The Beverley Gem Collection at Alnwick Castle is one of the most distinguished in Great Britain still in private hands. Alnwick Castle, ancestral seat of the Earls of Northumberland - and the House of Percy - was built as a border fortress against the Scots in the twelfth century, if not earlier. Substantially enlarged in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, and remaining in Percy family hands to this day, it stands now as a prime example of robust...