Holford Matthew, Stringer Keith. Border Liberties and Loyalties in North-East England, 1200-1400 (ENG)
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BORDER LIBERTIES AND LOYALTIES
86
the prior of Durham consulted in the 1310s. In 1311, similarly, it was ‘the
magnates, knights and free tenants’ who granted £200 to Edward II; in 1349
it was ‘the magnates, nobles and the whole community’ who authorised
the aid granted to Hat eld.
149
So, too, when Edward III hoped to have the
liberty contribute to the wool grant of 1338, he asked Bishop Bury to call
together at Durham or elsewhere ‘the prelates, abbots, priors, earls, barons,
knights and others whom you will know, and also the community of your
liberty of Durham’.
150
In all these cases it seems to be implied that the
magnates would have taken the leading role.
is was not always the case, however, and it is far from clear that the
Durham truces with the Scots, like those arranged by some other north-
ern communities in the 1310s, were in the hands of ‘a small group of local
gentry and magnates’.
151
e variety of gures who were involved at various
points in representing the community speaks against such an assumption.
Middling and lesser gentry, such as Roger Fulthorpe, Simon Esh and John
Allenshields, were important in the organisation of the truces; and when
the eyre ne of 1345 was agreed, two rising lawyers, Roger Blakiston and
omas Seaton, represented the community. It is likely that the distinctive
administrative structures of the liberty, in which signi cant o ce was o en
held by local gures of relatively low status, meant that those with a stake
in ‘the community of the liberty’ were always likely to extend outside the
circles of leading landed families.
152
At times, even quite obscure people could claim to represent ‘the com-
munity’, as is best illustrated by the truce of 1315. When the Scots entered
the liberty on 25 November of that year, all those ‘of the community of
the bishopric’ then at Durham decided to take action to prevent impend-
ing disaster. Each swore to stand by whatever should be decided ‘for the
good of the community’. e Scots demanded immediate payment of
1,600 marks, but the sum was not ready to hand. It was therefore decided
that ‘certain men of the community’ should go from house to house in
Durham bailey, taking whatever money they found. A later levy ‘from the
community’ would satisfy those whose money was seized. Two search-
ers – William Kelloe of ornley and David Rothbury – were appointed
149
RPD, i, p. 191; DCM, Loc.XXVII.31, mm. 1–2 (arts. 4 and 24); Loc.XXVIII.14, no. 15;
DURH 3/30, m. 4d.
150
RPD, iv, p. 227.
151
C. McNamee, ‘Buying off Robert Bruce: an account of monies paid to the Scots by
Cumberland communities in 1313–14’, TCWAAS, new ser., 92 (1992), p. 82; cf. J.
Scammell, ‘Robert I and the north of England’, EHR, 73 (1958), p. 398.
152
RPD, i, pp. 204–5; Greenwell Deeds, no. 138; DCM, Misc. Ch. 4265; CFR, v, p. 422.
See further ‘Office- holders’, i, pp. 103–4; below, Chapter 3, pp. 118–21; Chapter 4,
p. 152.
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87
and they took, among other sums, £70 from William Hebburn’s house
in the bailey: Hebburn later initiated the legal case in which these details
emerge.
153
He was a substantial Durham burgess, who was baili in
1312, 1316 and 1325–6.
154
Kelloe was a man of some standing in and
around ornley; but Rothbury is a very obscure gure.
155
All these men
could nevertheless claim to be part of the community and to act on its
behalf. Nor, it is clear, was common action and common assent simply
empty rhetoric. Collective decisions were taken on that November day,
preceded by discussion and debate, and reinforced by a collective oath;
and this oath was to be the undoing of Hebburn’s attempt to recover his
£70 against William Kelloe. As Kelloe pointed out, the money had been
taken ‘by common assent of the whole locality (pais)’, and royal justices
agreed that if Hebburn was to recover the sum it should be from ‘the
community’.
156
A range of people, then, might act on behalf of ‘the community’ and par-
ticipate in its decisions, and ‘the assent of the community’ was not always
an empty phrase. In 1311 the refusal to provide military service to Edward
II seems to have been preceded by some sort of assembly and discussion
among ‘the magnates, knights and free tenants’ of the liberty.
157
In 1296,
when Bek had needed carriage from the liberty to support himself and his
troops on campaign in Scotland, the request was probably put to a similar
assembly.
158
And another assembly is recorded in 1300, when opposition to
Bek’s regime reached crisis point. According to the chronicle accounts, ‘the
knights and free tenants of the liberty’ assembled in the cathedral church,
where one of their number called for a collective oath to defend the rights of
the church of Durham; a er some disagreement, an oath was indeed sworn
on the shrine of St Cuthbert. Shortly a erwards they decided to pursue
their claims in Parliament at their common expense.
159
In none of these cases, of course, did such assemblies encompass all free-
holding society. Bek’s o cers and others continued to support the bishop
153
KB 27/242, m. 60, best printed in RPD, iv, pp. 159–65; a more recent edition in Select
Cases on Trespass From the King’s Courts, 1307–1399, ed. M. S. Arnold (Selden Society,
1985–7), i, pp. 135–9, lacks the verdict.
154
FPD, pp. 66–7; DCM, 1.2.Spec.42; 2.11.Spec.33; 3.14.Spec.16; Cart. II, f. 257r.
155
For Kelloe, see Greenwell Deeds, nos. 114, 116–17, 119, 135; DCM, Misc. Ch. 6236, 6238;
G&B, no. 1485. He must be distinguished from his contemporary and namesake Master
William Kelloe, clerk and administrator. I have found no other reference to Rothbury.
156
Northern Pets, no. 130; RPD, iv, pp. 160–5.
157
Bishop Kellawe’s account of the local community’s decision refers to ‘careful considera-
tion’: DCM, Loc.XXVIII.14, no. 15.
158
Above, p. 84.
159
Gesta Dunelm., p. 12; Scriptores Tres, p. 76.
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during his disputes with Durham Priory and ‘the community’, and here
‘the community of the liberty’ thus represented only a particular interest
group, albeit one with a very wide base.
160
Nevertheless it does seem that
in general many freeholders considered themselves to be part of ‘the com-
munity’ and claimed a place in its decision- making. us when omas
Auford’s cart was seized at Willington in 1296 on the basis of a decision
made by ‘the community of the liberty’, he objected that ‘all the freemen of
the whole bishopric were then on campaign with the bishop at their own
expense’.
161
His argument was apparently that any collective decision was
invalidated by the absence of the majority of the liberty’s freeholders. It
was because Auford saw himself and his fellow free tenants as part of ‘the
community’ that he did not accept a decision made when they were not
represented.
e di culties faced by a select body in making binding decisions on
behalf of wider local society were not unique to the liberty. Elsewhere in
England, for example, there was considerable uncertainty about whether
decisions taken in a county court were binding on the county as a whole.
162
‘ e community of the liberty of Durham’, which lacked even an estab-
lished central meeting- place such as the county court, faced still greater
constitutional hurdles. is was one reason why ‘the community of the
liberty’ remained a deeply problematic concept whose legitimacy was
always open to challenge. Its social composition and organisation, as well
as its constitutional basis, were shi ing and disputed; and attitudes to ‘the
community’ in wider local society were mixed. Consequently, as we will see,
attempts to levy communal payments from the liberty as a whole had only
limited success.
It is unclear how several of these payments were organised, partly
because in the early 1300s there was no established method of assessment.
In 1296 each vill was expected to provide carriage according to its size; in
1302 the ‘the whole community of the county’ apparently made contribu-
tions ‘according to the amount of their lands’.
163
Only under the pressure
of the truce- payments did a more settled system arise, and it took time to
develop. In 1312 Bishop Kellawe was unable to persuade the inhabitants
of the wapentake of Sadberge to contribute to the ‘payment (frette)’, as the
160
Below, Chapter 4, pp. 148–52.
161
JUST 1/226, m. 5d.
162
Booth, Financial Administration, p. 142, n. 31; J. G. Edwards, ‘Taxation and consent in
the court of Common Pleas’, EHR, 57 (1942), pp. 473–82; W. N. Bryant, ‘The finan-
cial dealings of Edward III with the county communities, 1330–60’, EHR, 83 (1968),
p. 763.
163
JUST 1/226, mm. 5d, 8–8d.
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truce- payment was described, and had to seek assistance from the earl of
Warwick.
164
e bishop’s letter strongly suggests that lay contributions to
the truce- payment were informal and, to a signi cant extent, voluntary:
there was no systematic attempt to apportion the sum among local society,
and there were no mechanisms for ensuring that apportioned sums were
paid. Any such voluntary system was vulnerable to the ‘free rider’ able to
take advantage of the truces without personally contributing, and it was
therefore imperative to develop more adequate systems of assessment and
compulsion.
e clergy of the liberty had always been taxed along with the
other clergy of the realm, according to xed assessments of income, and
so it was straightforward for Kellawe to negotiate clerical subsidies, and
to enforce their payment. Subsidies from the archdeaconry of Durham
were levied by the bishop from as early as 1311.
165
In contrast, the liberty
had no real experience of lay taxation, and mechanisms for spreading the
cost of the truces among lay society were slower to emerge.
166
By 1314–15,
however, some form of assessment based on individual settlements was
probably in existence; it is certainly recorded in 1318 and with particular
clarity in 1327.
167
By this date, and doubtless earlier, collectors for the dif-
ferent wards of the liberty were being appointed, and may have acquired
some o cial powers of compulsion. Although there is no direct evidence,
it seems likely that these collectors, like those of the clerical subsidies,
were appointed by the bishops: at any rate, the role played by ‘the bishop’s
ministers’ in the administration of secular and clerical levies is abundantly
documented. In 1312 and 1313 it was these ‘ministers’ who seized money,
apparently wherever they could nd it, to satisfy the Scots, even if their right
to do so was not universally accepted.
168
e bishop’s o cers proved to be
vital in implementing the decisions of ‘the community’; and the power of
episcopal lordship was partly what enabled the liberty, in striking contrast
to other northern counties, to keep making collective payments to the Scots
throughout the 1310s and 1320s.
169
By 1343, when the truce- money was raised ‘as was customary of old’
by commissioners appointed by the bishop, methods of assessment had
164
RPD, i, p. 191.
165
Ibid., pp. 97, 637; DCM, Misc. Ch. 4254, 4416, 4702.
166
For the methods adopted in Cumberland and Northumberland, see McNamee, ‘Buying
off Robert Bruce’, p. 81; McNamee, Wars of the Bruces, p. 132.
167
In 1314–15 the priory paid £9.4s. ‘pro temporalitate’, the last word written over ‘man-
eriis’: DCM, Bursar’s Accounts, 1314–15 (A). For 1318, see DCM, Misc. Ch. 4399
(which refers to Newminster Abbey’s contribution for Chopwell); for 1327, Misc. Ch.
4607–10.
168
DCM, Misc. Ch. 6035.
169
Cf. McNamee, Wars of the Bruces, p. 135.
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acquired a certain maturity.
170
In this year a payment of £160 was agreed
– we do not know the details – by ‘the common counsel and unanimous
assent of the whole community of the lordship and royal liberty of Durham
and Sadberge’. A separate levy of £8.13s.4d., also authorised by common
assent of ‘the community’, covered the expenses of messengers and others
carrying the money to the Scots. Both sums were divided among the lib-
erty’s wards in ways that perhaps re ected the distribution of episcopal
incomes from the liberty. Sadberge bore one- h of the charge, divided
equally between its two wards. e wards of Darlington and Stockton
together bore two- hs; so did Chester and Easington. Darlington paid
twice what Stockton paid; Chester and Easington each paid around one-
h. Within the wards themselves the division and assessment of the sums
were at the discretion of the commissioners, who were local gentry and
freeholders of middling rank. e sums were to be assessed from ‘vills
and hamlets’, and the commissioners were authorised to distrain for them,
and then to attach, arrest and imprison any persons resisting distraint. is
may well have become the system used for later levies from the liberty,
although no assessments were given to Bishop Hat eld’s commissioners in
1345 or 1349.
171
It seems, then, that the pressure of meeting truce- payments led to the
development of what was essentially a system of lay taxation in the liberty.
is system, in theory, enabled payments negotiated by small groups,
claiming to represent ‘the community of the liberty’, to be shared across
the liberty as a whole – ‘the community’ in its broadest sense. is wider
community, however, had only limited enthusiasm for such contribu-
tions, and many of the levies imposed on the liberty failed to produce the
required sums. us in 1332 a further clerical levy was necessary to deal
with outstanding arrears for an unknown payment;
172
and, perhaps most
tellingly, it took some twelve years for the crown to recover £240 of cleri-
cal taxation that had been given to the Scots in 1315. e money had been
collected for the subsidy of 1314 granted by the northern convocation,
and had been deposited in Durham Priory for safe- keeping. It was taken
from the priory in 1315 ‘with the assent of the clergy and laity of the whole
170
RPD, iv, pp. 273–7; for the background, see J. Campbell, ‘England, Scotland and the
Hundred Years War in the fourteenth century’, in J. Hale, J. R. L. Highfield and B. Smalley
(eds), Europe in the Late Middle Ages (London, 1965), pp. 191–2. Campbell accepted the
dating of 1344 given in RPD; but while difficulties in establishing the precise beginning
of Bury’s pontifical year make dating problematic, the document almost certainly belongs
to 1343.
171
DURH 3/30, mm. 1d, 4d. For the levies of 1345 and 1349, see below, p. 92.
172
DCM, Misc. Ch. 5088.
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community and liberty’.
173
e crown demanded payment of the sum; and
although the priory failed in its attempts to recover the money through
litigation against ‘the community’, Edward II was eventually able to force
Bishop Beaumont to collect it anew through clerical and secular levies.
ese, however, were not organised until 1324 or 1325, and even then the
total raised fell short, so that the bishop was ordered to levy a further £140
in 1327.
174
Ultimately the crown was able to recover at least some of its
money, but not without considerable delay and only a er signi cant pres-
sure had been brought to bear. Given the political will to organise su cient
subsidies, and given willingness to pay them on the part of local society, the
costs of communal payments could be distributed through the liberty as a
whole. But such willingness seems to have been in relatively short supply.
As we have seen, William Hebburn also attempted to recover £70 seized
from him in 1315, which Edward II similarly ordered Beaumont to levy
from the local community; but the bishop seems simply to have ignored
these instructions.
175
It is likely, therefore, that the truce- payments were spread only to a
limited degree among ‘the community of the liberty’ as a whole, and
relied disproportionately on the contributions, willing or otherwise, of
wealthy men and institutions. Similar di culties emerged with the col-
lective pro ers made to the crown in 1311, 1333 and 1345 to avoid royal
eyres. e priory chronicler described how in 1311 ‘the men of the bisho-
pric’ refused to repay a ne Bishop Kellawe had paid to Edward II, and
173
The circumstances of the seizure are set out in an inquisition (5 January 1324) sum-
marised on the dorse of E 202/19/1, unnumbered writ of 16 November 1323 to Bishop
Beaumont, according to which ‘in the time of Richard Kellawe’ the bishop and the
men of the liberty met Robert Bruce at Chester- le- Street and bought peace for £1,000.
Because the whole sum was not to hand, Richard Fitzmarmaduke and others, by order
of the bishop, and with the assent of the whole community, took £240 from Durham
Priory. This does not quite fit with the evidence of any known truce- payments, but
probably refers to the crisis of November 1315 when the Scots demanded 1,600 marks,
or just over £1,000. The same writ makes it clear that the money had been raised from
a subsidy of 12d. in the mark granted by the York convocation and not, as Scammell
assumed, a papal tenth (‘Robert I and the north of England’, p. 399, n. 1). Such a subsidy
was granted in August 1314: Records of Convocation, xiii: York, 1313–1461, ed. G. Bray
(Woodbridge, 2006), p. 7, n. 15. See also DCM, Loc.XXVII.31, m. 3d, art. 37; Reg. II, f.
86v.
174
DCM, Misc. Ch. 4198, 4354, 5060, 6029. In answering a royal writ of 8 March 1324
ordering assessment of the £240 from ‘the men of the community and liberty’, Beaumont
stated that he had done what he could, but ‘the malice of the times’ and the poverty of the
bishopric had prevented the writ’s full execution (E 202/19/1, unnumbered). As the writ
makes clear, the money was to be repaid by the community as a whole, not (as McNamee
implies) just by the clergy. See also BL, MS Cotton Faustina A.VI, f. 36v (undated), which
records receipt, by the liberty’s steward and receiver, of £40 of the £240.
175
Above, p. 87; KB 27/257, m. 118d.
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it is doubtful – given the di culties of the following years – if the bishop
ever recovered the sum.
176
Payment of the ne of 1333 was protracted and
problematic;
177
so was that of 1345. On 1 June 1345 the keepers of the
liberty were noti ed that the royal eyre had been postponed; and on 3 June
Roger Blakiston and omas Seaton agreed on behalf of ‘the community
of the bishopric of Durham’ to pay £400 in return for its cancellation.
178
In January 1346 they reclaimed £20 from ‘the community’ to cover their
expenses to London.
179
Yet collection of the £400 itself was much more dif-
cult. Bishop Hat eld attempted to levy the sum soon a er his consecration
in August 1345, but with little success: another commission to audit and
collect this levy was appointed in January 1346.
180
at in turn probably
had little e ect. Hat eld seems nally to have threatened to impose his own
eyre on the liberty. He was ‘granted’ 400 marks by the local community
early in 1349, allegedly on account of his expenses in keeping the liberty
‘unharmed’, and appointed a commission to levy the sum on 9 March
1349.
181
It can hardly be coincidental that this was less than a week a er he
had, at the request of ‘the community of the liberty of Durham’, withdrawn
a general commission to his own justices. e threat and levy seem to have
been enough to raise the required sums, and the debt was nally cleared at
the exchequer in 1351.
182
To a certain extent, then, institutions were developed in the rst half of the
fourteenth century that provided the compulsion necessary to cement a
‘community of the liberty’. From this perspective ‘the community’ was, in
Maitland’s words, very much something ‘drilled and regimented’ by higher
authority.
183
Such an emphasis on compulsion is salutary. It reminds us
that ‘community’ has only assumed relatively recently the connotations
of shared values and social unity that it o en carries in historical writing.
e danger of ‘anachronistic overtones of identity and unity’ is one of
the attractions of the older translation ‘commonalty’, which also has the
advantage of emphasising that it was common or collective characteristics,
176
Scriptores Tres, p. 93.
177
CCR 1333–7, pp. 138, 182; CFR, iv, pp. 378–9, 444–6; Richard d’Aungerville of Bury:
Fragments of his Register and Other Documents, ed. G. W. Kitchin (SS, 1910), p. 107; Rot.
Parl., ii, pp. 99–100; cf. Northern Pets, pp. 231–2.
178
CCR 1343–6, pp. 524, 560; Rotulorum Originalium . . . Abbreviatio, ed. H. Playford and
J. Caley (Record Commission, 1805–10), ii, p. 177; CFR, v, p. 422.
179
DCM, Misc. Ch. 6059.
180
For the commissions of 1345 and 1346, see DURH 3/30, m. 1d.
181
Ibid., m. 4d.
182
Liddy, ‘Politics of privilege’, p. 70; E 372/196, m. 21d.
183
Pollock and Maitland, History of English Law, i, p. 688.
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rights or responsibilities which were at the heart of communitates.
184
In
many cases, as Maitland emphasised, common obligations were imposed
and did not arise out of collective action; and the ways in which actions
were organised, or obligations met, did not necessarily imply any real
unity.
Nevertheless the legalistic ‘commonalty’ and the more a ective ‘com-
munity’ should not be entirely distinguished, and ‘community’ was not
only something that was ‘drilled and regimented’. In the rst place, we
must remember that assemblies of ‘the community’ and mechanisms for
communal activity did not begin as ‘top–down’ impositions of the bishops
of Durham: they arose independently of, or even in opposition to, episco-
pal administration. In resisting Bek’s regime in 1300–2, in buying o royal
demands for military service in 1311, and in paying the Scots in the 1310s,
‘the community of the liberty’ was much more than a ction created by
episcopal institutions or by the liberty’s elites. Second, if ‘the community’
was an ideal, it was one to which people might be prepared to subordi-
nate their individual interests. Individuals and institutions were regularly
described as acting on behalf of the community, and such expressions were
more than rhetorical turns of phrase. Richard Fitzmarmaduke, notably, was
rightly said to have laboured strenuously on behalf of the bishopric in the
1310s to protect the liberty from Scottish attacks.
185
e truce- payments
were made possible not only by episcopal lordship but by the willingness
of people to act ‘for the good of the community’ or ‘for the good of the
country’.
186
It has been argued that men like Fitzmarmaduke were largely
self- interested, concerned above all with the potential pro ts that could
be had from controlling the collection of the truce- money and its delivery
to Scotland.
187
But it is likely that opportunities for pro teering have been
considerably overstated. e payments and levies were subject to audits,
which are re ected in the surviving documentation; and the many acquit-
tances preserved in the archives of Durham Priory do not indicate success-
ful peculation. Even claims for expenses were monitored with some care.
188
Of course the negotiation and payment of the truces did o er opportunities
for personal advancement. Simon Esh, prominent in the administration of
184
M. Prestwich, Plantagenet England 1225–1360 (Oxford, 2005), p. 405.
185
DCM, Loc.XXVII.31, m. 2 (arts. 15, 25); Offler, North of the Tees, Chapter 14, p. 208, n.
51.
186
DCM, Loc.XXVII.30, dorse, art. 15.
187
See in particular Scammell, ‘Robert I and the north of England’, p. 401; also McNamee,
Wars of the Bruces, p. 138, and ‘Buying off Robert Bruce’, p. 82; Offler, North of the Tees,
Chapter 14, p. 199.
188
DCM, Misc. Ch. 4458, endorsed to the effect that it was witnessed by the prior of Durham
and many others.
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the bishopric in the 1330s and 1340s, made his rst mark on the liberty’s
public life during a 1323 embassy to Carlisle, when he was already pro-
claiming his ambition through his seal.
189
But such opportunities arose as
a by- product of what was essentially public service. e organisation of the
truces involved labour and risk: it was one of the factors behind Richard
Fitzmarmaduke’s murder by Robert Neville in 1318.
190
We should not
doubt that ‘the good of the community’ was a key motivating factor, and
it was the community of the liberty as a whole, including the wapentake of
Sadberge. In 1312 Bishop Kellawe remonstrated with the earl of Warwick
over the failure of Barnard Castle to contribute towards a payment that had
ensured its protection; and Hartlepool, which was in the wapentake, was
speci cally exempted by Robert I from a truce granted to ‘the whole bisho-
pric of Durham’.
191
In the rst half of the fourteenth century, then, ‘the community of the
liberty’ was a signi cant force in the political life of the bishopric, as institu-
tions developed to meet the pressures of Bek’s regime, of royal demands,
and of Scottish exactions. As these pressures declined later in the fourteenth
century, so did the community become correspondingly less important.
Hat eld’s levy of 1349 was virtually the last occasion on which this ‘com-
munity’ took action that could be described as a ecting the liberty as a
whole. It is true that the royal parish tax of 1371, to which the liberty was
forced to contribute, was described as having been ‘freely granted’ by the
community of the liberty; and that, even if this was a convenient ction by
which the formal jurisdictional independence of the liberty was preserved,
it nevertheless re ected a genuinely collective obligation.
192
But Edward III
granted that the 1371 subsidy should not fall to the future prejudice of the
liberty; and the bishopric was not to be subject to further taxation until
1436. is was one reason why the robust defences of local privilege, which
characterised the political culture of eenth- century Cheshire, had no
parallel in Durham.
193
Paradoxically, that is to say, the very privileges of the
liberty, and the e ectiveness with which they were defended by the bishops
189
DCRO, D/Gr/138; M. L. Holford, ‘The Esh family: officeholding and landed society in
the palatinate of Durham in the earlier fourteenth century’, NH, 43 (2006), p. 231.
190
Offler, North of the Tees, Chapter 14, passim.
191
Above, pp. 88–9; Northern Pets, no. 131.
192
Liddy, ‘Politics of privilege’, pp. 71–3; W. M. Ormrod, The Reign of Edward III (London,
1990), p. 204.
193
E 159/151, recorda, Michaelmas, m. 15 (saving the superior rights of the crown); CPR
1374–7, p. 30; CFR, xvi, p. 262; Storey, Langley, p. 55; T. Thornton, Cheshire and the Tudor
State, 1480–1560 (Woodbridge, 2000), pp. 1–5.
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DURHAM: GOVERNMENT, ADMINISTRATION AND LOCAL COMMUNITY
95
of Durham, inhibited the bishopric from becoming a potent force for action
and identi cation.
Nevertheless the development of ‘the community’ in the early 1300s, for
all the problems in pinning it down, does bear witness to the range and
depth of identi cation with the liberty over the whole area between Tyne
and Tees. Admittedly doubts remain about whether commitment to the
liberty and its institutions was as strong in Sadberge as in the county of
Durham. Even in the thirteenth century, some men from the wapentake
were prominent in the liberty’s administration, such as the sheri , justice
and steward John Gilet of Egglescli e.
194
On the other hand, however,
almost all those who are evidenced as taking a leading role in ‘the com-
munity of the liberty’ were principally associated with the county, and we
have seen that the inhabitants of the wapentake were not quick to con-
tribute towards the 1312 truce. It is also suggestive that the great majority
of the deeds and recognisances enrolled in the episcopal chancery during
Bury’s episcopate – enrolments that well illustrate how the inhabitants of
the liberty came to value its institutions – related to county rather than
to wapentake.
195
In 1313 money was bequeathed for the upkeep of all the
bridges throughout the bishopric of Durham; but this was a bequest by
John Daudre of Shotton and Sedge eld, in the historic county.
196
Again,
this may indicate that identi cation with the wider liberty was strongest
in its historic core. Yet the fact remains that it was the liberty as a whole
that provided the most important, and perhaps the only, focus for collec-
tive action and identi cation. It was ‘the community of the liberty’, not of
Durham or of Sadberge, that petitioned the crown; and Sadberge – in con-
trast, for example, to the wapentake of Maccles eld, and to south Tynedale
(in 1314–15) – did not petition or act collectively.
197
e separate identity of
Sadberge seems to be emphasised only in the private petitions of magnates
seeking to escape episcopal overlordship.
198
e division of the liberty into
county and wapentake, and the absence of a central curia or comitatus, did
not prevent the bishopric as a whole from acting as a potent vehicle for
identi cation and action.
194
Below, Chapter 3, p. 108.
195
DURH 3/29, passim. Such enrolments in the episcopal chancery were well established
by at least the time of Bishop Beaumont: NDD, p. 263; Reg. Melton, f. 703r; DCM, Loc.
XXVIII.23.
196
RPD, i, pp. 497–8.
197
PROME, ii, pp. 106, 194; iii, pp. 85–6; SC 8/12/577–8; below, Chapter 7, p. 323.
198
Above, Chapter 1, p. 50.
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