These Bertrams must have been men of no little importance in their generations. The two heroes of Hastings evidently made their mark, and later on there is some reason to suppose that one, at any rate, of the family, perhaps more, joined in one or other of the Crusades. For in some excavations which were made among the ruins of the Castle in the middle of the nineteenth century, the workmen came upon a tiny piece of that serpentine marble which the Crusaders were wont to bring home from the Holy Land to be set in the altars of their chapels; the relic was found on the spot where the chapel is supposed to have stood. As should beseem Crusaders, the Bertrams were good and loyal servants of the Church: a pious Bertram it was that founded or endowed the Augustine Priory of Brinkbourne in the reign of Henry the First. Sir Roger de Bertram joined the insurrection of the Barons against King John, and it cost him dear, for in retaliation his castle was seized and his town of Mitford destroyed with fire and sword by the savage Flemish hordes who then devastated Northumberland as the auxiliaries of the King.[5] In the year 1215, then, Mitford Castle was in the hands of the Crown, and two years later Alexander of Scotland, who had invaded England at the instigation of France, laid siege to it with his whole army, but he was beaten off, and went back to Scotland none the richer for his venture. King John granted the Castle to Philip de Ulcoves, but in the following reign it was restored to the Bertrams by Henry the Third. The next notable Bertram was that Sir Roger who, with other northern Barons, marched into Scotland in 1258 to rescue the young King of the Scots, Henry the Third’s son-in-law; but he got into trouble, for six years later he was one of the insurgents in the Barons’ War, was taken prisoner at Northampton, and the Castle and Barony were once more forfeited and alienated from his descendants for four hundred years. He seems, indeed, to have speedily made his peace with the King, for in 1264 he was summoned to Parliament as Baron Bertram—but Mitford knew him no more.[6] This Sir Roger was succeeded by his son, who had only one daughter, and the Barony fell into abeyance between the Fitzwilliams, Darcys and Penulburys, the representatives of his three sisters. The learned labours of antiquaries and pedigree-mongers have so confused the story of the younger branch of the Bertrams, the Lords of Bothal, that it is extremely difficult, if not impossible, to make head or tail of their several statements. It is the more provoking in that it is from them that we, the Mitfords of the present day, are descended. From them also the Dukes of Portland, through a maternal ancestress, have inherited Bothal Castle.