Virtually every English ruler from the Conqueror to Cromwell has spent time in the North East, for the most part on serious business to do with the Scots. William the Conqueror came to York and began a programme of castle-building after the brutal 'harrying of the North' which laid waste to the country between the Ouse and the Tyne. William defeated Malcolm III of Scotland on Gateshead Fell in 1068 and later campaigned in Scotland in 1072, to bring Malcolm to heel. Durham castle was built in 1072. After the rising of 1080, and the murder in Gateshead of Walcher, bishop of Durham, the harrying was extended to the area between the Tyne and Tweed. The Conqueror's son Robert Curthose in 1080, built the wooden 'New Castle' which gave the city (formerly Monkchester) the name it bears today.

The Conqueror's elder son, King William II (Rufus) came north to secure the submission of Malcolm Canmore in 1091 and to crush Earl Robert of Northumbria in 1095, capturing Newcastle in the process.

Henry I was born in Selby, Yorkshire, in 1068 and was in Carlisle in 1122 to improve its defences, while King Stephen (1135-54) negotiated with the Scots king David in Durham in 1136. Henry II also came north reaching Carlisle in 1158 and York in 1160. The present keep in Newcastle, deliberately grim, was erected by Henry II in 1172-77. Set within the later walls, two miles in circumference, up to twenty feet high and studded with towers, Newcastle was England's northern fortress, 'The Eye of the North', and held in high regard by English monarchs, who granted it special favours. It had its own mayor, Peter Scott in 1251 being the earliest name we have, and became a county in 1400.

King John stayed at Alnwick Castle on 12 February 1201 and again on 24 April 1209, at which time the Scots king William the Lion agreed to pay tribute money at Norham castle. John was again at the castle in 1213. During the celebrated conflict between John and the Barons over Magna Carta in 1215, Alexander II invaded England and John marched north and burned Alnwick.
However, the king's activities were not wholly destructive: in Newcastle, he took the moat right round the castle. King Henry III visited Newcastle on 23 September 1255 on his return from Scotland, and treated with Alexander II, the Scots king, in the great hall of the castle, which stood in front of the present Moot Hall, in 1260.

King Edward I, the 'Hammer of the Scots'. He had visited Belsay in 1278, and at Christmas 1292 received the homage of John Balliol for the throne of Scotland in the great hall of the Newcastle fortress. Edward's subsequent Scottish campaigns, in which he was assisted by the Bishop of Durham, Antony Bek, were marked by considerable ferocity. He massacred 7,000 inhabitants of Berwick when he stormed the town on Good Friday 1296. In August, he brought the Stone of Scone back through the North East to Westminster Abbey, where it resided until recently. The great Scottish patriot William Wallace subsequently invaded the North after his victory at Stirling Bridge. His forces burned Corbridge and did much damage in Cumberland and Northumberland, using Hexham as his base. He did not, however, attempt to take either Newcastle or Carlisle. Edward I defeated the Scots at Falkirk and so temporarily gained the upper hand in Scotland. He was in the chapel at Heaton Hall on 6 December 1299 to hear the boy-bishop perform the vespers of St Nicholas and gave the boy and his youthful companions 40 shillings between them. Later, in 1305, he invented the ghastly punishment of being hanged, drawn and quartered for the captured William Wallace, parts of whose body were sent to Newcastle, Berwick, Stirling and Perth.

Edward II resembled his father only in looks and lost all the Scottish gains, including Berwick, where he stayed for ten months in 1310-11. Letters survive showing that Edward II was in Byker before travelling on to Newcastle the following day. This was in April 1312, before the terrible English defeat at Bannockburn in 1314, which effectively won Scotland its independence. There are also references to Newcastle and Tynemouth in Christopher Marlowe's play Edward II. It was from Tynemouth that Edward II and his favourite Piers Gaveston fled by ship to Scarborough. The queens of both Edwards preferred to stay in Tynemouth Castle while their husbands were campaigning. A happier occasion came in 1322, when the women of Whorlton in Durham sang songs about Simon de Montfort to him.

After his father's gruesome murder at Berkley Castle in Gloucestershire, Edward III ascended the throne in 1327. After humiliating skirmishes with Robert the Bruce in Northumberland and Durham in 1327, and being compelled to grant Scotland its independence, Edward gained a measure of revenge with the victory of Halidon Hill, near Berwick, where the Scots lost 16,000 men to the English long-bow. Once again an English monarch received the homage of a Scottish king, this time Edward Balliol, in the chapel at Blackfriars in Newcastle in June 1334. The occasion was one of pomp and glittering ceremony. Edward was back at Blackfriars attending mass on 1 November 1334. Edward was a glamorous, romantic figure and his famous remark: 'Honi soit qui mal y pense' would have been in character. This garter incident is claimed to have taken place in Wark Castle, the great Northumberland fortress, in 1342. While Edward was in France, his queen, Phillippa of Hainault (q.v.) with her northern levies, won the battle of Neville's Cross just outside Durham in 1346, thus thwarting the Scots.
Edward's 'Burnt Candlemas' campaign of 1356 ravaged Lothian and burned Edinburgh. Richard II in a retaliatory raid in 1386 again burned Edinburgh.

The Percy family was instrumental in placing the usurper Henry Bolingbroke on the English throne as Henry IV in 1399. Henry IV's northern campaign in August 1400 reached as far as Edinburgh. The Scots response ended in the disaster of Homildon Hill near Wooler, where the Earl of Northumberland and Hotspur were victorious. This event and the Percy claims resulting from it, are discussed at the beginning of Shakespeare's play Henry IV (Part I). After Harry Hotspur had been killed by the future Henry V at Shrewsbury, Henry IV reduced the Northumberland castles with artillery. Warkworth Castle in 1404 was the first in England to succumb to gunfire. Henry made a more leisurely northern tour in 1407. Henry V visited a number of pilgrimage centres in the North, including St John's shrine at Beverley MInster.

The saintly but ineffectual Henry VI visited Durham for some three days in 1448 and, overwhelmed with religious emotion, wrote of its monks and citizens: 'They be as Catholicke people as ever we came amonge and all good and holy.' Henry VIII described them in 1536, however, as 'brutes and inexpert folks.' Times had changed, not least because of the Wars of the Roses. Henry VI and Queen Margaret fled to Newcastle after the bloody Yorkist victory at Towton in 1461, and attempted to rally their Lancastrian supporters in Northumberland. Henry, simple and sweet-natured, was ill-fitted for the struggle, but he was constantly buoyed up and driven on by his wife, Margaret of Anjou, the 'she-wolf of France' who plays such a powerful part in Shakespeare's Plantagenet dramas.
Many were the affrays, sieges and treacheries in those years in Northumberland: Margaret twice lost control of Bamburgh and twice retook it. Dunstanburgh and Alnwick also changed hands. For a time in Northumberland, the queen of England subsisted on a herring a day. In 1463-4, Henry ruled England in name from Bamburgh for nine months, but in attempting to gain a victory at Hexham, his forces were routed at Devil's Water by Montagu, who had marched there from Newcastle. Henry was the first English king never to lead his troops in battle; he awaited the outcome at Bywell. The Lancastrian leaders were dealt with after the brutal fashion of the times: the Duke of Somerset and four others were immediately beheaded at Hexham. Lord Hungerford, Lord Roos and others were executed on the Sandgate at Newcastle.

It remained for the Yorkist King Edward IV to deal with the three castles still in Lancastrian hands, so he brought north with him his siege artillery. The king's greatest gun was called 'Newcastle' and was of iron, as was his second gun 'London'; he also had two short and large-bored bombardels called Edward and Richard after himself and his brother, the future Richard III. Alnwick and Dunstanburgh capitulated to Montagu at the threat of this armament, but Bamburgh was more resolutely defended - though not for long. Edward's heavy guns opened fire and 'the stones of the walls flew into the sea.' King Edward IV and his brother Richard III were both sons of Richard Plantagenet, Duke of York, and Cicely Neville, the 'Rose of Raby'. Richard, as Duke of Gloucester, ruled the North for his brother, and finally won Berwick from the Scots in 1482. It had changed hands thirteen times by then.

Henry VII, the king who united red rose and white, visited both Durham and Newcastle after the battle of Stoke in 1487. His ambassadors later negotiated the marriage of his daughter Margaret with the king of Scotland, but the Tudors were ill at ease in the North (Queen Elizabeth never went north of the Trent in her life). Charles I (q.v.) was in Newcastle to confront the Scots in 1639 and was a prisoner of the Scots in Newcastle in 1646-7.

Oliver Cromwell stayed with his army in Newcastle for three days in 1649. As he dined in the mayor's house, he was serenaded by the Town Waits on the little bridge over the Lort Burn near the Sandhill. He left on 20 October, but returned on 15 July 1650 on his way to the fateful encounter with the Scots at Dunbar.

Later English monarchs have come on more peaceful occasions. Queen Victoria opened the High Level Bridge in Newcastle in 1849, and the Royal Border Bridge in Berwick. Interestingly, Sadberge, between Stockton and Darlington was once an important royal manor and the earldom is attached to the crown. A great boulder stands on the pretty village green and commemorates the 'Golden Jubilee of Victoria, Queen of the United Kingdom, Empress of India and Countess of Sadberge, 1887.' The beautiful Gibside estate at Gateshead belonged to the Queen Mother, and the extraordinary Countess Mary Bowes was the great-great-great-grandmother of the present queen.