Morrowgate Keep

Morrowgate Keep was a fortress, the great tower of a castle, and little else is remembered of it. No one now names its builder, its holder, its country or what it was raised to guard. Its story is the story of its ending: the Chronicle's registry lists it with Bellmere Castle, Black Orchard Hall and Saltmere Manor as one of four seats pulled down deliberately and in public, as a warning to the families that had held them. Those lines carried too much weight in the realm's politics for their houses to be left standing as merely beaten.

The registry files the razing under the Baron Wars and as the end of a feud, but gives no year. The Baron Wars ran in three bouts, with the Mercenary Barons' War between the first two, and were years of sieges and burnt stores, with river tolls taken by private force; they taught London to fear house retainers and gave the Crown its machinery of requisition. Which bout, if any, brought Morrowgate down is not known. The registry also names a Storming of Morrowgate among the actions of the War of Shadows, and whether that Morrowgate is this keep has never been settled.

No one now remembers who held the keep before the razing. The only Bellmere of note is Baron Edmund Bellmere of Crowferry, and nothing joins him to the castle of that name. Country talk holds that the Crown, having pulled the old seat down, later put a garrison into a tower raised on its footings, so that a keep stands at Morrowgate again under a constable rather than a family, though none can say for certain.

A company visiting should learn early who holds the keys and who merely owns the ground, since a constable may close a gate that a lord would open. It is wise not to bring up the old family's name at the gate, and wiser still not to go looking for what a deliberate razing was meant to bury.