New Werk – the Book

TO BE PUBLISHED SOON – MAY 2025

“Newark Castle has almost no tale to tell.” So wrote the famous Author and Historian Hugh MacDonald in 1860.

This story covers the period circa 1550 to 1650 and the turbulent life of Sir Patrick Maxwell of Newark. The Maxwells of Newark were relatively short lived as a branch of the Maxwells of Pollock and it is possibly as a result of their relative obscurity that little has been written about them, however they have proved to be a typical microcosm of life in medieval Scotland and lived through the one of the greatest political and social transformations in the British Isles when King James VI of Scotland became King James I of England and the United Kingdom.