Holford Matthew, Stringer Keith. Border Liberties and Loyalties in North-East England, 1200-1400 (ENG)

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BORDER LIBERTIES AND LOYALTIES

136

were retained, and it is unlikely that the lives of the liberty’s greater families

centred on the bishops’ residences, as those of the Gloucestershire gentry

did on Berkeley castle.

215

And,  nally, throughout the period the legitimacy

of episcopal power had a potential rival in Durham Priory, where the body

of St Cuthbert was housed, and which might claim with equal validity

‘the liberties of St Cuthbert’ – as indeed might the local community, the

Haliwerfolk itself.

All this might suggest that, if questions of local hegemony and in uence

are considered broadly, the bishops of Durham not only were less masterful

in their liberty than the kings of Scots were in thirteenth- century Tynedale,

but exerted less impressive lordship than some English magnates did in

their ‘countries’ without any panoply of institutional privilege. Yet we must

not overstate the limitations of the bishops’ lordship.  ey may never have

dominated local society as did King Alexander III or, in a di erent context,

Richard Beauchamp, earl of Warwick (d. 1439).

216

But, as an ecclesiastical

liberty, Durham was not subject to the drastic  uctuations that might, as

a result of dynastic misfortune, a ect a secular ‘franchise’ or the regional

in uence of an aristocratic family. Its successive bishops were men of dif-

ferent character and abilities; and the time they spent in the bishopric also

varied a great deal according to their other responsibilities.

217

All, however,

defended ‘the liberty of St Cuthbert’ which, in Bishop Kellawe’s words, ‘is

ours to guard’;

218

and all exerted an in uence on the shape and aspirations

of local society. Despite changes of personnel, therefore, Durham enjoyed

a real continuity of lordship. Men might well move from one episcopal

domus or familia to another, and the composition of the liberty’s o ce-

holders rarely changed dramatically when a new bishop took o ce. In an

ecclesiastical liberty, opportunities for local families were always lessened

by the claims of clergymen and outsiders; but it does seem that local men

who wanted ‘in’ were able to obtain o ce and favour.  e liberty, we can

surmise, was central to the identities of men like Simon and Roger Esh;

 omas Surtees (d. c. 1345) served the crown on a few occasions, but

his lengthy service as steward of Durham (1330–3, 1337–43) surely mat-

tered more to him.  e liberty was able to support the ambitions of local

gentry, and this is one reason why these gentry did not become integrated

with neighbouring county society to the extent that can be witnessed in

215

Saul, Knights and Esquires, p. 74.

216

Below, Chapter 6, passim; C. Carpenter, ‘The Beauchamp affinity: a study of bastard

feudalism at work’, EHR, 95 (1980), pp. 514–32.

217

Compare the itineraries in Acta 1241–83, pp. 251–6; Fraser, Bek, pp. 233–49.

218

RPD, i, p. 296.

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DURHAM: PATRONAGE, SERVICE AND GOOD LORDSHIP

137

fourteenth- century Tynedale.

219

In fact, as has been seen with the families

of Meneville and Bowes, the liberty could also redirect the aspirations and

identities of men from Northumberland and Yorkshire. Even in the four-

teenth century, when the crown and some magnates exerted an increasing

in uence in the liberty, this in uence was o en brought to bear on patron-

age in the bishopric itself, so that the liberty and its opportunities remained

central to men’s concerns.

Moreover, if lordship is understood as ‘the power to command, to

compel and to exploit’,

220

then there can be no doubting the bishops’ impor-

tance throughout the period.  ey indeed had a control of government and

justice that the Beauchamps could only have dreamed of in Warwickshire,

and a virtual monopoly not only of legitimate secular force, but of ecclesias-

tical sanction. Such powers meant that their lordship as a whole was never

negligible. It might touch on every aspect of their subjects’ lives, and it

thereby gave the bishops the potential to exercise a decisive in uence on the

liberty’s social and political order. It was a potential that was rarely realised

to its fullest extent; but the e ects, for good or ill, could be dramatic. And, as

will be seen in the next chapter, at no period was this better illustrated than

under Bishop Anthony Bek.

219

Below, Chapter 7, pp. 334–55.

220

R. R. Davies, ‘The medieval state: the tyranny of a concept?’, Journal of Historical

Sociology, 16 (2003), p. 295, quoting Robert Boutruche.

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138

Durham under Bishop Anthony Bek,

1283–1311

Matthew Holford

e saw in the preceding chapter how the regalian powers of the

bishops of Durham gave them access to considerable stores of

patronage, and could make their good lordship extremely attractive. By

the same token, the bishops had the ability to be fearsomely heavy lords.

Private and public powers are not always easy to distinguish in medi-

eval England, but the distinction was particularly difficult in greater

liberties where ‘public’ rights were in ‘private’ hands. And doubtless the

‘private’ power and authority of the bishops of Durham were immeasur-

ably increased by their control of the bishopric’s ‘public’ government. The

bishops were sometimes told that they were no more than the king’s minis-

ters in the liberty, and on occasion they made the same claim themselves;

but such rhetoric should not distract us from the role of the liberty’s gov-

ernment in preserving and extending the bishop’s rights, possessions and

income. The liberty’s officers were the bishop’s salaried servants: the sheriff

of Durham swore to execute the bishop’s orders, and to maintain ‘the rights

and prerogative of the bishop’, not of the king.

The coroners, too, were

the bishop’s men: while their peers elsewhere in the kingdom – and indeed

in most liberties – were elected in the county court or its equivalent, in

Durham they were (with one exception) appointed by the bishop.

They

shared many duties with their royal counterparts, but they also helped

to administer the bishop’s estates. They collected rents from the bishop’s

free tenants, and were able to discipline his customary tenants with the

resources of ‘public’ rather than simply manorial authority.

Bek Recs, no. 82; RPD, i, p. 78; iv, pp. 420–1.

RPD, iv, pp. 347–8 (the oath of the Durham sheriff in 1345).

The exception was the coroner of Sadberge, who held office by hereditary serjeanty:

Storey, Langley, p. 62.

See, for example, C. J. Neville, ‘“The bishop’s ministers”: the office of coroner in late

medieval Durham’, Florilegium, 18 (2001), pp. 47–60; Storey, Langley, pp. 62, 69–70; R.

H. Britnell, ‘Feudal reaction after the Black Death in the palatinate of Durham’, Past and

Present, 128 (1990), pp. 32–3.

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DURHAM UNDER BISHOP ANTHONY BEK

139

 e combination of ‘public’ and ‘private’ administration that character-

ised the o ce of coroner in the liberty was displayed par excellence in what

was, in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, the liberty’s most impor-

tant o ce – that of steward. On the one hand, the steward had a general

responsibility for the liberty’s secular administration, and was said in 1388

to supervise its government. On the other, the steward had overall charge of

the bishop’s estates: he supervised the bishop’s hallmote court, and detailed

references to his management of episcopal properties occur in the receivers’

and baili s’ rolls of the liberty.

 is was in marked contrast to a liberty like

Bury St Edmunds, where the steward was concerned only with enforcing

the abbot’s governmental authority, and had no responsibility for running

his estates.

In Durham the government of the liberty as a whole was hard

to separate from the administration of the bishop’s estates and  nances and

from his ‘private’ lordship.

 e bishop’s control of local government allowed him to assert this lord-

ship vigorously. When rights of wreck were claimed against Peter Bruce

in Hartness early in the thirteenth century, it was the bishop’s baili s who

seized a disputed boat, and the bishop’s justices who ordered the bishop’s

sheri to erect symbols of episcopal jurisdiction.  e same justices amerced

Bruce’s men for seizing wreck on a di erent occasion; at another time,

excommunication and distraint compelled Bruce to release a prisoner he

had taken, an o ence for which the bishop’s justices  ned him £20.

When

wardships were disputed between the bishop and his tenants, the bishop

had the support of his o cers. Similarly episcopal actions a er the Black

Death demonstrate how the bishop ‘was able to employ the o cers of

local government to support his estate policy’, with the liberty’s coroners

arresting or distraining defaulting tenants.

Such powers can be paralleled in other liberties, and their abuse is o en

a recurrent theme. Lordship was exploited beyond what was acceptable to

the local community; the community sought to secure redress and where

possible to limit the powers of lordship, be it through negotiation, opposi-

tion by force, or appeals to a higher power – usually the crown. Such heavy

lordship was an important stimulus to the development of collective identi-

ties within liberties. It encouraged re ection on the rights and customs the

‘Office- holders’, i, p. 96. In the fifteenth century the stewardship declined in importance,

and the receiver- general became the principal agent of the bishop’s administration:

Storey, Langley, pp. 80–1; A. J. Pollard, North- Eastern England during the Wars of the

Roses (Oxford, 1990), p. 162.

H. M. Cam, Liberties and Communities in Medieval England, new edn (London, 1963), p.

189.

RPD, iii, pp. 46–8.

DCM, 1.5.Pont.3, art. 12; Britnell, ‘Feudal reaction’, pp. 32–3.

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BORDER LIBERTIES AND LOYALTIES

140

local community had enjoyed in earlier times, and consequently on that

community’s own ‘liberties’.  e organisation of resistance could be a spur

to communal activity; and if a collective ‘charter of liberties’ was secured,

such a document might well give ‘the community of the liberty’ a solidity

it had not previously possessed, thereby providing the basis for future self-

assertiveness.

In Durham, in fact, serious opposition to episcopal lordship seems to

have been relatively rare. Admittedly this impression may simply re ect

the uneven survival of evidence, because a er Bek’s episcopate the handful

of extant fourteenth- century  nancial and judicial records from the liberty

provides little basis for tracing episcopal lordship.  e picture might be

very di erent if we had knowledge of the proceedings before the justices

appointed in 1357 to enquire into the ‘oppression’ of the local commun-

ity.

Other records do contain references to the misdeeds of episcopal

o cers; but such references are few.

While any argument from silence is

di cult, the general absence of complaint may nevertheless re ect the will-

ingness of most thirteenth- and fourteenth- century bishops to exploit the

liberty in ways that recognised the traditional rights of its freeholders.

is probably signi cant, for example, that none of the surviving fourteenth-

century receivers’ rolls refers to an aid or a tallage, and that sums from

other casual ‘feudal’ revenue and from the pro ts of justice were always

low. Such income in 1339–40 brought in perhaps 5 per cent of the total, as

against around 80 per cent from rents and farms.  ere is a striking con-

trast with the Welsh Marcher lordships where casual revenue and judicial

pro ts could o en account for over half a liberty’s yield.

Arbitrary and

unpredictable exactions do not seem to have been so typical in Durham;

and it was perhaps for this reason that real opposition to episcopal regimes

arose on only two occasions in the Middle Ages,  rst in the early fourteenth

century and again in 1433.

On both occasions a bishop’s exploitation of

his regalian powers was a major source of grievance. But it was in 1300–5

DURH 3/30, m. 12d. For the context of this commission, see P. L. Larson, Conflict and

Compromise in the Late Medieval Countryside: Lords and Peasants in Durham, 1349–1400

(London, 2006), Chapter 6.

KB 27/246, m. 135 (a case brought in the royal eyre visiting the liberty during the vacancy

of 1317–18); CCR 1369–74, pp. 319–20.

For relations with unfree and customary tenants, poorly documented before around 1350,

see Britnell, ‘Feudal reaction’, passim; Larson, Conflict and Compromise, passim.

DCM, Loc.V.32; Davies, Lordship and Society, especially pp. 179, 187. Cf. J. Scammell,

‘The origin and limitations of the liberty of Durham’, EHR, 81 (1966), p. 472; above,

Chapter 2, pp. 83–4, for aids levied from the liberty in the thirteenth century.

For the dispute of 1433, see Storey, Langley, pp. 116–34; C. D. Liddy, The Bishopric of

Durham in the Late Middle Ages (Woodbridge, 2008), pp. 208–35.

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DURHAM UNDER BISHOP ANTHONY BEK

141

that episcopal lordship provoked the most forceful and e ective collec-

tive opposition, and although the dispute has been examined by modern

scholars, it repays further consideration. First, it provides an opportunity

to explore in depth the development and impact of the bishops’ powers as

‘lords royal’ over their subjects. Second, the exceptional documentation

of the dispute provides a snapshot of loyalties and identities in the liberty

which, if necessarily  eeting in duration, is nevertheless unparalleled in

detail. And,  nally, the resolution of the dispute allows the arguments

advanced in earlier chapters to be developed, since the roles played by

bishop, crown and local society re ected the cultural and political dynamics

already described.

 e course of the dispute can be summarised brie y.

It originated in

opposition to the ‘new and unheard- of impositions’ that were seen to

characterise Bek’s administration of the liberty, and this opposition was

galvanised by two factors. First, there were the heavy military demands

of Edward I in the winter of 1299–1300: these led to an a rmation of the

‘traditional’ right of the Haliwerfolk to be free from military obligations

outside the bishopric. Second, there was Bek’s attempt to carry out a visita-

tion of Durham Priory early in 1300, which was disputed by Prior Richard

Hoton: thereupon the priory was blockaded by the bishop’s forces, and Bek

appointed a new prior, Henry Lusby.  ese events pushed the local com-

munity into swearing a collective oath in April 1300 to seek justice from the

bishop and, if he failed them, from the crown. At the same time Prior Hoton

pursued his case against Bek before the king, and in Parliament in 1302 he

was able to show that Bek’s o cers had imprisoned a man carrying royal

letters of protection. Such an insult to royal authority provoked Edward

I’s con scation of the liberty on 7 July 1302. While the liberty was in royal

hands, pleas were heard against the bishop and his ministers, and a petition

of grievances was presented, in the spring of 1303, by ‘the community of the

liberty’.  is formed the basis for a ‘charter of liberties’, which was issued in

May 1303 and paved the way for the restoration of the liberty in July of that

year.  at was not the end of matters, however. Prior Hoton still had griev-

ances against Bek; and the local community was soon complaining to the

king that the bishop and his o cers were refusing fully to implement the

terms of the charter. Royal justices were sent to the liberty in March 1305,

and the charges brought before them, which again included the imprison-

The principal earlier accounts are R. K. Richardson, ‘The bishopric of Durham under

Anthony Bek, 1283–1311’, AA, 3rd ser., 9 (1913), especially pp. 130–208; Fraser, Bek,

Chapters 7–9.

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BORDER LIBERTIES AND LOYALTIES

142

ment of messengers carrying royal letters, led to the second con scation

of the liberty on 8 December 1305. And the liberty was to remain in royal

hands until the end of Edward I’s reign.

At the heart of the dispute was the ability of the bishop of Durham ruth-

lessly to exploit the resources of his liberty. Contemporary commenta-

tors were themselves in no doubt that dissension had been provoked by

a dramatic and unprecedented change in the liberty’s administration. It

was Walter Guisborough who described how almost all the inhabitants of

the bishopric revolted ‘in defence of their liberties’ in the face of ‘new and

unheard- of impositions’ by the bishop.

As we will  nd, matters were not

quite this straightforward, but there can be little doubt about Bek’s inten-

si cation of episcopal lordship. It can be seen, for example, in the income

he drew from the liberty. Receipts in 1306–7, which excluded franchisal

rights in crown hands, were still signi cantly greater than they were to be in

1339–40.

 e two accounts cannot be compared closely because too much

of Bek’s is damaged, but what survives suggests that the extra income came

from a limited range of sources.  e perquisites of Bek’s hallmote court,

for example, were worth £231.9s. from two tourns; Bury’s produced only

£101.9s.7d. from three tourns.

Freedom to increase many rents and farms

was restricted, but in other areas the bishop, as the lord of a ‘royal liberty’,

was less constrained. Judicial lordship, ‘feudal’ incidents, forest jurisdiction

and prerogative rights could all be exploited with vigour. It is no coinci-

dence that such areas were at the heart of local grievances in 1302–3.

Episcopal forest was thus a signi cant source of dispute. Usually forest,

and the relatively unrestricted seigneurial authority that went with it, was a

royal prerogative; but lords of greater liberties also claimed forest jurisdic-

tion, and its exercise provoked similar opposition to that found in royal

forests.

It did so, for example, in the Welsh Marcher lordships, and in

Cheshire in 1215 and again in the 1350s.

In Durham, similarly, forest

The Chronicle of Walter of Guisborough, ed. H. Rothwell (Camden Third Series, 1957), p.

348.

To the nearest pound, £4,028 (Boldon Buke, ed. W. Greenwell (SS, 1852), pp. xxxiii–

iv, total receipts of £5,695 minus foreign receipts of £1,667) as against £3,396 (DCM,

Loc.V.32), both sums including arrears.

Boldon Buke, p. xxxi; DCM, Loc.V.32, m. 6d; cf. Larson, Conflict and Compromise, p.

107, for later incomes (1349–62). ‘The community of the liberty’ complained in 1303 that

freemen were being forced to plead in the hallmote court: RPD, iii, p. 42.

The key work remains Select Pleas of the Forest, ed. G. J. Turner (Selden Society, 1901),

and the grievances of inhabitants of the royal forest are well illustrated by the Somerset

complaints of 1277 there printed and discussed, at pp. xxi–ii, 125–8.

Davies, Lordship and Society, pp. 123–6; VCH, Chester, ii, pp. 169–70, 175, 185–6.

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DURHAM UNDER BISHOP ANTHONY BEK

143

administration had long been an area of dispute between bishop, priory and

local community, and access to the important economic resources provided

by the forest was closely monitored by successive bishops.

In 1208 the

men of Haliwerfolk had found it necessary to obtain a guarantee of their

forest rights in King John’s charter.

When the respective rights of bishop

and priory in the liberty were set out in the Convenit of 1229, the bishop

reserved his forest, and the priory’s attempts later in the thirteenth century

to obtain common pasture, pannage and estover in areas of the forest were

only partly answered by a grant of Bishop Stichill.

Several of the speci c

complaints brought against Bek’s forest administration can be paralleled in

earlier and later sources.  e charge in 1303 that amercements in the forest

court were imposed ‘at will’, disregarding the suitors and the seriousness of

the o ence, echoed a mid- thirteenth- century complaint that the bishop’s

foresters had amerced one of the prior’s men at their will.

‘Chief foresters’

were singled out as ministers likely to have oppressed the local community

in 1357.

 e long- standing unpopularity of forest law and forest o cials

is not in doubt.

Bek, however, seems to have exploited the forest with new vigour.

provided issues of £180 in 1306–7; Bury, in 1339–40, could manage only

£135, including the arrears from the previous year’s account.

Some of

the ways in which Bek’s income was maximised were undoubtedly legiti-

mate: the sale of coal and timber, for example, was closely regulated.

But

other innovations encroached on the traditional customs of those within

and without the forest. In the  rst place, since the bishop was accused of

increasing the number of his foresters, it seems that forest administration

expanded under Bek, an expansion that is itself evidence of the bishop’s

concern for his rights and pro ts.

 is placed a greater burden on the

On these resources, see generally J. Birrell, ‘Common rights in the medieval forest: dis-

putes and conflicts in the thirteenth century’, Past and Present, 117 (1987), pp. 22–49.

Rotuli Chartarum in Turri Londinensi Asservati, ed. T. D. Hardy (Record Commission,

1837), p. 182.

G. V. Scammell, Hugh du Puiset, Bishop of Durham (Cambridge, 1956), pp. 216–17;

Acta 1153–1237, no. 282, art. 19 (and cf. nos. 39, 192, for ‘salva foresta’ clauses); DCM,

2.5.Pont.4; Acta 1241–83, no. 131.

RPD, iii, pp. 44–5; DCM, 2.5.Pont.4 (section 2, arts. 7–10).

DURH 3/30, m. 12d.

For other reviews of the evidence, see Fraser, Bek, pp. 87–8; K. Emsley and C. M. Fraser,

The Courts of the County Palatine of Durham (Durham, 1984), pp. 60–1.

1306–7: Boldon Buke, p. xxxiii (stock provided a further £50, giving a final total of £230);

1339–40: DCM, Loc.V.32, m. 6d. In the fifteenth century the sums were in the region of

£125: Storey, Langley, p. 71.

JUST 1/226, mm. 3d, 5d; Emsley and Fraser, Courts, p. 61, n. 6.

RPD, iii, pp. 65–6.

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BORDER LIBERTIES AND LOYALTIES

144

forest’s inhabitants, since some o cials received part of their fee in grain

renders from local vills, and in the mid- fourteenth century, at least, these

burdens fell on free tenants.

It is also likely that Bek had attempted to

expand the area of his forest: one of the community’s demands in 1303 was

that the forest should be no larger than it had been in King John’s reign.

Admittedly Bek may not have begun this expansion. In 1314 a jury found

that the abbot of Newminster and his men had been free to hunt at Chopwell

until Walter Barmpton attempted to claim the area as episcopal forest; but

the policy was traced back to Bishop Robert Lisle (1274–83), and Barmpton

 rst appears as forester towards the end of Lisle’s episcopate.

All the

same, Bek continued this policy with rigour. In 1287 the prior of Finchale

received a  ne of 500 marks for hunting in an area which he supposed to be

his common chase, but which the bishop evidently claimed as his forest: a

dramatic illustration of the potential severity of forest amercements.

In other areas, too, Bek intensi ed thirteenth- century developments in

episcopal lordship.  e exploitation of waste land had long been an impor-

tant source of income and patronage: throughout the second half of the

thirteenth century, the bishops of Durham were responsible for 80 to 90

per cent of all known grants of waste in the liberty. But such grants reached

new heights under Bek, who was responsible for more than any other

bishop except Richard Kellawe (1311–16), whose charters are exception-

ally well recorded.

When the reclamation of waste took place near areas

that were already cultivated, it threatened to harm the interests of existing

tenants by eating into their common land. Robert Binchester, for example,

complained that Bek’s assarting in Old Park north of Binchester had le

insu cient pasture for his tenement. Conversely John Mason, master of

the bishop’s works at Auckland, was granted 100 acres of land in Auckland

that had been common to the vills of Coundon and Byers. But he found it

impossible to keep hold of the entirety because of ‘the abusive words of the

people of Coundon’.

 ere is some evidence that Bek had attempted to expand episcopal

power in much more dramatic ways. One of his foresters claimed that the

bishops had forest ‘throughout the whole liberty’, which seems to echo

The later evidence is DURH 3/202/34–9; but cf. RPD, iii, p. 66.

RPD, iii, p. 44.

RPD, ii, pp. 1283–6.

RPD, iv, pp. 71–2.

H. M. Dunsford and S. J. Harris, ‘Colonization of the wasteland in County Durham,

1100–1400’, Economic History Review, 2nd ser., 56 (2003), p. 48. See also, for example,

RPD, ii, pp. 1177, 1195–7.

DCM, Reg. II, f. 91r–v; Cart. IV, ff. 257r–8v. For a dispute over approvements under

Bishop Lisle, see RPD, iv, pp. 10–11.

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DURHAM UNDER BISHOP ANTHONY BEK

145

the privileges of the Welsh Marcher lords who claimed control even over

wood growing on their tenants’ own land. It is clear that such a claim in

the bishopric had no historical foundation.

Bek’s attempts to control

freemen’s rights over mills o er another possible parallel to the Marches,

where Roger Mortimer, in the lordship of Chirk, exacted payment from

free tenants for the right to build mills on their land.

Bek destroyed a mill

of Durham Priory at Jarrow and prevented the priory from erecting one on

Holy Island;

and in 1303 it was necessary for the community to obtain

explicit con rmation of the right of every freeman to erect a mill on his

land.  is followed a complaint that the bishop’s baili s had prevented free

tenants from constructing mills and establishing mines on their demesne

land, ‘against the common law’; and a con rmation of free tenants’ right

to mine for coal and iron in several and common land was also included

in the ‘charter of liberties’.

 e implication seems to be that Bek had also

attempted to obtain a general jurisdiction over mining in the liberty.

Claims such as these probably were, as Walter Guisborough asserted,

‘new and unheard- of impositions’; so too, it is likely, were some of Bek’s

‘prerogative’ claims.

One, modelled on the royal prerogative, seems to

have been control over the alienation of land held of the bishop in chief.

 is privilege is of uncertain origin, and is not, in fact, clearly evidenced

under Bek, although it was well established under his much better-

documented successor Bishop Kellawe.

But the community’s petition in

1303 that men be allowed to grant, sell and lease their lands at will suggests

that Bek was exercising some control over alienation; and when Henry

Kelloe tried to lease land in Plawsworth in 1291 the bishop’s steward seized

the property and kept it for three years. It may well have been con scated

on the pretext that it had been alienated without licence.

It is also possi-

ble that the seizure of land alienated without licence was one of the factors

JUST 1/226, m. 3d; cf. Davies, Lordship and Society, p. 123. The bishops’ forest rights

early in the thirteenth century were described by witnesses in the document known as

Attestaciones Testium, printed in FPD, pp. 220–301.

L. B. Smith, ‘The Arundel charters to the lordship of Chirk in the fourteenth century’,

Bulletin of the Board of Celtic Studies, 23 (1968–70), p. 156.

RPD, iv, pp. 39–41, although the prior did not prosecute in one instance (JUST 1/227, m.

4d).

RPD, iii, pp. 42, 62–3. The grant to the community concerning mills excluded land that

already owed suit to a mill.

See generally C. M. Fraser, ‘Prerogative and the bishops of Durham, 1267–1376’, EHR, 74

(1959), pp. 467–76.

RPD, ii, pp. 1246–7, 1252–3, 1280; cf. RPD, iii, pp. 328–9, 344; DURH 3/202, passim.

RPD, iii, p. 43; JUST 1/226, m. 10. Henry eventually sold the land to the bishop for ten

marks. Fraser, ‘Prerogative’, p. 470, interprets this episode as showing that the bishop had

the right to buy at his own price land his tenants had alienated.

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