Northumberland Quotes

Northumberland, thou ladder wherewithal the mounting Bolingbroke ascends my throne.

I’ve always tried to make the best of what life gave me. When I was a girl, I longed for a kitten. Instead, I got a weasel. Not the pet I wanted by I’ve done my best to love Snowdrop just the same… Since my father died, I’ve been desperate for a place to call home. The humblest cottage would do. Instead, I’ve inherited a haunted, infested castle in Nowhere, Northumberland. Not the home I wanted, but I’m determined to make it a home.

Why, what a wasp-stung and impatient fool Art thou, to break into this woman's mood, Tying thine ear to no tongue but thine own!

En 1878, reçu médecin à l’Université de Londres, je me rendis à Netley pour suivre les cours prescrits aux chirurgiens de l’armée ; et là, je complétai mes études. On me désigna ensuite, comme aide-major, pour le 5e régiment de fusiliers de Northumberland en garnison aux Indes.

The fine purple cloaks, the holiday garments, elsewhere signs of gayety of mind, are stained with blood and bordered with black. Throughout a stern discipline, the axe ready for every suspicion of treason; “great men, bishops, a chancellor, princes, the king’s relations, queens, a protector kneeling in the straw, sprinkled the Tower with their blood; one after the other they marched past, stretched out their necks; the Duke of Buckingham, Queen Anne Boleyn, Queen Catherine Howard, the Earl of Surrey, Admiral Seymour, the Duke of Somerset, Lady Jane Grey and her husband, the Duke of Northumberland, the Earl of Essex, all on the throne, or on the steps of the throne, in the highest ranks of honor, beauty, youth, genius; of the bright procession nothing is left but senseless trunks, marred by the tender mercies of the executioner.

There is a history in all men's lives, Figuring the nature of the times deceas'd; The wich observ'd, a man may prophesy, With a near aim, of the main chance of things As yet not come to life, wich in their seeds and weak beginnings lie intreasured. Such things become the hatch and brood of time; And, by the necessary form of this, King Richard might create a perfect guess, That great Northumberland, then false to him, Would of that seed grow to a greater falseness; Wich should not find a ground to root upon, Unless on you.

The proud insulting queen, With Clifford and the haught Northumberland, And of their feather many more proud birds, Have wrought the easy-melting king like wax.

True heroism consists of being superior to the ills of life, in whatever shape they may challenge to the combat.’ Napoleon on board HMS Northumberland, 1815

I have told you that I love you. Because I do. It is bigger than me. Bigger than the moon and the sky and all the wheat in Northumberland. So big, I cannot contain it inside me, Chatham, so I must tell you. Over and over. It is the only way to ease the pressure.

A woman plays the Northumberland pipes; from where I’m sitting, on a wall at the back, it looks like she’s giving physiotherapy to a small marsupial wearing callipers and smoking a bong, but the sound is haunting and hypnotic, mournful and melodic at the same time, every note somehow harmonising with the low, droning purr.

A constant factor in human history is the need to protect oneself. Another factor is the urge to attack someone else.

A monster can be created because we look the other way when a domestic crime is being committed. Taking no action will get a reaction, causing a tidal wave of consequence "....... D. H . Jarrett

Northumberland Fusiliers as assistant surgeon. The regiment was stationed in India at the time, and before I could join it, the second Afghan war had broken out. On landing at Bombay, I learned that my corps had advanced through the passes, and was already deep in the enemy’s country. I followed, however, with many other officers who were in the same situation as myself, and succeeded in reaching Candahar in safety, where I found my regiment,

Whenever Northumberland appears Shakespeare allows him a noble, knightly demeanour and gives him language appropriate to it – indeed, he sometimes has very beautiful and even sublime passages to speak, since Shakespeare's practice is very far removed from that of Schiller, who likes to paint the Devil black and whose moral approval or disapproval of the characters he is drawing is audible in the words they themselves speak. In the case of Shakespeare, as also in that of Goethe, every character is, while he stands and speaks, entirely in the right, though he be the Devil himself.

Then it all came together—every particle of discontent, nostalgia, and resistance in England—fusing in the North. The North: two words to describe a territory and a state of mind. England was conquered and civilized from the South upwards, and as one approached the borders of Scotland—first through Yorkshire and then Durham and finally Northumberland—everything dwindled. The great forests gave way first to stunted trees and then to open, windswept moors; the towns shrank to villages and then to hamlets; cultivated fields were replaced by empty, wild spaces. Here the Cistercian monasteries flourished, they who removed themselves from the centers of civilization and relied on manual labour as a route to holiness. The sheep became scrawnier and their wool thicker, and the men became lawless and more secretive, clannish. Winter lasted eight months and even the summers were grey and raw, leading Northumberland men to claim they had “two winters—a white one and a green one.” Since ancient times these peripheral lands had gone their own way, little connected to anything further south. A few great warrior families—the Percys, the Nevilles, the Stanleys—had claimed overlordship of these dreary, cruel wastes, and through them, the Crown had demanded obeisance. But

He says she’ll not be here long.” This phrase, uttered in my hearing yesterday, would have only conveyed the notion that she was about to be removed to Northumberland, to her own home. I should not have suspected that it meant she was dying; but I knew instantly now! It opened clear on my comprehension that Helen Burns was numbering her last days in this world, and that she was going to be taken to the region of spirits, if such region there were. I experienced a shock of horror, then a strong thrill of grief, then a desire—a necessity to see her; and I asked in what room she lay. “She is in Miss Temple’s room,” said the nurse. “May I go up and speak to her?” “Oh no, child! It is not likely; and now it is time for you to come in; you’ll catch the fever if you stop out when the dew is falling.

QUO fATA Vocant

KATH: (Katherine) BRENT, daughter of Ed: Brent, dee'd., 300 acs. Northumberland Co., N.E. upon Quiough 421 Riv., S.E. upon land of Capt. Giles Brent. 9 Dec. 1662, p. 79, (554). (Capt. Gyles Brent, 4 May 1653, assigned to sd. Edm: Brent & by him given by will to sd. Kath.)

Mithras is a Persian light and warrior god adopted by the Roman army as their tutelary deity.  His name means “Friend”.  Mithras was the emissary of Ahura Mazda, the supreme power of good, who battled Ahriman, the supreme evil.  Mithras slew the divine bull to release its life-giving blood into the earth, and creatures that served Ahriman like scorpions and serpents tried to stop this happening. Mithras was often depicted with a pointed cap, and a number of reliefs show him in the act of slaying the bull.  As a solar god he was directly equated to Sol Invictus by the Romans, as can be seen from inscriptions.[469]  Twelve inscriptions to him have been found to date.[470] There were seven grades in the Mithraic mysteries, which were only open to free men.  The Mithraic cult was highly tolerant of other deities, as is evidences by depictions of other gods in the shrines.  Also as the soldier god, priesthoods were known to bring their statues to the Mithraea (temples) for protection when danger threatened. The Mithraea were usually small, and have preserved their mysteries to an extent as little writing remains from them.  A relief from Housesteads (Northumberland) shows Mithras bearing a sword and spear rising from an egg, surrounded by a hoop depicting the signs of the zodiac.  A silver amulet found at St Albans similarly depicts Mithras rising from a pile of stones.  More commonly images on altars showed him sacrificing a bull, such as at Rudchester (Northumberland), Carrawburgh (Northumberland) and the London Mithraeum.  There are now five known Mithraea in Britain, those at Caernarvon, Carrawburgh, Housesteads, London and Rudchester.  Of these all were purely military apart from the London Mithraea. 

This is Northumbria, spanning Durham, Yorkshire, and Northumberland, the northernmost county in England. Here was once the frontier, the last place, where, in the second century, the Romans built their vast fortifications to hold back the Scots and the Picts: first Hadrian’s Wall, running from the banks of the Tyne in the east to the Solway Firth in the west; and later, in a fit of optimism – or arrogance – the more northerly Antonine Wall, from the Firth of Forth in the east to the Firth of Clyde in the west, before abandoning it in favor of a consolidation of the southern defenses. In time, the remains of the Antonine Wall will come to be referred to as the Devil’s Dyke, but by then the Romans will be long gone, their fortresses already falling into ruin, leaving the blood to dry, and the land to bear their scars. Because the land remembers. So the Romans depart, and chaos descends. The Angles invade from Germania, battling the natives and one another, before eventually forging two kingdoms, Northumbria and Mercia, only to see them fall to the Norsemen in the ninth century, who will themselves be defeated by the kings of Wessex. More blood, more scars. In 927 AD, Northumbria becomes part of Athelstan’s united England. In 1066 William the Conqueror lands with his Normans, and crushes the Northumbrian resistance to Norman rule. The Norman castles rise, but they, like the Romans and the Angles before, are forced to defend themselves against the Scots. They leave their dead at Alnwick and Redesdale, Tyndale and Otterburn. The land has a taste for blood now. More conflicts follow – the Wars of the Roses, the Rising in the North, the Civil War, the Jacobite rebellions – and the ground makes way for new bones, but the blood never really dries. Dig deep enough, expose the depths, and one might almost glimpse seams of red and white, like the strata of rock: blood and bone, over and over, the landscape infused by them, forever altered and forever changing. Because the killing never stops.

Wrought iron began to replace cast iron before 1820, when a Northumberland railway engineer named John Birkinshaw patented a method of rolling wrought iron rails in various shapes in fifteen-foot lengths that could withstand the weight of steam locomotives pounding and running over them.

I wondered why so many gardens around the world focused on the healing power of plants rather than their ability to kill… I felt that most children I knew would be more interested in hearing how a plant killed, how long it would take you to die if you ate it and how gruesome and painful the death might be.

You must remember that I am descended from the Northumberland Ballingers, not the Hampshire Ballingers. The women of my side of the family do not care a great deal for Society’s rules.

We carry out a wide range of domestic & Commercial tree surgery services from Northumberland to South Yorkshire and surrounding areas. From tree pruning, hedge trimming and ivy removal, to bigger projects like tree felling, stump removal, dangerous tree dismantling and large-scale planting, our tree surgeons can do it all.

There's nothing to be afraid of, Jack. You know Master Harriot and Lord Northumberland. They won't let you come to harm." "What if I have a nightmare?" Jack whispered. "Nightmares are like Master Harriot's star glass. They are a trick of the light, one that makes something distant seem closer and larger than it really is." "Oh." Jack considered Matthew's response. "So even if I see a monster in my dreams , it cannot reach me?" Matthew nodded. "But i will tell you a secret. A dream is a nightmare in reverse. If you dream of someone you love, that person will seam closer, even if far away." He stood and put his hand on Jack's head for a moment in a silent blessing.

If I find this nostalgia for a "vanished" landscape a bit strange it is probably because as I write I can look from my window over twenty miles of superb countryside to the sea and a sparsely populated coast. This county, like many others, has seemingly limitless landscapes of great beauty and variety, unspoiled by excessive tourism or the uglier forms of industry. Elsewhere big cities have certainly destroyed the surrounding countryside but rapid transport now makes it possible for a Londoner to spend the time they would have needed to get to Box Hill forty years ago in getting to Northumberland. I think it is simple neophobia which makes people hate the modern world and its changing society; it is xenophobia which makes them unable to imagine what rural beauty might lie beyond the boundaries of their particular Shire. They would rather read Miss Read and The Horse Whisperer and share a miserable complaint or two on the commuter train while planning to take their holidays in Bournemouth, as usual, because they can't afford to go to Spain this year. They don't want rural beauty anyway; they want a sunny day, a pretty view. Writers like Tolkien take you to the edge of the Abyss and point out the excellent tea-garden at the bottom, showing you the steps carved into the cliff and reminding you to be a bit careful because the hand-rails are a trifle shaky as you go down; they haven't got the approval yet to put a new one in. I never liked A. A. Milne, even when I was very young. There is an element of conspiratorial persuasion in his tone that a suspicious child can detect early in life. Let's all be cosy, it seems to say (children's books are, after all, often written by conservative adults anxious to maintain an unreal attitude to childhood); let's forget about our troubles and go to sleep. At which I would find myself stirring to a sitting position in my little bed and responding with uncivilized bad taste.

Years later, when I heard friends speak sentimentally and lyrically about their place of birth, of how they’d been shaped by Northumberland or Glasgow, the Lakes or the Wirral, I’d find myself envying even the most hackneyed, stereotyped expressions of ‘belonging’. We had no sense of identity, no authentic accent, just a kind of cockney learnt from TV, applied over a slight country burr. I didn’t hate our town, but it was hard to feel lyrical or sentimental about the reservoir, the precinct, the scrappy woods where porn yellowed beneath the brambles.

Drake looked down at his bride, pride nearly crushing him. She looked the picture of virtue in a gown the color of dark cream. Her hair sat atop her head in a shining red-gold mass of thick braids and curls. A band of small pink rosebuds haloed the curls, their stems a tightly intertwined crown. There was no cap now. Her face was pale and glowing, her neck as graceful as any swan's he had ever seen on the lakes of Northumberland, her delicate collarbones as elegant and stately as the jewels of a queen. What he wouldn't have done to give her the magnificent London wedding she deserved. He would relish seeing her in rich satin and jewels, the envy of the civilized world. But Serena would never be in London... would probably not 'wish' to be, he realized. Gazing at her beauty, her tranquility, he had a blinding realization that caused him to grasp more tightly to her hand and almost falter as he turned toward the minister: Had he not left all behind, he never would have found her. For the first time, he had something to be thankful for in the wake of his ruined existence. Had he stayed in London, he would have wed one of the haughty women of the ton, a woman in whose eyes he would have seen a hunger that was never satisfied. Instead, he was marrying a woman of quiet strength and faith, all of which gave the very air around her peace. Was she not worth a dukedom? Yes. A thousand times yes. That and more. She was worth all that he had gone through to have her.

In opposition rose the ‘Die-Hard’ Unionists championed by the Duke of Northumberland; reactionary representatives of the landed gentry who believed in compulsory military service, social welfare, expanded military and naval strength, an end to ‘alien’ immigration, and armed resistance to Irish Home Rule