Langley Castle - Castle Duncan Forums

From icTeeside, 23rd April 2007

Baron is back at the castle

It is a historic title that dates back almost 850 years and has links with Henry VIII and Harry Hotspur. And after more than three centuries out of use, there is a new Baron of Langley.

In 1716, both the barony and Langley Castle itself were seized by the King and the title was later handed to a Crown charity which has held it ever since. But last week, Dr. Stuart Madnick - already the owner of the castle near Haydon Bridge, in Tynedale, Northumberland - bought up the Barony at auction.

He said yesterday that bringing the title back to the castle, now a successful hotel, had been a long-term ambition and was an important part of restoring the building to its past glory.

The new baron, who is also a Professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Boston, USA, and a technology consultant, said: "One of the things we have always wanted to do was reunite the barony with the castle - it is an important historical connection. We were investigating where the title was held when someone spotted a feature in The Journal saying that it was being auctioned, and that's where I first heard about it."

The Barony of Langley dates from 1165, but in 1716 the barony and castle were seized by the Crown from James Radcliffe, 2nd Earl of Derwentwater, executed for supporting the Jacobite Rebellion. King George I assigned the title and castle to the governors of Greenwich Hospital, a Crown charity, who have held the title ever since. In 1882, Cadwallader Bates, Sheriff of Northumberland, bought Langley Castle, but not the Barony, from the Crown.

Dr. Madnick bought the castle in 1985 and he and his wife Yvonne have turned it into an award-winning hotel. He declined to disclose how much he paid for the title, but it was put up for auction last year priced at £45,000.

The title brings no rights or privileges, but Dr. Madnick can use it on his passport, credit cards and correspondence. It also comes with a coat of arms, and the peerage has links to Henry VIII, Harry Hotspur and the great northern families of Neville, Umfraville and Radcliffe.

The hotel won the silver award for Best Small Hotel in England at the national finals last week.

From Dodds, Bastions & Belligerants.

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Langley Castle
NY834624 13 km, 8 miles, east of Haltwhistle

About two miles out of Haydon Bridge on the A686 Alston road, this most impressive 600+ year old tower on its elevated clearing midst the trees of Langley Wood demands attention. Big, strong and very complete - so complete, in fact, it is now a luxury hotel - it is arguably the best example in Northumberland of near-pristine military medlevalism.

The known history of Langley pre-dates the tower by two hundred years, however, for it was the centre of a barony granted by King Henry II between 1157 and 1165 to Adam de Tindale for one knight's fee or one mark. The main part of the barony extended northwards across the South Tyne to Stanegate and southwards to Allendale Common, and included Staward on the River Allen; it also included some isolated pockets of land both east and west of the core.

The Tindale family ended with Philippa who married Nicholas de Bolteby of Ravensthorp, near Thirsk in Yorkshire. A tax return dated 1235 confirms that Nicholas was then the Baron of Langley. His family held the place for about fifty years, then Isabelle passed it on to her husband, Thomas de Multon, whose parental home was near Spalding in Lincolnshire. The difficulties of travelling in those days never seemed to deter the young ones from searching far and wide for their spouses! Perhaps it was because they had no trains, buses or travel agents and had to rely on their own ingenuity. Thomas did not like his surname - too similar to the Norman-introduced word for sheep meat - so he changed it to his mother's maiden name of Lucy.

In 1308 Anthony de Lucy inherited the barony, and it remained his for thirty-five years. Like his forebears, he lived at Langley in an unfortified hall house, a risky thing to do while the Scottish War of Independence was getting into top gear. He felt reasonably safe, however, because he maintained a garrison of fifteen men-at-arms and forty hobilars (light horsemen) at Staward, a couple of miles to the west. There he had converted a derelict Anglian refuge on a virtually impregnable site into a 'pele', a timber blockhouse surrounded by a stout palisade. He felt this forward line of defence would prevent even a small army from reaching Langley, and indeed it did until King Edward II put a spoke in his wheel. Using his power of compulsory purchase, he annexed the River Allen part of the barony in 1326 and commissioned Thomas Featherstonehaugh to build a castle for him at Staward Pele. Anthony had to withdraw his garrison.

Anthony's son, Sir Thomas de Lucy, inherited in 1343, and three years later his hall house was destroyed by King David Bruce, who had invaded at a time when he believed all Englishmen except "Sutlers, skinners and merchants" were across the Channel fighting the French. He found he was mistaken when he reached Neville's Cross, near Durham, for there he met an English army large enough to defeat his soldiers and to take him prisoner. Sir Thomas was one of the commanders of the English force so he had the double satisfaction of discomfiting his king's enemy and taking vengeance for the loss of his home.

Faced in any case with the need to build a new home, Sir Thomas decided against a direct replacement but instead to go for something really strong and capable of keeping out all intruders. He had plenty of money for as a professional soldier he had seen service in France and had brought back much plunder, and also he received compensation from the Royal Exchequer for the damage to his property.

The original plan appears to have been for a tower of three storeys shaped like a capital H, with the centre part measuring 82 by 25 feet, and with four square towers at the corners forming the 'legs' of the letter. It is permissible, perhaps, to theorise that Sir Thomas was fighting for his king in Scotland or France when building started and that his first view of the nearly completed shell was when he got home on his annual furlough. He would have seen immediately that all was not as it should have been: the building was not tall enough for a start, and just look at that door - completely unguarded and giving access straight into the ground floor chamber! The disappointed soldier would have summoned his engineer and told him in no uncertain terms to add a fourth storey and to construct a fifth tower against the eastern wall to accommodate a secure entrance, complete with portcullis, guard chambers and stairs to all floors. This hypothesis could explain why the entrance tower is not keyed to the main structure, it having been built after the completion of the other, and why the fourth storey is built with stones a shade lighter in colour, the mason having to buy extra supplies from a different quarry. The corrections made, the building was completed in 1365.

Sir Thomas enjoyed his new residence for a couple of years then died, leaving everything to Maud, who could have been his sister but probably was his daughter. She was married to Gilbert. Earl of Angus, and the last Baron Umfraville of Prudhoe. She was widowed in 1381 and, rather hastily, she married Henry Percy, recently elevated to the earldom of Northumberland. When Maud died in 1398 Percy collected both Prudhoe and Langley baronies and added them to the 'Northumberland Estates'.

This should have satisfied the most covetous of men, but Percy remained discontented and joined Archbishop Scrope's revolt against King Henry IV in 1405. It never really got off the ground, yet it caused the king to march into Northumberland seeking vengeance. Percy escaped but all his property was confiscated. Langley was granted to Sir Robert Umfraville of a cadet branch of the old family. but, hard luck for him, the beautiful new tower was gutted by fire.

What started the fire is not known. It may have been an accident or a raider's mischief, but most likely it was ignited on purpose by a detachment of the King's army, rather over anxious to complete Percy's downfall.

The Earl was killed at Bramham Moor in 1409, and then followed more than two hundred years of domestic confusion, during which the Percy family ran in and out of trouble and Langley oscillated between public and private ownership. Some stability seemed to be in sight when John Murray, Earl of Annandale, bought the barony in 1625 as this marked the end of the Percy connection, but Murray's steadying influence only lasted seven years as the property was sold to Sir Edward Radcliffe in 1632.

Sir Edward was baron of Dilston, a man of considerable wealth and ambition. Since his inheritance in 1622 he had busied himself buying up properties, including the lucrative lead mines around Alston, so that he could claim the mantle of top Northumbrian aristocrat which the Percys seemed bent on fraying. His grand plan went a bit astray when he backed the loser of the Civil War, but his son, Sir Francis, put matters right, and in 1687 was awarded the Earldom of Derwentwater together with the viscountcy of Radcliffe and Langley and the barony of Tynedale.

Neither he nor his son had any interest in Langley, nor, it seems, had vandals or stone thieves, for the tower remained virtually as the 1405 fire had left it. His grandson james, who inherited the honours and property in 1705, left the place alone also; he had other things on his mind. Ten years later he set out on that fateful ride to Preston, imprisonment and execution.

The only people to benefit from the Jacobite revolt were the governors of the Royal Hospital for Seamen at Greenwich. In 1749 they were granted all the estates the Radcliffes had owned and which the Government had confiscated. This, of course, included Langley, but the Hospital was more interested in the smelting mills there than the tower, for they produced considerable income by processing the lead brought down from the Alston mines. So for a hundred and thirty years - then the bottom fell out of the British lead market and the Hospital was willing to sell.

Cadwallader Bates saw his chance and bought the whole estate. He saw in the stark ruins of the tower a unique opportunity to restore its fourteenth century grandeur, for, as he said, "Thanks to its destruction by fire soon after its erection, paradoxical though it may sound, the castle of Sir Thomas Lucy retains in an almost, if not quite, unique manner the essential outlines of a fortress house in the great days of Crecy and Poitiers. Had it continued to be inhabited it would sure to have been subjected to all sorts of Perpendicular, Tudor, Elizabethan, Jacobean, Queen Anne, Georgian and Strawberry Hill Gothic alterations and accretions, at the cost of architectural purity".

Although Bates was careful not to change the ambience of the tower, he did deviated from absolute purity in the matter of windows and door, and he had to guess and use his knowledge of medieval fortifications when rebuilding the battlements, for there was nothing to copy there. Internally he felt no misgivings about modernising the style and constructing what he thought would be a comfortable home for himself and his wife. He reduced the floors to three, each with higher ceilings than had the four storey rooms, and this is why the landings on the staircase in the little entrance tower do not line up exactly with the floors of the chambers. He constructed a very handsome wooden staircase in the south-west tower, which formerly had been devoted entirely to gardrobes. He divided the central space into conveniently sized rooms, and he added a kitchen and all the facilities in vogue in his day.

Unfortunately Bates died in 1902 so did not see the completion of his daunting task. His wife finished it off, and added a little chapel to his memory. Since her death the tower has been a girls' school, a theme restaurant, a private home for a Hexham business man (who installed a lift) and an hotel. The latter gives remarkable relevance to the Rev. John Hodgson's comment in 1839:

"... while I gaze on it, even at a great distance, it seems to bid a stern defience to the attack of time, as if determined once again to resume its roof, and hang out over its battlements its blue flag and pillared canopy of morning smoke, as emblems that joy and highminded hospitality have returned to reside in it."