18 REPORT OF MEETINGS FOR 1906 



East corner occupied tlie available time in viewing the ruinous 

 bastle-house of the ancient family of Hebburn, 

 Hebburn the earliest notice of whom seems to be in the 



Bastle. reign of King John, when John Viscount II., 



gave to the monks of Fame land at Newton- 

 by-the-Sea, adjoining the meadow of Eobert de Hebburn, 

 Knight. Between 1237 and 1244 John Viscount III., granted 

 a third part of Earle, near Wooler, and a moiety of Newton 

 to Eobert de Hebburn.*' In 1271 Nicholas de Hebburn 

 granted the vicar of Chillingham certain lands there on 

 condition of his providing every year for the celebration of 

 divine service in the chapel of Hebburn on the three principal 

 feasts of Our Lady.f The first notice of the stronghold itself 

 occurs in 1509, when it was inhabited by Thomas Hebburn, 

 and was reckoned capable of accommodating a garrison of 

 twenty horsemen. In the hands of the family of Hebburn 

 the estate continued till towards the end of the eighteenth 

 century, when it was purchased by the Earl of Tankerville, 

 and partly absorbed in the Park of Chillingham. The 

 building itself is of the ordinary Border-keep character, 

 having a vaulted entrance through the South wall. A 

 round-headed doorway on the East side communicates with 

 the wheel-stair at the South-east corner of the bastle, which 

 leads to the first and second floors. The basement forms 

 a vaulted cellar, in which there are loops in the East 

 and West walls, as well as a fireplace. On its East side 

 is situated a smaller vault believed to have been a 

 prison, as the mouth of a dungeon, now rebuilt, is readily 

 discernible at its South end. The first floor was divided 

 into three apartments, the Eastern room having two square- 

 headed windows with transoms and muUions ; the central, one 

 transomed window to the South ; and the innermost, one 

 small muUioned window on either side of the fireplace, and 

 another, with transom and mullions, in the North wall. 

 The second story, which was almost wholly in the roof, 

 has pairs of small square windows in both East and West 



* Archaeologia ^liana, Series ii.. Vol. xviii., p. 26. 

 t Border Ilolds, p. 302. 



