A Medieval Life: William de Felton and Edlingham Castle, 1260–1327

Graham Fairclough reconstructs the life of William de Felton, a relatively little-known landholder who built Edlingham Castle in Northumberland around 1300. The book combines biography with archaeology, using the castle and its landscape alongside documentary evidence to recover the choices, ambitions and circumstances of an individual who would otherwise remain peripheral to conventional medieval narrative.

Excavations at Edlingham between 1978 and 1982 uncovered a building begun around 1300, but the more surprising evidence came from the royal administration. Felton had served in the households of Edward I and Edward II, leaving his name scattered through roughly two hundred documents. Fairclough follows those small references back to a man who was neither a king nor a great magnate, and shows how a castle, a working life and a network of neighbours can be pieced together from records that rarely tell their story outright.