High crowned he sits, in dawning pale,
        The sovereign of the lovely vale. 
        What prospects from the watch-tower high
        Gleam gradual on the warder’s eye? 
        Far sweeping to the east he sees
        Down his deep woods the course of Tees,
        And tracks his wanderings by the steam
        Of summer vapours from the stream;
        And ere he pace his destined hour
        By Brackenbury’s dungeon tower,
        These silver mists shall melt away
        And dew the woods with glittering spray. 
        Then in broad lustre shall be shown
        That mighty trench of living stone. 
        And each huge trunk that from the side,
        Reclines him o’er the darksome tide,
        Where Tees, full many a fathom low,
        Wears with his rage no common foe;
        Nor pebbly bank, nor sand-bed here,
        Nor clay-mound checks his fierce career,
        Condemned to mine a channelled way
        O’er solid sheets of marble grey.

This lordly pile has seen the Balliols fighting with the Scots, of whom John Balliol became king, the fierce contests between the warlike prelates of Durham and Barnard’s lord, the triumph of the former, who were deprived of their conquest by Edward I, and then its surrender in later times to the rebels of Queen Elizabeth.

Another northern border castle is Norham, the possession of the Bishop of Durham, built during this period.  It was a mighty fortress, and witnessed the gorgeous scene of the arbitration between the rival claimants to the Scottish throne, the arbiter being King Edward I of England, who forgot not to assert his own fancied rights to the overlordship of the northern kingdom.  It was, however, besieged by the Scots, and valiant deeds were wrought before its walls by Sir William Marmion and Sir Thomas Grey, but the Scots captured it in 1327 and again in 1513.  It is now but a battered ruin.  Prudhoe, with its memories of border wars, and Castle Rising, redolent with the memories of the last years of the wicked widow of Edward II, belong to this age of castle-architecture, and also the older portions of Kenilworth.

Pontefract Castle, the last fortress that held out for King Charles in the Civil War, and in consequence slighted and ruined, can tell of many dark deeds and strange events in English history.  The De Lacys built it in the early part of the thirteenth century.  Its area was seven acres.  The wall of the castle court was high and flanked by seven towers; a deep moat was cut on the western side, where was the barbican and drawbridge.  It had terrible dungeons, one a room twenty-five feet square, without any entrance save a trap-door in the floor of a turret.  The castle passed, in 1310, by marriage to Thomas Earl of Lancaster, who took part in the strife between Edward II and his nobles, was captured, and in his own hall condemned to death.  The castle is always associated