Berwick-on-Tweed is certainly not happy in having no history. Its beginnings are not clearly ascertainable; but it was for long a Saxon settlement, until the Danes, attracted by the rich merse-lands through which the Tweed flows, helped themselves to it. Then came the turn of the Scots, who held it off and on from about the time of Alfred the Great until John Balliol renounced the authority of his liege lord, to whom he had sworn fealty at Norham. When an English army approached, the citizens were by no means alarmed, although it was led by Edward himself. “Kynge Edward,” they cried from behind their wooden stockade, “waune thou havest Berwick, pike thee; waune thou havest geten, dike thee.” But they were better at flouting than at fighting; and they soon had bitter reason for lamenting that they had not kept their mocks to themselves. The place was stormed with the most trivial loss, and nearly eight thousand of the citizens were massacred. Some brave Flemings who held the Red Hall were burnt to cinders in it; and the carnage only ceased when the sad and solemn priests bore the Host into Edward’s presence and implored his mercy. Then the impetuous monarch, who in his old age was able to say that no man had ever asked mercy of him and been refused, burst into tears, and ordered the butchery to stop. But the lion’s paw had fallen, and Berwick was crushed. When Edward sat down before it, it was not only the great Merchant City of the North, but ranked second to London among English towns; he left it little more than a ruin, and it has never since been anything but “a petty seaport.” Through its gates the king went forth to play the rôle of the conquering hero in Scotland; and when his over-lordship had been effectually vindicated, the Scottish barons and gentry met here to sulkily do him reverence.
Two-and-twenty years later there came another turn of the wheel. When Robert Bruce wrested his native land from the feeble hands of the second Edward, Berwick shared in the emancipation. Its capture was held to be an achievement of the first order, and after it, as Leland tells us, “the Scottes became so proud ... that they nothing esteemed the Englishmen.” But presently a weaker Bruce reigned in the North and a stronger Edward in the South. In due course the town was again beleaguered by an English force. A Scottish army under the Regent, Archibald Douglas, came to its relief; but the English held a strong position on Halidon Hill, and, met by their terrible showers of clothyard shafts, the Scots turned and fled, leaving Berwick to its fate. Thus it once more became English, and never again did it change masters, though it was allowed to retain many of its privileges. In these later days, however, it has had to part with one after another of its peculiarities, and now it is substantially a part of the county of Northumberland.
NORHAM CASTLE.
That a place which has received so many rude buffets should have few very ancient remains is not to be wondered at. The present walls, which stand almost intact, and in excellent preservation, though the town in its recent prosperity has straggled outside their line, have a very respectable antiquity, dating as they do from the closing years of the sixteenth century; but of the older fortifications, which embraced a much more considerable space, scarcely a vestige is left, except an octagonal tower; while of the castle, which frowned over the stream where the north bank is steepest, little beyond the foundations has survived. A part of the site has been appropriated to the uses of a railway station, which by a well-meant but unhappy thought has been made to take a castellated form. The fortifications were dismantled some forty or fifty years ago, but there is still much to recall the ancient importance of the town as a place of arms. Nor have the citizens lost the military spirit which was bred into their forbears. They are proud to tell the stranger within their gates that there is almost as large a garrison here as at Edinburgh; and even the tavern-signs bear witness to a traditional love of arms.
The parish church dates only from the Puritan period. It is said to be “quaint” when it is only ugly; and to be a plain specimen of the Gothic when it is not Gothic at all, except in the opprobrious sense in which the term was first applied to mediæval architecture by the superior persons of the Restoration. There being no tower—the Puritans had no taste for “steeple-houses”—the parishioners are summoned to service by the bells of the Town Hall, in the High Street, where also the curfew is still rung at eight of the clock every evening. Although the Anglican is here the Established Church, the prevalent form is the Presbyterian, which has many places of worship, while various other communions are also well represented. But there seems to be some want of resource in finding distinguishing names for the various churches and chapels, for there is a Church Street Church, and hard by a Chapel Street Church, while several places of worship are nameless. Among these latter is one which bears on its front the legend “Audi, Vide, Tace”—intended, presumably, for a concise exposition of the whole duty of the pew in relation to the pulpit.
JUNCTION OF THE TILL AND THE TWEED.
Not a great way from the first of the bends in which the stream indulges, and within sight of the towers of Longridge, the Whiteadder from the Lammermoors, reinforced by the Blackadder, renders up its tribute. Two miles above this point the river is crossed by the Union Suspension Bridge, which, built by Sir S. Brown in 1820, is said to have been the first structure of the kind erected in these islands, while as bridges go along the Tweed it is also quite an antiquity; for, until the beginning of the century, there was only one between Peebles and Berwick, a space of more than sixty miles. Now they are many, yet there has been little sacrifice of beauty to utility, for, as a rule, when not picturesque, they are at least neat and modest. Hereabouts the valley is fairly broad, the banks rising on either hand into a long succession of rolling meadows green with herbage, or of furrowed fields red with tilth, in the prime of summer smothered with tender shoots of corn all aglow with the bright yellow blooms of the runch—to the wayfarer a flower, to the husbandman a weed. So curve to curve succeeds until Norham Castle comes in sight, standing on a lofty cliff of red freestone which rises almost sheer from the water on the southern bank, and disdainfully rearing itself high above the trees that have presumed to grow up around it.
TILLMOUTH HOUSE, FROM THE BANKS OF THE TILL.
When this ancient little village first had a stronghold no one seems to know. As early as 1121 a fortress was built here by Bishop Flambard, of Durham; but it was not the first to occupy the site. After the death of “this plunderer of the rich, this exterminator of the poor,” the castle was so roughly handled by David I. that in 1164 we find another Bishop of Durham, Hugh Pudsey, virtually rebuilding it, and adding a massive keep. But warrior-priests were not much to the mind of the king who suggested the assassination of Thomas à Becket, and so, some ten years after he had rebuilt it, the bishop was prevailed upon to pass it on to William de Neville; and from this time onwards it appears to have been treated as a royal fortress. Thus it came about that more than once it was the scene of conference between William the Lion and the English King whose only association with the noble beast was through his brother. And here also came Edward I., to decide between the thirteen claimants to the crown of Alexander III., and to do a little business on his own account as well. A memoir of the Dacres on its condition early in the sixteenth century speaks of the keep as impregnable; but it was nothing of the kind. Like all these Border strengths, it was always being taken and retaken; and only a few years before this memoir was written, James IV., then on his way to Flodden, had brought up Mons Meg against it, and with the “auld murderess’s” help had possessed himself of it. Pudsey’s massive keep still remains, though in a greatly shattered state, and shorn of its mighty proportions; there are also bits of other parts of the castle, the whole enclosed within a wall of ample circuit.
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