Rev. P. Mearns on Wark Castle. 63 



for some time with his queen ; and on that occasion his 

 daughter, the Queen of Scotland, was detained on a visit to 

 her parents in consequence of her mother's illness. Deputies 

 from Edward I. were at Wark, when the Estates of Scotland 

 met at Birgham, and made arrangements for the marriage of 

 the maid of Norway to the Prince of Wales. Sir William 

 Wallace invaded England in 1297, and plundered several 

 parts of Northumberland. There are traditions of his pre- 

 sence at Wark. Edward I. spent Easter here, and hence 

 marched a great army against Scotland. He was here again, 

 four years before his death, on his way to inflict on Scotland 

 the heaviest blow she ever suffered from an invader. Edward 

 II. mustered here his vast army for Bannockburn, where the 

 liberties of Scotland were recovered after they had been en- 

 dangered by his father. Robert Bruce reduced this castle in 

 1318. David II. was foiled in his assault on it in 1342. The 

 Order of the Garter appears to have been instituted here by 

 Edward III. in 1349. It was originated by a trifling circum- 

 stance in connection with the Countess of Salisbury, by whose 

 charms the king is said to have been powerfully influenced. 

 It was at a court ball in the castle, where were brave war- 

 riors, and female beauty, and glad hearts, forgetting for the 

 hour the strife and turmoil and war with which these days 

 were sadly familiar. 



The castle imderwent various changes from 1383 to 1399. 

 In 1385 it was taken by storm ; and on that occasion the 

 Scots obtained possession also of the fortalices of Ford and 

 Cornhill. The Duke of Albany terminated his dishonourable 

 inroad at Wark in 1419. Wm. Halliburton took the castle 

 by surprise in that year, but it was retaken the same year by 

 the English under Sir Robert Ogle — access having been got 

 by a common sewer from the escarpment on the Tweed. In 

 both cases the whole garrison was put to the sword. The 

 sanguinary conflicts of those times, many of them unrecorded, 

 originated the old saying in Northumberland, — 



" Auld Wark upon the Tweed 

 Has been many a man's dead ;" 



which is intended to intimate that many a brave man has 

 fallen both in assailing and defending this fortification. On 

 this couplet it is remarked in the " Denham Tracts," that 

 Wark's " prominent position as a Border fortress exposed it 

 to repeated hostilities ; and its history from the 12th down to 

 at least the 16th century is perhaps without a parallel for 



