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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lands in 1372, when they were enfeo ed to William Hazlerigg of Fawdon
and Edmund Hazlerigg, both members of his council, Donald Hazlerigg of
Eslington and omas Surtees.
223
e Swinburnes of Haughton/Capheaton
had dealings with the newcomers; indeed, a Swinburne- Heron- Widdrington
assault on the Umfraville manor of Birtley opposite Wark was said to have
occurred in 1351.
224
But the overall impression is that the ‘new’ gentry were
operating at the outer limits of their accustomed range and did not identify
strongly with the liberty through their social connections and interactions.
Conversely the deed evidence suggests that Tynedale’s old gentry fami-
lies were more rmly tied to the liberty. is network’s key personnel were
Swinburne, irlwall, Tyndale, Vipont and Whit eld, and minor gentry
such as Haltwhistle, Johnson of Alston, Ridley, orngra on, Whitelaw of
Randalholme (near Alston) and Williamston. ey held as landlords much
of south Tynedale; and only Swinburne, linked to this area by control of the
manor of Williamston and by intermarriage with Haltwhistle and irlwall,
carried weight in the north of the liberty. ey had some contact with the
‘new’ gentry, but such contacts were partly through Swinburne and o en
sporadic at best. Otherwise, however, a relatively tight- knit social group
was based on the liberty. For example, Haltwhistle and Ridley feature in
both Swinburne and irlwall deeds; Ridley and Vipont in Swinburne,
Tyndale and Whit eld deeds; and Johnson, Ridley, Swinburne, Whitelaw
and Whit eld in Tyndale and Vipont deeds. Rarely do men from across
the liberty boundary appear in witness- clauses; the meeting- places were
Alston, Elrington, Haltwhistle, Kirkhaugh, Ouston, irlwall, Whit eld and
Williamston; and, all told, these southern gentry seem to have been close
associates, united by common interests in, and attachments to, the liberty.
e obvious conclusion is that, in the period concerned, the liberty was
not an all- inclusive unifying framework for gentry society and relation-
ships. As leading shire gures, the ‘northerners’ moved largely within
circles de ned by their more signi cant county lands and allegiances.
e ‘southerners’ were mostly less substantial gentry with fewer external
commitments; they were also bound to Tynedale by stronger historic ties.
Accordingly the liberty was more of a focus for their social a liations and
identities; and, furthermore, its administrative routines brought them
223
CFR, viii, p. 209. Appropriately the 1386 feoffment of the Tynedale lands to John
Widdrington by the surviving trustee was effected at Newcastle, and attested by the earl
of Northumberland and thirteen others, of whom only Matthew Whitfield represented
an old Tynedale family: NDD, p. 234.
224
CDS, iii, no. 1555; cf. NCS, ZSW/32; HN, III, i, pp. 22–3 (Williamston, 1354); NDD, p. 113
(Tarset, 1362). The emphasis, however, is on contacts outside the liberty: see, for example,
CIPM, xvii, no. 275; Lucy Cart., no. 204; NCS, ZSW/1/47, 77; 4/22, 79, 83, 86; HN, II, ii,
p. 251; III, ii, pp. 10, 16–18.
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together for jury service, which also entailed – unlike in other settings –
some interaction with small tenants in north Tynedale such as the Charltons
and Kershopes.
225
us, at least to these degrees, the liberty retained its
traditional role as a binding force. But perhaps only the cohesive e ects of
good lordship could have drawn both gentry groups into regular contact;
and so, in reality, those groups were in essence separate sociabilities operat-
ing more within their own spheres than within a single liberty community.
Arguably such di erentiation was already signalled when in 1314–15 the
liberty fractured into halves, with south Tynedale de ning itself in antith-
esis to north Tynedale. No doubt it was now reinforced by the long minori-
ties experienced by the Ogles (1362–72) and Widdringtons (1372–92). Yet
at the core of it lay di erent senses of locality and rootedness. e introduc-
tion of county families therefore profoundly altered the liberty’s internal
political dynamics and geography; and this provides a fuller context for
understanding its di culties in maintaining social unity and coherence.
e southern gentry, inhabiting a relatively close- meshed neighbourhood,
could call on well- established norms of mutual cooperation for regulating
their a airs and upholding local peace. By the same token, the lack of an
equivalent landed interest in north Tynedale would have heightened its
problems of governance and leadership. In brief, on such an interpretation
the Swinburnes were the only gentry of note embedded there; the family
lacked the kind of support from neighbours it could count on in south
Tynedale, not to mention their restraining in uence; and, all in all, it seems
little wonder that sooner or later the liberty polarised into a heartland and
an outer marchland.
But who were responsible for the petition presented to Edward III by ‘the
community of the liberty’ in about 1370? is display of collectivity would
indicate closer gentry–liberty attachments than network analysis alone
implies; and, rst, it may prove helpful to glance forward to 1422, when
two plainti s in Chancery delivered a homily on Tynedale’s privileged
status. e liberty, they declaimed, was an ancient ‘regality’ (dominium
regale); its lords had always had their own chancery and court of all pleas;
they enjoyed ‘regal authority’ (jurisdictio regalis) save only within the
mine of Alston Moor; and no royal o cer had ever exercised authority
in Tynedale except as regards the mine. e originators of this exegesis
were the Viponts’ successors, William and Mary Stapleton; and it might
225
Few local jury lists survive except for the period 1369–73, when the jurors included
Hugh Ridley, John Thirlwall (the elder?), John Tyndale, John Vipont and Matthew
Whitfield. Significantly none of the ‘new’ gentry appears. See C 135/205/22; 135/207/22;
135/223/10; 135/231/3; 145/203/23.
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348
be concluded that they had deep local roots, even that the liberty was basic
to their self- identi cation. But William Stapleton was an interloper from
Edenhall in Cumberland; he evoked the liberty’s privileges as a litigation
strategy; and, moreover, he was farmer of the Alston mine and had recently
obtained royal letters a rming its independence from the liberty – hence in
part the care he took in 1422 to distinguish between the two jurisdictions.
226
Nonetheless William was eager to stress the liberty’s rights when they
served his purposes; to that extent, his alternative attachments did not con-
ict with support for its traditions. us, depending on the circumstances,
the liberty might have implications for identi cation even when a man’s
other ties had much stronger claims on his loyalties.
e meaning of ‘community’ around 1370 appears to have been no less
exible, contingent and ambiguous. Nothing suggests that the petition’s
demand for law and justice did not represent the interests of the ‘old’
south Tynedale gentry. To judge from the composition of juries sworn in
at Newbrough and Wark between 1369 and 1373, they identi ed closely
with the liberty’s governance structures.
227
Nor, probably, could they easily
a ord the expense of seeking redress in the Westminster courts. Yet the
petition was not (unlike the 1315 petition) purely south Tynedale’s handi-
work. Its promoters invoked the entire ‘community of the liberty’; and
this community was, or seems to have been, xed less in social reality than
in shared consciousness of the liberty as a jurisdiction and support for its
good rule. On this view, the liberty was a su ciently powerful institutional
entity to unite people of diverse backgrounds and interests into a single
‘community of the mind’.
228
But we must also try to tease out some of the
complexities of the motives, values and assumptions that in all likelihood
informed that notion.
Arguably the lead was taken by the ‘new’ northern gentry, prompted by
concern to stabilise the liberty and, more especially, to satisfy their own
needs. In the 1360s most of them were actively associated with upholding
good governance in Northumbrian county society.
229
ey were, or might
claim to be, pre- eminently guardians of the rule of law and its enforcers.
226
C 44/25/17; KB 27/652, m. 94; HC, iv, pp. 463–5; CPR 1413–16, pp. 250–1; CIMisc., vii,
no. 519. For the legal context, see F. W. Ragg, ‘Mauld’s Meaburn, the Alston mines, and
a branch of the Veteriponts’, TCWAAS, new ser., 11 (1911), pp. 294–5.
227
Above, n. 225.
228
A recent study stressing the importance of ‘imagined communities’ is M. L. Holford,
‘Pro patriotis: “country”, “countrymen” and local solidarities in late medieval England’,
Parergon, 23 (2006), pp. 47–70.
229
In particular, John Stirling and Roger Widdrington appear on numerous county
commissions during this decade: CPR 1361–4; 1364–7; 1367–70, passim; Laing Chrs, no.
55.
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Inasmuch as Tynedale landowners served as liberty justices, it was also such
men who did so. Signi cantly, too, in 1361 the justices held their sessions
not in Wark but in William Heron’s manor of Simonburn; while in 1364
Aymer Atholl and John Stirling conducted, in terms of judicial pro ts, the
most exacting of all the assizes in the period 1361–76.
230
Furthermore, it
has already been noted that from 1369 baili Strother’s behaviour was jeop-
ardising ‘new’ gentry interests. Tellingly he did not lack support, tacit or
otherwise, among the ‘old’ gentry; and so his opponents had to look outside
the liberty for allies.
231
But they would also have wanted local checks on
Strother’s control of its government. Indeed, it was perhaps William Heron
and Roger Widdrington who presented the petition to Edward III on their
visit to London in 1371; and when Edward did provide a remedy – that is, by
granting the liberty to Edmund Langley in 1373 – this was doubtless seen as
going some way towards restoring their position. But the petition’s signi -
cance, it can be argued, rests much more on the fact that the ‘new’ gentry’s
chief priorities lay elsewhere; thus, as a normal course, they needed regular
governance and justice to compensate for their lack of local in uence and
control, not least because when they used the crown’s courts to prosecute
Tynedale suits, they could not rely on them to defend their interests and
rights.
232
In fact, in this sense the liberty’s ‘royal’ status disadvantaged these
men; it might also give them little option but to identify with the liberty’s
prerogatives and authority.
It is a nice paradox to have to conclude that the ‘new’ gentry’s appar-
ent loyalty to the liberty and its ‘community’ around 1370 seems merely
to con rm that east Northumberland was the main source of their power
and allegiances. Such a verdict should not obscure the suggestion that the
more marginal and vulnerable a landowner’s role and place in local society,
the more he might imagine institutional solidarity with the liberty. By this
yardstick, the liberty’s ability to evoke awareness of common interests and
loyalties does indeed merit emphasis. Similarly even notable royal servants
– John Stirling was promoted to the peerage in 1363, as was William Heron
in 1371 – were seemingly capable of supporting the respective rights of both
230
A £200 common fine (1364 assizes) can be compared with £72 (1361), £37 (1366) and £23
(1376): SC 6/952/11; NCS, ZSW/4/54. Unfortunately the names of the justices in 1376 are
not recorded. For Simonburn gaol, see CPR 1358–61, p. 374.
231
Above, pp. 341–2. Local juries, on which families such as Ridley, Thorngrafton, Tyndale
and Williamston were represented, upheld Strother claims to Henshaw and found against
the Widdrington enfeoffment- to- use: C 135/205/22; 135/231/3.
232
In 1363, for instance, William Heron brought into Common Pleas a case of trespass in
Shitlington (in Bellingham) against Thomas Johnson of Thirlwall, Thomas Kershope,
John Richardson and others; but the sheriff of Northumberland could not find and attach
them: CP 40/412, m. 155.
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the crown and Tynedale itself. But it nevertheless remains important not to
oversimplify perceptions of the liberty and the terms in which attachments
and obligations to it might be understood. Whatever hopes William Heron
and Roger Widdrington had of it, they appear to have seen nothing incon-
sistent in pursuing their feud with Strother by turning to the county and its
jurisdiction. Earlier, in 1346, they were among the nineteen named knights
and serjeants of ‘the community of the county of Northumberland’ who
petitioned Edward III against a postponement of the Newcastle assizes;
233
and it can probably be assumed that they were also among the county
spokesmen who in 1342 denounced the liberty as a criminal society and
requested action against it. Certainly, in 1343 William Heron, John Stirling
and Gerard Widdrington secured their appointment as royal justices to
punish crime in Tynedale, and thereby sought to protect their local inter-
ests not as members of any ‘liberty community’ but as representatives of the
county and crown power.
234
‘Community’, then, was de ned and rede ned in relation to context and
need, and loyalties to the liberty uctuated accordingly. It may serve to
underwrite how far Tynedale was assimilated into complex orbits of over-
lapping and sometimes contradictory associations and identi cations. Nor
can it be taken as read that the ‘old’ south Tynedale gentry, though linked
more closely to the liberty, lived in a world that was substantially less
multi- textured than the world of the ‘new’ gentry. Some evidence puts the
emphasis on the immediate family and locality. In 1385, for example, John
irlwall the elder led a retinue of nine followers, including three kinsmen
and two neighbours, while Matthew Whit eld had eleven men, of whom
ve were his sons.
235
As for larger involvements, the irlwalls were not the
only ones to gravitate westwards. e Viponts advanced themselves as lords
of Johnby (Cumberland) and Keisley (Westmorland), just as the Whit elds
extended their reach to Tarraby north of Carlisle and to Whitrigg on the
Solway ats. Johnby and Keisley slipped from the Viponts’ grasp in 1369;
and Whit eld expansion was pioneered by a cadet branch. But there can be
no gainsaying the ease with which the irlwalls, Viponts and Whit elds
turned in Cumbrian society or the widely rami ed nature of their contacts
with gentry such as the Aglionbies, Blencowes, Cotesfords, Daubeneys and
Stapletons. Even the Whitelaws of Randalholme followed in the Viponts’
233
C 49/7/20.
234
CPR 1343–5, p. 67; Rot. Scot., i, p. 644 (and note also p. 935: the commission awarded in
1369 to William Heron and Roger Widdrington as warden- conservators).
235
BL, Cotton Roll XIII.8. See similarly CPR 1354–8, p. 610; CDS, v, no. 3926 (the Vipont
retinue, 1357).
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wake as proprietors in Johnby.
236
Also instructive is Hexham Priory’s
rent- roll of 1379, which shows that John irlwall, William Whitelaw and
Matthew Whit eld were homagers of the priory for all or some of their
main estates in the liberty.
237
Nor was south Tynedale’s eastern bound-
ary less porous in other respects; and a notable case in point concerns the
manor of Kirkhaugh, which passed from the Tyndales to their Durham
kinsmen, the Claxtons.
e Claxton association with Kirkhaugh may also serve to illuminate
the liberty’s history in relation to competing spheres of noble in uence,
an issue perhaps unduly neglected hitherto.
238
It was in 1376 that Walter
Tyndale (d. 1378), having disowned as an adulteress his wife Isabel, set
about disinheriting her o spring by conveying Kirkhaugh, and his lands
outside the liberty in Dilston and Corbridge, to John Claxton of Fishburn.
Walter thereby trod on important toes: the Percies regarded Corbridge
as their preserve and as a base from which to dominate the surrounding
district, including south Tynedale itself;
239
but the Claxtons were leading
retainers of the Percies’ principal rivals, the Nevilles of Raby. Kirkhaugh
remained with John Claxton until just before his death in 1392, when
he granted it for life to his brother, omas Claxton of Old Park. In the
1390s, however, the Nevilles represented a growing threat to Percy ambi-
tions in south Northumberland; and the Percies used their in uence over
Tynedale’s baili and chancellor, John Fenwick and Alexander Marton,
to secure omas Claxton’s ejection from Kirkhaugh, in favour of Isabel
236
Thirlwalls: above, p. 335; CRO (Carlisle), D/Ay/1/75, 114; D/HA/2/118. Viponts:
CFR, vii, p. 96; CIPM, xi, no. 476; xiii, no. 54; CPR 1343–5, p. 147; CRO (Carlisle), D/
HGB/1/3, 27; D/Lons/L5/1/BM49; D/Mus/2/2/53. Whitfields: CCR 1323–7, pp. 193–4;
CRO (Carlisle), D/Ay/1/13–75, passim; 2/5, 12; The Register of Gilbert Welton, Bishop
of Carlisle, 1353–1362, ed. R. L. Storey (Canterbury and York Society, 1999), nos. 320,
328. In 1345 Robert Wulveseye, a servant of Bishop Kirkby, exchanged the rectory
of Scaleby near Tarraby for that of Whitfield: The Register of John Kirkby, Bishop of
Carlisle, 1332–1352, etc., ed. R. L. Storey (Canterbury and York Society, 1993–5), i, nos.
272, 784–9, 793. Whitelaws: CCR 1369–71, p. 147; CIPM, xiii, no. 54; CRO (Carlisle),
D/Wal/9/32; and, for other connections with Cumberland, see CRO (Carlisle), D/
Mus/2/2/10, 31; Testamenta Karleolensia, ed. R. S. Ferguson (CWAAS, Extra Series,
1893), nos. 46, 49.
237
Hexham Priory, ii, pp. 18–19. For the reality of Hexham Priory’s lordship over the
Whitfields, see NCS, 324/W1/13A: licence to found a chantry in Whitfield church issued
by the prior to Robert Whitfield (1339), albeit in confirmation of earlier licences by John
Darcy and Queen Philippa (CPR 1334–8, p. 331); and deed by Matthew Whitfield, in
which Prior Marton is styled ‘dominus meus’ (1386).
238
Much of this paragraph rests on NCH, x, pp. 252–9; B. Barker, Law and Disorder in the
Medieval North East (North East England History Institute, 2007), pp. 17–24.
239
In 1375 John Ebchester, rector of Knarsdale, was presented by Percy favour to St Mary’s
chantry, Corbridge: NCH, x, p. 195.
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Tyndale’s surviving daughter, and to deny him any local remedy.
240
It was
then that omas appealed to Edmund Langley for justice; but on Langley’s
failure to get justice done, the Claxtons looked to the good lordship of
Ralph Neville, earl of Westmorland, who settled the dispute by arbitration
in about 1399.
is story, however untypical it may have been, has several strands to
it. For Fenwick and Marton, like Alan Strother before them, the liberty
was a valuable source of political power and advantage. Equally, however,
they were ready and able to put other loyalties before their responsibilities
to the liberty, and it was a ne thing when such loyalties could bring its
judicial machinery to a stop. Signi cantly omas Claxton had recognised
the liberty’s authority by regarding its court and its lord as his rst ports
of call; but for him, too, alternative magnate leadership turned out to be
more important and relevant. All told, this episode provides another telling
measure of the liberty’s integration into the wider socio- political networks
of regional society, and starkly reveals what the cost could be for its role as
a local polity.
On a broader view, moreover, magnate in uence in the region a ected
liberty loyalties in ampler if less dramatic ways. For throughout the four-
teenth century, in peace as well as in war, myriad client–patron links were
forged. Loose, provisional and short- lived such ties may o en have been,
but they nevertheless involved multiple connections and obligations outside
the liberty. All parts of its gentry society explored the available options, and
to such an extent that virtually every English magnate active in the Borders
carried a certain political weight within that society. To give some indica-
tive examples, Gerard Widdrington was Henry Percy’s feed retainer in the
1340s, and later became a household knight of Humphrey Bohun, earl of
Northampton (1360–73).
241
It is also impossible to reconstruct the careers
of the irlwalls without noting their links with William Bohun (d. 1360),
or that they were in John of Gaunt’s orbit in the 1360s, performed serv-
ices to the Percies in the 1370s, and owed much of their prominence in
Cumbrian local governance in the 1380s to a mixture of Gaunt, Neville and
240
For Fenwick’s Percy connections, see A. King, ‘“They have the hertes of the people
by north”: Northumberland, the Percies and Henry IV, 1399–1408’, in G. Dodd and
D. Biggs (eds), Henry IV: The Establishment of the Regime, 1399–1406 (Woodbridge,
2003), p. 141. It should also be noted that Marton’s deputy in Tynedale as keeper of
the seal, John Mitford, was steward of Corbridge for the Percies from 1370: HC, iii,
pp. 744–5.
241
Thomas Walsingham, Gesta Abbatum Monasterii Sancti Albani, ed. H. T. Riley (RS,
1867–9), ii, pp. 375–8. The Bohuns were evidently Gerard’s most important patrons: see
also, for example, Rot. Scot., i, p. 706.
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Percy in uence.
242
In 1347 William Heron bound himself to serve the prior
of Durham before all others, except the king and the bishop of Durham
– though not Queen Philippa. Robert Bellingham showed an exceptional
loyalty to the Percies, and was granted, presumably in trust, all the Percy
lands in Lancashire and Westmorland in 1368. e Viponts’ Cli ord a li-
ations were strong enough to have repercussions for the liberty in the early
eenth century, when John Cli ord attempted to extend his hegemony
into south Tynedale by engrossing the Vipont inheritance at the Stapletons’
expense.
243
And thus we may return to William IV Swinburne’s multi- faceted career,
which especially in its closing stages perhaps best encapsulates how far
the boundaries of identities and allegiances could be transformed. For all
William’s attachment to the liberty and its opportunities for local power,
it was undoubtedly the county of Northumberland that became the pivot
of his interests and aspirations. His Hetton marriage and his election as
MP (1395) are two important pointers; but the story did not begin or end
there. William’s role in the shire included duties as tax- collector (1380)
and arrayer (1392). Moreover, it was in the late 1390s that Percy service
and patronage proved irresistible to him; and, a er Henry IV had show-
ered Hotspur with rewards for supporting the Lancastrian coup, he was
the chief Percy retainer to pro t from them – as Hotspur’s deputy justiciar
of Cheshire, his steward and receiver- general in the lordship of Denbigh,
and his constable of Beaumaris. For William this was not an automatic or
necessarily a painless accommodation, assisted as it was by the power- shi
in north Tynedale on Hotspur’s acquisition of the former Talbot lands in
1399; but it nonetheless reinforced his county links and brought him to
prominence on an even wider stage. In 1403, however, William did not
join the Percy rebellion, which reminds us that his Lancastrian connections
went back to 1384 when he had joined Gaunt’s a nity, and that the Percies,
even as they entrenched themselves in Tynedale, were by no means his sole
focus of loyalty, obedience and lordship.
244
Such was the fragmented nature
242
Above, p. 303; CDS, iv, nos. 225, 331; v, no. 4091; HC, iii, p. 584; CPR 1385–9, pp. 10, 129.
It can be added that two successive rectors of Haltwhistle, John Seggenaux and Richard
Barton, were Gaunt’s servants: DCM, Reg. Hatfield, ff. 64v, 160r.
243
Heron: DCM, Loc.XXVIII.9(1). Bellingham: CDS, v, nos. 4023, 4090; BL, Cotton Roll
XIII.8; Bodl., MS Dodsworth 149, f. 103r. Viponts: the Clifford campaign to annex the
Vipont patrimony is discussed in Ragg, ‘Mauld’s Meaburn’, pp. 294–8, and a key unno-
ticed source, linking Clifford with the Herons and Swinburnes in 1421, is Notts. Archives,
DD/4P/5/1. A Vipont–Percy tie, to which William Vipont owed his appointment as
keeper of Inglewood Forest in 1328 (CPR 1327–30, p. 249), apparently did not last.
244
HC, iv, pp. 552–4; King, ‘“Hertes of the people”’, pp. 141, 146. Evidence of the relevance
to Swinburne of his Lancastrian links includes his possible support of the Appellants,
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of the universe in which the liberty’s gentry ordered their lives, and which
moulded their identities and behaviour.
So, nally, what meanings should be assigned to ‘the liberty of Tynedale’
in the fourteenth century? Much remains problematic because of the lack
of sources about its routine judicial and administrative work. But, plainly,
both the authority and the reverses of the English ‘war- state’, as well as
more local in uences, altered the overall context for the liberty’s develop-
ment and o en ran counter to its traditional governmental integrity and
socio- political distinctiveness. In the event, however, Tynedale’s autonomy
as a ‘royal liberty’ was not reduced very far. Despite the crown’s increasing
contact with the liberty, it thus remained a recognised power- structure,
whose independent status was in varying degrees respected and supported
by king and liberty- owner alike, and gave it a considerable potential to
shape people’s lives and identities. But if this much is clear, so also is the gap
between potential and reality. e stirrings of ‘community’, as in 1314–15
and around 1370, epitomise the liberty’s shortcomings in the service of local
interests and needs; and, more especially, they tell of the lack of a lordship–
liberty partnership of the sort that had enabled thirteenth- century Tynedale
to de ne itself as a local polity of striking cohesion and power. Measured by
these terms of reference, its fourteenth- century successor was much less of
a unifying force for loyalty, culture and identity. Above all, once the lines
of authority, protection and advancement became fragile, complex and
contradictory, a pluralistic world emerged where ‘the liberty of Tynedale’
denoted merely one of a range of options for allegiance and identi cation,
and was not automatically a major focus for those relationships.
Yet, for all our reservations, the liberty was still a focus of some sig-
ni cance. Its in uence on traditional political society was weaker; but it
continued to provide that society with a certain sense of social coherence
and identity. And while its tenurial and administrative structures were
dominated as never before by leading county gentry, even they could value
its privileges or powers according to their needs and priorities. us liberty,
county and other loyalties were sometimes opposed; but they might also co-
exist and, what is more, there was a sense of commitment to the liberty that
did not necessarily depend on close personal ties or on the agency of supe-
rior authority. Nowhere are these themes more in evidence than in about
1370, when a community united around the liberty as an institution and a
and his enlistment of the aid of Bolingbroke (the future Henry IV) against the Percies in
a dispute over the Hetton inheritance. See also above, p. 332, n. 164; and, for the Talbot
lands, CPR 1399–1401, p. 94.
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TYNEDALE: A COMMUNITY IN TRANSITION
355
source of collective rights. So Tynedale became more typical of the ‘average’
shire with its ‘web of overlapping and multi- layered loyalties and channels
of patronage’;
245
but we cannot simply conclude that it was the ‘state’ and
not the liberty that prevailed. Or, to restate John Leland’s apposite assess-
ment of the Tynedale he visited in the 1530s, in some respects it belonged
to the county of Northumberland, but in others it was self- su cient and
distinct.
246
245
G. Harriss, Shaping the Nation: England, 1360–1461 (Oxford, 2005), p. 197.
246
The Itinerary of John Leland, ed. L. T. Smith (London, 1906–10), v, p. 63.
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