an epitome of English history. The first
lord of Alnwick was a knight of great
prowess in Gascony and Scotland; his son
Henry fought bravely at Halidon Hill and
Sluys, and captured King David of Scotland.
The fourth Lord Marshal of England
was a favourer of Wickliff, and, banished
by Richard the Second, returned to die on
Bromham Moor. Hotspur fell in Hately
Field, his father died in the battle of
Taunton, and his son was slain at St.
Albans. The fourth earl was murdered by
a mob. The seventh earl aided the great
rising in the north, and was executed. The
eighth earl, the lover of Mary Queen of
Scots, was beheaded in the Tower.

Some curious feudal customs still prevail
under the shadow of the duke's castle. At
the July fair, four men from different townships
form a watch, and patrol from dusk
till midnight. This service, exempting the
townships from toll, preserves the remembrance
of the annual Scottish inroad made
at fair time in old days. On the evening of
St. Mark's day freemen are admitted. The
candidates, armed with swords, ride on
horseback (it was quite necessary to go armed at
Alnwick in the moss-trooper days), and at
the market-place the cavalcade is joined by
the chamberlains and duke's bailiffs. A
band then heads the procession to the
Freemen's Hill (four miles distant), where
the candidates, dismounting, and putting on
white dresses and white caps trimmed with
ribbons, struggle ignominiously through a
dirty, stagnant pool, twenty yards long.
Holly-trees are then planted at the doors
of the new freemen, as a signal for their
friends to assemble and offer them
congratulations at a bean feast.

From Alnwick the crow darts to Berwick,
his last roosting-place, before he
turns to his final roost on the old black
dome that the golden gallery coronets so
proudly. He alights on the old wall of
Berwick (the town of the Bernicians), which
has stood as much shot from both English
and Scotch cannon as any town on the
blood-stained Border. This town beside the
debatable river was always being burnt
or pillaged. When the Yorkshire barons
went to Melrose and did fealty to King
Alexander of Scotland (a boy of fifteen),
as the Northumberland barons had done
previously at Felton, King John, in rage
and fury, stormed and burnt Berwick,
setting fire with his own hand to the
very house where he had lodged. He and
his foreign mercenaries, Frenchmen and
Brabancons, tortured many of the inhabitants,
hanging them up by their hands and
feet till they groaningly disclosed where
they had hidden their money. Then the
Scots snatched it again till Edward the
First, after coming here to discuss the claims
of Bruce and Baliol, took it by storm some
years after. The king on this occasion
encamped on the declivity at the foot of the
east end of Halidon Hill, in full view of the
castle and town. His own quarters were
fixed at the nunnery. His fleet venturing a
rash attack, three ships ran aground and
were burnt by the enemy. Edward, enraged
at this, attacked the town, and, forcing the
rude barricades of boards, took the place
by the first coup de main. Thirty Flemish
merchants held the Red Hill Tower till the
evening, but were then destroyed by fire.
Edward's soldiers, it is said, slew seven
thousand Scotchmen in this attack, and,
as Boethius says, the mills were turned with
blood instead of water. The women and
the garrison of two hundred men were sent
back into Scotland, and Douglas remained
a prisoner till the end of the war. King
Edward stopped at Berwick fifteen days,
and, to protect the place against the warlike
Scotch, ordered a vast ditch, eighty feet
broad and forty deep, to be dug through the
neck of land between the sea and the Tweed.
But the Scotch soon swarmed back again to
Berwick; and when Wallace had slain the
hated Cressingham, flayed him and cut his
skin into stirrup-leathers, he took Berwick,
the stone wall not being yet finished. But
the English found it deserted on their
advance. Robert Bruce next took it by
escalade, being aided by a burgess of the
town: Randolph and Douglas were the
first to climb over the ramparts at a part
near Cowgate.

A few years later brave Wallace was
executed at Smithfield, and half his body
sent to Berwick to be hung upon the
bridge; while the wretched Countess of
Buchan, who had crowned Robert Bruce at
Scone, was shut up in a wooden cage, and
hung like a blackbird outside one of Berwick
Castle towers; after Edward had assembled
here his Bannockburn army, Bruce,
however, took the place again, which
Edward the Second soon attacked in force.
The English fastened boats full of men to
the masts of their vessels, hoping to throw
bridges on to the ramparts, but the assailants
were driven off. They then tried a sow (a
covered battering ram), but the Scotch split
the roof with stones from their military
engines, and with cranes let down burning
timbers upon it and finally destroyed it.