According to the historian Dan Spencer, no place in England was besieged more often during the Wars of the Roses than Alnwick. Held for Henry VI until 1461, lost to Edward IV that year, retaken by the Lancastrians, retaken by the Yorkists in July 1462, retaken again, abandoned in January 1463, regained through betrayal in May, surrendered for the final time on 23 June. Six changes of hands in two years. The castle that anchored all that violence still stands at the south bank of the River Aln, still occupied by the same Percy family that took it over in 1309, still surrounded by the small Northumberland market town that grew up to feed and house its garrison.
Alnwick was founded around 600 AD as a farming settlement on the Aln, but its history is really the history of the lords who owned the high ground above the river. After the Norman Conquest the estate was given to Gilbert Tyson, one of William the Conqueror's standard-bearers. The De Vesci family held it for two centuries, then it passed in 1309 to the Percys, the great medieval baronial dynasty of the north. The castle, founded as timber by Ivo de Vesci around 1096 and rebuilt in stone after David I of Scotland captured it in 1136, became the principal residence of England's most powerful frontier family. Every gate, tower, and street name in the town carries a Percy echo. The Bondgate Tower, the only surviving stretch of the medieval walls, is still called the Hotspur Tower after Sir Henry Percy, the Harry Hotspur of Shakespeare's Henry IV, born at Alnwick in 1364 and killed at the battle of Shrewsbury in 1403.
Two kings of Scotland came to grief at Alnwick. A cross near Broomhouse Hill, across the river from the castle, marks the spot where Malcolm III fell in November 1093 during the first Battle of Alnwick. On Ratten Row, between the West Lodge and Bailiffgate, a stone tablet remembers a second royal humiliation: William the Lion, captured during the second Battle of Alnwick in July 1174 by about four hundred mounted knights under Ranulf de Glanvill, who had ridden through fog from Newcastle and arrived in time to surprise a Scottish king whose army had wandered too far from his tent. Constant border warfare shaped the Percys. Constant border warfare shaped the town. Hulne Priory, founded around 1240 for the Carmelites by William de Vesci, was sited within what is now the Duke's walled estate because, in legend, the hills nearby reminded him of Mount Carmel.
The castle the Percys abandoned in the Reformation, leaving to decay for two centuries, was revived in the mid-eighteenth century. Hugh Percy, 1st Duke of Northumberland, hired Capability Brown to landscape the parkland. Brown gave Alnwick the sweeping vistas, ruins, and follies that visitors still walk through. Among them are Brizlee Tower, designed by Robert Adam and built in 1781, and the Pottergate Tower, a Gothick eye-catcher of 1768. In the twenty-first century, the castle stepped into a different kind of fame. Its exteriors served as Hogwarts in the first two Harry Potter films, the courtyard where Madam Hooch teaches first-years to fly broomsticks. The castle has appeared in Becket, in Elizabeth, in Downton Abbey. The Percys still live above the gift shop.
Walk Alnwick's marketplace today and you find the medieval market cross, the nineteenth-century Northumberland Hall, and the White Swan Hotel, a Georgian coaching inn whose dining room is panelled with fittings rescued from RMS Olympic, the near-identical sister ship of the Titanic. The former railway station, which closed in 1968, now houses Barter Books, one of the largest second-hand bookshops in England. The town's economy still rides on heritage and craft: Hardy fishing rods are made and sold here, NFU Mutual employs hundreds, and the Bailiffgate Museum next to the castle holds the social history of north Northumberland in two thousand objects. With a population of about 8,400 at the 2021 census, Alnwick remains what it has been for a thousand years: a small place organised around a very large house.
Alnwick sits at 55.41 degrees north, 1.71 degrees west, 32 miles south of Berwick-upon-Tweed and the Scottish border, 5 miles inland from the North Sea at Alnmouth, and 34 miles north of Newcastle upon Tyne. The A1 trunk road, the main north-south route between London and Edinburgh, runs just west of town. From the air the castle dominates: a large irregular pentagon of grey stone above the south bank of the River Aln, with the formal Alnwick Garden to its east. Newcastle International (EGNT) is roughly 35 miles south. Best views come from medium altitudes in clear conditions, when the river bend, the castle keep, and the geometric garden cascade are all visible together.