speaking of Bamburgh, called, so the story ran, from the Queen Bebbe, as a special work of Ida. Whatever may be the origin of the name, it suggests the kindred name of the East Frankish Babenberg, which has been cut short into Bamberg by the same process which has cut short Bebbanburh into Bamburgh. Yet Bamburgh was a fortress by nature, even before Ida had fenced it in, first with a hedge and then with a wall. Here we see the succession of the early stages of fortification, the palisade first and then the earthen wall, the _vallum_, not the _murus_, of the Roman art of defence. But, whether hedge or wall, the site of Bamburgh was already a castle before it had been fenced in by the simplest forms of art. That mass of isolated basaltic rock frowning over the sea on one side, over the land on the other, was indeed a spot marked out by nature for dominion. Here was the dwelling-place of successive Bernician kings, ealdormen, and earls; here they took shelter as in an impregnable refuge from the inroads of Scot and Dane. Here the elder Waltheof shut himself up in terror, while his valiant son Uhtred sent forth and rescued the newly-founded church and city of Durham from the invader. Here Gospatric the Earl held his head-quarters, while he and Malcolm of Scotland were ravaging each other’s lands in turn. In earlier days a banished Northumbrian king, flying from his own people to seek shelter with the Picts, defended himself for a while at Bamburgh, and gave the native chronicler of Northumberland an opportunity of giving us our earliest picture of the spot. Baeda, without mentioning the name, had spoken of Bamburgh as a royal city, and it is not only as a fortress, but as a city, that Bamburgh appears in the Northumbrian chronicler. He speaks of ‘Bebba civitas’ as ‘Urbs munitissima non admodum magna.’ It did not take in more than the space of two or three fields; still it was a city, though a city approached by lofty steps, and with a single entrance hollowed in the rock. Its highest point was crowned, not as yet by the keep of the Norman, but by a church, which, according to the standard of the eighth century, was a goodly one. This church contained a precious chest, which sheltered a yet more precious relic, the wonder-working right hand of the martyred King Oswald. We read, too, how the city, perched on its ocean rock, was yet, unlike the inland hill of the elder Salisbury, well furnished with water, clear to the eye and sweet to the taste. We see, then, what the royal city of the Bernician realm really was. It simply took in the present circuit of the castle. The present village, with its stately church, is, even in its origin, of later date. But by the time that we reach the event in the history of Bamburgh which is told us in the most striking detail, the keep had already arisen; the English city had become the Norman castle. In the days of Rufus, when the fierce Robert of Mowbray had risen a second