege in 1174. On 13 July 1174 Ranulf de Glanvill’s party of about four hundred knights, lost in fog, caught William outside the walls with perhaps sixty men. His horse was killed and he was captured.

The Treaty of Falaise put English garrisons in Roxburgh, Berwick, Jedburgh, Edinburgh, and Stirling at Scottish expense. The treaty lasted fifteen years.

Eustace de Vesci, lord of Alnwick and a Magna Carta surety, was accused of plotting against King John in 1212. John ordered Alnwick demolished, and the castle account says that order was not carried out. On 27 May 1213 Philip of Oldcoates was ordered to destroy the castle. Eustace was one of the twenty-five barons set to enforce the charter, and he was killed by an arrow at the siege of Barnard Castle in 1216.

John de Vesci inherited as a minor in 1253. Antony Bek, his guardian, sold the estates to the Percy family in 1307. A second date for Henry de Percy’s purchase is 1309. The new owners rebuilt a modest stone castle into a major border fortress.

The Abbot’s Tower, the Middle Gateway, and the Constable’s Tower survive from that work. In 1345 the family also acquired Warkworth, which became the preferred residence even though Alnwick was considered more prestigious.

Henry Percy, 1st Earl of Northumberland, and his son Harry Hotspur helped to dethrone Richard II and then rebelled against Henry IV. Hotspur, born at Alnwick on 20 May 1364, was killed at the Battle of Shrewsbury on 21 July 1403. The castle surrendered the same year under threat of bombardment.

In the Wars of the Roses, D. J. Cathcart King called the defence here the only practical defence of a private castle. It was held against Edward IV until mid-September 1461, after Towton, and it changed hands again through 1462, 1463, and 1464, when Warwick received its surrender on 24 June.

Henry Percy was restored as earl in early 1470, and the castle account says the 4th Earl had the castle back after he pledged fealty to Edward IV.

After Thomas Percy, 7th Earl, was beheaded at York on 22 August 1572 for the Rising of the North, the castle was increasingly empty. In 1594 the 9th Earl, later called the Wizard Earl, made his cousin Thomas Percy constable. Thomas joined the Gunpowder Plot and was killed fleeing it. The earl was held in the Tower, and more than a century passed without a significant Percy presence.

In 1650 Oliver Cromwell used the castle to house prisoners after the Battle of Dunbar. The number held here is not stated.

The family returned in the eighteenth century. Hugh Smithson and Elizabeth Seymour became Duke and Duchess in 1766. Robert Adam, James Paine, Daniel Garrett, and Capability Brown are all named in the alterations, and James Wyatt and James Prince are also named for the same campaign. Brown and Thomas Call landscaped the Pastures, and Brown is credited with filling the moat formed by the Bow Burn.

Adam’s Gothic interiors were largely replaced. Between 1854 and 1865 Algernon, 4th Duke, paid Anthony Salvin two hundred and fifty thousand pounds, also called a quarter of a million, to restore a medieval exterior and Italian state rooms. Salvin’s work is also said to have begun in 1852. He is credited with the kitchen, the Prudhoe Tower, and the inner ward.

Luigi Canina decorated the rooms shown to the public. A chromolithograph of 1870 is by Alexander Francis Lydon.

The plan, set by the twelfth century, has no square keep. A shell keep of ten towers sits inside a bailey of ten more towers, with a long barbican at the main gate. Some carved figures are from about 1300, and many are mid-eighteenth-century work by James Johnson of Stamfordham. The present duke was born in the castle in 1956 and succeeded in 1995.

His wife Jane began the new garden in 2000. Excavation in 2000 and 2004 found seven successive designs in the walled garden, from a kitchen garden of the 1760s to a twentieth-century decline. In 2006 a cable trench inside the walls found no significant ancient features, while outside them a stone-lined pit of the eighteenth or nineteenth century held pottery, bone, and plant remains, and a stone culvert was recorded.

Since 2024 the great kitchen has been opened in stages. Victorian ovens hidden behind plaster, and the original stone floor under modern tiles, were uncovered for the 2025 season. The kitchen had been unveiled in November 1859 with a dinner for six hundred and forty workers.

It later housed wartime evacuees from Newcastle Church High School for Girls, then a teacher-training college from 1945 to 1977, and a campus of St. Cloud State University, dated both to the 1970s and to 1981. The castle is open to the public in the summer. In 2006 it drew 195,504 visitors.

In 2016 the castle and the garden together drew more than 600,000. Film crews have used the walls often, including as Hogwarts in two Harry Potter films.

## Photographs

- [Alnwick Castle, Northumberland, UK - home of Harry Potter movies — Thomas Quine](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/8e/Castle_at_Alnwick_panorama_%2827201950193%29.jpg)
- [Alnwick "always someone in the way" castle:) — Sketyl none](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/0e/Alnwick_%22always_someone_in_the_way%22_castle_%29_%2822456735731%29.jpg)
- [Alnwick, Alnwick Castle. — IanChristopherWeston](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/c0/Alnwick_-_Alnwick_Castle_-_20210418120034.jpg)
- [Alnwick, Alnwick Castle. — IanChristopherWeston](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/8e/Alnwick_-_Alnwick_Castle_-_20210418121752.jpg)
- [To celebrate the 19 Squadron numberplate being awarded to the Battle Management Operations Wing BMOW on the 1st of April 2021, and the 20 Squadron numberplate — Simon Moore](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/3b/19_and_20_Squadron_Reformation_Parade.jpg)
- [Alnick Castle and the River Aln — Richard Sutcliffe](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/9f/Alnick_Castle_and_the_River_Aln_-_geograph.org.uk_-_5054056.jpg)
- ['Guest Hall' Outer Walls, Alnwick Castle — Geoff Holland](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/5b/%27Guest_Hall%27_Outer_Walls%2C_Alnwick_Castle_-_geograph.org.uk_-_6873055.jpg)
- [Alnwick (Northumberland, England, UK) - Alnwick Castle - Small courtyard near tte entrance, with the equestrian statue of Harry Hotspur Percy — Benjamin Smith](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/31/Alnwick_-_Alnwick_Castle_-_01.jpg)
- [Alnwick (Northumberland, England, UK) - Alnwick Castle - Courtyard near the entrance, now hosting the café and gift shop — Benjamin Smith](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/fe/Alnwick_-_Alnwick_Castle_-_03.jpg)
- [Alnwick (Northumberland, England, UK) - Alnwick Castle - Courtyard near the entrance, now hosting the café and gift shop — Benjamin Smith](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/e4/Alnwick_-_Alnwick_Castle_-_04.jpg)

## Sources

- [Battle of Dunbar (1650)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Dunbar_(1650)) — Wikipedia
- [Alnwick Castle](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alnwick_Castle) — Wikipedia
- [Norman Conquest](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norman_Conquest) — Wikipedia
- [Ivo de Vesci](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ivo_de_Vesci) — Wikipedia
- [Eustace de Vesci](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eustace_de_Vesci) — Wikipedia
- [David I of Scotland](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_I_of_Scotland) — Wikipedia
- [William the Lion](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_the_Lion) — Wikipedia
- [Battle of Alnwick (1174)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Alnwick_(1174)) — Wikipedia
- [Henry Percy, 1st Earl of Northumberland](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Percy,_1st_Earl_of_Northumberland) — Wikipedia
- [Henry Percy (Hotspur)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Percy_(Hotspur)) — Wikipedia
- [Battle of Shrewsbury](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Shrewsbury) — Wikipedia
- [Wars of the Roses](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wars_of_the_Roses) — Wikipedia
- [Edward IV](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_IV) — Wikipedia
- [D. J. Cathcart King](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D._J._Cathcart_King) — Wikipedia
- [Thomas Percy, 7th Earl of Northumberland](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Percy,_7th_Earl_of_Northumberland) — Wikipedia
- [Henry Percy, 9th Earl of Northumberland](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Percy,_9th_Earl_of_Northumberland) — Wikipedia
- [Gunpowder Plot](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gunpowder_Plot) — Wikipedia
- [Robert Adam](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Adam) — Wikipedia
- [Hugh Percy, 1st Duke of Northumberland](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hugh_Percy,_1st_Duke_of_Northumberland) — Wikipedia
- [Daniel Garrett](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_Garrett) — Wikipedia
- [Capability Brown](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capability_Brown) — Wikipedia
- [Algernon Percy, 4th Duke of Northumberland](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Algernon_Percy,_4th_Duke_of_Northumberland) — Wikipedia
- [Anthony Salvin](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthony_Salvin) — Wikipedia
- [Alexander Francis Lydon](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexander_Francis_Lydon) — Wikipedia
- [Ralph Percy, 12th Duke of Northumberland](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ralph_Percy,_12th_Duke_of_Northumberland) — Wikipedia
- [Jane Percy, Duchess of Northumberland](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jane_Percy,_Duchess_of_Northumberland) — Wikipedia
- [The Castle, Stable Court and Covered Riding School](https://historicengland.org.uk/listing/the-list/list-entry/1371308) — Historic England
- [Alnwick Castle park and garden](https://historicengland.org.uk/listing/the-list/list-entry/1001041) — Historic England
- [Opening times and ticket prices](https://www.alnwickcastle.com/plan-your-visit/visitor-information/opening-times-ticket-prices) — Alnwick Castle
- [Visitor questions](https://www.alnwickcastle.com/plan-your-visit/visitor-information/faqs) — Alnwick Castle
- [About Alnwick Castle](https://www.alnwickcastle.com/about-alnwick-castle) — Alnwick Castle
- [Restoration and conservation](https://www.alnwickcastle.com/about-alnwick-castle/restoration-and-conservation) — Alnwick Castle
- [Alnwick Castle, Alnwick, Northumberland](https://archaeologydataservice.ac.uk/library/browse/issue.xhtml?recordId=1015426&recordType=GreyLit) — Archaeology Data Service
- [Alnwick Castle Gardens](https://www.pre-construct.com/alnwick-castle-gardens/) — Pre-Construct Archaeology
- [Parterres Bright with Flowers](https://www.pre-construct.com/product/parterres-bright-with-flowers/) — Pre-Construct Archaeology
- [Alnwick Castle opens its kitchens](https://highlifenorth.com/2025/04/04/alnwick-castle-opens-hidden-section-for-the-first-time-its-nearly-thousand-year-history) — High Life North
- [Castle at Alnwick panorama (27201950193).jpg](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Castle_at_Alnwick_panorama_(27201950193).jpg) — Wikimedia Commons
- [Alnwick "always someone in the way" castle ) (22456735731).jpg](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Alnwick_%22always_someone_in_the_way%22_castle_)_(22456735731).jpg) — Wikimedia Commons
- [Alnwick - Alnwick Castle - 20210418120034.jpg](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Alnwick_-_Alnwick_Castle_-_20210418120034.jpg) — Wikimedia Commons
- [Alnwick - Alnwick Castle - 20210418121752.jpg](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Alnwick_-_Alnwick_Castle_-_20210418121752.jpg) — Wikimedia Commons
- [19 and 20 Squadron Reformation Parade.jpg](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:19_and_20_Squadron_Reformation_Parade.jpg) — Wikimedia Commons
- [Alnick Castle and the River Aln - geograph.org.uk - 5054056.jpg](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Alnick_Castle_and_the_River_Aln_-_geograph.org.uk_-_5054056.jpg) — Wikimedia Commons
- ['Guest Hall' Outer Walls, Alnwick Castle - geograph.org.uk - 6873055.jpg](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:%27Guest_Hall%27_Outer_Walls,_Alnwick_Castle_-_geograph.org.uk_-_6873055.jpg) — Wikimedia Commons
- [Alnwick - Alnwick Castle - 01.jpg](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Alnwick_-_Alnwick_Castle_-_01.jpg) — Wikimedia Commons
- [Alnwick - Alnwick Castle - 03.jpg](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Alnwick_-_Alnwick_Castle_-_03.jpg) — Wikimedia Commons
- [Alnwick - Alnwick Castle - 04.jpg](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Alnwick_-_Alnwick_Castle_-_04.jpg) — Wikimedia Commons

## Detailed history

Alnwick Castle is a castle and country house in Alnwick, in the English county of Northumberland. It guards a road crossing the River Aln. The river flows past the north side, and a deep ravine to the south and east separates the castle from the town. The point given for it is 55 degrees 24 minutes 57 seconds north and 1 degree 42 minutes 22 seconds west. It is the seat of Ralph Percy, 12th Duke of Northumberland, and he and his family live in part of it. One account calls it, after Windsor, the second largest inhabited castle in England. Another calls it one of the largest inhabited castles in the United Kingdom. The building, with the stable court and covered riding school, including the west wall of the riding school, was designated on 20 February 1952. The landscape park and garden were designated on 1 January 1985. Both are placed in the highest grade. The recorded grid of the building is NU 18685 13574, and a later investigation of the castle used NU 1875 1355. It is not a world-heritage inscription.

The castle stands in a kingdom remade by the Norman Conquest. That conquest was an eleventh-century invasion by thousands of Norman, French, Flemish, and Breton troops led by the Duke of Normandy, later called William the Conqueror. His claim came from kinship with the childless king Edward the Confessor. Edward died in January 1066 and was succeeded by his brother-in-law Harold Godwinson. Harald Hardrada of Norway invaded the north, won at Fulford on 20 September, and was killed at Stamford Bridge on 25 September. On 28 September William landed at Pevensey. Harold marched south and was killed at Hastings on 14 October. William was not secure until after 1072. He confiscated the lands of the resisting English elite, granted lands to his followers, and built castles on military strong points. The Domesday survey was completed by 1086. A dialect of French became the language of the elite. Slavery was formally abolished, and the new administrators took over many forms of the older government. Alnwick’s first recorded builder belongs to the next reign, not to the battle at Hastings.

Ivo de Vesci, also written Vescy, and sometimes Yves, was a prominent eleventh-century noble. He obtained the lands and the lordship of Alnwick from King William II, and he was also given lands in Malton in Yorkshire. It is not known whether he was the son or the kinsman of the Robert de Veci who took part in the conquest and was rewarded with estates in Northamptonshire, Warwickshire, and Lincolnshire. The castle account says he was a nobleman from Vassy in Calvados, in Normandy, and that he erected the first parts of the castle in about 1096. He married Alda, daughter of William Tyson, the former lord of Alnwick. Their daughter Beatrix de Vesci died about 1130. She married Eustace Fitz John, who died in 1157, Constable of Chestershire and Knaresborough. By that marriage Eustace gained the baronies of Malton and Alnwick. Beatrix died at Knaresborough Castle giving birth to their son, William.

The castle was first mentioned in 1136, when King David I of Scotland captured it. At that point it was described as very strong. David was king of Scotland from 1124 to 1153, and before that Prince of the Cumbrians from 1113. He was born about 1084, the youngest son of Malcolm III and Margaret, and he spent much of his childhood in Scotland before a temporary exile in 1093. In that year Malcolm and David’s brother Edward were killed at the Battle of Alnwick during an invasion of Northumberland. That fight belongs to the town and the year before the first parts of this castle are said to have been raised. It is not a siege of the later stone walls. David was reared at the court of Henry I, married Matilda of Huntingdon, and took the earldom claim of her father Waltheof seriously. When Stephen seized the English throne, David, who had sworn in 1127 to uphold the Empress Matilda, made war. Stephen was crowned on 22 December 1135. Before December was over David marched into northern England, and by the end of January he had occupied Carlisle, Wark, Alnwick, Norham, and Newcastle. A treaty then left him Carlisle. He invaded again in 1138. A list of the fabric says that by 1138 a strong stone-built border castle, with a shell keep in place of the motte, formed the nucleus of the present castle, with two baileys enclosing about seven acres. The castle account instead says the castle was rebuilt in stone in 1157. Both dates are given. The curtain walls and their square towers are said to rest on early foundations, and the inner gatehouse has round-headed arches with heavy chevron decoration.

William the Lion was born around 1142, during the reign of his grandfather David. His father Henry of Scotland died in 1152, and William inherited the earldom of Northumbria. David died the next year. In 1157 William had to give that earldom to Henry II of England. He became king when his brother Malcolm IV died on 9 December 1165, and he was inaugurated on 24 December. He was described as powerfully built, redheaded, and headstrong, and much of his reign was spent trying to recover Northumbria. In 1168 he arranged the first definite treaty of alliance between France and Scotland. The castle account says Alnwick was besieged in 1172 and again in 1174 by William, and that he was captured outside the walls during the Battle of Alnwick. The battle account places the first invasion in 1173, while Henry II was fighting his sons in the revolt of 1173 to 1174. William advanced on Newcastle, found the partly built stone castle too strong, attacked Prudhoe and found it too strong as well, and, unwilling to undertake a long siege, returned to Scotland. In 1174 he invaded again with a larger army that included Flemish mercenaries. The army was said to number eighty thousand, a figure treated as almost certainly an exaggeration. He avoided Newcastle, attacked Prudhoe again, and after a siege of three days moved north to besiege Alnwick. He divided the army into three columns. One, under Duncan, Earl of Fife, attacked Warkworth and set fire to the church of St Lawrence with a large number of refugees inside.

On the night of 11 July a party of about four hundred mounted knights, led by Ranulf de Glanvill, set out from Newcastle. The force contained seasoned knights who had fought the Scots before. They became lost in heavy fog and reached Alnwick shortly after dawn. William had let his army spread out. He was protected by a bodyguard of perhaps sixty men. At the alarm he rushed from his tent. The English charged, his horse was killed beneath him, and he was captured. The fighting did not last long, and those of his followers who had not been killed surrendered. The date of the battle is 13 July 1174. He was brought to Newcastle. The leaderless army wandered back to Scotland. Newcastle was not thought strong enough to hold him, and he was moved to Falaise in Normandy. Henry sent an army to occupy part of Scotland and its five strongest castles: Roxburgh, Berwick, Jedburgh, Edinburgh, and Stirling. To gain his freedom William signed the Treaty of Falaise, swore allegiance to the English king, and agreed that English soldiers would garrison the captured castles at Scottish expense. On his release he travelled back through Newcastle and was attacked by a mob. The treaty lasted fifteen years, until Richard the Lionheart effectively sold those castles back to fund his crusade. The battle account calls this the last attempt by a Scottish king to regain the lost territories in northern England. In 1237, under the Treaty of York, Alexander II abandoned his forefathers’ claims to Northumbria and Cumbria. The boundary was set between the Solway Firth and the mouth of the Tweed, though in the east it leaves the Tweed to swing around Berwick, which became an English town in 1482.

Eustace de Vesci, born in 1169 and killed in 1216, was lord of Alnwick Castle and a surety of Magna Carta. He also held Sprouston in Roxburghshire. His parents were William de Vesci and Burga, daughter of Robert III de Stuteville. He paid his relief on coming of age in 1190. Claims that he was with Richard I in Palestine in 1191 are said to lack support in primary sources. On 13 August 1199 he was one of the guarantors of a treaty between the new king John and Renaud, Count of Dammartin. He was sent to William the Lion to promise satisfaction of William’s rights in England, and he witnessed William’s homage on 22 November 1200. He married Margaret, a half-sister of Alexander II and an illegitimate daughter of William the Lion. Their son William was the father of John de Vesci and of another William de Vescy, one of the competitors for the crown of Scotland in 1291. Eustace witnessed charters often in John’s early years, was a guardian of the bishopric of Durham in 1209, met William the Lion on a visit to England on 10 April 1209, and served the king in Ireland from June to August 1210.

Accused of conspiring against John in 1212, he fled to Scotland. A tale that John tried to seduce his wife, and of a trick played on the king, first appears in Walter of Hemingburgh and resembles a classical model. The castle account says he was accused of plotting with Robert Fitzwalter against John in 1212, and that John ordered the demolition of Alnwick and of Fitzwalter’s Baynard’s Castle, though the instructions were not carried out at Alnwick. His own life says his lands were seized, and that after John’s submission to the pope the king was forced to invite him back on 27 May 1213, while orders went the same day to Philip of Oldcoates to cripple him by destroying Alnwick. Both the 1212 order, said not to have been carried out, and the order of 27 May 1213 are on record. On 18 July 1213 he was among those who received John’s pledge to abide by the pope’s decision. On 5 November 1214 Pope Innocent III warned him not to trouble the king. In 1215 he marched south with Robert Fitzwalter in the First Barons’ War. He was one of the twenty-five appointed to see Magna Carta carried out, and he was excommunicated by name in 1216. He then supported Louis of France. While he accompanied Alexander II on the way to do homage to Louis, they besieged Barnard Castle, which belonged to Hugh de Balliol. Eustace went too near and was shot through the head by an arrow. His lands were confiscated and given to Simon de Champ Rémy, Philip de Ulecot, and William de Harcourt.

John de Vesci succeeded to his father’s titles and estates when that father died in Gascony in 1253. They included the barony of Alnwick, a large property in Northumberland, and considerable estates in Yorkshire, including Malton. John was under age. Henry III conferred the wardship on a foreign relative, which caused great offence to the family. The property was put into the guardianship of Antony Bek, who sold it to the Percy family in 1307. A description of the fabric dates the purchase by Henry de Percy to 1309, and dates the middle gateway to about 1309 to 1315. From 1307 the fortunes of the Percys, who still held Yorkshire lands and titles, were linked with Alnwick. The stone castle Henry Percy bought was a modest affair. He immediately began rebuilding and did not live to see it finished. The work turned Alnwick into a major fortress on the Anglo-Scottish border. His son, also Henry, who lived from 1299 to 1352, continued the building. The Abbot’s Tower, the Middle Gateway, and the Constable’s Tower survive from this period. The same years had to meet military needs and the family’s wish for a residence. The result is described as the template for fourteenth-century castle renovations in northern England. Several palace-fortresses of the region, called extensive, opulent, and theatrical, date from this time, among them Bamburgh and Raby. In 1345 the Percys acquired Warkworth Castle, also in Northumberland. Alnwick was considered more prestigious. Warkworth became the preferred residence.

Henry Percy, 1st Earl of Northumberland, was born on 10 November 1341 and died on 20 February 1408. He was the son of Henry de Percy, 3rd Baron Percy, and of Mary of Lancaster. He served Edward III, was Warden of the Marches toward Scotland in 1362, and in February 1367 was entrusted with all castles and fortified places in the Scottish marches. As a supporter of John of Gaunt he was Marshal of England in December 1376 and gave that office up in 1377. With Gaunt he had to take refuge with Joan of Kent at Kennington during the London riots of 1377. As Marshal he had an important part in the coronation of Richard II, and he was formally created an earl. Between 1383 and 1384 he was Admiral of the Northern Seas. In 1381 he married Maud Lucy, and through her he inherited Cockermouth on condition that he and his heirs bear the Lucy arms quarterly. They had no children. His son Harry Hotspur was born of his earlier marriage to Margaret Neville.

Sir Henry Percy, called Hotspur or Harry Hotspur, was born at Alnwick Castle on 20 May 1364 and killed on 21 July 1403. The Scots gave him the nickname as a tribute to his speed in advance and his readiness to attack. He was knighted by Edward III in April 1377, together with the future Richard II and the future Henry IV. He was in Ireland with the Earl of March in 1380 and travelled in Prussia in 1383. He was appointed Warden of the East March either on 30 July 1384 or in May 1385, and in 1385 he went with Richard II into Scotland. In April 1386 he was sent to reinforce Calais and raided Picardy. Between August and October 1387 he commanded a naval force. In June 1393, not yet thirty, he was sent on a diplomatic mission to Cyprus. He was Lieutenant of the Duchy of Aquitaine from 1394 to 1398 for John of Gaunt, took part in Richard’s Irish expedition, and was again in Calais in the summer of 1396. The earl and his son helped to dethrone Richard II. When Henry Bolingbroke returned from exile in June 1399 they joined him at Doncaster. After the deposition they were lavishly rewarded. The earl became Constable of England and Warden of the West March. Hotspur became Warden of the East March and justiciar of north Wales. Thomas Percy, Earl of Worcester, became Admiral of England and, in 1401, steward of the household.

The favour did not last. Henry IV shifted the cost of his 1401 Scottish campaign onto the northern nobility and then denied them the ransoms of the Scots taken at Homildon Hill in September 1402. Hotspur’s brother-in-law Edmund Mortimer was captured by Owain Glyndŵr and not ransomed. The king favoured Dunbar, demanded the Scottish prisoners, and promoted his son’s military authority in Wales. In the summer of 1403 the Percys rebelled. Hotspur issued proclamations in Cheshire accusing the king of tyrannical government. It is said that they were in collusion with Glyndŵr. The Battle of Shrewsbury was fought on 21 July 1403 between Henry IV and Hotspur. It is called the first battle in which English archers fought each other on English soil. Part of the fighting is placed at what is now Battlefield, three miles north of Shrewsbury. Hotspur marched south early in July to meet his uncle in Cheshire. The king, at Burton-on-Trent, marched to Stafford on 18 July, set out on 20 July, and reached Shrewsbury, thirty-two miles on, the same day, where his son Henry of Monmouth was waiting. Hotspur could not enter the town and retired three miles to Berwick for the night. His father’s forces were still in the north, and Glyndŵr’s army was somewhere to the south-west.

Mediation by the Abbot of Shrewsbury failed. The king’s archers were driven back by the rebels’ arrows. Hotspur sent men-at-arms after them. With the Earl of Douglas and about thirty soldiers he tried to charge the royal standard. George Dunbar, Earl of March, led the king out of the way. The prince, on the left, drove back Hotspur’s right wing and was hit in the face by an arrow. The rebels, outnumbered, were surrounded. Hotspur was killed. One account says the king wept over the body. It was taken by Thomas Neville, Baron Furnivall, to Whitchurch for burial. Rumours that Hotspur was alive led the king to have the corpse exhumed and displayed, propped upright between two millstones, in the marketplace at Shrewsbury. Another account says the body was salted and set up impaled on a spear between two millstones, with an armed guard. The head was sent to York and set on Micklegate Bar, or on the north gate, looking toward his own lands. The quarters were displayed at London, Newcastle upon Tyne, Bristol, and Chester. In November his widow Elizabeth received the remains, and he was buried in York Minster. In January 1404 he was posthumously attainted. Worcester was beheaded, and Sir Richard Venables, Sir Richard Vernon, and Sir Henry Boynton were hanged, drawn, and quartered at Shrewsbury on 23 July. A later play made Hotspur the same age as Prince Hal and had the prince kill him in single combat. He was in fact twenty-two years older, and the prince was sixteen. A fourteen-foot statue of him was unveiled at Alnwick in 2010 by the Duke of Northumberland. The castle itself surrendered in 1403 under the threat of bombardment. The earl had not fought in person at Shrewsbury. He was not convicted of treason, but he lost the office of Constable. In 1405 he, Glyndŵr, and the Mortimers signed the Tripartite Indenture, which would have given him the north of England and also Northamptonshire, Norfolk, Warwickshire, and Leicestershire. Later in 1405 he supported Richard le Scrope, Archbishop of York, in another rebellion, and then fled to Scotland.

During the Wars of the Roses, castles were infrequently attacked and the fighting was generally in the field. Those wars were a series of confrontations for the English throne from 1455 to 1487, between supporters of the houses of York and Lancaster, cadet branches of the Plantagenets. Henry Percy, 2nd Earl of Northumberland, was killed at the first battle of St Albans on 22 May 1455, when fewer than one hundred and sixty men fell and Henry VI was found hiding in a tanner’s shop. Alnwick was one of three castles held by Lancastrian forces in 1461 and 1462. The military historian D. J. Cathcart King called the defence made there the only practical defence of a private castle in that war. David James Cathcart King lived from 1913 to 29 September 1989. He was a historian, an archaeologist, and a schoolteacher. He studied law at Bristol, served in the Royal Artillery in the Middle East during the Second World War, and then taught history at Walton Lodge Preparatory School in Bristol. He was elected a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries in 1962, was president of the Cambrian Archaeological Association in 1976 and 1977, and was a founding member of the Castle Studies Group in 1987. His index of castles appeared in 1983, and his interpretative history of the castle in England and Wales in 1988.

Edward IV was born at Rouen on 28 April 1442 and died on 9 April 1483. He was king from 4 March 1461 until 3 October 1470, and again from 11 April 1471 until his death. He inherited the Yorkist claim at eighteen, when his father Richard, Duke of York, was killed at Wakefield in December 1460. He defeated Lancastrian armies at Mortimer’s Cross on 2 February 1461 and at Towton soon afterwards, deposed Henry VI, and was crowned on 28 June 1461. Contemporaries described him as handsome, affable, and energetic, and unusually tall at six feet four inches. Alnwick was held against him until it surrendered in mid-September 1461, after Towton. Sir William Tailboys retook it for Lancaster. During the winter he surrendered it to Hastings, Sir John Howard, and Sir Ralph Grey of Heton in late July 1462. Grey was appointed captain, then surrendered to the Lancastrians after a sharp siege in the early autumn. When the Earl of Warwick arrived in November, Queen Margaret and her French adviser Pierre de Brézé sailed to Scotland for help. A mainly Scots relief force under George Douglas, 4th Earl of Angus, and de Brézé set out on 22 November. Warwick’s army, commanded by the Earl of Kent and the recently pardoned Lord Scales, kept news from the starving garrisons. Bamburgh and Dunstanburgh soon agreed terms. Hungerford and Whittingham held Alnwick until Warwick had to withdraw when de Brézé and Angus arrived on 5 January 1463. The Lancastrians did not bring Warwick to battle. They retired and left a token force, which surrendered to the Yorkists the next day.

By May 1463 Alnwick was in Lancastrian hands for the third time since Towton. Grey of Heton betrayed it, tricking the commander Sir John Astley. Astley was imprisoned, and Hungerford resumed command. After Montagu’s victories at Hedgeley Moor and Hexham in 1464, Warwick arrived before Alnwick on 23 June and received its surrender the next day. That brought it finally into Yorkist hands. The Percys had fought for Lancaster at Towton, and their titles and estates were given to Warwick’s brother John Neville. Edward reinstated Henry Percy as Earl of Northumberland in early 1470. John was compensated with the title Marquess of Montagu, a change that marked a significant loss of his northern power. The castle account says that by the following decade the 4th Earl had pledged fealty to Edward IV and the castle was returned to the Percys. Edward’s later reign included the breach with Warwick, the brief return of Henry VI in 1470, and Edward’s victories at Barnet and Tewkesbury in 1471. Henry VI was then found dead in the Tower. Those later turns of the wars are not described as further sieges of Alnwick.

After the execution of Thomas Percy, 7th Earl of Northumberland, in 1572, the castle was increasingly uninhabited. Thomas was born in 1528 and beheaded on 22 August 1572. He led the Rising of the North against Elizabeth I in 1569. His father, Sir Thomas Percy, had been executed at Tyburn on 2 June 1537 for a leading part in the Pilgrimage of Grace, when this Thomas was eight. An act of 1549 restored him in blood. In Mary’s reign he regained the ancestral honours and lands. He was governor of Prudhoe and in 1557 besieged and took Scarborough Castle, which rebels had seized. After the rising failed he fled to Scotland, was captured by James Douglas, 4th Earl of Morton, and was held at Lochleven. Negotiations to send him to England were unfinished when Regent Moray was assassinated at Linlithgow in January 1570. In January 1572 his wife Anne wrote from Mechelen in the hope of a ransom. After three years he was sold to the English government for two thousand pounds, taken to Eyemouth, and lodged at Berwick on 8 June 1572 in Valentine Browne’s house. He was conducted to York and beheaded on the Pavement, refusing an offer to save his life by renouncing Catholicism. His body was buried at St Crux, York, a church since demolished. He was later beatified.

Henry Percy, 9th Earl of Northumberland, was born at Tynemouth Castle on 27 April 1564 and died on 5 November 1632. He succeeded his father in 1585. The father had died, an apparent suicide, in the Tower, where he was questioned about dealings with Mary, Queen of Scots. The son was brought up a Protestant. He was one of the wealthiest peers at the court of Elizabeth. He was called the Wizard Earl for scientific and alchemical experiments, cartography, and a large library, a nickname also given to Gerald FitzGerald, 11th Earl of Kildare. In 1594 he placed a distant cousin, another Thomas Percy, in charge at Alnwick as constable. He also employed that Thomas as a rent collector at Syon. Thomas was the great-grandson of the 4th Earl, a recent Catholic convert, and was described as unscrupulous, with thirty-four charges of dishonesty brought against him. In 1602 the earl sent him three times to the court of James VI to say that English Catholics would accept James if the persecution were reduced. The earl wrote that it would be a pity to lose a good kingdom for not tolerating a mass in a corner.

The Gunpowder Plot of 1605 was an attempted killing of James VI and I, led by Robert Catesby. The plan was to blow up the House of Lords at the state opening on Tuesday 5 November 1605, and then to raise the Midlands and place the king’s nine-year-old daughter Elizabeth on the throne. Thomas Percy was one of the five who met on 20 May 1604, probably at the Duck and Drake inn off the Strand, swore secrecy on a prayer book, and afterwards received the Eucharist. On 9 June 1604 the earl appointed him to the Band of Gentlemen Pensioners, which gave him a reason to seek a house near the Prince’s Chamber. Percy worried about his patron being in the chamber. Fawkes, calling himself John Johnson, was found with the firewood in the undercroft and said it belonged to his master Thomas Percy. The name deepened suspicion because Percy was already known as a Catholic agitator. Just over a decade after the constableship, Thomas was killed fleeing the plot. The earl was imprisoned in the Tower on suspicion of complicity. The castle account says this began more than a century without a significant Percy presence at Alnwick.

In the Tower the earl, still rich, had spacious rooms in the Martin Tower, twenty servants, a covered bowling alley, and tennis and fencing. He spent fifty pounds a year on books. The scholars Thomas Harriot, Walter Warner, and Robert Hues were known as his Magi, and with Walter Raleigh they discussed scientific ideas. He had been warned against, with Raleigh and Cobham, before James’s accession, on the theory of a diabolical triplicity, but he was appointed to the Privy Council and bought Walsingham House in Seething Lane for two thousand two hundred pounds in 1603. His children included Algernon, later the 10th Earl, and Henry, Baron Percy of Alnwick, who died unmarried in April 1659. The long absence at the castle was broken, in one recorded use, in 1650. The Battle of Dunbar was fought on 3 September 1650 near Dunbar, between Oliver Cromwell’s New Model Army and a Scottish army under David Leslie. It was the first major battle of the English invasion of Scotland, begun after Scotland recognised Charles II on 1 May 1650. Cromwell crossed the border on 22 July with a force of over sixteen thousand. He claimed to have killed nearly four thousand and captured ten thousand. Other accounts put the Scottish dead far lower, at about three hundred, or between three hundred and five hundred, and treat his figures as absurd. The castle account says Cromwell used Alnwick to house prisoners after the battle. It does not say how many were held there, and the casualty figures belong to the field at Dunbar, not to a count inside these walls.

In the second half of the eighteenth century Robert Adam, James Paine, Daniel Garrett, and Capability Brown carried out alterations under the returning family. A life of the first duke says that at Alnwick the duke employed James Wyatt, whose work has been effaced by later remodelling, and that one or other Adam designed Brizlee Tower. A description of the fabric names James Prince, with Robert Adam, for the rehabilitation and extension. The three names, James Paine, James Wyatt, and James Prince, are all attached to that eighteenth-century campaign. Daniel Garrett died in 1753. He had been a clerk of works, set up his own practice in the north of England in 1735, and in 1747 wrote a book of designs and estimates for farm buildings. He worked at Castle Howard’s mausoleum, on the Burlington estate, and at houses where he used Rococo plaster and some Gothic detail. The castle account places him with the later eighteenth-century workmen even though his life ended in 1753.

Hugh Smithson married Elizabeth Seymour on 16 July 1740. She was Baroness Percy in her own right and the indirect heiress of the family. He took the name Percy in 1749 by a private act. The earldom passed to him when her father died on 7 February 1750. In 1766 George III created them Duke and Duchess of Northumberland. Their restorations at Alnwick partly inspired George’s own restorations at Windsor. Robert Adam’s work at the castle is dated 1766 and is said to have been destroyed when the state rooms were later remade. Little of it remains in the principal rooms shown to the public. Fireplaces in the housekeeper’s room and the steward’s room, and work inside the present estates office range, are named as survivors. The interiors were largely in a Strawberry Hill Gothic, not the neoclassical manner Adam used at Syon House, the couple’s London home. Adam was born in 1728 and died in 1792, and the castle interiors are listed among his minor country-house works. Capability Brown was baptised on 30 August 1716 and died on 6 February 1783. He was born at Kirkharle in Northumberland, apprenticed in the kitchen garden there until he was twenty-three, and from 1742 to 1751 was head gardener at Stowe. He designed more than one hundred and seventy parks and was nicknamed Capability because he told clients that their land had capability for improvement. His own life does not name Alnwick. The castle account says he and Thomas Call landscaped the smaller park immediately north of the castle, across the Aln, known locally as the Pastures. He is also credited with filling in the former moat, which the Bow Burn had formed. The much larger Hulne Park, which contains the remains of Hulne Priory, is a separate ground.

Algernon Percy, 4th Duke of Northumberland, was born on 15 December 1792 and died on 12 February 1865. He was the second son of the 2nd Duke. He entered the navy in March 1805, aged twelve, was made captain in 1815, and in 1816 was created Baron Prudhoe. Between 1826 and 1829 he travelled in Egypt, Nubia, and the Levant, and he gave the Prudhoe Lions to the British Museum. He succeeded his childless brother in 1847. In 1852 he was First Lord of the Admiralty in Derby’s cabinet, and in 1853 a Knight of the Garter. He married Lady Eleanor Grosvenor on 25 August 1842. They had no children. He died of gout at Alnwick Castle and was buried in the Northumberland vault in Westminster Abbey. Between 1854 and 1865 he paid Anthony Salvin two hundred and fifty thousand pounds, also stated as a quarter of a million, to remove the recent additions and remodel the castle in a more convincingly medieval style. Salvin’s own life says the restoration started in 1852, and that it included replacing one tower with the larger Prudhoe Tower, creating a porte-cochère, replacing windows, and replanning the interior. That remodelling was meant to remove Adam’s fanciful Gothic, restore a serious Gothic air to the exterior, and redesign the state rooms in an imposing Italian manner.

Anthony Salvin was born on 17 October 1799 and died on 17 December 1881. He was an architect with a reputation for medieval buildings. He trained under John Paterson at Brancepeth, worked in the office of John Nash, and was elected a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries in 1824. He restored or rebuilt at Norwich, Newark, Carisbrooke, Caernarfon, Naworth, the Tower of London, and Windsor, where Prince Albert instructed him, and he designed Peckforton as a castle of the time of Edward I. At Alnwick he is mostly credited with the kitchen, the Prudhoe Tower, the palatial accommodation, and the layout of the inner ward. The state rooms shown to the public were redecorated in an opulent Italianate style by Luigi Canina. Some of Adam’s work still survives outside those rooms. A chromolithograph of the castle in 1870 is by Alexander Francis Lydon. Lydon, born in 1836 or 1837 and dead in 1917, was an Irish-born watercolour artist, illustrator, and engraver of natural history and landscapes. He was apprenticed young to the printer Benjamin Fawcett and collaborated with Francis Orpen Morris, including on a series of picturesque views of seats of noblemen and gentlemen. A census of 30 March 1851 records him, aged fourteen, as a printer’s assistant, born in Dublin, and living at Bridge Street in Great Driffield.

By the twelfth century the castle had assumed the general layout it retains. It is distinguished as one of the earliest castles in England built without a square keep. There are two main rings. The principal rooms are in a much rebuilt shell keep. The keep is entered by an elaborate Romanesque arch, flanked by two semi-octagonal towers added in the fourteenth century. Unlike a plain circular shell, Alnwick’s keep is formed by ten tightly packed towers. Two flank the gate, three more are of the fourteenth century, and the rest are Salvin’s. Inside, the arches over the well and the gateway are medieval. Salvin added the Prudhoe Tower, with a loggia at ground level, in the north-west corner of the small inner courtyard. A list of the fabric calls that tower the most prominent feature on the west, and notes the polygonal apse of the chapel near it. Because the central block could not hold all the later accommodation, a long range was built along the south wall of the bailey, joined to the keep by a link building. About a sixth of the bailey wall has been reduced almost to ground level on the inner side to open views into the park. Where the outer wall formerly met the keep, a lower terrace was added in the Georgian works. Stables and service yards lie outside the bailey and would not have existed while the castle still had a military function.

Ten main towers stand on the outer bailey. Running clockwise from the keep they are the Postern Tower, the Constable’s Tower, the Record Tower, the Warder’s Tower, the middle gatehouse, the Auditor’s Tower, the Clock Tower, the main gatehouse, the Abbot’s Tower, and the Falconer’s Tower. Some are D-shaped, for resistance to assault, and some are rectangular, for rooms. Most are part of the fourteenth-century work, though the Constable’s, Warder’s, Clock, and Falconer’s towers have been rebuilt. A fabric description dates the Abbot’s Tower to about 1350 and gives it a rib-vaulted basement, the Falconer’s Tower and the Warder’s Tower to 1856, the Record Tower to the fourteenth century with a rebuilding in 1885, and the West Garrett as partly Norman. The main gate is defended by two semi-octagonal towers and a long barbican. A smaller turret on the east, Hotspur’s Chair, is named after Harry Hotspur. The West Garret and the Avener’s Tower flank the main gatehouse. The approach from Bailiffgate passes the crenellated barbican and gatehouse of the early fourteenth century, with a lion rampant, described as a replica, over the arch, and a fortified passage over a dry moat to a vaulted gateway. Carved figures surmount the battlements. Some date from around 1300. Matthew Johnson notes that several northern castles, including Bothal, Lumley, and Raby, were decorated in a similar way around that time. Many of the surviving figures are from the mid-eighteenth century, commissioned by the first duke and duchess from James Johnson of Stamfordham. They are also placed about 1750 to 1770, and are said probably to reflect an earlier arrangement.

The present duke was born at the castle on 16 November 1956, the fifth child and second son of Hugh, the 10th Duke, and of Lady Elizabeth Montagu Douglas Scott. He was styled Lord Ralph Percy until 1995. He was educated at Eton, at Christ Church, Oxford, where he read modern history, and at Reading, where he studied land management. He worked for seven years in the estate office at Arundel, then managed the Alnwick estate for his elder brother Henry, the 11th Duke. He succeeded in 1995 when Henry died without children. He sat in the House of Lords until the Act of 1999 ended the automatic right of hereditary peers, and no contribution of his to the Lords’ debates is recorded. Northumberland Estates, the corporation that holds the ducal assets, owns land in Northumberland, Scotland, and to a lesser extent London, Surrey, and Tyneside. He or the corporation owns this castle, Warkworth, Prudhoe, Syon House and Syon Park, Hulne Park and Hulne Priory, Albury Park, and Brizlee Tower. The estates are said to extend to one hundred thousand acres, with four thousand acres of forestry and twenty thousand of farmland managed directly, and about one hundred tenant farmers on the rest. In 2024 he was ranked 285th, with an estimated wealth of five hundred and nine million pounds. His sale in 2003 of Raphael’s Madonna of the Pinks, on the open market rather than at a lower price to the National Gallery, was criticised. At about the same time, during a foot-and-mouth crisis, he cut the rents of tenant farmers by ten percent. He has opposed certain wind farms, and he adopted renewable energy in the restoration of a hydroelectric generator. On 8 April 2014 the estate announced an art sale to raise fifteen million pounds for the cost of the Newburn flood of 25 September 2012, caused by the failure of a culvert for which it was responsible. The sales were completed by Sotheby’s in July 2014. In 2015 the family revoked a Hounslow allotment lease that had existed since the First World War, intending to develop the land. The plans were rejected in 2023 on the grounds that they would harm heritage assets.

He married Jane Richard on 21 July 1979 at Traquair parish church. Their children are Lady Catherine, called Katie, born on 23 June 1982; George, Earl Percy, born on 4 May 1984; Lady Melissa, born on 20 May 1987; and Lord Max, born on 26 May 1990. Isobel Jane Percy, Duchess of Northumberland, was born in Edinburgh on 11 May 1958. She was Lord Lieutenant of Northumberland from 2009 to 2024, the first woman to hold that office. The couple lived in a farmhouse until 1995. She was unhappy in the ducal role until her husband suggested that she renovate the garden. She began in 2000. In 2003 the garden became a charitable trust separate from the estates, with the duchess as a fundraiser and one of six trustees. The duke donated the forty-two-acre site, also given as seventeen hectares, and nine million pounds. A figure of forty-two million pounds was given for the cost, attached to a notice of 7 August 2003. The designers were Jacques Wirtz and Peter Wirtz of Wirtz International, in Schoten. The first phase, a fountain and the planting, opened in October 2001. In 2004 a treehouse complex of six thousand square feet, also given as five hundred and sixty square metres, including a café, was opened and called one of the largest of its kind. In February 2005 a poison garden was added, growing plants such as cannabis and the opium poppy. In May 2006 a pavilion and visitor centre by Michael Hopkins and Buro Happold opened, with seats for up to one thousand people. She was praised and scorned. Locals welcomed the visitors. She was accused of destroying one of the greatest gardens in England, and she called the criticism the snobbery element of gardening. In 2004 she was taken to hospital after collapsing under the pressure, and she considered giving up the trusteeship. She also introduced cage boxing at the gardens, and a range of cocktails named after her.

The walled garden lies about three hundred metres east of the castle, inside the grounds. Excavation and building recording in 2000 and 2004, during the latest transformation, found the development from a kitchen garden of the mid-eighteenth century up to the eve of the new garden. The work, with the archives, treats the new garden as the seventh major redesign. Remains of the first duke’s garden, from 1766 to 1786, are scant: an enclosing wall on three sides with arched gateways, and a heated wall for fruit, consistent with early plans. The second duke’s garden, from 1786 to 1817, served a wish to grow exotic fruit, with a pine stove for pineapples, vineries, and a mushroom house. Excavation found a major heated structure and its furnace. The gardener’s house survives and is still used. The third garden, from 1817 to 1847, replaced that heated structure with a hothouse and conservatory, a more recreational building, and added a crenellated water tower in a Gothic style. The fourth duke, from 1847 to 1865, kept earlier elements and redesigned the rest on Italianate lines, with terraced parterres, a formal layout of paths and beds, an extension south of the original garden, and a large central pond. A new conservatory replaced part of the original north wall. From 1867 to 1899 the parterres were replanned, the northern conservatory became a palm house, and one hothouse became a bothy for the garden staff. The twentieth century largely saw decline. The heating of the hothouses used hot air, hot water piping, and steam. A town excavation at the former Duchess’s School, published in 2024, found occupation from the Early Neolithic to the twenty-first century. That dig is in the town, not in the castle or its walled garden, and its prehistoric material is not a find from these walls.

In 2006, during work for cables, three walls were recorded that the cables would have to pass through. Within the castle walls no features of archaeological significance were found, and the homogeneous nature of the deposits was read as evidence that the interior had been landscaped. Outside the walls a stone-lined pit of the mid-eighteenth to nineteenth century contained pottery, animal bone, and abundant macrofossils. A stone culvert was also found. Later conservation, directed by the present duke since the early 2000s, has repaired curtain walls, towers, battlements, sculptures, glazing, and joinery, installed lightning conductors, repaired the spiral stairs to the north wall walks, and uncovered an underground eighteenth-century ice house in the grounds, which was dismantled and rebuilt. Throughout 2024 the library in the state rooms was cleaned, including a carved, painted, and gilded wooden ceiling of the mid-nineteenth century designed by Giovanni Montiroli. The ceiling alone took about four hundred hours, and the balustrade, bookcases, fireplaces, and floors were also treated.

A restoration of the great kitchen has been under way since 2024, intended to recover its history and to open it to visitors for the first time. The first phase opened at the start of the 2025 season. Visitors can see Salvin’s kitchen and four larder rooms. Victorian ovens that had been hidden behind plaster were uncovered, and modern tiles were lifted to reveal the original stone floor. The cook’s sitting room was returned to a Victorian appearance. During the 2026 season work continued on the cooking spits, the roasting range, and the butchery room. The kitchen and its larders were unveiled in November 1859 with a dinner for six hundred and forty restoration workers. A baron of beef was brought in by the duke’s piper. The kitchens later housed evacuees when Newcastle Church High School for Girls was moved to the castle during the Second World War. They were afterwards used for teacher training. The castle account places an Alnwick College of Education, for training teachers, in the castle from 1945 to 1977, and a branch campus of St. Cloud State University of Minnesota here since 1981, as part of an international study programme. Another account places the university’s use from the 1970s. Both are recorded.

The castle is open to the public through the summer. In 2006 it received 195,504 visitors and was counted the tenth most visited stately home in England. In 2016 the castle and the adjacent garden together received over 600,000 visitors. Three perimeter towers hold exhibitions. The Postern Tower shows the dukes and their interest in archaeology, with frescoes from Pompeii, relics from ancient Egypt, and Romano-British objects. The Constable’s Tower has military displays, including the Percy Tenantry Volunteers, local soldiers raised against a planned invasion by Napoleon in the years 1798 to 1814. The Abbot’s Tower houses the regimental museum of the Royal Northumberland Fusiliers. The castle has often been used for filming. The films include Prince Valiant in 1954, Becket in 1964, Mary, Queen of Scots in 1971, Ivanhoe in 1982, Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves in 1991, Elizabeth in 1998, Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone in 2001, Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets in 2002, Your Highness in 2011, Transformers: The Last Knight in 2017, and Dungeons and Dragons: Honour Among Thieves in 2023. It stood in for the exterior and the interior of Hogwarts in the two Harry Potter films, and that use increased public interest. Its occupied and repaired condition is contrasted with the ruined state of most castles in the country. The family still lives in part of the building, and the estates keep their offices here. It has been a border fortress, a palace, a prison for men taken at Dunbar, an empty house, a school, a college, a film set, and a home.

Canonical page: https://getsitesee.com/places/alnwick-castle