The ancient village of Corbridge--the quietest of country villages now, with extensive market-gardens occupying ground on which the Roman legions may have camped--lies but a short distance away, and it was on Corbridge Common that the army of the Stuart adherents came together when preparing to attack Newcastle. There was a British settlement near the little river Cor, as is made evident by certain camps and tumuli in the neighbourhood. The later Roman station of Corstopitum, believed to have been founded by Agricola, was a little west of the present village. It was on the line of the Watling Street, and had considerable extent and importance. Many of the fragments of it have been worked into existing buildings, for the stations of the Roman wall, and the wall itself, were during many generations so many quarries for those who succeeded the first conquerors of our island. For a few years before and after Wilfred's time there may have been a period of quiet, during which a monastery, and, it is believed, even a king's palace, was established; but thenceforward, for long afterwards, Corbridge is mentioned in history only when it is overtaken by some great trouble. When King John arrived here in 1201 he conceived the idea that the place must have been destroyed by an earthquake, so complete and so extensive was the ruin that had been wrought. Yet three times again the town was burnt by the Scots. Even this, however, did not prevent the return of the people, and the founding of a new town of Corbridge, which sent a member to our earliest Parliaments, and only abandoned the privilege when the Corbridge folk became too poor or too indifferent to defray his "proper cost." The bridge which gives the village its name is the only bridge over the river which was not washed away or broken in the great flood of 1771. [Illustration: BYWELL CASTLE.]