Holford Matthew, Stringer Keith. Border Liberties and Loyalties in North-East England, 1200-1400 (ENG)
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BORDER LIBERTIES AND LOYALTIES
166
On 10 February 1303, a er the community of the liberty had provided
men- at- arms and foot- soldiers to ght at the king’s wages, Edward wrote
to reassure it that such service would not be used as a harmful precedent,
and he repeated his assurance on 19 April.
143
In 1311 the local community
reiterated (apparently with success) the claim that service beyond Tyne or
Tees would be to ‘the damage of the liberty of St Cuthbert’, and the privilege
was repeatedly recon rmed.
144
So the liberty was o en asked to perform
military service; but it was usually acknowledged that such service was
being provided freely, and could not be exacted. Arguably, in the long run,
the claim established in 1300–3 was successful.
145
e question of military service, in May and (perhaps) February 1303,
had been among the disputed issues reserved for consideration in a future
session of Parliament.
146
In the end, however, events overtook any such
plans: no Parliament was held between October 1302 and February 1305,
and by the latter date further proceedings were being brought against
Bek, leading to another con scation of the liberty in December 1305.
Nevertheless Edward I’s gesture towards wider political consultation is
important. Decisions relating to the governance and customs of a liberty
as signi cant as Durham were not to be taken lightly. Edward showed no
such circumspection when the liberty of Tynemouthshire was con scated
between 1291 and 1299.
147
In general, the king’s attitude to the liberty during the dispute showed
more caution than might be expected. Historical consensus holds that
while Edward I took very seriously his duty to answer complaints from the
inhabitants of liberties, he had no objection to ‘franchises’ provided that
his overall control was recognised.
148
Edward’s respect for Durham was
rather greater than such an assessment suggests, even if the con scations
of the liberty le no doubt about the king’s ultimate mastery. As we have
noted elsewhere, he scrupulously maintained the independent functioning
of the liberty while it was under his control.
149
More striking, however, is
143
DCM, 2.2.Reg.12; CPR 1301–7, pp. 112, 134 (but cf. p. 426).
144
DCM, Loc.XXVIII.14, no. 15; Surtees, I, i, Appendix, no. 16 (printing DCM, 1.4.Reg.2).
145
Above, Chapter 1, pp. 42–3. Requests for military service from the liberty before 1327
are usefully listed in the digests in Parl. Writs, I; II, iii; see also RPD, i, pp. 16–17; ii, pp.
989–90, 1003–4, 1100–1. Examples of the reservation of the liberty’s privileges include
RPD, i, pp. 16–17; iv, pp. 512–13; Rot. Scot., i, pp. 169, 196; CPR 1321–4, p. 191; 1330–4,
p. 460; 1340–3, p. 348; C 81/280/14468.
146
RPD, iii, p. 46; CPR 1301–7, p. 149; above, p. 163, n. 133.
147
Below, Chapter 5, pp. 207, 219.
148
See, for example, Select Cases in the Court of King’s Bench, ed. G. O. Sayles (Selden Society,
1936–71), ii, p. lv; Prestwich, Edward I, pp. 258–64, 538–40; Davies, Lordship and Society,
pp. 257–69.
149
Above, Chapter 2, pp. 66–7, 75.
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DURHAM UNDER BISHOP ANTHONY BEK
167
Edward’s acknowledgement of the bishop’s prerogative wardship, all the
more so because the king was actively de ning and not simply con rm-
ing this privilege. No less remarkable was his respect for the community’s
exemption from military service. Both cases illustrate the arguments put
forward in an earlier chapter about the crown’s attitude to the liberty. e
power of Cuthbert, the liberty’s patronal saint, certainly encouraged Edward
to treat Durham with great circumspection: in the king’s own words, he
was simply the ‘minister and maintainer of the liberty of St Cuthbert’.
150
Furthermore, the privileges of wardship and exemption from military
service were both strongly associated with the liberty ‘between Tyne and
Tees’: the Haliwerfolk positioned themselves within the two rivers, and it
was similarly there that, according to Prerogativa Regis and other sources,
the bishop exercised his rights of prerogative wardship. As has been seen,
the distinctive status of the lands and people ‘between Tyne and Tees’ was
rmly established, well supported by powerful cultural and historical tradi-
tions.
151
It was these cultural and historical traditions, claimed as they were
by both bishop and local community, that ultimately enabled both parties
not only to retain, but to con rm and increase their privileges – privileges
that were not always compatible.
e dispute between Bek and his tenants, as we have seen, has some
parallels in the con ict between Bishop Langley and his tenants in 1433.
It also has analogues in various other liberties where the exploitation of
lordship led to collective resistance and, in some cases, to royal interven-
tion and to ‘charters of liberties’.
152
e Bek dispute, admittedly, allows
both collective activity and royal intervention to be followed in unusual
detail. But it was also distinctive in more signi cant ways, which re ected
the factors that made Durham unique among the north- eastern liberties.
Important above all was the historical culture explored in Chapter 1,
which lay behind many of the features that distinguished the ‘revolt’ of
1300–3 from that of 1433. e outbreak of opposition to Bek was made
possible because the protection and privileges St Cuthbert bestowed on
the liberty were claimed by the local community and by Durham Priory,
as well as by the bishop himself. A sense of traditional rights and freedoms
facilitated the emergence of collective action. e resolution of the dispute
by Edward I, similarly, re ected the king’s respect for the claims of these
various parties.
150
Above, Chapter 1, p. 37; C. M. Fraser, ‘Edward I of England and the regalian franchise of
Durham’, Speculum, 31 (1956), pp. 329, 336, 338, 342.
151
Above, Chapter 1, especially pp. 44–52.
152
Below, Conclusions, p. 428.
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BORDER LIBERTIES AND LOYALTIES
168
One e ect of the dispute was to cement the rights of these di erent
constituencies in the liberty. In extensive extracts from royal records and
other sources, the priory recorded its victories over the bishop and his
ministers.
153
King John’s charter to the Haliwerfolk of 1208 was copied
by the priory, and became newly important as a record of local privilege.
e Haliwerfolk themselves gained a new self- identi cation in the years
around 1300, and the dispute provided a crucial stimulus to the develop-
ment of collective action and institutions in the liberty, as ‘the community
of the liberty’ made its rst sustained appearance. One lasting result of the
dispute was that the rights of these constituencies became more clearly
de ned. Bek’s ‘charter of liberties’, which was also in places a royal a rma-
tion of the bishop’s own ‘liberties’, became something like an authoritative
statement.
154
On a broader view, what impact did the dispute have on the liberty’s
development in the longer term? Most profoundly, the shape and integrity
of the bishopric were fundamentally a ected by Edward I’s con scation
of Barnard Castle and Hartness when the liberty was in royal hands in
1306–7. It marked not only a theoretical challenge to the bishops’ powers
of prerogative, but a signi cant decrease in their in uence in the wapen-
take of Sadberge: Bishop Poore’s victories over Peter Bruce in Hartness
were considerably undermined a er its grant to the Cli ords. is sup-
ports the judgement that the liberty’s privileges were diminished by the
dispute. Such was the opinion of the Durham priory chronicler, writing a
little later, and his verdict – as well as being echoed by Lapsley and other
historians
155
– appears to have been shared by some contemporaries. Even
in the immediate a ermath of the dispute it may have seemed that, despite
Edward I’s scrupulous preservation of the liberty’s privileges in 1302–3, its
status was not secure. In March 1304, several months a er the liberty had
been restored to Bek, Peter Tursdale and Agnes his wife quitclaimed to
Durham Priory their common land in Ferryhill and the Merringtons. At
the same time, they agreed – if they should be so required – to levy a nal
concord before the bishop’s justices, ‘or before the justices of the king of
153
See in particular DCM, Loc.VII, passim.
154
Thus in DCM, 1.5.Pont.3, art. 12, of c. 1400, it is implied that the charter offered a defini-
tive ruling on prerogative wardship – although doubt was cast on whether this should
bind Durham Priory, which had not been party to the charter. Cf. Richardson, ‘Bek’, p.
193, n. 21.
155
Scriptores Tres, pp. 88–9; Lapsley, Durham, p. 42; J. W. Alexander, ‘The English palati-
nates and Edward I’, JBS, 22 (1983), p. 10. The re- establishment of Bek’s authority over
the liberty following its restoration in 1307 is examined in detail in Fraser, Bek, pp.
215–28.
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DURHAM UNDER BISHOP ANTHONY BEK
169
England if they should happen for any reason to hold pleas in the liberty of
Durham’.
156
e possibility of royal interference in the liberty was real; and it also
remained real because of the circumstances in which the dispute of 1300–3
had been resolved. Edward I assumed responsibilities which went beyond
the usual royal duty of doing justice to all subjects. When the liberty was
restored in July 1303 Edward threatened royal intervention if the ‘charter
of liberties’ was not observed; the charter itself was copied onto the close
roll in the royal chancery, and the original was given to William Green eld,
the king’s chancellor, for safe- keeping. When the bishop was later accused
of failing to honour the settlement, the community was forced to petition
Edward for the return of the original charter.
157
e local community thus
developed a habit of turning directly to the crown, and complaints against
the bishop continued to be made. Early in 1307 – while the liberty was in
royal hands – ‘the community’ complained in Parliament about the exac-
tions of the bishop’s o cers; and it did so again later the same year.
158
e
liberty’s direct relationship with the crown persisted in some sense until
1353. In this year, when ‘the community of the bishopric’ (for reasons that
are unclear) sought an exempli cation of Bek’s charter, it did not turn to
the current bishop, omas Hat eld, but to Edward III, who inspected and
con rmed the text on the royal close roll.
159
It must be emphasised that the liberty was returned, shortly a er Edward
II’s accession in 1307, with the privileges of the bishops of Durham largely
untouched, and in some ways even strengthened. Nevertheless Edward
I’s role in con rming these privileges does deserve emphasis, because the
dispute was a foretaste of the increasingly important role the crown was
to play in de ning the liberty. And by reviewing that growing role, we can
draw to a close the story of the dispute, and highlight the wider motifs
in the liberty’s later history that have emerged in the preceding chapters.
e scal and military demands of successive kings, and the increasingly
antiquated nature of the liberty’s legal system, all made negotiation with
the crown ever more necessary in the rst half of the fourteenth century.
Bishops of Durham were increasingly driven to petition kings of England
for clari cation or con rmation of their privileges, or to limit the activities
156
DCM, 4.12.Spec.13, 14.
157
PROME, ii, p. 106 (and cf. p. 194). For earlier events, see Fraser, Bek, pp. 190, 192–6. It
was perhaps the original charter, rather than the close roll text, which formed the basis of
two copies made at Durham in the early fourteenth century: BL, MS Lansdowne 397, ff.
266r–8r; RPD, iii, pp. 61–7.
158
Northern Pets, no. 179.
159
DCM, 2.4.Pont.13.
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BORDER LIBERTIES AND LOYALTIES
170
of royal o cials. It was thus apparently with the assent of Edward III and
Parliament that the liberty’s legal system was reformed around the 1340s.
160
But the growing role of the crown, and indeed of Parliament, in the de ni-
tion of the liberty by no means led to its diminution. e commons did
attack some of Durham’s privileges – notably, in the 1370s, its immunity
from taxation – but the overwhelming trend of parliamentary legislation
in the later fourteenth and the eenth centuries was to con rm and even
extend the liberty’s rights.
161
e Bek dispute also presaged the growing informal in uence of
the crown in the liberty’s social and political life. e development of the
dispute in 1300–1 owed something to personal links between Edward
I and the liberty’s magnates, especially John Fitzmarmaduke; and, not
surprisingly, the dispute strengthened their associations with the crown.
Fitzmarmaduke le for Scotland, where he had been in the king’s service at
intervals since 1301; by 1309 he was governor of Perth, and in 1310 Edward
II rewarded him for his services with lands worth £200 a year. Indeed he
was to die in Perth, although he did request burial in the bishopric.
162
Nor
was Fitzmarmaduke the only one to imagine that his best opportunities
lay outside the liberty, or who wished to keep a low pro le until the end of
Bek’s episcopate. Alan Teesdale, another representative of the local com-
munity, pursued a career in the service of Hugh Despenser the younger
and of Edward II, probably because he faced reprisals from Bek a er the
restoration of the liberty.
163
As we have seen, the growth of the crown’s indirect in uence within
the bishopric did not lead automatically to an undermining of the liberty’s
autonomy.
164
But it did mark a real change in the later medieval history of
the bishopric – in summary, ‘the growing importance of Westminster’.
165
is was something Durham shared with the other north- eastern liberties,
largely as a result of war with Scotland. In other ways, however, Durham
was distinctive. What Jean Scammell called ‘the static infertility of fran-
chise’ is far from universally evident in the North- East: witness the develop-
ment of justices of the peace in Hexhamshire and Tynemouthshire, as well
160
Above, Chapter 2, pp. 73, 81.
161
C. D. Liddy, ‘The politics of privilege: Thomas Hatfield and the palatinate of Durham,
1345–81’, Fourteenth Century England, 4 (2006), pp. 71–5; T. Thornton, ‘Fifteenth-
century Durham and the problem of provincial liberties in England and the wider ter-
ritories of the English crown’, TRHS, 6th ser., 11 (2001), p. 94.
162
CDS, v, nos. 2300, 2406, 2424, 2436, 2452, 2460, 2716, 2745; CCR 1307–13, pp. 182–3;
CPR 1307–13, pp. 226, 228; RPD, ii, pp. 1149–50; Fraser, Bek, pp. 104, 218, n. 1.
163
Fraser, Bek, p. 217; above, Chapter 3, p. 132.
164
Above, Chapter 3, pp. 134–5.
165
Liddy, ‘Politics of privilege’, p. 79.
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DURHAM UNDER BISHOP ANTHONY BEK
171
as in Durham itself.
166
But no other north- eastern liberty developed a er
the mid- fourteenth century in quite the same way as Durham. e liberty’s
administration was increasingly modelled on Westminster; men associated
with the royal courts played a greater role in the liberty’s courts, and the
liberty increasingly came to resemble royal government in miniature. At
the same time, and as a result, the bishops’ regalian jurisdiction became
increasingly elaborate, as was symbolised by Bishop Hat eld’s ostentatious
seal, directly modelled on the royal great seal.
167
Contrary to the arguments
of some earlier writers, it may well have been the century and a half a er
1345, and not the years around 1300, that marked the liberty’s greatest
development.
What this meant for the inhabitants of the liberty is not always clear. But
it is perhaps signi cant that it was the mid- 1340s – years of dramatic reform
in the liberty – that witnessed the refusal of the Haliwerfolk to carry out an
inquisition post mortem for royal commissioners.
168
Durham’s institutional
development may well have strengthened its inhabitants’ identi cation
with the liberty. Loyalties, of course, were complex, and could not always
be relied on, as Bishop Langley found to his cost in 1433.
169
But in general,
as Tim ornton in particular has shown, the liberty seems to have our-
ished in the eenth century.
170
is was in part the result of institutional
evolution in the liberty, which continued to keep pace with developments
in royal government such as the expansion of equity jurisdiction. It also,
perhaps, owed something to the vigorous defences of the bishopric’s privi-
leges mounted at Durham Priory. But we must not neglect the actions and
loyalties of the liberty’s inhabitants: ‘the people called Haliwerfolk’, as they
could still be described.
171
166
Scammell, ‘Origin and limitations’, p. 463; below, Chapter 5, pp. 193, 227.
167
Above, Chapter 2, p. 65.
168
Above, Chapter 1, pp. 51–2.
169
Storey, Langley, pp. 116–34.
170
Thornton, ‘Fifteenth- century Durham’, passim.
171
DCM, Cart. III, f. 1r.
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172
5
Hexhamshire and Tynemouthshire
Matthew Holford
I
n many respects the liberties of Hexhamshire and Tynemouthshire, held
respectively by the archbishop of York and the prior of Tynemouth, had
little in common. They were of contrasting geographical character, for
Hexhamshire was compact and Tynemouthshire dispersed. Hexhamshire’s
privileges were substantial and well established; Tynemouthshire’s rights,
on the other hand, especially from around the 1290s to the 1330s, faced
serious challenges from the crown and from the priory’s own tenants.
The lordship of the absentee archbishops of York was rarely oppressive or
resented, whereas successive priors of Tynemouth alienated many of their
more substantial tenants. The contrasts are great: but it is these contrasts
that justify analysis of the two liberties together. Above all, their divergent
stories show clearly how the impact of liberties on local society was deter-
mined by the complex interactions of lordship and jurisdictional privilege.
e outlines of these stories are not new, as both liberties have been
given considerably more scholarly attention than Tynedale or Redesdale.
Both – and Tynemouthshire in particular – received valuable coverage
in the Northumberland County History.
1
No apology, though, need be
made for a reconsideration of lordship and loyalties in both liberties that
draws on the full range of available evidence. And while neither liberty
is as well documented as Durham, each has its particular archival riches.
For Hexhamshire the key sources are the registers and cartularies of the
archbishops of York, although these vary considerably in the amount of
relevant material they contain. Unusually rich for the rst half of the thir-
teenth century, they provide a steady record of o cial appointments and
business from the late thirteenth until the mid- fourteenth century, when
entries concerning the liberty become much scarcer. For Tynemouthshire
the principal source is the register or cartulary compiled mostly under Prior
Robert Tewing (1315–40). is includes a wide range of material relating to
1
NCH, iii (by A. B. Hinds), and iv (by J. C. Hodgson); viii and ix (by H. H. E. Craster).
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HEXHAMSHIRE AND TYNEMOUTHSHIRE
173
the liberty, particularly for the period between around 1290 and 1340: not
only formal grants and deeds, but manorial surveys, legal extracts, other
memoranda, and records of leases. Again, however, the sources become
relatively few a er the mid- fourteenth century. For both liberties, therefore,
the period to around 1350 lends itself to particularly detailed coverage; and
this period provides the focus of the following discussions.
Hexhamshire
Compared with Durham or Tynedale, Hexhamshire was a relatively small
liberty, covering an area of just over ninety square miles. South of the
Tyne, its eastern border largely followed the Devil’s Water to the moor-
lands around Blanchland and Rookhope, where the watershed divided the
southern extremities of the liberty from Northumberland and Durham. To
the west the boundary followed the River West Allen, travelling north past
Staward and Langley until the junction of the North and the South Tyne.
A stretch of the North Tyne then separated Hexhamshire from Tynedale
until, south of Chollerton, the boundary followed the Erring Burn. e
remainder of the liberty’s border travelled east, south of Bavington, and
then south back to the Tyne west of Kirkheaton, Whittington and Halton.
Much of the liberty was not clearly de ned by major natural features,
and it is no surprise that there were disputes over common and bounda-
ries around Staward, Elrington, ockrington and Anick.
2
Nevertheless
Hexhamshire did occupy a contiguous and compact area: in contrast to
Tynemouthshire, geography posed few di culties for government or social
cohesion. Its ecclesiastical organisation, too, was coherent and uni ed, for
the liberty comprised a single parish, with chapelries at Allendale, Bing eld,
St Oswald in Cocklaw and St John Lee.
3
e liberty’s privileges, furthermore, provided a constitutional and insti-
tutional basis for the powerful exercise of lordship and – potentially – for the
development of a cohesive local community. Like Durham and Tynedale,
Hexhamshire was accepted as a ‘royal liberty’ where the king’s writ did not
run. As the jurors south of the Coquet put it in 1279, ‘the archbishop of
York holds Hexham and Allendale, and his writ runs there’.
4
As such, the
2
Reg. Gray, pp. 286–8, 290–1; NCS, ZSW/1/9; HN, II, iii, pp. 443–4; Northumb. Pets, no.
62. For a reference in 1269 to the bounds of the liberty ‘as they are observed on the day of
this agreement’, see NAR, pp. 160–1.
3
The modern civil parishes comprising the liberty are Allendale, West Allen, Acomb,
Bingfield, Hexhamshire, Sandhoe and Wall, and parts of Corbridge (Portgate) and
Whittington (Hallington).
4
NAR, p. 358; cf. RH, ii, p. 21.
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BORDER LIBERTIES AND LOYALTIES
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Map 3 The Liberty of Hexhamshire
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HEXHAMSHIRE AND TYNEMOUTHSHIRE
175
liberty gures only very rarely in the thirteenth- century records of royal
government – most notably during vacancies of the see of York, when it fell
into royal hands. And a er the episcopate of Walter Gray (1215–55) these
vacancies were rarely prolonged, although on a number of occasions the
temporalities of the see were in crown hands for periods of over a year.
5
As in the case of other liberties, of course, Hexhamshire’s privileges had
to evolve to keep pace with the developing organs and pretensions of royal
government – judicial, military and nancial. By at least the early thirteenth
century, the archbishop appointed his own justices to hear pleas in the
liberty during visitations of the royal eyre, and the liberty’s independence
from such eyres was respected throughout that century.
6
For most of this
period little is known of the liberty’s court outside sessions of eyre; but the
absence of Hexhamshire pleas from the records of the royal courts suggests
that the liberty served its inhabitants well.
7
It continued to keep abreast of
developments in royal justice in the later thirteenth and the fourteenth cen-
turies, as successive archbishops appointed justices of gaol delivery, oyer
and terminer, and the peace.
8
e challenge o ered to their judicial privi-
leges in the Quo Warranto proceedings of 1293 was perfunctory: although
the crown’s attorney argued that such royal rights as a chancery and justices
required explicit royal grant, the archbishop’s assertion of long usage was
soon accepted.
9
Hexhamshire’s privileges were more searchingly tested by the growing
demands of the ‘war- state’ for money, manpower and resources. Such
demands signi cantly curtailed the privileges of many other liberties else-
where in England. Almost all became subject to parliamentary taxation,
which royal writs and commissions instructed should be levied ‘within
and without liberties’; even jurisdictions as privileged as Bury St Edmunds
and the Isle of Ely might nd themselves unable to exclude the king’s
taxers.
10
And commissions of array that also contained the clause ‘within
and without liberties’ were o en similarly intrusive. It was rare for com-
missions to be issued to liberty- holders, and few joined the abbot of Battle
5
That is, in 1265–6, 1296–7, 1304–6, 1315–17, 1340–2 and 1405–7.
6
Hexham Priory, ii, p. 91; NAR, pp. 312, 357–9.
7
The references to liberty justices in Reg. Gray, pp. 227–8, 235, 248–9, all apparently relate
to 1227–8 and are to be associated with the 1227 Northumberland eyre. See otherwise
ibid., pp. 282–3; below, pp. 193–4.
8
For example, Reg. Giffard, no. 855; Reg. Romeyn, ii, no. 1225; Reg. Greenfield, i, no. 558;
NCH, iii, p. 30; and see also below, pp. 192–3.
9
PQW, p. 591; KB 27/137, m. 33d; cf. D. W. Sutherland, Quo Warranto Proceedings in the
Reign of Edward I, 1278–1294 (Oxford, 1963), pp. 109–10.
10
J. F. Willard, Parliamentary Taxes on Personal Property, 1290 to 1334 (Cambridge, MA,
1934), p. 31; E. Miller, The Abbey and Bishopric of Ely (Cambridge, 1951) p. 206.
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