Alnwick Castle Tours › History
Nine hundred years, one family for most of it, and a castle that's been rebuilt not once but twice — first as a Gothic fantasy, then torn back down and rebuilt again as something closer to what a medieval fortress actually looked like. Here's how a Norman border post became the Percy family's home, then Hogwarts.
Last reviewed:Alnwick Castle didn't start as anyone's home. It started as a problem for the Scots.
Around 1096, Ivo de Vesci — a Norman nobleman from Vassy, in Calvados — erected the first parts of the castle to guard the road crossing the River Aln. Northumberland sat right on the fault line between England and an ambitious Scottish crown, and a fortified crossing point here was worth more than the stone it was built from. The de Vesci family held it for two centuries, through a role that was mostly military rather than domestic. This was not yet a castle anyone would call comfortable.
The castle's first real test came from William the Lion, King of Scotland, who besieged Alnwick in 1172 and again in 1174. The second attempt went badly for him personally: William was captured outside the walls during what's now remembered as the Battle of Alnwick, and forced to pledge loyalty to England's Henry II as the price of his release. It's a detail easy to skip past, but it's a genuinely rare thing — a reigning Scottish king taken prisoner beneath an English castle wall, not in some larger pitched battle but right here.
The de Vesci line died out in 1297, and ownership passed briefly to the Bishop of Durham, Antony Bek. In 1309, Bek sold the barony of Alnwick to Henry Percy, 1st Baron Percy — and the castle has belonged to the Percy family, later the Earls and then Dukes of Northumberland, ever since. Over 700 years under one family is not a claim many castles in Britain can make.
What Henry Percy bought was, by his own family's later account, a fairly modest stone castle. He set about rebuilding almost immediately, and though he died before seeing the work finished, his son — also Henry — carried on for another four decades, converting Alnwick into a serious fortress along the Anglo-Scottish border. Three structures from this 14th-century building campaign still stand today: the Abbot's Tower, the Middle Gateway, and the Constable's Tower. The battlements from this period were even topped with carved stone figures, a defensive trick meant to make the garrison look larger than it actually was to anyone eyeing the walls from a distance.
Henry Percy, 1st Earl of Northumberland, backed Henry Bolingbroke's move to dethrone Richard II in 1399 — a gamble that paid off when Bolingbroke became Henry IV. It didn't stay a happy alliance. By 1403 the Percys had turned against the king they'd helped crown, and the earl's son, Sir Henry Percy — nicknamed "Hotspur," and later immortalised by Shakespeare — led the rebellion into open battle. Hotspur was killed at the Battle of Shrewsbury in 1403. His father tried again two years later and lost that fight too: the king marched north, and Alnwick surrendered under the threat of bombardment rather than risk destruction.
The castle's Lancastrian sympathies made it a target once the Wars of the Roses turned against that side. Alnwick surrendered to the Yorkists in September 1461 after the Battle of Towton, was recaptured by Lancastrian forces the following winter, surrendered again in mid-1462, and changed hands at least once more before the Earl of Warwick finally secured it for the Yorkists for good in January 1463. Four changes of ownership in under two years — the castle's walls survived all of them intact; the loyalty of whoever happened to be holding the keys did not.
Thomas Percy, 7th Earl of Northumberland, was executed for treason in 1572, and the family largely stopped living at Alnwick after that. The 9th Earl, Henry Percy — remembered by history as the "Wizard Earl" for his consuming interest in alchemy and the sciences of his day — placed a distant cousin in charge as constable in 1594 rather than take up residence himself. For roughly two centuries, Alnwick Castle stood as a fortress with no one significant actually living in it: maintained, defensible, but essentially dormant as a family home.
Everything changed with Elizabeth Seymour and her husband Sir Hugh Smithson, who took the Percy name and were created the 1st Duke and Duchess of Northumberland by George III in 1766. They decided Alnwick should stop being a defensible ruin and start being a home worthy of a dukedom. Three of the era's leading architects — Robert Adam, James Paine, and Daniel Garrett — were brought in to remodel the interiors, and landscape designer Lancelot "Capability" Brown reshaped the grounds and dammed the River Aln into a more picturesque setting.
The result was unusual for Adam specifically: rather than his signature neoclassical style, the interiors went full Strawberry Hill Gothic — ornate, romantic, self-consciously medieval-fantasy rather than historically accurate. It made Alnwick famous all over again, this much so that George III's own later restorations at Windsor Castle were reportedly inspired in part by what the Percys had done here.
A century later, Algernon Percy, 4th Duke of Northumberland, decided he didn't want a Gothic fantasy — he wanted the castle to look like what it actually was: a real medieval border fortress. He hired architect Anthony Salvin and paid him £250,000 (a genuinely enormous sum for the 1850s) to strip out most of Adam's work and remodel the exterior in a convincingly medieval style. Salvin is responsible for the castle's kitchen, the Prudhoe Tower, the palatial accommodation wing, and the layout of the inner ward that visitors walk through today.
For the interiors shown to the public, though, the direction went a different way entirely: Italian architect Luigi Canina and his assistant Giovanni Montiroli were brought in to create the lavish, Renaissance-style State Rooms that still hold the Percy family's art collection. It's a strange, layered result when you think about it — a castle given a more authentically medieval exterior by one architect, wrapped around interiors deliberately designed to look like an Italian Renaissance palazzo by two others, all commissioned by the same duke in the same decade.
The 20th century brought quieter changes. Parts of the castle served as a refuge for evacuee children during the Second World War, then housed Newcastle upon Tyne Church High School, followed by a stint as the Alnwick College of Education — a teacher-training college — from 1945 to 1977. Since 1981, St Cloud State University of Minnesota has run an international study programme from part of the site, a genuinely unusual footnote for a Northumberland castle.
Ralph Percy inherited the title as 12th Duke of Northumberland in 1995, and he and his family still live at Alnwick Castle today — during the winter months, at least, when the public season is closed. Under his stewardship the castle has opened further to visitors than ever before, drawing around 250,000 people a year, and become something its medieval builders could never have anticipated: one of the most recognisable film locations in Britain, playing Hogwarts in the first two Harry Potter films and hosting the Downton Abbey series finale, among more than 40 other productions.
See How the Castle Was Actually Built →