Mitford Castle

There were few if any stone castles in England before 1066, and the land at Mitford was held after the Conquest by Sir John de Mitford. His only daughter and heiress, Sybilla, was given in marriage by William the Conqueror to the Norman knight Richard Bertram, and the manor went with her. By the late 11th century Mitford was an earthwork fortification of the Bertram family, set on a small, somewhat elliptical prominence above the River Wansbeck where the natural hill could be scarped and ditched into a motte. It enters the record in 1138 as William Bertram's oppidum.

In 1215 the castle was seized by the troops of King John. Stone came to Mitford in stages: an inner ward early in the 12th century, a triangular outer ward to the south and east late in the same century, and in the early 13th an unusual pentagonal keep raised on the highest ground at the north end, each of its five sides cut to a different dimension. In 1264 the stone castle was held by the third Roger Bertram, and in that same year it was seized from him and committed to the custody of William de Valence, 1st Earl of Pembroke and half-brother of King Henry. In 1275 it was in the hands of Alexander de Balliol, son of John de Balliol and elder brother of John Balliol, King of Scotland, the 'Toom Tabard' or empty coat.

During the rebellion in Northumberland in the 1310s, Mitford was seized from the Valence family by Sir Gilbert de Middleton and Sir John de Lilburn. In 1315 Sir Gilbert used it for kidnappings and as a gaol for high-profile prisoners: Lewis de Beaumont, Bishop of Durham, his brother Harry de Beaumont, and two Italian cardinals who had been travelling with the bishop from Darlington to Durham. Ralph de Greystoke seized de Middleton for treason, and he was taken to the Tower of London and executed.

Accounts of the castle's end conflict. One holds that it burned during Middleton's own rebellion; another that the Scots destroyed it in May 1318, while Middleton was imprisoned in the Tower. What is certain is the verdict of 1323, when an inquest held after the death of its then owner Aymer de Valence, Earl of Pembroke, recorded Mitford Castle as "entirely destroyed and burnt". Even a ruin still changed hands by force: by the death of David II Strathbogie, Earl of Atholl, in 1335, the castle had been seized from him.

Nothing was rebuilt on the mound. Mitford had been the first of three seats of the main line of the Mitford family on the manor lands; after its destruction they used Mitford Old Manor House, to the north-west, from the 16th century until Mitford Hall was built in 1828. The castle's mid-12th-century chapel was largely quarried away in the early 19th century, and in 1939 a cemetery came to light north of it, its headstones dating to the 12th century — at least one was moved to Mitford churchyard, others removed or vandalised. The Mitfords sold the estate, castle included, to the Bruce Shepherd family in 1993.