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

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BORDER LIBERTIES AND LOYALTIES

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business was conducted by the chief o cer in Tynedale, referred to as the

sheri (vicecomes); and it was taken for granted that, as an eyre court before

the lord/king’s justices, it had the jurisdiction and functions of a full royal

court in all matters concerning the liberty.  e roll’s speci c references to

comitatus and vicecomes have no parallels in other Tynedale documents:

the terminology is curia (court) and ballivus or, rarely, senescallus (baili /

steward). But Alexander III’s clerk was far from embroidering the liberty’s

institutional status and organising power. In 1293 a Northumberland

county jury con rmed that the king of Scots used to have his own coroners

in Tynedale; that he held gaol deliveries at his pleasure; and that he heard

all crown and civil pleas by his own justices and by his own writs.

Other

observers put matters more succinctly: they spoke of his ‘regal rights’ (lib-

ertates regales); they might stress his entitlement to ‘all rights pertaining to

the [English] crown and to the dignity of the king’; they declared that ‘his

writ runs there’, and thereby assumed that the liberty excluded the king of

England’s writs and his o cers.

Admittedly the evidence for the broader rights of local superiority

appropriate to the owner of a ‘royal liberty’ is sometimes non- existent or

ambiguous, especially as regards ‘repledging’, pardons, forfeits of war,

forti cations, markets and boroughs.

Yet if in some respects Tynedale

cannot be shown to have been as privileged as Durham, it can con dently

be said that, at least by Alexander III’s day, the liberty conferred on the

lord/king a copious portfolio of power and patronage, including rights to

administer forests, levy tolls, enforce knighthood, grant land and judicial

privileges at will, and confer exemptions from juries and o ce. Again, he

could control alienations by his tenants, take primer seisin, and seize mesne

tenancies into wardship whether they were held by knight service or not; he

likewise enjoyed such a supremacy that he could not be sued in the liberty

court. As will also become clear, it was correctly assumed that there was no

major rival focus of governance and obedience within the liberty, and that

the peace enforced there was the lord/king’s own peace, not the English

king’s peace. In theory, and o en in actuality, this was a form of self- rule to

be reckoned with; it was a no less potent source of political authority and

control.

Moreover, no English liberty- owner was more assertive and in uential

PQW, p. 604; NER, no. 641a.

JUST 1/651, m. 19; PQW, p. 197; RH, ii, p. 21; NAR, p. 358.

For example, Tynedale’s boroughs at Haltwhistle and Newbrough depended initially on

grants of markets by the English crown (below, p. 276); but their development is not fully

documented. For a market at Bellingham by prescription or the Scots king’s grant, see

JUST 1/657, m. 9.

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than the Scots king in protecting the institutional identity and integrity

of his liberty. In 1272 Alexander III bluntly instructed his father- in- law

Henry III that Tynedale’s eastern march formed a jurisdictional fault- line

between ‘our liberty’ and ‘the county of Northumberland’;

he later refused

to prejudice his authority by obeying Edward I’s commands to enforce

orders of excommunication within the liberty, and simultaneously curbed

the ecclesiastical jurisdiction exercised there by the bishops of Durham.

Yet more notable was Alexander’s insistence on Tynedale’s immunity from

English royal taxation. He objected when the liberty was asked to contrib-

ute to the   eenth of 1275, even though he was o ered the privilege of

levying it himself. He berated Edward I’s taxers for their ‘molestation and

calumny’ in attempting to assess Tynedale for the thirtieth of 1283, and

instructed ‘his well- beloved brother’ that the liberty ‘ought to be free from

all such taxation’.

Nor, as will be seen, was there anything tentative about

Alexander’s assertion of his dominance over the miners of Alston Moor,

the one body to claim exemption from, and actively to contest, his superior-

ity as lord of Tynedale.

Besides these considerations, the few cases of direct involvement by the

English crown in Tynedale’s internal a airs before 1286 scarcely amounted

to systematic surveillance and had only a limited impact.  ere was, at

times, the possibility of pre- emptive action for military- political reasons.

In fact, Alexander II’s exercise of the right to licence castle- building twice

alarmed the English authorities, and provoked protests that he was exceed-

ing his powers ‘contrary to his predecessors’ charters’ and ‘to the king of

England’s prejudice’.  us the sheri of Northumberland asked Henry

III for instructions in 1237 because (he claimed) Alexander had illegally

authorised the forti cation of a house of exceptional strength at Dally,

which would be garrisoned with men ‘who wish evil to the kingdom of

England and especially to Northumberland’. On the second occasion, in

1244, Henry III’s fears of Scottish aggression were such that he ordered the

sheri to take into his custody the castle or hall newly erected at Tarset.

It is not known, however, if the sheri was able to execute this writ.  e

outcome in 1237 is also unclear; and, more importantly, the normal

pattern of close relations between the two royal houses kept the need for

interventions of this kind to a minimum.

Royal Letters, ii, no. 681.

CDS, ii, no. 290. The principle upheld here – that the lord/king’s tenants in Tynedale

should not be excommunicated without his licence – was, of course, a ‘regal right’.

CDS, ii, nos. 62, 241; SC 1/20/163.

CDS, v, no. 12; CR 1242–7, p. 221; with Matthew Paris, Chronica Majora, ed. H. R. Luard

(RS, 1872–83), iv, p. 380.

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 en there is the well- documented case of Alston, which merits discus-

sion at some length. Matters came to a head when in 1278–9, a er decades

of largely ignoring the miners’ complaints about attacks on their customs

and rights, the English government mounted the only sustained chal-

lenge to the Scots king’s local jurisdiction and authority.

 e miners saw

themselves as a privileged community under the English crown’s direct

lordship.  ey laid claim to special eyre sessions held by its justices, and to

their own coroner; they likewise insisted that the mine had by right always

been part of the county of Cumberland. Now they also maintained that the

whole manor, moor and waste of Alston lay within the mine’s bounds – a

key demand in terms of their need for wood and pasture, but one at odds

with their acknowledgement in 1245 that the manor had been given to the

Scottish crown with the ‘barony’ of Tynedale, reserving to the English king

only the mine and its privileges.

Arrayed against them were Alexander III’s all- inclusive claims of higher

jurisdiction and the manorial rights asserted by Alston’s mesne lords, the

Viponts. But during the northern- circuit eyres led by John Vaux in 1278–9,

a series of victories were won for the miners and the English crown. At

Carlisle in November 1278, it was found that the mine, moor and waste

had been withdrawn from the king of England’s authority, and the sheri

of Cumberland was empowered to sequester them (including the Vipont

lands). At Alston itself, jurors from Cumberland and Westmorland testi ed

that the lawful boundaries between Cumberland and Tynedale followed

the Gilderdale and Ayle burns, and that Alston – that is, the entire modern

parish of Alston with Garrigill – therefore lay wholly within the county

and outside the liberty. In April 1279 Edward I intervened in response to a

petition from ‘our miners of our manor of Alston in Cumberland’, which

complained that for the past forty years they had been subject to the liberty

without Henry III’s licence, and to the disinheritance of the English crown

and its lieges. In letters to Vaux and his fellow justices, Edward I deplored the

‘great injury and many wrongs’ done to the royal dignity, and called up the

record of the case for review in King’s Bench. In May 1279, in the eyre court

at Appleby, Robert Vipont did surrender his claim to the mine, though not to

F. W. Ragg, ‘Mauld’s Meaburn, the Alston mines, and a branch of the Veteriponts’,

TCWAAS, new ser., 11 (1911), pp. 260ff., is the indispensable starting- point, though

not free from error. The main record sources are JUST 1/132, mm. 27, 34; 1/143/1, with

translated extracts in CDS, ii, nos. 146–7; Ragg, ‘Mauld’s Meaburn’, pp. 266–9. See also

CRR, xviii, no. 1721E; NAR, p. 266; PQW, pp. 117, 129–30, 197. The wrangles over Alston

apparently did not centre on ownership of mineral rights. The once rich silver- bearing

veins around Garrigill and Nenthead were largely spent, though lead production remained

important, if not consistently so: cf. H. Summerson, Medieval Carlisle (CWAAS, Extra

Series, 1993), i, p. 68.

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the manor. When the justices sat in Yorkshire, a quo warranto action about

it was brought against Vipont by Edward I’s prosecutor, Alan Walkingham,

who dismissed Vipont’s charters as insu cient title for the exercise of any

authority in Alston. Walkingham also sued Alexander III to answer by what

warrant he claimed regal jurisdiction over the manor, which is ‘of the ancient

demesne of the crown of the lord king within his county of Cumberland’. It

was pleaded that Alexander had usurped ‘all the crown’s rights in the manor’,

and the counterplea of long user cited by Alexander’s attorney was rejected

as inadmissible. In June 1279 Alexander persuaded Edward I to issue writs

restoring to him ‘his liberty of Alston’ and to Robert Vipont ‘his lands of

Alston’; but Edward reserved the right to renew suit.

 e whole matter was

then taken coram rege, and in 1281 or 1282 Edward recovered by judgement

‘the manor of Alston as of our county of Cumberland’.

Several conclusions can be drawn from this a air. At  rst sight it seems

that the English monarchy had in icted a major defeat on Alexander III

and the Viponts. Indeed, Robert Vipont acknowledged as much when he

renounced his homage for Alston in deference to Alexander’s right, as a

‘lord royal’, not to be vouched to warranty or otherwise subject to the liberty

court’s jurisdiction.

Yet, taken in the round, the English crown’s mastery

was more apparent than real. A er all, according to some of the legal argu-

ments in 1278–9, the original encroachments on English royal prerogative

went back as far as King John’s reign (1199–1216). And when Edward I

and his ministers stirred themselves to intervene seventy years or so later,

they expressed their authority reactively, inquiring into Tynedale’s govern-

mental rights only as a consequence of serious local tensions – a reminder

in itself that there were no routine mechanisms for interaction between the

English royal administration and the liberty. What is more, those tensions

had arisen as much from disputed ownership of the Alston fells as from (on

the miners’ side) concern to uphold the English king’s authority. Yet again,

a er  nal judgement had been given – and when Edward I was in the throes

of his second Welsh campaign in July 1282 – Scottish pressure secured a

regrant of Alston manor to the Viponts, to be held in fee of the kings of

Scots as part of the liberty of Tynedale. Political considerations did not

oblige Edward to retreat from the principle that the mine itself was under

his immediate jurisdiction.

But, in the event, Alexander III’s o cers

C 54/96, m. 6, calendared, without reference to the salvo jure regis provisions, in CCR

1272–9, p. 532; CDS, ii, no. 160.

For the judgement, which cannot be found on King’s Bench rolls, see CPR 1281–92, p. 29.

The Acts of the Parliaments of Scotland, ed. T. Thomson and C. Innes (Edinburgh, 1814–

75), i, p. 116.

CPR 1281–92, p. 29, noting the reservation of the mine.

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BORDER LIBERTIES AND LOYALTIES

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and the Viponts continued to assert their authority in Alston Moor at the

miners’ expense.

All told, what this rare intrusion into Tynedale’s a airs

seems to con rm is that, as a normal course, a monopoly of local power and

governance lay  rmly in the liberty- owner’s hands.

 is is a view of power- relations that cuts across the traditional model

of a centralised thirteenth- century English ‘state’. But it still falls short of

fully registering the essentials of the liberty’s distinctiveness as a power-

structure, which brings us to a closer examination of its relationship

with the king and kingdom of Scotland. We must, however, be careful.

It is one thing to maintain that Tynedale was in key respects no ordinary

‘royal liberty’; quite another to suppose that (save in 1215–17) the Scots

king ever sought to annex it from England. In e ect he accepted that he

exercised jurisdiction under the English crown; he likewise acknowledged

that the liberty was subject to English common law and statute law. Such

matters are exempli ed by the Tynedale eyres, which could be held only on

the holding of Northumberland eyres. Jurisdiction in eyre had also to be

obtained by sending the baili outside the liberty to sue for the articles of

the eyre from the English king’s justices; only then were the liberty’s own

justices commissioned, and they had to proceed according to the articles

and ‘the law and customs of the realm’.

Against this backcloth, Robert

Bruce the Competitor was simply stating a truism when he declared in 1292

that Tynedale was ‘not of the regality of Scotland’.

Nevertheless Tynedale provides a rich means of understanding the

actual realities of lordship over and within a thirteenth- century Border

liberty; and in some aspects the inferences to be drawn are more telling

than those concerning Durham. Perhaps nowhere is this better seen than

as regards the English crown’s ‘feudal’ rights. Unlike the ‘prince- bishop’,

the Scots king managed to restrict his obligations to homage, without any

requirement of knight service or  scal dues such as scutages.

Nor did the

liberty come into English royal custody during Alexander III’s minority

(1249–58). Furthermore, whereas the bishop was e ectively the English

king’s appointee, and the bishopric a renewable source of crown patronage,

Tynedale under the Scots kings lay entirely beyond such lines of authority

and displays of power. For various reasons, Alexander III was even allowed

See below, p. 279, where matters are discussed more particularly from the Viponts’

perspective.

NAR, pp. 358–9; PQW, pp. 604–5; NER, nos. 287, 641a; CCW 1244–1326, p. 34.

Edward I and the Throne of Scotland, 1290–1296, ed. E. L. G. Stones and G. G. Simpson

(Oxford, 1978), ii, p. 233.

CIPM, iii, no. 83. Before 1214 the sheriff of Northumberland had tried to exact cornage

from Tynedale, though with scant success; and from 1214 its exemption from cornage was

automatically acknowledged: Pipe Roll 16 John, p. 64, and thereafter in the Pipe Rolls.

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TYNEDALE: POWER, SOCIETY AND IDENTITIES

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to hold the liberty outside the homage of the English crown for the  rst six

years of Edward I’s reign (1272–8).

 e Scottish monarchs also brought their own royal in uence and control

to bear on the liberty and its society in multiple and powerful ways. While

they had much more pressing commitments elsewhere, their interest in

Tynedale was far from negligible. Even Alexander II, when he considered

using Tynedale as a dowry for his sister Marjorie in 1230, took it as read that

the liberty should not be wholly alienated.

It adjoined Scotland’s heart-

lands, and major royal centres such as Berwick, Jedburgh and Roxburgh

regularly brought the Scots kings within close reach.

 ey were therefore

‘active absentees’, and easily overcame the practical limitations that under-

mined the regional ambitions and rule of their remote English counterparts.

Certainly the liberty was at least as vigorous a unit of government and justice

as any Scottish sheri dom. And nor was it less so than Durham. Part of the

explanation for this is simply the liberty’s relative lack of internal jurisdic-

tional complexity. For, by contrast with Durham, it was not divided into

separate shires and wards, and a single central court, held in the lord/king’s

demesne manor of Wark, gave cohesion to local society by providing it with

a common institutional focus.

Likewise the liberty’s boroughs, Haltwhistle

and Newbrough, came more or less fully within the court’s jurisdiction,

though they were represented by their own juries at the eyres.

Yet Scottish

royal supervision le its mark in more direct senses on the liberty’s unify-

ing power and processes. Its court sat every three weeks for ‘county’ pleas

and other business; the periodic royal justice of the eyre – as in 1257, 1269

and 1279–81 – was supplemented by regular gaol deliveries and (it seems)

assizes.

Above all, while the precise scope and types of writs and remedies

A. A. M. Duncan, The Kingship of the Scots, 842–1292 (Edinburgh, 2002), pp. 159–62.

Alexander II’s charter for Marjorie (CChR, i, p. 127) reserved the advowson of Simonburn

and the homage and service of major tenants in the liberty. Moreover, it stipulated that

if she married outside Scotland, Tynedale should revert – as it did on her marriage to

Gilbert, earl of Pembroke, in 1235.

For William I’s visits to Tynedale, see Regesta Regum Scottorum, ii: The Acts of William

I, King of Scots, 1165–1214, ed. G. W. S. Barrow (Edinburgh, 1971), pp. 103, 105, 177. An

example of other forms of personal contact is provided by Alexander II’s court at Berwick

in April 1248, which was apparently attended by nearly all his leading tenants in Tynedale:

Liber Sancte Marie de Melros (Bannatyne Club, 1837), i, no. 237.

An eyre session was, however, held in Nunwick in 1257: DCM, Misc. Ch. 5254; NCS,

ZSW/1/12; HN, II, iii, pp. 59–60; III, i, pp. 10–12.

Hartshorne, p. xxxix; JUST 1/657, m. 7.

C 133/60/10; CFR, ii, p. 245; NCH, xv, p. 244; The Exchequer Rolls of Scotland, ed. J. Stuart

et al. (Edinburgh, 1878–1908), i, p. 23; Hartshorne, pp. xliv, xlvii–viii, liv–v. Only a few

stray records concerning the 1257 and 1269 eyres survive: above, n. 32; below, p. 243, n.

39; NCS, ZSW/1/20; HN, III, ii, p. 22. For pointers regarding assizes, see NDD, pp. 111,

244; C 66/105, m. 8d.

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available outside the eyres cannot be known, the liberty’s legal system kept

pace with, or at least was not signi cantly undermined by, the contempo-

rary expansion of English royal justice.

 e pro ts of law and governance

accounted for 18 per cent of the Scottish crown’s gross income from Tynedale

in 1264–6; the issues from the 1279–81 eyre amounted to some £230. But it

was not merely for  nancial reasons that Tynedale mattered to the Scots

kings: their lesser, return- of- writs liberty of Penrith, whose ordinary annual

yield of about £200 to £260 was roughly double that of Tynedale, scarcely

received the same attention.

Rather, Tynedale gave them unrivalled oppor-

tunities to play a commanding political role in the English Borders. It was a

role they normally played with aplomb; and, to provide another index of it,

one in  ve of Alexander III’s known written acts concerns the liberty.

Furthermore, while Tynedale lacked Durham’s dynamic mix of secular

and ecclesiastical authority and culture, the distinctive identity of the liberty

was rea rmed by other and no less e ective means. Its separate institutional

status was accentuated (from an English standpoint) by its integration into

Scotland’s governance structures and routines. Scottish royal servants were

thus nominated to hear pleas in Tynedale and to scrutinise its management

– most impressively in 1279–81, when the chief eyre justice was  omas

Randolph, sheri of Berwick, and his juniors included Simon Fraser, sheri

of Peebles, and Hugh Pearsby, sheri of Roxburgh.  e 1257 eyre was con-

ducted by Richard Bickerton and John Eslington: the former, of Bickerton

near Livingston, belonged to the Lothian gentry; the latter, though a

Northumbrian tenant- in- chief of the English crown, was connected with

Earl Patrick of Dunbar who, as head of Alexander III’s 1255–7 minority

council, controlled all appointments of the king’s ministers.

Moreover,

the liberty’s chancery, treasury and exchequer were one and the same as

See below, especially pp. 279–81.

Exch. Rolls, i, p. 23; Hartshorne, pp. lxi–viii. In 1293 Tynedale and Penrith were valued

respectively at £108 and £200: CDS, ii, nos. 664–5. The accounts returned for both liberties

by Edward I’s keeper in 1286–90 broadly confirm the Tynedale estimate; but the income

from Penrith was more in line with a valuation of some £267 made in 1292: Documents

and Records Illustrating the History of Scotland, ed. F. Palgrave (London, 1837), pp. 3ff.;

Stevenson, Docs, i, nos. 1, 16, 21, 40, 119, 299.

To the Tynedale- related items noted for Alexander III in G. G. Simpson, Handlist of the

Acts of Alexander III, the Guardians, John, 1249–1296 (Edinburgh, 1960), must be added

the following ‘lost acts’: three writs to the bailiffs of Tynedale (Hartshorne, pp. xii, lvi;

PROME, ii, p. 513); three charters concerning Bellingham and Haughton (CIMisc., i, no.

2032; JUST 1/657, mm. 2, 4–4d); and thirty- two original writs explicitly referred to in the

1279–81 eyre roll. If the last are excluded, the proportion of Tynedale acta is one in nine.

DCM, Misc. Ch. 5254; NCS, ZSW/1/12; HN, II, iii, p. 59; III, i, p. 10. Bickerton: Registrum

Monasterii S. Marie de Cambuskenneth (Grampian Club, 1872), nos. 83–4; Registrum S.

Marie de Neubotle (Bannatyne Club, 1849), no. 183. Eslington: CDS, i, no. 1712; Raine,

North Durham, Appendix, no. 137; cf. CPR 1247–58, p. 497.

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TYNEDALE: POWER, SOCIETY AND IDENTITIES

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the Scottish royal chancery, treasury and exchequer.  us litigants went to

law armed with writs sued out under the chancellor of Scotland’s author-

ity, and it was only to such writs that people in Tynedale had to answer; the

liberty’s legal records were deposited in the Scottish treasury; and the baili

accounted at the Scottish exchequer.

Finally the liberty court was linked

by processes of appeal or reference to the king of Scotland and his council

as the ultimate authority in practice, if not in theory.

At least as signi cant was the Scots kings’ ethos and style of rulership.

 ey enjoyed within their kingdom a resonant reputation for good lord-

ship/kingship – famously Alexander III was praised for ruling Scotland

‘in love and law’

– and they did not alienate local society (as Bishop Bek

was to in Durham) by governing the liberty according to di erent norms.

Alexander III did punish those who infringed his rights, as was illustrated

in 1279, soon a er Prior Henry of Hexham had brought before English

royal justices a suit of trespass in Priorsdale (in Alston with Garrigill)

against the Viponts.  e prior explained that since Alston had been in the

English crown’s hands at the time, he was obliged to plead in its courts; but

that did not save him from a demand for damages of £1,000 for ‘disinherit-

ance of the king and violation of his liberty and regality of Tynedale’.

long as the Scots kings’ jurisdiction was respected, however, they took pains

to keep local opinion on their side. It was a policy that met men’s core needs

and won their allegiance; by the same token, it validated and protected the

lord/king’s authority, and thereby reinforced the liberty’s autonomy and

freedoms. So it was that the English king’s o cers normally deferred to

Tynedale’s privileges; that a large body of people was removed from English

royal jurisdiction; and that the liberty could be described, even in o cial

English records, as ‘beyond the king of England’s power’.

In 1292 the treasury contained feet of fines from the 1279–81 eyre and an estreat of its

issues bearing Alexander III’s seal (Acts Parl. Scot., i, pp. 114, 116); the plea roll itself,

removed with many Scottish records to Westminster in 1296, mentions the 1257 eyre

rolls, from which an extract under the king’s seal was brought before the justices in

Tynedale in 1279 (Hartshorne, p. xx); and the bailiff’s accounts for 1264–6 survive among

the extant fragments of Scottish exchequer records (Exch. Rolls, i, pp. 23, 25).

Hartshorne, pp. xx, xxix, lxi. No case is known to have been removed from the liberty court

to an English royal court by process of error or false judgement.

A. Grant, ‘Aspects of national consciousness in medieval Scotland’, in C. Bjørn, A.

Grant and K. J. Stringer (eds), Nations, Nationalism and Patriotism in the European Past

(Copenhagen, 1994), pp. 79–80.

Hartshorne, pp. xxix–xxx; cf. JUST 1/983, m. 3; CDS, ii, no. 133; NAR, pp. 277–9.

CRR, xv, nos. 960, 1259; cf. NER, no. 447 (‘within the king of Scotland’s power’). For

specific thirteenth- century examples where sheriffs recognised that they had no right of

entry, see Pipe Roll 10 John, p. 60; Northumb. Pleas, no. 631; Northumb. PDBR, nos. 159,

257; NER, no. 424; Stevenson, Docs, i, no. 57.

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Here then was a robust structure for the assertion of a single unify-

ing authority; the liberty’s governance rights and culture might likewise

provide a powerful frame of reference for the consolidation of a distinct

socio- political order and consciousness.  at English law ran in Tynedale

may have allowed for some sense of Englishness as it was generally under-

stood in England.

Yet insofar as local society came under the direct lord-

ship and control of another monarch, Tynedale was attached to the English

‘state’ more loosely than Durham or any other liberty in the kingdom.  is

leads to the point that not only were its privileges libertates regales, but

the Scottish dominus rex routinely drew on his own regal language and

symbology to tie himself to the liberty and its ‘community’. Just as written

communication with Tynedale was mediated through his chancery, so were

potent governmental and political messages transmitted through its lexicon

of authority. All acts began with the king’s name and his style, Dei gratia

rex Scottorum; charters were addressed to ‘all the good men (probi homines)

of his whole land’; and writs were directed to ‘his baili s and sworn men

( deles) of Tynedale’.  ese were touchstones of both the king’s and the

liberty’s regality – as well they might be, for the liberty’s seal was naturally

the Scottish royal seal.

We also see that Tynedale’s tenants and inhabitants

were regarded as the Scots king’s subjects, no more and no less. It was as if

the Scottish realm operated in the English realm, and drew the contours of

authority and loyalty on its own terms.

It was likewise through such means that solidarities based on the liberty

and its privileges could be underpinned by a speci c ‘kingship culture’ to

create a mental landscape that was more than a poor ideological relation

of Durham’s political culture – thanks partly, no doubt, to the identity-

reinforcing sense of a distinct Scottish heritage and history.  e phrase  deles

domini regis is in fact a familiar jingle in Tynedale documents.  e territory of

the liberty was terra regis Scotie; the liberty court was curia domini regis, and

it punished breaches of the pax domini regis.

Private deeds might employ

Scottish regnal- year dating; one stipulated that Arbroath Abbey was to hold

Two purported original acts of William I, in a hand of the 1250s, stipulated that property

in Haughton was to be held as freely as other freemen held land ‘within the kingdom of

England’: Reg. Regum Scott., ii, nos. 143, 424.

Alexander III’s second great seal on NCS, ZSW/1/24, illustrated in HN, III, i, pp. 16–17,

is now lost; but another Tynedale act, NCS, ZSW/1/16, carries a rare example of his seal

of minority, on which see G. G. Simpson, ‘Kingship in miniature: a seal of minority of

Alexander III, 1249–1257’, in A. Grant and K. J. Stringer (eds), Medieval Scotland: Crown,

Lordship and Community (Edinburgh, 1993), pp. 131–9.

Examples include Bodl., MS Dodsworth 45, f. 89; DCM, Misc. Ch. 5254; NCS, ZSW/1/12;

HN, II, iii, p. 59; Vetera Monumenta Hibernorum et Scotorum Historiam Illustrantia, ed.

A. Theiner (Rome, 1864), no. 213.

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TYNEDALE: POWER, SOCIETY AND IDENTITIES

245

the church of Haltwhistle ‘as freely . . . as any alms are . . . held in the whole

kingdom of Scotland’.

A deeper imprint on local mindsets is indicated by a

view from Alston, attributed to the Viponts in 1278–9, that the kingdom of

Scotland and the Scots stretched to the liberty’s southernmost corner.

Nor

indeed was such a notion con ned to Tynedale circles. In 1279 even a jury

of Newcastle burgesses declared unequivocally that ‘Tynedale [is] outside

the realm of England, in the realm of Scotland’.

 us it was that people

in Tynedale and in the county of Northumberland might see themselves as

moving in two quite distinct orbits of power and obedience. Tynedale, in

brief, was then so completely a land where lordship, liberty and loyalty were

mutually reinforcing that it could be, and was, imagined as a local polity

entirely removed from the English kingdom and the sovereignty of its king.

When we turn to Tynedale’s social architecture, we must not make the

mistake of assuming that medieval forms of association and community were

less complex than was actually the case.  e following analysis has therefore

to range widely if it is to clarify the liberty’s true signi cance as a framework

for allegiance and identi cation. More particularly, many of the issues

to be discussed in the context of administration and law will suggest that

Tynedale’s ‘regal jurisdiction’ was itself highly relevant for the organisation

of socio- political identities; but it is already clear that liberty- society interac-

tions cannot be divorced from the policies and practices of lordship.  ey

were essentially interdependent and, as such, both must be given their due.

Who then were the Scots king’s  deles of Tynedale? No single con-

temporary source supplies a directory of the liberty’s lay tenantry, but

on Alexander II’s death in 1249 we might picture a three- tier social

structure.

At the top stood  ve high- status families: Graham of Dalkeith

(Midlothian) and Eskdale (Dumfriesshire); Lindsay of Barnweill (Ayrshire)

and Byres (East Lothian); Ros of Helmsley (Yorkshire); Ros of Wark-

on- Tweed (Northumberland); and – most notably – the senior line of

Comyn, thirteenth- century Scotland’s greatest magnate house.

 eir

NCS, ZSW/1/17, 27, 32; HN, III, i, pp. 9–10, 15, 18; Liber S. Thome de Aberbrothoc

(Bannatyne Club, 1848–56), i, no. 37.

JUST 1/143/1: all Alston belonged ‘to the kingdom and fee of the king of Scots and not

to the kingdom and fee of the king of England’. Relatedly a case where Alexander III’s

charters were pleaded at the 1293 Tynedale eyre (JUST 1/657, m. 4d) suggests how local

rights might be thought of as originating from his own royalty.

NAR, p. 365; cf. JUST 1/645, m. 17d; 1/646, m. 20d.

Still valuable, though incomplete, is the analysis of the tenurial landscape in Moore, Lands

of the Scottish Kings, pp. 40–7, 129; cf. also NCH, xv, pp. 191ff.

For the Comyns, especially their political activities, see A. Young, Robert the Bruce’s Rivals:

The Comyns, 1212–1314 (East Linton, 1997).

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