The ancient name was Ubbanford. Ecgred of Lindisfarne, who died in 845, replaced the wooden church with a stone one and translated the relics of Saint Ceolwulf to the new building. The early eleventh-century text On the Resting-Places of the Saints names Norham as one of the resting places of Saint Cuthbert, whose travelling relics were among the most important in the north of England. Recent scholarship has even suggested that Norham, rather than Chester-le-Street or Durham, may have been the centre of the diocese of Lindisfarne from the ninth century until somewhere between 1013 and 1031. For centuries after, Norham was the centre of an outlying exclave of County Durham called Norhamshire, an administrative oddity that survived until 1844, when the area was finally absorbed into Northumberland.

In 1292 Edward I of England met the Scottish nobility on the Tweed at Norham. The Scottish throne was vacant. There were thirteen claimants. Edward, asked to arbitrate, used the opportunity to extract acknowledgements of his overlordship from each candidate and then chose John Balliol, the man he judged most pliable. The decision, known as the Great Cause, fed directly into the Wars of Scottish Independence that defined the next thirty years. Norham was the venue partly because it sat on the border itself, allowing both delegations to attend without crossing into hostile territory. The twelfth-century parish church of St Cuthbert in the village, an ambitious aisled work whose details echo Durham Cathedral, was heavily rebuilt in 1846 to 1852, but its bones still belong to the period when Norham was a bishop's frontier town.

J. M. W. Turner first painted Norham Castle in 1797. He was twenty-two. The watercolour, exhibited at the Royal Academy the following year, made his reputation as a landscape artist and effectively launched his career. He came back to the subject again and again throughout his life. In 1831, passing through, he is said to have tipped his hat to the castle in acknowledgement of what it had done for him. His final treatment of it, Norham Castle, Sunrise, painted in oils around 1845 in his late nearly-abstract style, is one of the great treasures of Tate Britain. The Ladykirk and Norham Bridge, a late stone road bridge built in the nineteenth century, connects the village across the Tweed to Ladykirk in the Scottish Borders. The crossing still works exactly as Edward I would have understood it: one country on each bank, the river arbitrating between them.

Norham railway station was built in 1851, served the village for over a century, and closed in 1965. Its last station master, Peter Short, turned it into a museum. In 2013 it was offered for sale at an asking price of £420,000. The electoral ward of Norham and Islandshires now stretches south-east toward Bamburgh and counted 4,438 residents at the 2011 census. The village itself is much smaller than that. Norham has also returned to Ubbanford in fiction, as the residence of Beobrand, the seventh-century protagonist of Matthew Harffy's Bernicia Chronicles. The novels imagine a kingdom of mead halls and shield walls on roughly the same patch of ground where the real village sits today. The Tweed runs past as it always has, broad and deep as Scott described it, with Scotland on the far bank and the castle still keeping its broken silhouette against the sky.