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Updated: May 18, 2025
But perhaps the animosity here shown to Leehall comes more from one who was a lover of horses as who in Northumberland is not? than from a partisan of Lowes. However, the feud ran on, year in, year out, as is the custom of such things, and no doubt it might have been bequeathed from father to son, like a property under entail, had it not been for the intervention of Frank Stokoe.
Frank demanded the surrender of Lowes, uninjured. Leehall retorted that he might take him if he could. But Leehall had reckoned without his retainers; they dared not fight against Frank Stokoe. So they said. But was it not, in reality, a sort of incipient Strike?
Now, the law, in those breezy times, took small cognisance of such little freaks as this; the law, indeed, was pretty powerless up among those wild hills. It wanted some force stronger, or, at all events, some force less magnificently deliberate, than that of the law. Frank Stokoe was that force. To him went the friends of Lowes; and next morning saw the peel tower of Leehall besieged.
There was, for instance, that affair of the feud between Lowes of Willimoteswick Castle and Leehall of Leehall, which kept a great part of Tynedale in hot water for so many years.
Something lingering and long was more to his taste; he would make Lowes "eat dirt." With every mark, therefore, of ignominy and contempt, he dragged his fallen foe home to Leehall, and there chained him near to the kitchen fire-place, leaving just such length of chain loose as would enable the prisoner to sit with the servants at meals.
Yet, to the followers of Lowes there must always be two sides to a story it was he, and not Leehall, who was the finer man, for, of an encounter between the pair near Bellingham, when Lowes' horse was killed by a sword-thrust directed at the rider's thigh, the old ballad says: "Oh, had Leehall but been a man As he was never ne-an, He wad have stabbed the rider And letten the horse alean."
Leehall appears to have been physically the better man; at any rate, on more than one occasion Lowes seems to have escaped from the clutches of his enemy solely by the superior speed of the horse he rode, or possibly he was a light, and his enemy a heavy, weight, which would make all the difference in a rousing gallop across deep ground or heathery hill.
Whether or not Leehall was content to have thus played second fiddle, one does not know. Perhaps it was his men who, a year or two later, paid a nocturnal visit to Stokoe's peel tower. Frank was roused from sleep one winter night by his daughter, who told her father that some one was attempting to force the outer door.
Lowes and Leehall, it seems, had met by chance near Sewing Shields, with the usual result. Only, upon this occasion, the former was possibly not on the back of an animal the superior in speed and stamina of the horse on which Leehall was mounted. At least, Lowes was captured. But, having got him, his enemy did not proceed to cut him into gobbets, or even to "wipe the floor" with him.
Did they, perhaps, being wearied of the somewhat tame sport of baiting him, think the opportunity a fitting one to get rid of their uninvited guest for good and all? In any case, before an hour had passed, Leehall found it convenient to hand Lowes over to Stokoe, who safely deposited him by his own fireside at Willimoteswick, and the feud was pursued no further.
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