After the treason of Sir Roger Bertram in 1264, wild men succeeded one another in the ownership of the Castle. In the year 1316 it was the home of a freebooter of the pattern of the Rhenish robber knights, named Sir Gilbert de Middleton. He was an old soldier of fortune, who had fought against Lewelin in the Welsh war and probably for that service was rewarded with the Castle and Manor of Mitford. But he was infuriated against King Edward, on account of the appointment to the See of Durham of Lewis de Beaumont, a cousin of the Queen’s. It was said that Queen Isabella, “the French she-wolf,” as she was called, had knelt upon her bare knees before the King, praying him to confer this fat Bishopric upon her kinsman. Sir Gilbert rebelled, proclaimed himself Duke of Northumberland, and took the occasion of a mission which the King had sent to Scotland, headed by two Cardinals and the Bishop of Durham, to swoop down upon the Embassy and pillage it on its return South. It was a mistake to attack the scarlet hat; the Church ever had a long arm. Sir Gilbert was taken prisoner by Ralph de Greystoke (or, according to Hollinshed, by Thomas Heton and William de Fulton), fettered in irons and carried to Newcastle, whence he was shipped to Grimsby. From Grimsby he rode to London with his feet tied under his horse’s belly, was imprisoned in the Tower, and dragged by horses to the gallows on the 26th of June, 1318. His property and goods and those of his brother were confiscated. (See Hodgson’s “Northumberland.”) In 1318 Mitford was the property of Adomar de Valence, Earl of Pembroke, and then it was that the last and fatal attack upon the Castle by the King of Scotland took place, and the grand old stronghold that had withstood the buffets of so many sieges was finally laid in ruins. When one looks at the humble little village of Mitford to-day it is hard to realize that it was once a borough! I know not how it may be now, but when I was a boy the old folk held firmly to their traditions and to the legends of the ancient greatness of the place; there was an old rhyme which they loved to quote: “Mitford was Mitford ere Morpeth was ane And still shall be Mitford when Morpeth is gane.”