Richard Duke of Gloucester lived at Middleham Castle, with his wife and child, for ten years, from 1472 to 1482, from his twentieth to his thirtieth year. Here he had passed his early youth, had formed his most enduring friendships, and had first seen his cousin Anne. The ten years of peaceful married residence at Middleham was no doubt the happiest period of Richard's short but eventful life. [Illustration: SEIZE QUARTIERS OF ANNE NEVILL] The ruins of the grand old pile, with the village and the church at their feet, still form a conspicuous object on the southern slope of Wensleydale. Middleham {83} is about a mile and a half above the junction of the Ure and the Cover. In rear of the castle are the breezy downs, and in front the river Ure flows through rich pastures, with the town of Leybourne on the opposite slope. The castle consisted of a lofty Norman keep surrounded by an enceinte eighty yards long by sixty-five wide. The keep, which was built by Robert FitzRanulph in 1190, was fifty feet high, with walls nine feet thick, strengthened at the angles by buttresses rising into rectangular turrets. It was divided into two large rooms on each floor, the great hall having a lofty arched window, due to the taste of the Duke of Gloucester. In the north-east angle there was a curious mural chamber, twelve feet long by nine, opening on to the hall, and the east face of the keep was one side of the chapel. The outer walls were thirty feet high with square towers at the angles, and a gatehouse on the north face. The residential buildings stood against three sides of the _enceinte_, and seem to have communicated with the great hall in the keep by a covered passage. The nearest neighbours of the Duke and Duchess of Gloucester were the Monks of Jervaux and Coverham, their cousin the Lord Scrope of Bolton,[1] and the Metcalfes of Nappa Hall.[2] The manuscript volume No. 433 of the Harleian collection in the British Museum supplies a few {84} glimpses of the home life at Middleham. We read of a pack of hounds and of the wages of a jester. There is the election of a king of rush bearing, and of a king of Middleham, evidently games for the amusement of the Duke's little son Edward, who was born about 1473.[3] The child's tutor was Richard Bernall, and the cost is recorded of his primer and psalter, and of satin to cover them. There are also payments for green cloth for my lord prince, and for a feather for my lord prince. [Sidenote: Richard's able administration]