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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Swinburne, who remained faithful to Edward II throughout.
144
As for Hugh
Walles, in 1315 he was sued in King’s Bench by Robert Raimes of Aydon
near Corbridge for betraying his fortalice to the Scots. In September 1317
Hugh was in Edward II’s pay, but soon a er he was back at Aydon and
raiding at large together with John Elder, John Spence, John Stokoe and
John Younger, and the Yorkshire men- at- arms Geo rey Delamare, John
Page of Flaxton and John Quoint.
145
Moreover, in 1319 Hugh was a leader
of a gang- raid on Richmondshire, an expedition probably linked to Scottish
attacks on the Vale of York. Of his thirty- eight named accomplices, at least
twelve were from Tynedale; more striking are the diverse origins of the rest:
confederates such as omas Snape, John Forester of Corbridge, and men
associated with Bywell, Stocks eld and Newcastle, and with Auckland and
Windlestone in south Durham.
146
No doubt a roving gang of this sort had
a uid membership; but some of the same personnel accompanied Hugh
to pillage Tynemouthshire as followers of the Middletons’ chief lieutenant,
Walter Selby.
147
Since this period was one of the most turbulent in the history of the
Marches, and of Tynedale in particular, it did not necessarily set patterns
for the future. But with political dislocation and, more especially, with no
strong lordship to focus allegiances, came other forms of authority and
association at the cost of the liberty’s unity and its relevance for collec-
tive loyalty and identity. Nor was such a situation entirely novel. In 1307
John Swinburne had pursued his feud with John Halton by recruiting a
motley band of supporters, including the likes of John, knave of William
‘le Sutherin’; in the same year, Hugh Walles went with a Durham force to
harry the earl of Warwick’s lands in Teesdale – though admittedly in aid
of his former lord Bishop Bek.
148
By the mid- 1320s, however, a shadow
of peace had returned to the liberty. Edward II appointed one of Gilbert
Middleton’s captors, William Felton, as its keeper in 1324. Full, and much-
delayed, inquisitions post mortem into the Comyn estates and the lands
of Adam Swinburne were returned into Chancery in 1326–9; while the
loyal service of Hugh Walles to Edward III in the Weardale campaign of
1327 was acknowledged by his appointment as a conservator of the Anglo-
144
CPR 1317–21, p. 231; 1321–4, p. 90; 1324–7, p. 27; CCW 1244–1326, p. 529. Robert was
made keeper of Lancaster’s castle of Pontefract after its surrender in 1322: BL, MS Stowe
553, f. 136r.
145
Middleton, Gilbert de Middleton, pp. 70–2; NCH, x, p. 345; Society of Antiquaries, MS
121, f. 43r; KB 27/245, m. 59.
146
CPR 1317–21, p. 359. Snape was a notorious Yorkshire soldier- cum- marauder: CCR
1313–18, pp. 398, 493, 497; CPR 1313–17, p. 586; 1317–21, p. 162.
147
CPR 1324–7, p. 289; 1330–4, p. 389.
148
CPR 1307–13, pp. 39–40, 169; Bek Recs, pp. 209–13.
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Scottish truce. But Hugh’s habit of mixing in lawless circles outside the
liberty remained ingrained, and in 1333 his one- time ally, John Forester of
Corbridge, was indicted for his murder.
149
A selection of later records provides a di erent perspective. Not only do
these sources bring Tynedale’s status as a ‘royal liberty’ back into focus, but
they suggest that a distinct identity, culture and community were nurtured
by it. e material comprises representations to Edward III from the coun-
ties of Cumberland and Northumberland, and the crown’s responses (1342–
3); three further royal injunctions (1346, 1359, 1362); and a parliamentary
petition from ‘the community of the county of Northumberland’ (1414).
150
eir rhetoric normally embraces other liberties in the North- East, and
sometimes all of them; but with this proviso they give an instructive view
of Tynedale as it might be imagined by both the English government and
neighbouring county society.
Two inter- connected themes characterise these texts. First they cat-
egorised Tynedale as a society whose disrespect for the law and civilised
values was basic to its way of life; it was, moreover, easily seduced from
its allegiance to the crown, and its lawless and seditious proclivities
posed a grave threat to public peace and national security. e tone was
set by the county spokesmen in 1342. ‘ e community of the county of
Cumberland’ condemned the men of Tynedale as incorrigible maraud-
ers; and ‘the people of the counties of Northumberland and Cumberland’
complained that Tynedale swarmed with robbers and thieves, who
consorted with the Scots, plundered at will, and generally terrorised the
surrounding districts. Such concerns were echoed in 1414; while the gov-
ernment’s policy statements stressed its anxieties about confederations
of wrongdoers and their maintainers and promoters – the hallmarks of
organised crime. In the second place, both the crown and the county
petitioners identi ed Tynedale’s privileges and independence as the
key determinants of its inhabitants’ lifestyles: the one by implication
when royal agents (usually the March wardens) were commissioned to
expedite round- ups of truce- breakers; the other by the assertion in 1342
that the liberty shielded evil- doers from arrest, and by the explicit state-
ment in 1414 that wanted men could escape to Tynedale without fear of
149
CFR, iii, p. 297; CIPM, vi, nos. 697, 751; vii, no. 157; CPR 1327–30, p. 227; SC
8/243/12108.
150
Northern Pets, no. 67; CPR 1343–5, p. 67; Rot. Scot., i, pp. 644, 670, 839, 862; PROME, ix,
pp. 49–50. Some of these records have been discussed for other purposes above, at pp.
311–13.
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328
punishment because they were enfranchised and ‘the king’s writ does not
run there’.
151
It must be emphasised that the government regarded lawlessness as
a problem by no means con ned to liberties; it might even allow that
Tynedalers were as likely to be prey for their neighbours as to prey on
them. What was not said is also revealing, for the rhetorical strategies fall
short of the implacable anti- liberty discourse of Tudor propagandists.
ough references were made to criminal gangs, there was no denun-
ciation of ‘surnames’; nor in fact have we found any allusion to such
solidarities in other contemporary records.
152
And there was no demand
for the suppression of liberties. Indeed, in 1414 the county spokesmen,
and Henry V himself, simply wanted guarantees of regular law enforce-
ment through Tynedale’s own legal system. ey therefore understood
that the liberty had a well- founded legitimacy as a governmental entity,
and that its independent status merited respect. Despite all this, however,
public order themes were a means of di erentiating between Tynedale
and wider society, and the role assigned to the liberty was that of a gen-
eralised ‘Other’, whose alien norms exempli ed a kind of counter- culture
dangerously opposed to ‘common- law’ manners and customs. e liberty’s
bounds were thus represented as a socio- cultural divide, with liberty and
county inhabiting separate worlds. Tynedale’s privileges had turned it, so
to speak, into a ‘criminals’ paradise’;
153
and even more did those privileges
place that land and society beyond the pale when they seemed to include
the power to make war ‘in breach of the king’s peace and to the consterna-
tion of his lieges’.
154
Yet, in reality, such expositions have only limited value for clarifying the
nature of ‘liberty identity’. It is undeniably signi cant to see the liberty–
county jurisdictional boundary taken as a given. For all Tynedale’s vicis-
situdes, it would thus be rash to underestimate its institutional autonomy
and the connotations this had for individual or shared interests and identi-
ties, as when (for example) a distinction was drawn in 1381 between ‘the
king’s subjects of the parts of Tynedale and his subjects of the county of
151
See similarly SC 8/130/6459; PROME, ix, p. 296: petition of 1421 against the felons of
Hexhamshire, Redesdale and Tynedale, which added for good measure that no justice
was done there ‘because most of the inhabitants . . . are malefactors or maintainers of
them’.
152
NCS, ZSW/1/110, a bond extracted by William IV Swinburne from Thomas Reed in
1400, has been cited as ‘evidence that these surnames go back to the fourteenth century’
(Tuck, ‘Richard II and the Border magnates’, p. 29, n. 6); but there is nothing in the bond
to justify this conclusion.
153
The term is borrowed from Davies, Lordship and Society, p. 170.
154
Rot. Scot., i, p. 644.
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Northumberland’.
155
In addition, the periodic categorisation of Tynedalers
as an ‘out- group’ may have enhanced their self- perceptions of belonging
to a discrete and specially privileged territory and society. Even so, we
must not jump to the conclusion that the liberty fostered a local identity,
culture and mindset as coherent, distinctive and menacing as its detractors
supposed.
Public concerns about a ‘lawless’ community, it must be conceded, were
no doubt real and in a measure justi ed; and certainly the liberty’s rights
did advantage unruly elements – so much so that the wardens’ supervision
of Tynedale may in practice have been largely ine ective.
156
But the crown
had a metropolitan view of authority that was unforgiving of the adjust-
ments and compromises a frontier society was forced to make; it was also in
its interests to ‘invent’ a renegade community in order to justify extensions
of its jurisdiction. Moreover, county petitions were traditional mediums
of political discourse, which drew on a stock of conventional loyalist
tropes and paradigms.
157
In the present context, a key aim was to win royal
approval for their sponsors by stressing their law- abiding respectability at
the liberty men’s expense. It was central to such a purpose to criminalise
Tynedale society as marginal and morally inferior, and to deny the exist-
ence of any similarities, or peaceful modes of interaction, between county
and liberty. Power- structures like Tynedale were thus represented as the
main obstacles to justice and order, regardless of contrary evidence, includ-
ing what seem to have been broadly comparable levels of county- based
criminality.
158
Also, the complaints from counties and the crown normally
coincided with upsurges of cross- Border violence. It was then that the prob-
lems posed by a disjointed judicial landscape would have been most acute,
and assumptions about the liberty were inevitably in uenced by such con-
ditions. e texts considered here thus reveal more about their originators’
agendas, prejudices and neuroses at times of exceptional danger than about
155
KB 27/481, m. 16d.
156
Cf. below, p. 331. More generally, the tenants of Wark perhaps had a point when in 1613
they traced back to Edward III’s reign their claims to tenant- right, which included immu-
nity from forfeiture for felonies: S. J. Watts, ‘Tenant- right in early seventeenth- century
Northumberland’, NH, 6 (1971), p. 79.
157
Cf. J. A. Doig, ‘Political propaganda and royal proclamations in late medieval England’,
Historical Research, 71 (1998), pp. 253–80; A. Musson and W. M. Ormrod, The Evolution
of English Justice (London, 1999), pp. 163–6.
158
See A. J. Macdonald, Border Bloodshed (East Linton, 2000), p. 235, for the view that
Border liberties were not more turbulent than adjacent counties until the fifteenth
century; and, most recently, H. Summerson, ‘Peacekeepers and lawbreakers in medieval
Northumberland, c. 1200–c. 1500’, in M. Prestwich (ed.), Liberties and Identities in the
Medieval British Isles (Woodbridge, 2008), pp. 56–76.
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the organisation of criminal underworlds and the liberty’s actual relevance
as a source of socio- cultural identity and de nition.
It would naturally be helpful if we had a rich alternative supply of col-
lective articulations to illuminate how members of Tynedale society saw
themselves; yet such sources are scant. is is perhaps only to be expected
of a jurisdiction rarely troubled by the demands of lordship and kingship.
But there is also some evidence from the 1340s and 1350s to suggest that
the liberty as a whole was less important for shaping communal conscious-
ness than were the interests of groups within or connected with it. In 1356
the miners of Alston Moor petitioned Edward III against distraints by
Tynedale’s baili .
159
Earlier, in 1340–1, the king’s collector of the ninth in
Northumberland had been unable to tax Alston, Kirkhaugh, Knarsdale,
Whit eld and Simonburn because ‘no writ of the king runs within the
liberty’. ough no fuller explanation was given, it seems that he had
encountered local resistance founded on the liberty’s privileges. If so,
however, people protested on a parish- by- parish basis and do not appear to
have cooperated closely – as is suggested by a peculiarity of the collector’s
accounts, which record that Knarsdale and Simonburn were in Tynedale,
but allocate Alston, Kirkhaugh and Whit eld to Hexhamshire. at par-
ishes were the local assessment units for the ninth helps to explain the cir-
cumstances; yet it is also noteworthy that Haltwhistle originally agreed to
pay, and that Kirkhaugh was not a party to the appeals for respite submitted
to Edward III between 1344 and 1357. ose appeals, moreover, were made
in combination with other Northumbrian parishes, and on grounds not of
exemption but of hardship due to Scottish raids.
160
Yet in about 1370, when Tynedale was in crown hands, a community of
some signi cance did nd its voice. It was then that ‘the community of the
liberty of Tynedale’ complained to Edward III that since Queen Philippa’s
death (in 1369) the liberty was bere of justices, chancellor and chancery,
and that its tenants would be ruined for lack of justice if he did not supply a
remedy.
161
is is clearly a valuable illustration of the claims a liberty could
make on identities and loyalties. Here was a community shaped and de ned
not by the power of lordship, but by common institutional attachments
and interests. In principle, it was committed to and prized Tynedale’s legal
independence and privileges: the liberty court, not some external court, was
its preferred tribunal; it likewise expected to have justice and government
159
CCR 1354–60, pp. 262, 281–2; CIMisc., iii, no. 222.
160
E 179/158/14, mm. 1, 2; CPR 1343–5, p. 409; CCR 1349–54, p. 613; 1354–60, pp. 71, 120,
185, 409–10.
161
Northumb. Pets, no. 105.
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provided by the liberty rather than by the ‘state’. Furthermore, the petition-
ers registered their self- identi cation with the liberty at deeper levels. ey
embodied its traditions and autonomy by assuming responsibility for its
survival as a viable local polity; and they took as read that its ‘regal rights’
were not just lordly prerogatives, but rights the community itself was enti-
tled to hold and bene t from – and above all else the right to good rule.
In all these respects, the liberty and its customs evidently had signi cant
meanings for identity and solidarity. But it cannot simply be assumed that
the liberty was the petitioners’ nodal focal point for communal loyalties.
A er all, the circumstances tell against well- developed norms of collective
cooperation by indicating that, as in 1314–15, so again around 1370, it
required a profound crisis of lordship to bring a community into being.
162
In a broader sense, we also see that people were not tolerating lawlessness;
a properly run jurisdiction was basic to their common a airs and welfare.
Accordingly there was, in terms of public discourse, no di erence between
liberty and county cultures, but rather a shared concern for peacekeeping
and social harmony. And yet this was also a community that in practice was
paying a price for its enfranchisement. It had more freedom than its com-
munal resources could cope with. It therefore needed e ective local lord-
ship; it likewise gave notice that without such the liberty was not meeting
local expectations as a focus for governance and social unity.
Unfortunately there is no means of measuring actual crime- levels
in fourteenth- century Tynedale or, as it were, how far its jurisdictional
autonomy did cease to bene t its law- abiding tenants and residents. Yet
it now becomes harder to believe that people could necessarily rely on the
liberty for government and justice, and all the easier to understand why
local strongmen could emerge as self- appointed arbiters of its rights and
powers. So it was that the liberty might well sustain alternative forms of
local authority and solidarity, to the detriment of its institutional integrity,
its ability to serve the interests of local society as a whole, and its social
equilibrium and cohesion. Nowhere is this more fully borne out than in
the activities of William IV Swinburne of Haughton/Capheaton (d. 1404),
whose power- building was in large part dependent on, and facilitated by,
the liberty. It was above all he who took advantage of its privileges to frus-
trate the March wardens.
163
More notably, he specialised in appropriating
governmental authority and adapting it to create his own system of local
rule and ‘justice’. Too much should not be read into Richard II’s pardon
162
For discussion of how the community of c. 1370 might be defined, see below, pp.
347–50.
163
For the ease with which Swinburne brushed aside summonses to attend March days, see
NCS, ZSW/1/101–2; Neville, Violence, p. 86.
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to Swinburne of June 1398, which refers in formulaic terms to escapes and
chattels of felons, forfeitures and misprisions. Yet a royal writ of April 1398
shows that Swinburne had been appealed of usurping under ‘false and con-
trived colour of authority’ the stewardship of Hexhamshire; and much the
same had happened in Tynedale in the late 1380s, when he supplanted or
otherwise neutralised the then baili omas II Swinburne.
164
William Swinburne plainly valued Tynedale’s rights and independence,
and pro ted signi cantly from them. But he was never able to impose his
control and leadership on the entire liberty; rather, his priorities and actions
directly weakened its unifying frameworks and force. North Tynedale was
his main base; and the point has general as well as speci c relevance for
understanding what may be characterised as the increasingly polarised
nature of the liberty’s socio- political and governmental structures. e
area north of the Wall su ered far more than the rest of the liberty from
the power- vacuum that emerged a er 1296. In particular, Wark was a
monument to absentee lordship; so likewise was Tarset a er the Comyns’
departure. Moreover, the rugged Border valleys of north Tynedale formed
an isolated and fragmented world of dispersed settlements and farmsteads;
the resident landlords were fewer and o en poorer than their southern
counterparts; and the district was highly vulnerable to Scottish raids. For
these reasons, it was an area where the culture of an unstable march society
was most likely to take root. Such a conclusion is not contradicted by the
‘separatism’ displayed by north Tynedale in 1314, or by those fourteenth-
century sources (albeit external sources) that identi ed north Tynedale as
the most belligerent part of the liberty. According to the Historia Aurea
(sub anno 1318), its menfolk ‘treated their neighbours the Northumbrians
savagely, looting their goods and abducting captives’; even the women rode
forth in warlike array to take their share of spoils. Indeed, as early as 1300
or soon a er, Durham sources spoke of the men of north Tynedale as ‘a
wretched people’ (gens perdita), ‘despicable scoundrels’ and ‘enemies of the
king’.
165
164
NCS, ZSW/1/81, 95–6. Thomas Swinburne may have been a willing accomplice. In 1388
he incurred the government’s displeasure as a truce- breaker, and in 1392 he appointed
William to collect debts owed to him in Tynedale: CPR 1385–9, p. 412; NCS, ZSW/1/83.
In 1389 they also served together on the Border as retainers of Thomas Mowbray: A.
King, ‘“Pur salvation du roiaume”: military service and obligation in fourteenth- century
Northumberland’, Fourteenth Century England, 2 (2002), p. 29. This raises the further
possibility that William’s pardon of 1398 had no special local significance, but related to
service with Mowbray in the Appellant rising (1387–8).
165
Galbraith, ‘Historia Aurea’, p. 209; Gesta Dunelm., pp. 33, 39; RPD, iv, pp. 20, 57. More
prosaically, it was said in 1297 that Simonburn church was ‘in a solitary place, near the
borders of England and Scotland, wherefore there are many dangers, and it is difficult
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eir leader, so we are told, was Hugh Walles, and if anyone assumed his
mantle in the later fourteenth century it was assuredly William Swinburne.
Lord of the third part of Haughton, he had obtained by 1391 a lease of the
adjoining Widdrington demesne; by 1392 he was also leasing the rectory
of Simonburn from St George’s College.
166
at other aspects of his activ-
ity shaded into lawlessness and the arrogation of governmental authority
– including ‘imagined’ prerogatives such as the right to wage war inde-
pendently – was because these were the orthodox means whereby power-
brokers in competitive marchland zones asserted their local superiority.
Yet what kind of community did Swinburne preside over? It was not, nor
could it have been, ‘the community of the liberty’. In 1385 his thirty- one-
strong retinue included local henchmen such as Richard Carraw, omas
Chirdon, Richard and Robert Kershope, and Robert Yeland. omas
Shipley, a brigand who had received Edward III’s pardon in 1377, was
another from north Tynedale. But Swinburne had also attracted into his
service John Richardson of Featherstone and Richard Vaux of Fallow eld
(one of John Coupland’s killers); east Northumbrians such as John Hogg of
Brandon, omas Roddam, and Adam Rogerson of Alnham; and Scots or
Cumbrians such as Oliver Grant, Adam and John Liddel, and possibly the
notorious John Hunter.
167
It was a similar story in 1398, when Swinburne
apparently negotiated royal pardons for men from Tynedale, Hexhamshire
and Langley barony.
168
e loyalties of such a warband were created as much by the trans- local
contacts and associations of a frontier society as by the liberty itself; like-
wise, no doubt, the criminal activity of Swinburne and his followers was
o en conducted outside Tynedale. Yet this was no species of ‘social bandits’
who enjoyed widespread support within the liberty for resisting external
authority, dispensing community- based justice and preying only on aliens.
Communal solidarity was a low- level a air when men treated neighbours
to find rectors who will stay there to serve the church’: Bek Recs, no. 56. For a gang of
felons based in Simonburn in 1313, see RPD, i, pp. 291–2; similarly JUST 1/661, mm. 2,
7 (Bellingham, 1354, 1365).
166
NDD, p. 235; NCS, ZSW/1/86, 89, 90; HN, III, ii, p. 35.
167
BL, Cotton Roll XIII.8, with C 67/28B, m. 6 (Shipley); JUST 1/661, mm. 1, 6 (Vaux). John
Hunter ‘the Scot’, who was hanged in Newcastle in 1390 for many crimes committed in
the county in 1384–5, had operated out of Tynedale: JUST 3/176, m. 21; cf. CCR 1385–9,
pp. 410–11. But Swinburne’s follower may have been the John Hunter ‘of Tynedale’
who received a protection for service in Berwick in 1391 and was apparently bailed in
Hexhamshire in 1398: CDS, v, no. 4471; NCS, ZSW/1/98. It is uncertain to which John
Hunter the following records relate: CPR 1381–5, p. 135 (with men of Redesdale and
Bewcastledale: truce- breaking, 1382); ibid., pp. 507–8; NCH, iv, p. 201 (with men of
Hexhamshire: robbery in Fairhills and Whittonstall, 1384).
168
C 67/30, mm. 8, 9.
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as fair game, and one victim of Swinburne’s confederates may have been
his kinsman John irlwall the elder, who was slain ‘in manner of war’ for
goods worth 100 marks in 1385.
169
us when we nd Edmund Langley
responding to local anxieties in 1390 by placing Swinburne under a recog-
nisance of 500 marks, to desist from ‘raiding, violence, oppression, extor-
tion and wrong against the duke’s o cers and tenants, counter to the peace
. . . and privileges of the lordship’, it is di cult to suppose that Tynedale was
anything other than a destabilised and deeply divided society.
170
Yet there was another side to William IV Swinburne’s power, identity
and behaviour, and it rested (as will be seen) on his membership of the
Northumbrian shire elite. Indeed, the liberty’s incorporation into the
broader social fabric of the English Borders was, relative to pre- 1296 norms,
exceptionally thoroughgoing. Brie y stated, it was less of an anchor for
gentry society because it was caught up in a complex world of adversity and
opportunity that surfaced alongside (and was o en conditioned by) Anglo-
Scottish warfare. Tynedale experienced the arrival of a ‘new’ landed class
and o ce- holding oligarchy, whose loyalties were also claimed by neigh-
bouring shires where the personnel concerned were o en major ‘county
gentry’. Generally these were the men who in terms of administrative power
and preferential leases capitalised on the retreat of lordship from the liberty;
it was likewise they who pro ted from the extinction or economic decline of
Tynedale families, thereby further restricting the openings available to local
people. is served in turn to accentuate the liberty’s problems in competing
with the rival attractions of county society as a forum for crown service and
as a source of advancement, security and mutual aid. e consequent diver-
sity of interests and allegiances was less marked among old local families
like irlwall, Tyndale, Vipont and Whit eld than it was among in uential
newcomers like Heron, Musgrave, Ogle, Strother and Widdrington. But
the fact remains that the liberty’s gentry moved increasingly within wider
regional circles. A di erent story might well have unfolded had there been
a potent focus of local lordship, support and protection; but, in its absence,
169
JUST 3/176, m. 21. John Hunter ‘the Scot’ was one of Thirlwall’s killers. See also CIMisc.,
vi, no. 408: Robert Yeland ‘the younger’, convicted of a homicide in Lee Hall near
Bellingham (1399). More broadly, a case of 1371 concerns John Robson, murdered with
others in Falstone, and Roger Spence, abducted from Charlton and held to ransom in
Scotland. Both were north Tynedale tenants, and the perpetrators were assumed to be
local men: CCR 1369–74, p. 296; CFR, viii, p. 201; NDD, p. 114. Also, in 1362 Robson was
accused of harbouring Robert Stokoe after he had stolen property from John Thirlwall,
and Stokoe had earlier been put to ransom by his kinsman John Stokoe: JUST 3/145, m.
23; CPR 1358–61, p. 374.
170
NCS, ZSW/1/81. The recognisance’s terms are misconstrued in HC, iv, p. 547.
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the liberty became merely one of a number of possible reference points for
identities and loyalties, and sometimes with far- reaching repercussions for
its traditional cohesion and e ectiveness as a local polity.
So it was that links to Cumbria grew stronger. By the 1360s, for example,
Robert Bellingham had married the heiress of the manor of Burneside
near Kendal, thereby becoming the rst of the Bellinghams to assume
knighthood; while John irlwall the younger controlled Alstonby near
Carlisle and was keeper of Nicholforest.
171
In the opposite direction had
come omas Musgrave (d. c. 1385), lord of half the manor of Haltwhistle
and Coanwood from the mid- 1340s in right of his marriage to a Ros co-
heir.
172
But more signi cant were the landholding ties forged or strength-
ened between Tynedale and the rest of the North- East. To borrow the
terminology of a deed of 1357, a family’s landed estate might lie ‘in the
county of Northumberland [and] in the liberties of Durham, Hexham
and Tynedale’.
173
One important development stemmed from the mar-
riages by about 1300 of two of Adam Swinburne’s daughters into the
east Northumberland families of Heron and Widdrington, both of which
shared in the partition of Adam’s substantial properties a er his son’s
death without male heirs in 1326. John Stirling had snapped up Adam’s
third daughter Barnaba by 1329.
174
e springboard for the Ogles’ expan-
sion into Tynedale was provided by their pre- existing connections with
Hexhamshire. ough from the Morpeth region, Robert II Ogle (d. 1362)
had acquired Aydon Shields and Rowley Head, probably through his service
as Hexhamshire’s baili . By 1355 he was o ciating as Queen Philippa’s
baili , and he used this position to obtain the manor of Sewing Shields,
previously held by the Haltons, as well as a seven- year lease of the Talbot
estates.
175
Hugh Settlingstones, a Newcastle lawyer who became recorder
171
Bellingham: W. Farrer, Records Relating to the Barony of Kendale, i, ed. J. F. Curwen
(CWAAS, Record Series, 1923), pp. 206, 268, 285; CIPM, ix, no. 74; and, for his
Tynedale estates, see Bodl., MS Dodsworth 149, f. 103r–v. Thirlwall: CRO (Carlisle),
D/Ay/1/79; 2/11; CIPM, xii, no. 170; CFR, vii, p. 381. Linked with Thirlwall in the
keepership of Nicholforest, in Liddel barony, was William Dixon of Kirkhaugh, who
later held property in Carlisle: CIMisc., iii, no. 734; Castle Howard, A1/100; cf. JUST
3/176, m. 32.
172
CIPM, viii, no. 599; xiii, no. 192; cf. NCS, ZSW/2/36; HN, II, iii, p. 116; III, ii, pp. 33–4.
173
DCM, Misc. Ch. 6947. The family concerned was Vaux of Whittonstall
(Northumberland), Tudhoe (Durham) and Beaufront (Hexhamshire). Its Tynedale
lands cannot be identified.
174
Northumb. Fines, ii, no. 223.
175
Above, Chapter 5, p. 190; SC 6/952/10; CIPM, xi, no. 401; Notts. Archives, DD/4P/52/134.
See also on Ogle’s career GEC, x, pp. 24–6. According to J. Wallis, The Natural History
and Antiquities of Northumberland (London, 1769), ii, p. 551, Ogle was Tynedale’s bailiff
in 1337, but this remains unverified.
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