Hexham was once, says Prior Richard, "very large and stately." However, it diminished in importance under the influence of successive battles, tumults, incursions, and changes. Hexham ceased to be the seat of a bishopric at an early period of its history; and though the monks donned armour and girded swords to their sides when Henry VIII.'s commissioners came, declaring that, "we be twenty free men in this house, and will die all or that you shall enter here," their bravery nothing availed them, and the dissolution of the monastery still further depressed Hexham in the list of English towns. There is a story that the last Superior was hanged at the priory gates, and several of his monks along with him. The beautiful Abbey Church was restored, greatly to its detriment, in 1858. But even the restorers could not spoil it utterly, and it still gives an air of grandeur and stateliness to the quiet town which it adorns. It is all an old battlefield, the land around Hexham. "Wallace wight," who is frequently heard of on Tyneside, generally to his disadvantage, and part of whose body was hung up on the bridge at Newcastle when he was executed, came here and slaughtered the people in 1297. One of the decisive battles of the Wars of the Roses was fought close by Hexham in 1464, on which occasion, as one of the most romantic stories in our history narrates, Queen Margaret and her son found shelter and hiding in a robbers' cave. "Hexham," writes Defoe, "is famous, or rather infamous, for having the first blood drawn at it in the war against their Prince by the Scots in King Charles's time." A good deal of the blood of the families of these parts was shed for the Stuart cause, then and long afterwards. Three miles below Hexham, and near to the scene of the Yorkist and Lancastrian battle, Devil's Water flows into the Tyne, past the grey old tower which is all that remains to attest the former splendour of the Earls of Derwentwater. This Devil's Water--which was Dyvelle's Water in bygone days, so called from an ancient family of these parts--tears its way swiftly between high and verdurous walls of rock-- "It's eddying foam-balls prettily distrest By ever-changing shape and want of rest." The hillsides of Dilston are clothed in magnificent woods. The scene is such as those which the old-fashioned writers were wont to describe as "beautifully sylvan." There are wild wood-paths and beds of fern, the green tangle of underwood, and the varied shade and brightness of interlacing boughs. And hence, with hesitation and a doubtful mind, the last Earl of Derwentwater set out on that rash and unlucky expedition which caused him the loss of his head. [Illustration: PRUDHOE CASTLE.] [Illustration: CORBRIDGE.]