the ancient walls were pulled down to make way for the new pier and docks, and hardly any trace of them now remains. In 1599, by the good offices of Lord Lumley, the burgesses of Hartlepool obtained from Queen Elizabeth a charter of incorporation, under which the town was governed until 1834, when the conditions of the charter were not fulfilled, and it lapsed. The present governing charter of the town was obtained in 1850. The borough of West Hartlepool has grown up in the nineteenth century on the south side of the bay on which Hartlepool stands. _Durham to Stockton._ The Durham and Stockton road passes through Bishop Middleham, where one of the Bishop’s manor-houses used to stand, and through Sedgefield, about eleven miles from Durham, a market-town which received the grant of a weekly market and fair at the Feast of St. Edmund the Bishop (November 16) from Bishop Kellaw in 1312. The borough of Stockton lies on the north bank of the Tees, twenty miles south of Durham. It is situated in the district which in early times formed the wapentake of Sadberg, and comprised all the lands lying along the north bank of the river. The wapentake, which was purchased by Bishop Pudsey in 1189, at the same time as Hartlepool, had a separate organization from the rest of the Bishopric, and its courts were held at Sadberg, which is now a small village about three miles east of Darlington. Stockton itself, however, seems to have come into the Bishop’s hands before the purchase of the wapentake, as it is included in the Boldon Book, 1183. The date of the incorporation of the borough is unknown, but there are grants by several of the Bishops, dated 1310, 1602, and 1666, of a weekly market and a fair at the Feast of St. Thomas à Becket (December 29). There is also an interesting letter relating to the customs practised both at Newcastle and at Stockton, which was sent by the Mayor of Newcastle [Illustration: THE PALACE, BISHOP AUCKLAND.] to the Mayor of Stockton in 1344 in reply to certain questions which the people of Stockton had addressed to Newcastle as their mother town. The municipal government of the borough was in the hands of the mayor and the borough-holders, seventy-two in number, until Stockton was included in the Municipal Corporations Act of 1835. _Durham to Barnard Castle._