Aydon Castle

Aydon Castle, also called Aydon Hall, and written in older records as Eyden, Eydon, Ayden and Aidon, is a fortified manor house at Aydon near Corbridge in Northumberland. It stands on the edge of a steep slope above the Cor Burn, a little way from the town. One account places it about a mile from Corbridge. Another places it two miles to the north-east of the town.

A third says that food and drink can be found in Corbridge two miles away, and that the house is less than a mile from the Hadrian's Wall trail and a short drive from the Roman town at Corbridge and from Chesters. The group notice spells the town Corbidge. The address used for visitors is Off Aydon Road, Corbridge, Northumberland, NE45 5PJ. The map point is given as latitude 54.99137 and as 54.9914, with longitude 1.99941 degrees west.

Those positions are also written on the Ordnance Survey National Grid, a lettered grid for Great Britain whose origin lies west of the Isles of Scilly, separate from latitude and longitude. The first letter comes from a set of 500 kilometre squares labelled A to Z with I omitted, and the second letter from a 100 kilometre square inside it. The references recorded for this house do not all agree. One is NZ00146631.

The listed-building survey uses NZ0014366283. The tree-ring record uses NZ 002 663. A six-figure form such as these is the ordinary way of naming a 100 metre square, and the digits may be written with or without spaces.

The house is a Scheduled Ancient Monument and a Grade I listed building. In the United Kingdom a scheduled monument is a nationally important archaeological site or historic building protected against unauthorised change. The protection sits under the Ancient Monuments and Archaeological Areas Act 1979, a different law from the planning rules used for listed buildings. England has about 20,000 scheduled monuments, representing about 37,000 heritage assets.

The 1979 Act says a monument cannot be a structure occupied as a dwelling, used as a place of worship, or a protected shipwreck. People still say scheduled ancient monument, although the Act itself defines ancient monument and scheduled monument. The first protection Act, in 1882, listed 68 prehistoric sites and made Augustus Pitt Rivers the first inspector. Medieval monuments came into that scheme under an Act of 1900, and scheduling in the modern sense dates from 1913.

This manor was scheduled on 28 November 1932. The main buildings and courtyard walls were first listed on 24 May 1988. A short county summary dates the castle from the late twelfth century. The building accounts date the stone house to the last quarter of the thirteenth century, or about 1280 to 1300, or to a start in 1296.

Both datings are on record, and they do not match.

The manor is in Northumberland. It is not in County Durham, the ceremonial county that borders Northumberland and Tyne and Wear to the north, the North Sea to the east, North Yorkshire to the south and Cumbria to the west. County Durham covers 2,676 square kilometres, or 1,033 square miles, and had an estimated population of 894,025 in 2024. In 995 monks founded the city of Durham as a place safe from Viking raids for the relics of St Cuthbert.

The cathedral, rebuilt after the Norman Conquest, and Durham Castle together are a World Heritage Site. By the late Middle Ages the bishops governed the county semi-independently as a county palatine, and the county was a buffer between England and Scotland. Early names include Dunelmensischira, or Durhamshire, from about 1100, and Comitatus Dunelmensis, County Durham, from 1344. None of that episcopal government was the government of Aydon.

The bishops could grant a licence to crenellate inside their own palatinate. The licence for this house came from the king, not from the bishop.

Brinkburn Priory is a different place. It is a former Augustinian monastery on a bend of the River Coquet, about four miles, or six kilometres, east of Rothbury, also in Northumberland. William Bertram, Baron of Mitford, founded it in the reign of Henry I, and the foundation cannot be later than 1135, the year Henry died. About 1180 it became an independent house and the church was begun in a style described as transitional between Norman and Gothic.

It was never particularly wealthy. It acquired lands in Northumberland and Durham, it was raided and robbed as late as 1419, and in late November 1515 Margaret Tudor, Queen of Scots, spent a week there convalescing after the birth of her daughter Lady Margaret Douglas. It was dissolved in 1536 under the Act against the lesser monasteries, those worth under 200 pounds a year. In 1535 the Valor Ecclesiasticus recorded its value as 69 pounds.

The church survived because it was also a parish church. The Fenwick family held the estate and built a manor house just south of the church in the late sixteenth century. The roof collapsed before 1700. Restoration began in 1858, the roof was finished within a year, stained glass was in by 1864, and the church was furnished in 1868.

That priory, its 1419 raid, and the queen's stay are not events inside the walls at Aydon.

In the tenth and eleventh centuries Aydon was part of an important royal manor centred on Corbridge. By the twelfth century Corbridge had declined because Newcastle upon Tyne had risen, and by 1162 Aydon had been granted to the barons of Bolam. The last of them, Walter fitzGilbert, married Emma de Umfraville. Walter died in 1206.

His estates passed to his widow and two daughters. Emma's portion appears to have been Aydon, and the timber hall that stood before the fortified house was likely her home until her death in about 1235. After her death her second husband, Peter de Vaux, continued to rent the hall from her daughters. He died in 1256, and the hall passed to Emma's granddaughter Margery.

Margery's son, Hugh de Gosbeck, succeeded in 1284. The principal Gosbeck estates lay in Suffolk. Between 1293 and 1295 Hugh de Gosbeck sold Aydon, together with the family's remaining share in the fitzGilbert barony, to Hugh de Raymes, a wealthy Suffolk merchant. The sale was delayed by legal trouble.

Because Gosbeck did not seek royal permission, the estate was taken into royal custody and was not released until 1296. By then Hugh de Raymes was dead. One account puts his death in 1295. His son Robert took the property, moved his household, and made the hall his main home.

The move is tied to his chances in the Scottish wars. He is known to have fought in Scotland in 1297 and 1298, and he is believed to have fought at the Battle of Falkirk in 1298 against the forces of William Wallace.

Another account says that Hugh de Reymes himself brought the manor and began the house in 1296, at the end of a long peace on the border, and that he died soon after. The scheduling account says the opposite about the start of the work: Hugh was already dead when the estate was released, and it was Robert who went north and built. A third account gives the late thirteenth-century solar hall and residential range to Hugh. The son's name is written Robert de Raymes, Robert de Reymes, and, in the licence, Robertus de Reynes.

A licence note says that no biographical details are given for him there, but that an effigy of a fourteenth-century knight, said to be Sir Robert de Reymes, lies in St Andrew's Church at Bolam.

The years of that move are the opening of the Scottish Wars of Independence. The wars, from 1296 to 1357, were two long conflicts in which the kingdom of England tried to take full control of the kingdom of Scotland. The English won large temporary successes. Scottish resistance kept Scotland independent.

The first war, from 1296 to 1328, ended with the Treaty of Edinburgh–Northampton. The second, from 1332 to 1357, began with an English-backed invasion by Edward Balliol and the men called the Disinherited, and ended with the Treaty of Berwick. Kings of Scots in this story include Alexander III, John Balliol, Robert the Bruce and David II. On the English side the kings are Edward I, Edward II and Edward III, with Edward Balliol a contested king of Scots.

William Wallace was Guardian of Scotland from 1297 to 1298. The longbow became a decisive weapon in these wars.

Alexander III died in 1286. One account of Wallace's life dates that death to 19 March 1286, after a fall from a horse, and remembers the reign as a time of peace and economic stability. His heir was his granddaughter Margaret, the Maid of Norway, then three years old. In 1290 the Guardians of Scotland signed the Treaty of Birgham for her marriage to Edward of Caernarfon, son of Edward I.

The Scots required the treaty to say that Scotland stayed separate from England and that its rights, laws, liberties and customs were preserved. Margaret died in Orkney shortly after landing, around 26 September 1290, or in late September. Thirteen rivals then claimed the crown. The two leading claimants were Robert de Brus, fifth Lord of Annandale, grandfather of the later king, and John Balliol, Lord of Galloway.

The Guardians asked Edward I to arbitrate so that the Bruce and Balliol parties would not fall into civil war. At Norham in 1291 Edward insisted on being recognised as Lord Paramount of Scotland. When the guardians refused, he gave the claimants three weeks, by which time his armies would have arrived. The claimants accepted.

Many of them held large estates in England and would have lost those lands if they had defied him. Churchmen such as Bishop Wishart had no such estates to lose, and the pressure on them was different.

On 11 June, acting as Lord Paramount, Edward ordered every Scottish royal castle into his temporary control, and every Scottish official to resign and be reappointed by him. Two days later, at Upsettlington, the Guardians and the leading nobles swore allegiance. All Scots were to pay homage in person or at a named centre by 27 July 1291. From May to August 1291, at Berwick, thirteen meetings heard the claims, the Great Cause.

Most claims were rejected. Those left had to show descent from David I: Balliol, Bruce, Floris V, Count of Holland, and John de Hastings of Abergavenny. On 3 August Edward asked Balliol and Bruce each to choose forty arbiters, and he chose twenty-four. On 12 August he ordered the collection of every document that might bear on the competitors' rights or on his own claim to superiority.

A majority named Balliol king on 17 November 1292. He was crowned at Scone Abbey on 30 November. On 26 December, at Newcastle upon Tyne, he swore homage to Edward for the kingdom. Judgment in a great court at Berwick is also placed in early November 1292, given to Balliol as senior by primogeniture even though not the nearest by blood.

Edward treated Scotland as a vassal state. In 1294 he summoned Balliol and ordered him to provide Scottish troops and money for an invasion of France by 1 September 1294.

Balliol's council chose defiance. A parliament appointed a war council of twelve, four earls, four barons and four bishops. Envoys told Philip IV of France and made a treaty: the Scots would invade England if the English invaded France, and France would support the Scots. The treaty was to be sealed by a marriage between Balliol's son Edward and Philip's niece Joan.

A further treaty with Eric II of Norway offered, for 50,000 groats, 100 ships for four months of each year while France and England fought. Norway never acted. The French treaty, later called the Auld Alliance, was renewed often until 1560. A council of twelve is also placed at Stirling in July 1295.

Edward learned of the secret talks in 1295, not before. In early October he strengthened the north. He made Robert Bruce, sixth Lord of Annandale, father of the future king, governor of Carlisle Castle. He ordered Balliol to give up Berwick, Jedburgh and Roxburgh.

In December more than 200 of his Newcastle tenants were summoned to form a militia by March 1296, and in February a fleet sailed to meet the army at Newcastle. Balliol summoned able-bodied Scots to Caddonlee by 11 March. Several nobles ignored him, among them Robert Bruce, Earl of Carrick, whose Carrick lands Balliol had seized and given to John, called the Red Comyn. Bruce had become earl that year when his father resigned.

The war began in earnest with Edward's sack of Berwick in March 1296, the Scottish defeat at Dunbar, and Balliol's abdication in July. Dunbar Castle was taken on 27 April 1296. Balliol abdicated at Stracathro near Montrose on 10 July 1296. The arms of Scotland were torn from his surcoat, and he was afterwards called Toom Tabard, the empty coat.

By August most of the country was subdued. Edward took the Stone of Destiny from Scone to Westminster Abbey and held a parliament at Berwick where the nobles did homage to him as king of England. By July he had told his officers to take homage from some 1,800 Scottish nobles, many of the rest being prisoners.

William Wallace was a knight of the lesser nobility, born about 1270. Little is certain about his parents. His own seal, on a letter of 1297 to the Hanse city of Lübeck, names his father Alan Wallace. That Alan may be the crown tenant in Ayrshire on the Ragman Rolls of 1296, but this is not confirmed.

Ellerslie near Kilmarnock and Elderslie in Renfrewshire have both been suggested as his birthplace, the second from Blind Harry's late fifteenth-century poem, which calls his father Sir Malcolm of Elderslie. There is no contemporary evidence for either place. Early Wallaces held Riccarton, Tarbolton, Auchincruive in Kyle, and Stenton in East Lothian, as vassals of James Stewart, fifth High Steward. The surname comes from Old English wælisċ, foreigner or Welshman.

It may mark immigrants from Wales, or Cumbric-speaking people of the old kingdom of Strathclyde. Brothers named Malcolm and John have been claimed. John's relationship is not securely evidenced. Some historians think Wallace had earlier military experience, perhaps in Edward's Welsh wars.

His seal bears an archer's insignia. Walter Bower, in the mid-fifteenth century, called him a tall man with the body of a giant, long in the flank, broad in the hips, strong in arms and legs. Blind Harry said he was seven feet tall. That height is not treated as reliable.

The first act certainly his is the killing of William de Heselrig, the English sheriff of Lanark, in May 1297. He then joined William the Hardy, Lord of Douglas, in the raid on Scone. Other risings were already under way, including Andrew Moray's in the north. In July the nobles submitted at Irvine.

Wallace and Moray did not. Wallace raided from Ettrick Forest and attacked Wishart's palace at Ancrum. He and Moray joined, possibly at the siege of Dundee in early September.

On 11 September 1297 they won the Battle of Stirling Bridge. The sixth Earl of Surrey brought a feudal army of 3,000 cavalry and 8,000 to 10,000 infantry. The bridge was so narrow that perhaps only three men could cross abreast. The Scots waited until about half the English were over, then killed them as they came.

Infantry crossed first, then heavy cavalry. Scottish schiltrons drove the foot back into the horses. A charge led by one of Wallace's captains helped to break the bridge under the weight of men, and many English drowned. Hugh de Cressingham, Edward's treasurer in Scotland, was killed.

It is said that his body was flayed and the skin cut into tokens. The Lanercost Chronicle says Wallace had a broad strip taken from head to heel to make a baldrick for his sword. Moray was mortally wounded and died later in 1297. After the battle the two men took the title of Guardians for King John Balliol.

Wallace then crossed into Northumberland. Hundreds of refugees crowded into Newcastle. The Scots wasted the countryside, turned west into Cumberland as far as Cockermouth, returned into Northumberland, and fired 700 villages. Wallace went home with the booty.

Toward the end of the year, at the Kirk of the Forest at Selkirk, he was knighted, by one of three earls: Carrick, who was Robert the Bruce, Strathearn, or Lennox. From November 1297 until January 1298 he led a Scottish army south, raiding from Newcastle upon Tyne to Carlisle. That raid is the nearest these campaigns come to Corbridge and to the valley of the Cor Burn. No account says that the raiders entered the timber hall at Aydon.

Edward had learned of Stirling Bridge. He made a truce with Philip the Fair in October 1297 and was back in England on 14 March 1298 to finish an army he had been gathering since late 1297. He moved the government to York for the next six years. A council of war there in April summoned the Scottish magnates.

None came, and all were declared traitors. The army was to gather at Roxburgh on 25 June. One count gives 2,000 armoured cavalry and about 12,000 infantry receiving wages, with many more unpaid, serving for independence of status, for debts forgiven, for pardons, or for adventure. Stuart Reid's estimate is 214 knights with 900 troopers, 1,000 cavalry from the earls, 500 mercenary crossbowmen, and 2,000 archers with billmen from the Lancashire and Cheshire levies, and he allows that the infantry may have been only 8,000.

Another count, from Wallace's life, says that two days before the battle 25,781 foot soldiers were paid, more than half of them Welsh, and that Edward had roughly 1,500 horses. These figures do not agree, and all of them are kept.

Edward left Roxburgh on 3 July and reached Kirkliston in two weeks. Supplies by sea were late because of the weather. He put down a Welsh mutiny. On 20 July he advanced, and he was at Linlithgow on 21 July.

He was about to fall back on Edinburgh when he heard that the Scots were at Torwood, near Falkirk, ready to worry a retreat. He is reported to have said that he would not trouble them to seek him. On the morning of 22 July he placed his army south of Falkirk. He wanted to camp and feed the men until the infantry caught the cavalry.

His cavalry commanders wanted to attack at once. The Battle of Falkirk was fought that day, 22 July 1298. It is called Blàr na h-Eaglaise Brice in Scottish Gaelic and the Battle o Fawkirk in Scots. Wallace is supposed to have said, in the spelling of the chronicle, that he had brought them to the ring, and they might hop if they could.

The Comyns were absent, and so was Robert Bruce. Andrew Moray, who had used the schiltron as an attacking formation at Stirling Bridge, was dead.

The Scots stood in four schiltrons, hedgehogs of spearmen, about 1,000 men each on Reid's reckoning, drawn from Fife, Kinross, Midlothian, Haddington, Stirling, Linlithgow, Lanark, the Merse and Teviotdale, with archers in the gaps and 500 mounted knights behind. Wallace's life adds that the rings were probably set about with wooden stakes tied with ropes. The English cavalry advanced in four battles in echelon. The Earl of Lincoln led the vanguard to the left of a marsh, followed by John de Warenne, sixth Earl of Surrey.

Anthony Bek, Bishop of Durham, and then the king's battle, went to the right. Lincoln and Bek charged. Lincoln routed the Scottish horse. Sir John Stewart, younger brother of the High Steward, kept his bowmen in place until the English cavalry overran them.

The schiltrons held. Knights made little mark on the spears, and 111 horses were killed. Edward's cavalry fell back until the infantry and archers came up. Archers, crossbowmen and slingers then struck the spearmen, who had no shelter.

When the ranks thinned, cavalry and infantry broke the rings. Scottish leaders killed included Sir John de Graham, Wallace's second in command, Sir John Stewart, and Macduff of Fife. Wallace escaped. Edward occupied Stirling and raided Perth, St Andrews and Ayrshire, and he was back at Carlisle by 9 September.

He invaded again in the summer of 1300.

The battlefield is not fixed. Three sites have been proposed: Campfield, near the modern Central Retail Park; south of Callendar Woods; and Mumrills, the site of an Antonine fort. Walter of Guisborough put the Scots on hard ground on one side of a hillock. The Scalacronica says the fight was on this side of Falkirk.

Reid suggested the burgh muir, while noting a consensus that put the Scots below Callendar Wood with the Glen Burn in front. The Falkirk Roll of Arms, the oldest known English occasional roll, lists 111 names and shields of English bannerets and noblemen present. The drawings now used follow the blazons in Henry Gough's Scotland in 1298.

By September 1298 Wallace had resigned the guardianship to Robert Bruce, Earl of Carrick, and John Comyn, Balliol's nephew. One account says he resigned shortly after the battle. William de Lamberton, Bishop of St Andrews, became a third, neutral guardian in 1299. Some stories send Wallace to France to fight for Philip, and Lamberton to the pope.

A letter of Philip IV dated 7 November 1300 tells his envoys in Rome to help Sir William, and it suggests Wallace meant to go to Rome. It is not known whether he went. An English spy reported Scottish leaders saying Wallace was in France. Campaigns in 1300 and 1301 led to a truce in 1302.

In 1303 and 1304 Edward campaigned again. Stirling Castle, the last great Scottish-held stronghold, fell, and in February 1304 most remaining nobles did homage. Bruce and Lamberton may then have made a secret bond to put Bruce on the throne. Lamberton's family was tied to the Balliol and Comyn party, and his final loyalty is unknown.

By 1304 Wallace was back, in skirmishes at Happrew and Earnside.

He was taken on 5 August 1305 at Robroyston, near Glasgow, by John de Menteith, a Scottish knight loyal to Edward, and handed to English soldiers. A Celtic cross now marks the place. Letters of safe conduct from Haakon V of Norway, Philip IV and John Balliol were found on him and taken to Edward by John de Segrave. He was tried at Westminster Hall for treason.

His defence was that, unlike most Scottish leaders, he had never sworn allegiance to Edward. He was also charged with atrocities against civilians, sparing neither age nor sex, monk nor nun. The trial is discussed now as an early case of what would be called a prosecution for war crimes, one of only three known pre-modern trials that raise, in modern terms, questions of international humanitarian law. On 23 August 1305 he was taken to the Tower, stripped, dragged at a horse's heels to the Elms at Smithfield, and hanged, drawn and quartered: strangled, released while alive, emasculated, eviscerated with his bowels burned before him, beheaded, and cut in four.

His head was tarred and set on London Bridge, later joined by the heads of his brother John, Simon Fraser and John of Strathbogie. The limbs were shown at Newcastle, Berwick, Stirling and Perth. A plaque unveiled on 8 April 1956 at St Bartholomew's Hospital, near Smithfield, carries a Latin sentence that freedom is best and that a son should never live as a slave, and the Gaelic Bas Agus Buaidh, death and victory. The Wallace Monument was raised in 1869 near Stirling Bridge.

The Wallace Sword, some of whose parts were made at least 160 years later, was long kept at Dumbarton Castle and is now in the monument.

On his return from Scotland, Robert de Raymes began the first stone building at Aydon. A timber hall is known from documents to have stood on the site before about 1300. Oddities in the later chamber block show that the older building stood in roughly the same area as the late thirteenth-century hall, and that part of it may still have been in use for a time after the chamber block was up. An excavation inside the chamber block found the footings of a wall under the floor, from an earlier structure on a slightly different alignment.

The chamber block held the private rooms of the new house and is likely to have replaced that older block, which is read as the solar of the earlier hall. More of it, and of other buildings of the same date, is expected under the later hall and the service ranges. The stone house was not meant, at first, to be a fortress. Work began in the last quarter of the thirteenth century, before the border wars of the fourteenth.

The earliest stone parts are the hall, the chamber block and the garderobe, or latrine, wing that projects from the east side of the chamber block. The chamber block was built first. All of these are dated between about 1280 and about 1300. The listed account says the solar and east wing are about 1280, and the hall, replacing an earlier structure, a little later.

A further account dates the start of the original manor to 1296, when there was a wooden two-storey chamber block, and says that after his return Robert added a two-storey hall range. One description of the first stone house is a two-storey hall house with solar, dining hall and kitchen on the upper floor. The Cor Burn gave natural defence on one side. Otherwise the house was open.

The rooms can still be read. Between 1300 and 1305 battlemented walls were built to the north, enclosing an inner courtyard. The west wall was one side of a range that held service rooms and a kitchen on the first floor and store-rooms below. That range runs north from the west end of the hall.

The hall range there has three storeys: a store on the ground floor, a service room in the middle, and a chamber on top. The east end of the hall is two-storeyed. Below is a less comfortable room of the same size as the room above, with a fireplace, connected to the stores. That lower hall is read as a servants' hall.

The upper room, the lord's hall or public chamber, is lit at the east by tall windows with seats, and it opens behind the high table into the upper floor of the chamber block. The chamber block's upper floor has an original fireplace, moved from the east wall to the west wall in the sixteenth century, and it opens into the upper storey of the garderobe wing. The ground floor of the chamber block has an elaborate carved fireplace, which suggests that this room too was once private. Later it seems to have been a hall for the lord's personal attendants, and in the sixteenth century it was made a kitchen, a use it kept into the twentieth century.

The central hall itself has been described as having no fireplace, because it would have had a central hearth in the older manner. There is no pele tower. There is an undercroft, a feature associated with peles, and the upper floors were reached by a stair.

The thirteenth-century parts are good squared stone, with a chamfered plinth and an eaves string with stone drain spouts. Later work is coursed rubble with dressings, under stone slate roofs. The first plan is cruciform, on the edge of the valley. Stepped clasping buttresses stand to the south and east, and a garderobe projects at the south-east corner of the east wing.

Doorways into the hall block have shouldered arches. An external stone stair on the north of the hall rises to a landing with a balcony on moulded corbels, and the stonework above shows the chases of two former canopies. The hall doorway has a double-chamfered pointed arch and a moulded hood. Hall and solar have two-light windows, twin lancets under pointed arches with moulded hoods.

The solar's north window has a quatrefoil in the spandrel enclosing a bearded mask. The east wing has single-light windows, the eastern one with foliage stops on the hood mould. Two stacks project on the east of the solar, their upper parts rebuilt in the twentieth century. A stack on the south of the hall has a semicircular top with pointed vents and a pyramidal cap at eaves level.

Inside, the solar and the solar basement keep good fireplaces of the first build, and the hall basement has a simpler one. Two-light windows in hall and solar have window seats. The east wing chamber has a wall cupboard, a sink and a garderobe, and the kitchen range has further cupboards and sinks. The interpretation has been disputed: ground floor and first floor seem to repeat the same functions, and it has been asked whether the house was planned as two dwellings.

On 5 April 1305, at Westminster, by privy seal, in the thirty-third year of Edward I, Robert de Reymes received a royal licence to crenellate his dwelling places of Shortflat and Eydon in Northumberland. The Latin calls him Robertus de Reynes and the place Eyden, and speaks of his mansum, his dwelling. The same day he and Thomas de Bekeryng received a licence for a market and a fair at Bolam. A licence to crenellate, a term coined in the nineteenth century, was a royal permission to fortify, usually mentioning battlements.

Such grants run from the twelfth century to the sixteenth. From 1199 they were entered on the patent rolls. In time of conflict the number rose. Fees were rare, and then only a mark or half a mark.

Most grantees were knights rather than the highest nobles. Towns received 28 licences, churches, abbeys and cathedrals 44, and eleven women are named, four of the licences being granted directly to women. Rulers of the counties palatine could grant them inside their own lands: the bishops of Durham, the earls of Chester, and after 1351 the dukes of Lancaster. There are over 1,500 castles in England, but about 460 surviving licences refer to just over 500 sites.

Requests were rarely refused. One view is that licensing stopped subjects from raising forts against the king. Charles Coulson's view is that battlements had become a mark of rank, and that a licence was the public compliment that went with them. At Cooling in Kent a brass of 1381 on the outer gate says the castle was made in the help of the country, while the wall-top has been judged to have no room for a real parapet.

Philip Davis has compared such battlements to a visible alarm on a modern house. The licences have never been formally abolished, and whether they still have legal force is debated.

For Aydon the military reading and the status reading are both on the page. Anthony Emery notes that Scottish raids did not begin until 1311, so the 1305 licence was not the direct result of a raid, though tension was rising. Andy King wrote that there was no compelling reason for Raymes to fortify when he received the licence, but that as a parvenu he still needed to mark his arrival in Northumbrian society, a gentry world defined by militarism. The same date's grant of a market at Bolam sits awkwardly beside a story of immediate danger.

After the licence, parapets were added to the domestic buildings and to the inner courtyard wall, and the outer courtyard was begun. It was complete by 1315. The house narrative says something different about the timing: there was little need for defence at first, permission came in 1305, the crenellations may have been for status, and real fortification began in 1311 and 1312 as Scottish raiders crossed into England. That narrative calls those raiders border reivers.

The history of the border reivers places their emergence later, between 1350 and 1450, with their height in the sixteenth century under Tudor and Stewart rule. The combined name is traced to Walter Scott. G. M.

Trevelyan compared the borderers to Homeric Greeks, cruel and proud. Reiving, blackmail and truce days belong to that later world. The raiders of 1311 are called Scots in the other accounts of this house. The two descriptions should not be folded into one.

Aydon itself was attacked in those years and is said to have beaten off at least two assaults. The raiders damaged the country around and did not take the hall. The present visitor's notice says the castle was attacked at least three times by Scots. The named captures are not all Scots, and they are not all successes for the defence.

On 10 February 1306, at Greyfriars Kirk in Dumfries, Robert the Bruce killed John Comyn, the Red Comyn. The two were the remaining claimants. An agreement that one would yield the crown and take lands from the other had, on this account, been broken by Comyn, who told Edward of Bruce's plan. A messenger carrying Comyn's papers was caught.

Bruce was crowned at Scone less than five weeks later. He was defeated at Methven and driven from the mainland. Edward I promised no quarter to his supporters. Queen Elizabeth, their daughter Marjorie, and Bruce's sisters Christina and Mary were captured.

Bruce returned in 1307. Edward I died in July 1307. Edward II did not provide the same drive. Loudoun Hill, the Pass of Brander, and the taking of Roxburgh and Edinburgh pushed the English back.

The Battle of Bannockburn, on 23 and 24 June 1314, was the turning point of the first war, which ended fourteen years later in the treaty that restored Scottish independence in law.

Edward II invaded because Bruce, in 1313, had required every supporter of the ousted Balliol to acknowledge Bruce or lose his lands, and because Stirling Castle, still held for the English, was besieged by Edward Bruce. If it were not relieved by midsummer it would be surrendered. The lead account says the English summoned 25,000 infantry and 2,000 horses from England, Ireland and Wales against 6,000 Scots whom Bruce had divided into three contingents, and calls this the largest army ever to invade Scotland. A later passage says Edward asked for 2,000 heavily armoured cavalry and 13,000 infantry, that no more than half the infantry arrived, and that the Scots numbered about 7,000, with no more than 500 mounted.

Modern researchers estimate the English advantage at one and a half to three times the Scottish number. The Scottish cavalry was fit for scouting, not for a charge. The infantry had axes, swords and pikes, and few bows. Four divisions are also described, commanded by Bruce, his brother Edward Bruce, his nephew Thomas Randolph, Earl of Moray, and, jointly, Sir James Douglas and the young Walter the Steward.

Angus Og Macdonald, Lord of the Isles, brought Islesmen, including galloglass, and was given the place of honour in Bruce's own schiltron with the men of Carrick and Argyll. Another order puts Bruce to the south, Douglas to the east, Randolph to the north toward Stirling, and 500 horse under Keith to the west.

On the morning of 23 June the armies were still eight miles apart. The English had marched seventy miles in a week and were worn by toil and hunger. Two cavalry forces went ahead to raise the siege. The Earl of Gloucester and the Earl of Hereford crossed the burn toward the wood.

Clifford and Henry de Beaumont, with about 300 men-at-arms, circled toward the castle. Bruce was out in front on a small horse, in light armour, with a battle axe, reconnoitring. Henry de Bohun, Hereford's nephew, charged him. Bruce split Bohun's head with the axe.

The Vita Edwardi Secundi tells it differently: the Scots seemed to be straggling as if in flight, Henry de Boune pursued them to the wood meaning to kill or capture Bruce, Bruce came out of the wood, Boune turned, and Bruce struck him on the head. Boune's squire was overwhelmed. Gloucester and Hereford were then pushed back across the burn. Randolph, not wanting to be left out of his uncle's success, crossed the open ground.

Beaumont told his men to give the Scots room. Sir Thomas Gray doubted the gift. Beaumont told him to be off if he was afraid. Gray said it was not fear and charged between Beaumont and Sir William Deyncourt.

Deyncourt was killed, Gray was taken, his horse died on the pikes, and the English squadron was routed. Some fled to the castle, some to the king, who had come out of the wood onto a plain near the Forth beyond the burn, an evil wet marsh, and stayed the night, already discouraged.

Sir Alexander Seton, a Scot in Edward's service, defected that night and told Bruce the English morale was low. Bruce attacked in the morning, using schiltrons as offensive formations, which Wallace had not done. The Scots came out of the woods, paused, and knelt. Edward is said to have thought they prayed for mercy.

An attendant answered that they asked mercy of God, not of him, and that they would conquer or die. Gloucester had quarrelled with Hereford over the vanguard and had urged delay. The king called him a coward. He rode on with few companions and was surrounded and killed.

English archers were told to stop shooting for fear of hitting their own men, and when they were sent to a flank, 500 Scottish cavalry under the marischal Sir Robert Keith drove them off. Those horsemen are sometimes called light cavalry. That reading is doubted: John Barbour's point is that they were men-at-arms on lighter horses than the English. The English horse was pinned against the burn and broke.

Aymer de Valence and Giles d'Argentan, called the third-best knight in Europe, led the king out with about 500 knights of the bodyguard. Clear of the fight, d'Argentan said that the king's protection had been his charge, that the king was now safe, and that he himself had never fled a battle and would not now. He charged back and was killed. Edward reached Stirling and was turned away by Sir Philip de Moubray, because the castle would soon be surrendered.

James Douglas pursued him to Dunbar, and he took ship for Berwick.

The rest of the army tried to reach the border, ninety miles, or 140 kilometres, to the south. Peter Reese wrote that only one sizeable body of foot, Welsh spearmen kept together by Sir Maurice de Berkeley, made a real escape, most of them reaching Carlisle, and he thought it doubtful that even a third of the infantry returned. If that estimate is right, about 11,000 of 16,000 English infantrymen were killed. Thomas Walsingham counted 700 English men-at-arms killed and 500 more spared for ransom.

Scottish losses look light: only two knights are named among the dead. The Earl of Gloucester and Sir Robert Clifford were killed. The Earl of Hereford was captured. Stirling surrendered and Bruce slighted it.

Bothwell Castle surrendered with a large party of English nobles, including Hereford. Dunbar and Jedburgh were taken. By 1315 only Berwick, among the great holds, remained outside Bruce's control. In exchange for the captives, Edward II released Elizabeth de Burgh, Christina Bruce, Mary Bruce, Marjorie Bruce and Bishop Robert Wishart, ending eight years of imprisonment.

Sir Gilbert Hay of Erroll became hereditary Lord High Constable.

Where the fighting stood is still argued. Most modern historians reject the traditional site of the first day, where a visitor centre and a statue now stand. For the second day, two places are taken seriously: the Dryfield, south of Balquhiderock Wood, about 0.75 miles or 1.2 kilometres east of the traditional site, and the Carse, or Wetfield, north of the wood, about 1.5 miles or 2.4 kilometres to the north-east, which the trust that cares for the field accepts as the likeliest. Wherever the fight began, it likely ended on the Carse.

A poem written just after the battle by the captured Carmelite Robert Baston is first-hand evidence that one or both sides used slingers and crossbowmen. In 1932 Edward Bruce, tenth Earl of Elgin and Kincardine, led a preservation committee that presented land there. More land was bought in 1960 and 1965. The monument is two semicircular walls for the two armies.

Nearby is a statue of Bruce from the 1960s, conceived by Pilkington Jackson and made by Thomas Taylor Bowie of the Ontario College of Art in Toronto, whom Jackson commissioned. The first visitor building closed for demolition on 31 October 2012 and a new centre, by Reiach and Hall, opened in March 2014. On 11 June 2020, during the protests that followed the death of George Floyd, the statue was defaced with graffiti. Robert Burns's Scots Wha Hae and the chorus of Flower of Scotland both look back to this victory.

The battle is not at Aydon. It is the fight at which, on one account, the owner of Aydon was taken.

That account says Robert de Raymes was captured at Bannockburn and was financially ruined by the destruction of his home and by a ransom of 500 marks. Another account says he was taken prisoner when Scottish raiders captured the hall in 1315, and that he added the curtain wall only after he had been released. The scheduling account dates the outer courtyard as complete by 1315, and explains a rapid surrender in that year by the weakness of the wall and by the entrance. The curtain was never a strong line.

The defence relied on the sheer slopes to the south, west and east. The north-west side had a ditch up to 15 metres wide and 5 metres deep. There was no gatehouse, only a simple arch, apparently without drawbridge or portcullis. That weakness is offered as one reason the manor was given up so quickly in 1315.

The house was captured after the governor surrendered to a besieging Scottish force. It was pillaged, burnt and severely damaged. In 1317 English raiders damaged it again, looking for whatever the Scots had left. Robert died in 1324 with little to his name.

By then the estate was considered worthless.

A tower-like projection of the courtyard ward was built to look like a castle garderobe tower, though it contained no garderobes. A corbelled garderobe stands nearby in the wall. The effort has been read as a way to make the hall look like a castle, either for defence or for standing among neighbours who were barons and knights. The vaulted D-shaped tower at the north corner is not precisely dated.

Its construction differs from the curtain, and it is thought to be later, probably the middle of the fourteenth century. Inside the outer court, the south-west corner was cut off as a middle courtyard. Along the south curtain are the broken remains of a two-storey range, the upper floor lit by windows in the curtain, read as lodgings for servants, guests, or men-at-arms. A similar range stood on either side of the gate in the north-west curtain.

In both, the dark ground-floor rooms would have been barns or shelter for horses and stock.

After Bannockburn the north of England lay open to Scottish raids, and Bruce's followers invaded Ireland. Berwick was retaken in April 1318. In 1320 the Declaration of Arbroath was sent to the pope. In 1324 Thomas Randolph, Earl of Moray, persuaded Pope John at Avignon to recognise Robert as king.

In 1327 Edward II was deposed and killed. Edward III, nearly captured at Stanhope Park, signed the Treaty of Edinburgh–Northampton on 1 May 1328, recognising Scottish independence and Robert as king. Robert's son David married Edward III's sister. Robert died in 1329, aged about 55.

None of these later acts is said to have been done at Aydon. They are the political world in which the ruined house stood, and in which Robert de Raymes died four years before the peace.

His son, also Robert, inherited and rebuilt the fortifications that the capture had destroyed. He died in 1349. The property then came to Nicholas de Raymes. Nicholas tried to recover the family's standing and, on this account, was forced to sell the estate by the fifteenth century.

The house changed hands several times with little building until the seventeenth century. A longer ownership is also on record. The family is said to have kept Aydon until the middle of the sixteenth century, while declining in rank and money, and in the early fifteenth century to have retired to Shortflatt, letting the house to tenants. A survey of 1450 described it as ruinous, and there is no sign of repairs after that survey.

One later retelling calls it a ruinous castle and suggests the Anglo-Scottish fighting of 1448 and 1449 as a possible cause. That cause is a suggestion, not a stated finding. The two stories of the sale, one by the fifteenth century and one by an exchange in 1541, are both left standing.

The second war explains the danger of 1346 without proving what happened inside these walls. After Robert died, Thomas Randolph was guardian for the child David II. Randolph died on 20 July 1332. The nobles at Perth elected Domhnall II, Earl of Mar.

Edward Balliol sailed from the Humber with the Disinherited and mercenaries, probably no more than a few thousand, and landed at Kinghorn in Fife on 6 August. Edward III, formally at peace, would not let him cross the Tweed, but looked away from an invasion by sea. At Dupplin Moor, Henry Beaumont, with dismounted knights in the centre and archers on the flanks, defeated the larger Scottish army. The Earl of Mar, Sir Robert Bruce, an illegitimate son of the king, many nobles, and about 2,000 Scots were killed.

Balliol was crowned at Perth and again in September at Scone. In December Sir Archibald Douglas, the new guardian, surprised him at Annan. Balliol escaped naked through a hole in the wall and rode to Carlisle. In April 1333 Edward III and Balliol besieged Berwick.

Douglas was killed in July at Halidon Hill trying to relieve it. Berwick surrendered and was annexed. Eight lowland counties were ceded. In May 1334 David and his queen reached France and a court in exile at Château Gaillard.

Edward's invasions of 1334 and 1335 burned the country and did not force a battle. A draft that would have left the childless Balliol as king, with David as heir living in England, was rejected by David. In 1335 and 1336 the north-east, including Elgin and Aberdeen, and the south-west and the Clyde were ravaged. At Culblean, Andrew de Moray's smaller army broke the Earl of Atholl's force, and Atholl was killed after refusing to surrender.

By the end of 1336 the Scots held almost all of Scotland again. Agnes, Countess of Dunbar, called Black Agnes, held Dunbar Castle and mocked the besiegers from the wall. Edward turned to his claim on France. David returned in June 1341 to a poor country.

He raided England in 1341. In 1346, after further raids, Philip VI asked for an invasion to loosen the English hold on Calais. David led an army south, meaning to take Durham. On 14 October, at the Battle of Neville's Cross, the Scots were defeated.

David was wounded in the face by two arrows and captured, and he knocked out two teeth of the man who took him. He was held in the Tower for eleven years. His nephew Robert Stewart ruled Scotland. Balliol came back, held only part of Galloway, resigned the claim in January 1356, and died childless in 1364.

On 3 October 1357 the Treaty of Berwick freed David for a ransom of 100,000 merks, a merk being two thirds of an English pound, to be paid over ten years. Heavy taxes and the Black Death left the country unable to keep the instalments. Later bargains reduced the debt. When Edward III died in 1377, 24,000 merks were still unpaid, and they never were paid.

David died in February 1371.

In that same year, 1346, Scots occupied Aydon again. The occupation is also called a second sacking, in 1315 and again in 1346. No account identifies the men who entered this house with the army that fought at Neville's Cross, and the two events are not here treated as one. The son's death in 1349 falls after that occupation.

In 1541 Robert Reymes, the ninth of that name, exchanged his portion of the manor, including the castle, for lands of Sir Reynold Carnaby of Hexham. Carnaby died in 1543 and left the house to his brother Cuthbert, who made it his home and carried out the alterations of that time. The tree-ring study of the latrine block belongs to this repair. Fourteen samples were taken from the roof and from the attic floor.

Twelve of them formed one chronology, called AYDASQ01, of 140 rings, spanning 1406 to 1545. Six have complete sapwood. Five of those end in 1541, and the sixth in 1545. Those are felling dates.

A seventh timber is estimated to have been felled about 1541. The heartwood-sapwood boundary on the others points to felling between 1536 and 1561, consistent with either 1541 or 1545. Two samples in the sequence lack that boundary, so no estimated range can be given. Their last rings are 1505 and 1518, and it is possible that they too were felled in 1541 or 1545.

Of the two samples dated separately, one runs from a first ring in 1398 to a last ring in 1450. Without the boundary, the earliest estimated felling is 1466. The last sample could not be matched and is undated. Thirteen timbers in the latrine roof and attic floor were dated.

Six roof timbers are from trees felled in 1541, and one floor timber from a tree felled in 1545. The other timbers are quite likely from 1541 or 1545 as well. Nothing in the structure shows the attic floor as a later insertion that would explain the small gap.

The laboratory list gives the same range, 1541 to 1545, at grid NZ 002 663, with more individual results: principal rafters, six of six, at 1518 with one sapwood ring, 1538 with twenty sapwood rings and two or three lost, and 1541 with complete sapwood counts of 29, 25, 24 and 23; purlins, both, at 1531 with four sapwood rings and 1541 with thirteen complete; attic floor beams, three of four, at 1505, 1518 and 1545 with eighteen complete; common joists, both, at 1450 and 1520 at the heartwood-sapwood boundary. The site master 1406 to 1545 was matched against other northern curves. The roof now seen has three principal-rafter trusses with purlins and nailed collars, and empty mortices show where other collars were intended. The floor frame is three and a half bays.

The structure is read as one build. The older roof is thought to have been a steeper medieval common-rafter roof, replaced, with the evidence in traces on the east wall of the solar block. The dates are read as felling begun in 1541, when Sir Reynold took possession, and as the work itself carried out under Cuthbert in or soon after 1545. The scheduling date of the exchange is 1541, and Carnaby's death is 1543, so the possession and the felling sit together, while the death falls between the two felling years.

In the sixteenth century the lower hall was partitioned into smaller rooms. In the sixteenth or the seventeenth century the eastern part of the outer courtyard was walled off as an orchard. Seventeenth-century work subdivided the east end of the hall into new living quarters and turned the medieval kitchen wing over to farm use. The Carnaby arms appear on sixteenth-century fireplaces in the chamber west of the hall and in the room above.

A stone-walled screens passage is a later medieval replacement of timber partitions. The hall roof, of principal rafters with collars, is of the seventeenth century. The north-west range has a roof of curved principals, perhaps of the sixteenth century, and a barrel vault that is probably a seventeenth-century insertion. Further changes in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, when the manor was a farm on the Matfen estate, added a range of farm buildings in the middle courtyard and new windows in the living rooms.

The medieval hall was divided to make more sleeping rooms. Those partitions have since been removed. A door to the solar undercroft is dated 1653 and initialled W C and H C, for William and Henry Collinson. A doorway on the north of the north-west range has a lintel inscribed 1657 and W C.

The Carnabys kept the house until 1654, when it was sold to William Collinson. He and his son Henry were the last owners who lived in it. One account says the family went on improving the buildings until the middle of the seventeenth century, then sold to William Collinson, and that Henry was the last to live there before the sale to William Douglas of Matfen. In 1702 Henry Collinson sold the house to that William Douglas.

It remained an estate farm until 1966, when it passed into state care. In the early nineteenth century it was the residence of a George Bates. No more is said of him. From the seventeenth century onward the castle was run as a farmhouse.

Use as a farm ended in 1966, when it was opened to the public. It has since been put back toward its medieval appearance. It is described as one of the least altered fortified medieval manor houses in England, and as almost completely intact, one of the finest and most unaltered examples of a thirteenth-century English manor house. A considerable part of the medieval fabric survives, which is why the rooms can still be followed.

Aydon Castle was formerly a township in Corbridge parish. From 1866 it was a civil parish of its own. In 1951 that parish had a population of ten. It was abolished on 1 April 1955 and merged again with Corbridge.

The excavation that fixed the older wall under the chamber block was carried out in 1975 and published in 1976 by Margaret Ellison. The published notice of that dig is the wall footing on a different alignment. No list of loose finds from the trench is given in the scheduling summary, and no later excavation inside the house is stated. The tree-ring work is a study of standing timbers, reported in 2002, and the catalogue entry for it was issued on 28 November 2016.

It is not a new hole in the ground. In the summer of 2022 a group of designers, working with the body that cares for the castle, set contemporary domestic objects in the rooms, an installation called Re-imagining Aydon, made in answer to the history, the look and the atmosphere of the place. It was not a dig, and it is not reported as the discovery of a medieval object.

The whole monument, including the orchard, the eighteenth-century farm buildings along the west side of the middle courtyard, the medieval ditch outside the north-west curtain, and the buried timber hall, is what the scheduling protects. The house is not one of the Roman frontier works, and it is not the cathedral and castle at Durham. It is a manor that became a small castle because its building happened to coincide with the Scottish Wars of Independence, and that then survived, altered but readable, as a farm.

It is closed for winter and will reopen in 2027, so entry is not available until then. One older notice says it is closed from October to March, with the hours varying through the rest of the year, and that entrance charges apply to visitors who are not members. The current notice gives the winter closure and the reopening in 2027, and it does not print a set of prices. Dogs are allowed to enter on a lead, and assistance dogs are welcome.

Smoking, vaping, barbecues and naked flames are not allowed. Wheelchair users may not enter above the ground floor. Pushchairs are allowed to enter. There are toilets for men and women, with baby changing, and an accessible toilet.

On the grass inside the walls, ball games are permitted and kites are not allowed. A group of fifteen or more paying visitors, paying in one transaction, receives a reduction of ten percent, and entry is free for one tour leader and one coach driver, who, with any members, do not count toward that number. The price without a donation is the one that applies to groups. The car park has twenty spaces and six spaces for disabled visitors, a hundred metres down the lane, with a charge for non-members and no charge for members.

Coaches cannot be taken into that car park. Tea, coffee and hot chocolate are said to be served on the site, while another notice places food and drink in Corbridge. A picnic in the walled orchard is part of the visit as it is described. The average length of a visit is given as one hour.

The castle telephone on the group notice is 01434 632450, and a general help line is given as 0370 333 1181.