In the “Battle Abbey Roll” of the Duchess of Cleveland, it is stated that William de Bertram, who founded Brinkbourne Priory, married a daughter of Guy de Baliol by whom he had two sons, Roger, Baron of Mitford, and Richard, the ancestor of the Lords of Bothal, who held that Barony by the service of three knights’ fees. This is, I believe, the more probably correct story, and it comes into line with the evidence of the “Newminster Abbey Register Booke,” which makes the inheritance descend to the Dukes of Portland from the Lady Sibella, wife of the first Lord Bertram. That Bothal should have been held by Sir William (sometimes called Sir Richard) Bertram, the brother of the first Lord Bertram, as some have maintained, is worthy of no credence. Why should an important portion of Sibella de Mitford’s property have gone to her husband’s younger brother? Burke, in his “Landed Gentry,” anxious, probably, to prove a Saxon descent from father to son, appears to wipe out all the Bertrams in the middle of the fourteenth century, and makes Mitford (the town or village, not the Castle and Barony, which were forfeited) descend to Sir John de Mitford, tenth in succession to Matthew, the younger brother of the Sir John who was the father of Sibella. That we shall see is quite apocryphal, for when the elder branch of the Bertrams came to an end in 1311, the younger branch continued to flourish at Bothal, and soon adopted the name of Mitford, taking their patronymic from the property which the family had then held for two and a half centuries. It was to that branch that the famous Hermit of Warkworth belonged, whose tragic story was woven into a poem by Dr. Johnson’s friend, Bishop Percy of Dromore, who collected the “Reliques of Ancient Poetry.” The poem, very poor stuff, was published separately some years after the “Reliques.” This Bertram was in love with a neighbouring Lady Isabel de Widdrington, and she returned his love, but like a true daughter of ‘These northern counties here Whose word is snaffle, spur and spear.’