Ebook The Border Holds of Northumberland

Under even present conditions, a provincial historian, before he can commence painting on a broad canvas, is more or less obliged, if he possesses a conscience, to manufacture his own pigments, and the drudgery of the process cannot fail both to dry up the springs of his imagination and seriously to impair his sense of perspective and proportion. The Border Holds is a mere compilation of facts, documentary and architectural, gathered together for the purpose of saving myself and other students of medieval Northumberland, from the trouble of carting a whole library about the county, when we visit the shattered relics of that proud array of more than three hundred castles, fortalices, towers, peles, bastle houses and barmkins, with which the East and Middle Marches at one time bristled. The title has been chosen from a desire to embrace all these in one general expression. Shakespeare calls Warkworth a worm-eaten hold of ragged stone;' and the official return of 1509 applies the term holdis equally to castles such as Harbottle, Eta], and Chillingham, to towers diminishing in size from Bewick to Thropton, and to the typical bastle of Hebburn.