This paper surveys the seigneurial buildings of the Anglo-Scottish Border, and places the fortified buildings constructed between the eleventh century and the seventeenth century in their social and economic context. It shows that the development of these houses was a complex pattern in which the builders responded to changing needs of politics and lordship, which ended in a breakdown of the local feudal society in the late Middle Ages.

The Anglo-Scottish Border is an area famous for its castles, an area in which private fortifications abound, and in which, it has been said, ‘nearly all men of any wealth at all occupied bastle-houses’, that is to say, fortified farmhouses. The common picture of the society and its architecture is one in which the rough and conservative North preserved Norman or even earlier habits to the end of the Middle Ages. The types of buildings, too, are seen as backward-looking: the towers of the fourteenth century and later which are so distinctive a feature of the area were based on Norman keeps: ‘By this time [1386] the days of castle building in England were virtually over … by this time the castle has yielded pride of place to the mansion house. But in the North of England, along the Scottish border where warlike conditions persisted, the old Norman tradition of a square keep or tower-house was never forgotten.’ Even Allen Brown followed this line: ‘Northern fortification in the later Middle Ages shows a remarkable conservatism. Etal … is essentially a lesser keep-and-bailey castle after the twelfth-century manner … and Edlingham in Northumberland … consists merely of a simple, walled enclosure with a square keep at one end and perhaps a gatehouse at the other.’ This echoes a view long held by students of the architecture of the Middle Ages, summed up by Hamilton Thompson: ‘The pele-tower may be regarded as a direct survival of the rectangular keep in a simplified form.’ In this military society, therefore, there is for the student little prospect of tracing the progressive changes to be found in southern England: ‘[Yanworth Hall, Westmorland] shows little development from the Norman keeps of a date two hundred years earlier.