HISTORICAL SKETCHES RELATING ΤΟ THE CHURCH, CASTLE, AND BARONY OF BOTHAL, IN NORTHUMBERLAND.

[Read at a Meeting of the Tyneside Naturalists' Club, held at the Rectory, Bothal, on the invitation of the Rev. Henry Hopwood, Rector.]

THE earliest document in which I have found the name of Bothal-a name which I believe may be safely attributed to the Anglo-Saxon designation for a dwelling-place, as distinguished from the natural wildness still around-is the foundation charter granted to the ancient abbey of Benedictine monks at Tynemouth, by Robert de Mowbray, Earl of Northumberland, early in the reign of William Rufus; and from that time to the 12th of Henry the Second, when Bothal is mentioned as the barony of Richard Bertram, its name is not found in any historical records with which I am acquainted.—The family of Richard Bertram was anciently one of the greatest families of Northumberland. The Bertrams of one branch were lords of Mitford, those of another were lords of Bothal; and they flourished from the time of Henry I. to the reign of Edward III.: many manors, lands, and villages, from the green banks of the Wansbeck to those of the Coquet, owned their sway; their ancestor William Bertram, who was lord of Mitford in the reign of Henry I., founded the Priory of Brinkburn; and succeeding Bertrams enriched monasteries and built churches that survived the duration of their race. The history of their first connection with these territories is nevertheless involved in much obscurity. It is said that a Richard Bertram that is to say, a Richard the Fair-was one of the followers of the Conqueror, and that by his marriage with Sybil,

the daughter and heiress of John de Mitford (who is apochryphally described as lord of Mitford, Meldon, Ponteland, and Felton, in the time of Edward the Confessor), those possessions were first acquired by the Bertram family.

It is no part of my present purpose to show the want of historical foundation for this story: suffice it to say here, that the gift of "tithes of Bothal" to the monastery at Tynemouth by Earl Robert de Mowbray,* about twenty years after the Norman Conquest, may be taken to show that he was lord of Bothal; and there is reason to believe that when his great possessions were seized by William Rufus as forfeit to the Crown, Bothal was conferred by the king on Guy de Balliol, (ancestor of the Bertram family,) together with Barnard Castle, and other large possessions northward of the Tees. Another account, however, states that the Bertrams acquired Bothal by marriage; and this statement appears to rest on what is called an "old pedigree" of the barons of Bothal,† from which it appears that the lord of Bothal at the Conquest was Reynold Gisulph, whose possessions were inherited by the only daughter and heiress of his son Simon Gisulph, and that by her marriage with Robert Bertram, brother of Roger the lord of Mitford, Bothal came to the Bertram family.

I shall not attempt to elucidate the connection between the Bertrams of Mitford and the Bertrams of Bothal, nor endeavour to ascertain the precise time at which a Bertram first became its lord. The name of Bertram seems to have been first borne as a family surname by William the Fair, who was son of Guy de Balliol; and it was he who founded Brinkburn Priory, in the reign of Henry I., and who may be regarded as the head of his distinguished race.

The historian of Northumberland has said that tradition dimly irradiates the barony of Bothal for the first century after the Conquest; and it is not seen in the steady light of history until the time of Henry II., in the twelfth year of whose reign. Richard Bertram, as already stated, occurs as lord of Bothal, which he held in capite by the service of three knights' fees. * Hist. of Tynem. vol. i. p. 40, and charter of Henry I.

† Printed in Hodgson's History of Northumberland, "Bothal."

This Richard Bertram confirmed to the monks of Tynemouth the sheaves of corn from his demesne lands of Bothal, which, as his charter states, the monastery took by the gift of his ancestors, and it seems to show that the great tithes of the parish had become by some means restored to the church of Bothal, if, indeed, they had ever been effectually appropriated to Tynemouth.

I will now briefly advert to what we know of the history of the church of this extensive parish; but if the genealogy of the early lords of Bothal is dimly traced in the darkness of ages, still more obscure is the origin and first foundation of its church.

In tracing the history of any of our old ecclesiastical edifices, the antiquary feels an especial pleasure if he can identify the site as a shrine of more ancient worship. Hodgson, the lamented historian of Northumberland, seems, accordingly, to have beheld in the light of imagination a circle of gray Druids' stones, surrounded by the lone sequestered woods of Bothal, and the religious groves and altars of Celtic worship on the plateau afterwards occupied by the church and the castle. But not only do we fail to discover any visible trace or tradition of ancient Britons here:-history does not mention even a Christian edifice at Bothal until the twelfth century, and probably none existed until long after the time when in Northumberland the shadows of heathenism had fled from the light of Christianity.

If Bothal was a place of abode, and a parish church was founded here before the year 793, when the Danes landed on the Northumbrian coast, and marked their devastating progress by the overthrow of churches and the massacre of Christian priests, it probably shared the fate of the mother church of Lindisfarnethat venerable pile, once the abode of the Apostle of Northumbria, and the resting-place of the body of St. Cuthbert. His church was sprinkled with the blood of his servants, and with tears the monks fled from their hallowed walls to the shelter of Northumbrian mountains, while their country was abandoned to the fury of the Dane.

At a later period of the wanderings of the bishop and monks who guarded the relics of their saint, they traversed a part of the parish of Bothal. This was in the year 1069, when the monks began the third flight with the body of St. Cuthbert, and they

passed the ford of Shipwash below Bothal, on their way from Durham to Lindisfarne. One hundred and ninety-four years before that passage

The monks fled forth from Holy Isle,

carrying the body of the saint. In their wanderings to escape the Danes, they visited many places in ancient Northumbria, which territory in later times became studded with churches and chapels dedicated in honour of St. Cuthbert on the localities where his relics had rested. After being fugitives for seven years the monks settled in A.D. 883 at Chester-le-Street, where the bishop fixed his episcopal see, and where the remains of St. Cuthbert rested for 113 years, the victories of Alfred having restored peace to the Christians in the North. But in A.D. 995, fear of the Danes again drove the bishop and his clergy from their home, and taking with them the body of St. Cuthbert, their flight this time was southward. At length,

After his many wanderings past,

He chose his lordly seat at last,
Where his cathedral huge and vast
Looks down upon the Wear;

But in the year

and to Durham the see was removed in 995. 1069, as already mentioned, when William the Conqueror advanced into the North to subdue the men of Northumbria and compel their allegiance to himself, the bishop and his clergy sought refuge in Lindisfarne. On the first night, the body of St. Cuthbert rested at Jarrow; on the second at Bedlington; and on the following day the fugitives crossed the Wansbeck at Shipwash, and, as it is said, rested at a spot in the chapelry of Hebburn, part of the rectory of Bothal. The present great North road runs for a few miles through the chapelry of Hebburn; and tradition indicates a spot about six miles to the north of Morpeth, near Causey Park, as the place where the monks and their unquiet burthen rested. The name of "Causey" Park is obviously derived from the ancient paved way which led along its eastern boundary on the line of the North road; and the chapel of St. Cuthbert "super le Causey," mentioned by that

designation in the 11th Henry VI., was probably a memorial of this event.

The Church of Bothal is dedicated under invocation of St. Andrew. He was the favourite saint, as it would seem, of the illustrious Wilfrid, in whose footsteps so many edifices of religion rose, and it is worthy of remark that some of the most ancient churches of Saxon foundation in Northumberland are in the dedication of St. Andrew. But of course this circumstance alone would not warrant a claim of such high Christian antiquity for the Church of Bothal. We may, however, well believe that a church had been founded here before the coming of the Normans, the tithes of the parish having been given, as already mentioned, to Tynemouth by the great Norman Earl of Northumberland soon after the Conquest. When Athelstan in the preceding century had broken the power of the northern Danes, and restored Christianity and the Saxon sway, the Pagans began to receive the knowledge of the truth, which was imposed as a condition of peace by the Saxon lawgivers. Country churches began to increase under the care of that pious sovereign and his counsellors, and the payment of tithes was enjoined by his laws. A thane's rank might be attained by a Saxon freeman who possessed 500 acres of land, and who was entitled to a place in the Council of the Wise, if he had a church with a bell-tower on his estate; and this law aided the progress of parish Churches under the Saxon kings. The ancient forests still covered a great part of the land, and the population dwelt in scattered hamlets; but there were villages in many of the most remote and woody districts, where a church had been built and a priest resided. We have a remarkable instance of this in Northamptonshire, for, thinly as it was inhabited in the Anglo-Saxon times, and considerable as is the proportion of the county then as now covered by the forest, there were existing at the Conquest more than sixty village churches. However, there is good reason to believe that in the time of Earl Robert de Mowbray the parish church which we suppose to have existed at Bothal was in a state of ruin, and was deserted by both priest and people. It is said that the church which stood at Shipwash lower down the river existed before any church was built at Bothal, and was the mother church of the latter parish;