Between 1978-1982 Graham Fairclough led the excavation of Edlingham Castle, Northumberland. Rather than write up a traditional excavation report in his new book he takes a different and fascinating approach to understanding more about this castle.
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Edlingham Castle, in Northumberland between Rothbury and Alnwick, comprises the remains of a medieval fortified house excavated for the predecessor of English Heritage between 1978 and 1982, and freely open to the public from the mid-1980s. The earliest known building is a hall-house (to use a slightly contested term) of c.1295-1300, probably originally inside a palisaded moated enclosure, but to this was added a chamber tower in the 1330s or ‘40s and a stone gatehouse. Its enclosing walls were rebuilt on several occasions until by the sixteenth century the place resembled a small courtyard house, which was finally abandoned by the 1650s. Edlingham thus shows in microcosm the impact of Anglo-Scottish border warfare in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, and of endemic lawlessness in the sixteenth, centuries. Another narrative, however, from a sociological perspective, first places the site and its owners in a national or even European context, and only in its later centuries into a more local, county-scale, world. A third Edlingham story would take most account of its architecture, notably the distinctive hall-house which before excavation was only guessed-at, and its imposing later tower that has usually been seen as part of the border ‘pele tower’ narrative – but both demand wider notice.
The excavations of 1978-82 focussed on the buried material remains of the site, which were described archaeologically and architecturally in summary interim articles prepared during the excavation and shortly afterwards. In my recent book, I took a different approach, and used biography – predominantly that of the castle’s first builder William de Felton, but also at some periods his peers, neighbours and family, as far as they are known – to inquire into Edlingham’s context and origins, and what might have influenced William in building the hall-house at Edlingham.
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Born and probably raised in Shropshire, in some uncertain way an offshoot of the large Lestrange clan of Shropshire and Norfolk, William de Felton’s first small landholding was in Northamptonshire; he acquired land in Northumberland in the late 1270s on marriage to a Northumbrian heiress, Constance de Pontop, and he acquired Edlingham only in 1295. By then he had been a member of the royal household since c. 1278, as a personal usher (husser) in Edward I’s private chamber. He travelled the length and breadth of England and Wales with the king, spending three years in France, mainly in Gascony and Béarn. His duties included supervising the king’s personal building works, but he was also a soldier, and had fought in Wales, Flanders and Scotland. He was constable of a succession of royal castles in Wales, Scotland and England, notably, in company with the famous James of St George, Beaumaris and Linlithgow while they were under construction. Given his travels and experience, therefore, it is not surprising that whatever William was to build at Edlingham was not necessarily going to have a regional or local inspiration.
The biographical approach taken in ‘A Medieval Life’ illuminates Edlingham’s origins in several ways. It is a current maxim in castle studies that castles and other elite houses should be considered in the context of their territories or landscapes, but this involves more than land and its affordances but more widely the social affinities, perceptions and abilities of their builders and inhabitants. Knowing a little of the events and travels of William’s life thus becomes significant in how we see Edlingham. My book therefore reflects on the accuracy or desirability of seeing Edlingham as a ‘Northern’ castle, coloured by a perception of Northumberland as a violent, vulnerable and distant (indeed different) border region. For William (and probably for his son and at least his first grandson), the house at Edlingham belonged to a much wider psychological and emotional landscape. Understanding the origins and early decades of the castle’s life reveals the mentality of a social and geographical network far beyond Northumberland.
Finally, let us not forget modern biography. The excavation and my early work on it occurred when I was an Inspector of Ancient Monuments, my work focussed on the material remains of the past. Since, roughly speaking, the middle 1990s, however, my work turned increasingly towards landscape ways of seeing the past. ‘A Medieval Life’, therefore, as well as being a biography, and an archaeology and history book, is also at least in intention a landscape book.
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A Medieval Life: William de Felton and Edlingham Castle, 1260-1327 was published by Windgather Press (Oxbow books) in March 2025. A paper for Archaeologia Aeliana is also in preparation, and on 30 September 2026, Graham Fairclough is scheduled to give a talk about Edlingham and the book to the Society of Antiquaries of Newcastle upon Tyne.
Graham Fairclough, latterly of Newcastle University and before that Historic England and its predecessors, https://www.ncl.ac.uk/hca/people/profile/grahamfairclough.html, led five years of excavation at Edlingham Castle in Northumberland between 1978 and 1982. Early full publication of excavation results is a goal much-desired, but there is an argument for longer periods of reflection, and the recent book ‘A Medieval Life’ is a more matured discussion of the castle and the excavation framed primarily as a biography of its first builder, William de Felton.
