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

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BORDER LIBERTIES AND LOYALTIES

New work has gone a stage further by powerfully disputing the concept of

an inexorable growth of crown regulation and administrative uniformity

over the long duration.  us important studies of Cheshire and Durham

by Tim  ornton and Christian Liddy have highlighted the continued

governmental vitality of these liberties, the extent to which the monarchy

respected their status as entities distinct from the rest of the kingdom, and

the resilience of regional autonomy as a potent and enduring idea into the

early modern era.

Moreover, some scholars have pointed directly to the roles liberties

might play in moulding common attitudes, interests and allegiances. When

Nigel Saul referred to fourteenth- century Sussex as ‘a county of communi-

ties’, and Tony Pollard found in   eenth- century Yorkshire ‘“counties”

within the county’, they based their assessments on brief if revealing analy-

ses of how each county’s ‘rapes’ or ‘shires’ in uenced its social and political

structures.

Robert Somerville took the view that Lancashire’s palatinate

courts created a deep and abiding sense of local attachment because they

were prized sources of speedy and familiar justice.

Majorie McIntosh’s

study of the hundredal liberty of Havering in Essex, and Andy Wood’s

long look at privileged mining communities such as that of Alston Moor in

Cumberland, have stressed the signi cance of relatively minor jurisdictions

for socio- legal solidarities.

Relatedly, Alan Harding has argued for the

importance of ‘franchises’ as sources of people’s rightful customs and per-

sonal freedoms, so that ‘the meaning of liberties [shi ed] from the powers

of the prelates and barons to the rights of individual subjects’.

No less pro-

foundly,  ornton’s work on Cheshire, and Liddy’s on Durham, have sug-

Thornton: Cheshire and the Tudor State, 1480–1560 (Woodbridge, 2000); ‘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), pp. 83–100; ‘The palatinate of

Durham and the Maryland charter’, American Journal of Legal History, 45 (2001), pp.

235–55. Liddy: ‘The politics of privilege: Thomas Hatfield and the palatinate of Durham,

1345–81’, Fourteenth Century England, 4 (2006), pp. 61–79; The Bishopric of Durham in

the Late Middle Ages (Woodbridge, 2008).

N. Saul, Scenes from Provincial Life: Knightly Families in Sussex, 1280–1400 (Oxford,

1986), p. 60; A. J. Pollard, North- Eastern England during the Wars of the Roses (Oxford,

1990), p. 153.

R. Somerville, ‘The palatinate courts in Lancashire’, in A. Harding (ed.), Law- Making and

Law- Makers in British History (London, 1980), pp. 54–63.

M. K. McIntosh, Autonomy and Community: The Royal Manor of Havering, 1200–1500

(Cambridge, 1986); A. Wood, ‘Custom, identity and resistance: English free miners and

their law, c. 1550–1800’, in P. Griffiths, A. Fox and S. Hindle (eds), The Experience of

Authority in Early Modern England (London, 1996), pp. 249–85. On the Alston miners,

see further below, especially Chapter 6, pp. 238–40, 275, 279.

Harding, Medieval Law, pp. 216–21 (quotation at p. 216), and his ‘Political liberty in the

Middle Ages’, Speculum, 55 (1980), pp. 423–43.

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INTRODUCTION

gested how major liberties might foster independent political cultures and

act as ‘imagined worlds’ around which local identities could crystallise.

Such insights, it would seem, invite historians to rethink traditional

assumptions about the taxonomy of the medieval English ‘state’ or, to be

more precise, the manner in which di erent governance systems interacted

with society, their relative signi cance for power, loyalty and identity, and

the extent to which England’s ‘local polity’ was in reality a polycentric order

of multiple local polities. Yet despite some questioning of earlier views,

the fact remains that the central issues in recent scholarship have been

the institutions of ‘bureaucratic monarchy’ or, more particularly, govern-

ment and political society as organised around the king’s counties.

So it

is that liberties in their own rights have rarely  gured in the work done

over the last decade and more on such seminal themes as the interaction

of law and society, the origins and development of ‘bastard feudalism’, and

the emergence of the gentry. Rather, the emphasis has been on deepening

our understanding of a legal system and culture presided over by the king

and his justices; of the ability of individual magnates (or, more o en, their

inability) to dominate county politics; and of the role played by the county

as a focus for a rising gentry class in terms of service, advancement and

identi cation.

Not least the existence and nature of ‘county communities’

have been keenly argued, largely in relation to a county’s administration

and its encounters with the crown, and in ways that take little account of the

sum of local jurisdictions within, or co- existent with, county jurisdictions.

Such approaches have therefore had only limited relevance for registering

the possible or actual signi cance of alternative institutional frameworks

for local governance and society.

And, certainly, they do not provide

ready- made models for illuminating the history of the medieval North-

Thornton, Cheshire and the Tudor State, Chapter 2; Liddy, Bishopric of Durham,

Chapter 5.

Recent reinforcements of state- centred paradigms include A. Jobson (ed.), English

Government in the Thirteenth Century (Woodbridge, 2004).

See respectively (and most accessibly), A. Musson, Medieval Law in Context (Manchester,

2001); M. A. Hicks, Bastard Feudalism (London, 1995); P. Coss, The Origins of the English

Gentry (Cambridge, 2003).

For an influential survey, see C. Carpenter, ‘Gentry and community in medieval England’,

JBS, 33 (1994), pp. 340–80. The latest contributions include J. Freeman, ‘Middlesex in the

fifteenth century: county community or communities?’, in M. A. Hicks (ed.), Revolution

and Consumption in Late Medieval England (Woodbridge, 2001), pp. 89–103; A. Polden,

‘The social networks of the Buckinghamshire gentry in the thirteenth century’, Journal of

Medieval History, 32 (2006), pp. 371–94.

A notable recent exception is D. A. Carpenter, ‘The second century of English feudalism’,

Past and Present, 168 (2000), pp. 30–71, though the focus is on the continuing importance

of the ordinary honour in the political organisation of thirteenth- century England.

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BORDER LIBERTIES AND LOYALTIES

East, which had more in common with the highly fragmented governmen-

tal landscapes of the March of Wales and of English Ireland than with much

of midland and southern England.

Such a statement requires some ampli cation. In 1352 reference was

made to ‘royal liberties’ in Ireland ‘like Durham and Chester [that] take

from the king not only great pro ts, but much of the obedience of the

persons enfranchised’.

Strictly speaking, this assessment exaggerated the

legal- constitutional status of the Irish liberties: a er all, their courts were

rarely entitled to hold all crown pleas, their church lands were supposed to

come under the jurisdiction of the king’s sheri s, and their inhabitants were

liable to the king’s taxes.

A closer parallel for the greater north- eastern

liberties is supplied by the Welsh March.  e prerogatives and rule- making

powers of the Marcher liberties were undoubtedly more exclusive, so that

they remained in a remarkable sense beyond the reach of the English mon-

archy and its agents. But it is the magisterial work of Rees Davies on these

liberties that has provided the key contextual basis – and the main inspira-

tion – for the present study.

Indeed, for all that the March was atypical

and distinctive, his analyses of how liberties  tted into and in uenced the

organisation of governance and loyalties have set an agenda that is gener-

ally applicable to the institutional and political con guration of the English

polity as a whole. And, in fact, it was Davies’s scrutiny of the March that in

due course prompted his reappraisal of the anatomy of the medieval ‘state’,

including that of ‘crown- centred’ England itself. For there, too, power

might well be characterised by its ‘alternative nodal points’, its ‘multiplex

nature’ and its ‘plurality and overlapping context’.

What then were the local coordinates of government and justice in the

medieval North- East? A composite snapshot is provided by the Hundred

Roll inquests of 1274–5, the Northumberland eyre rolls of 1279, and the

Quo Warranto inquiries of 1293.

 e English crown’s direct power in

the region was based on the county of Northumberland. Its e ective gov-

ernmental boundaries were much narrower than those of the modern

CCR 1349–52, p. 461.

R. Frame, ‘Lordship and liberties in Ireland and Wales, c. 1170–c. 1360’, in H. Pryce and

J. Watts (eds), Power and Identity in the Middle Ages (Oxford, 2007), pp. 131–3.

See especially Davies, Lordship and Society, and his The Age of Conquest: Wales, 1063–

1415 (Oxford, 1991), Chapters 4, 10, 15. Rees Davies’s final book, Lords and Lordship in

the British Isles in the Late Middle Ages (Oxford, 2009), appeared as our work went to

press.

Davies, ‘Medieval state’, pp. 290–1.

RH, ii, pp. 17–24; NAR, pp. 357–9; PQW, pp. 585–605; NER, pp. 222–65.

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INTRODUCTION

pre- 1974 county;

and there were no hundreds or wapentakes, or regular

frankpledge and tourn, through which the sheri ’s authority could be

articulated.  e shire proper was divided into eight wards, which were

primarily administrative-  scal units; and within them lay numerous baro-

nies, which exercised a hundred- type jurisdiction.  us their lords had by

long usage gallows and infangthief, and the assizes of bread and ale; they

might also claim, o en by royal grant, rights of chase, warren, market and

fair. Such powers were signi cant forms of local authority: infangthief, for

instance, allowed the lord to hang thieves caught red- handed on his lands.

But they were scarcely the hallmarks of major jurisdiction, and for pur-

poses of royal administration the baronies were normally treated as regular

parts of the county. It was, however, a di erent matter for the borough of

Newcastle and the earl of Lancaster’s barony of Embleton, whose rights to

return of writs excluded the sheri . Newcastle also elected its own coroners,

and both liberties long retained distinct identities as separate tax- paying

communities.

Yet neither compared in independence with the  ve power-

structures that had not been absorbed into, or were largely detached from,

the routine systems of county and royal governance.  ese were the liber-

ties recorded in 1279 and in 1293 as entitled to hear all crown and other

pleas at their own eyres; and together they dominated much of the North-

East, both territorially and governmentally. Durham ‘between Tyne and

Tees’, with Bedlingtonshire, Islandshire and Norhamshire, was controlled

by the bishop; Hexhamshire by the archbishop of York; Redesdale by the

Umfravilles, an old- established Northumbrian family; Tynedale – for most

of the thirteenth century – by the king of Scots; and Tynemouthshire by

the prior of Tynemouth.  ese liberties, it is true, were not equally privi-

leged. Redesdale and Tynemouthshire were ‘merely’ superior return- of-

writs jurisdictions like Battle, Beverley and Ripon; it was therefore only

in Durham, Hexhamshire and Tynedale that the king’s writ was said not

to run. Nevertheless Redesdale and Tynemouthshire had developed wide

powers by the later thirteenth century, and both deserve to be considered,

as they are in this book, alongside the north- eastern regalities.

Our priority is to assess the capacities of each of these liberties as a local

polity in the fullest sense of that term.  us we examine the nature of the

liberty- owner’s rights and rule; the extent to which loyalty to the lord

According to the ampler claims made for the crown’s jurisdictional supremacy, the medi-

eval county embraced the entire region between the Tees and the Tweed; but we are here

concerned with actual practice, not abstract theory.

See, for example, NLS, pp. 39–47, 114–15; The Lay Subsidy of 1334, ed. R. E. Glasscock

(London, 1975), pp. 219, 226. R. R. Reid, ‘Barony and thanage’, EHR, 35 (1920), p. 191,

incorrectly assumes that all tenants by barony in Northumberland had return of writs.

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BORDER LIBERTIES AND LOYALTIES

overrode other allegiances; and how far his tenants were tied to the liberty

by their landed interests and social relationships, by its mechanisms of gov-

ernance and justice, and by involvement in o ce- holding. No less impor-

tantly, how e ectively did each liberty shape or a rm local identities and

solidarities by serving the common needs of local society, by forging a sense

of collective commitment to its institutions and freedoms, and by develop-

ing its own speci c culture, customs and traditions? Moreover, to what

degree did the power and demands of the ‘state’ endanger or strengthen a

liberty as a unit of government and social organisation, and how did their

impact vary over time? In what measure were a liberty’s authority and cohe-

sion a ected by broader processes of political and socio- economic change?

 e thirteenth and fourteenth centuries are the obvious and critical

periods for addressing such matters.  e available documentation, notably

from the 1250s to the 1340s, is relatively rich.  e Durham archive is

of course outstandingly important; but archiepiscopal registers covering

Hexhamshire, Tynedale eyre rolls and the Tynemouth Priory cartulary give

insights into liberty- society interactions of the sort that are rarely possible

at other times. Again, these two centuries represented the most formative

era in the liberties’ histories, especially as regards their relations with the

English monarchy. Richard Kaeuper’s distinction between the thirteenth-

century ‘law- state’ and the fourteenth- century ‘war- state’ is a construct

that does not entirely convince, but it can usefully be adopted the better to

get our bearings.

In the thirteenth century, when the crown’s supervisory

authority dramatically increased even in England’s northern outskirts,

it was the ‘law- state’ that tested the rights and powers of liberties, be it

through the expansion of the king’s justice or by rigorous Quo Warranto

scrutiny of the claims of liberty- owners. In the event, this kingdom- wide

renegotiation of central and local power involved give and take on both

sides; but it naturally brings the greater north- eastern liberties into sharper

focus, and facilitates assessment in some detail of their strengths and limita-

tions as hubs of governance and social cohesion.  e ‘law- state’ was hardly

a spent force in the fourteenth century: while there would be no parallel to

the systematic inspection of liberties of 1274–93, the growing appeal of the

central royal courts posed fresh challenges.

Arguably, however, a er the

outbreak of the Scottish wars in 1296 it was the pressures and problems of

the ‘war- state’ that had the most decisive e ects on the development of the

north- eastern liberties. With war came intensi ed military-  scal and politi-

R. W. Kaeuper, War, Justice and Public Order: England and France in the Later Middle

Ages (Oxford, 1988).

See most recently G. Dodd, Justice and Grace: Private Petitioning and the English

Parliament in the Late Middle Ages (Oxford, 2007).

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INTRODUCTION

cal demands from the crown, a new cohort of royal o cials, and increased

opportunities for employment and reward in the king’s service. No more

than in the thirteenth century would ‘state centralisation’ lead inescap-

ably to serious erosion of a liberty’s institutional authority and relevance;

paradoxically it may sometimes have reinforced them. Yet war did bring

the north- eastern liberties into closer contact with the crown in ways that

might deeply a ect traditional patterns of power and leadership. In addi-

tion, the failures of the ‘war- state’ resulted in further changes and di cul-

ties, which serve in their turn to highlight the evolving history of individual

liberties and their roles in society.

We approached each liberty with the same terms of reference; but inevi-

tably our researches evolved in di erent ways, partly because of the

nature of the relevant historiography. Good general studies exist for

Durham, Hexhamshire and Tynemouthshire, while Durham’s consti-

tutional and legal development has received detailed attention.

Late-

medieval Durham’s government, landed society and ‘community’ have also

been addressed in Christian Liddy’s recent monograph.

Such contribu-

tions thus made it feasible to concentrate on key themes or episodes where

the impact of these three liberties on society could be explored in particular

depth. By contrast, the historiographical bases for Tynedale and Redesdale

proved to be much less helpful and secure.

Moreover, since these were

secular liberties, and also lacked major religious houses, the documentation

is much less extensive: indeed, the entire corpus of surviving medieval deeds

for both liberties can be counted in the low hundreds, whereas by them-

selves the ‘Miscellaneous Charters’ in the Durham Cathedral Muniments,

most of which predate the Reformation, number some 7,300 items. So

Tynedale and Redesdale have required more groundwork treatment, and in

other respects the scope of the analyses provided re ects what is possible in

the circumstances. Tynedale’s 1279–81 eyre roll, for example, gives such a

unique insight into the liberty’s socio- political culture that it receives much

closer analysis than any comparable roll from Durham.

For Durham, special mention should also be made of Constance Fraser’s work: notably

Fraser, Bek, pp. 79–99; ‘Edward I of England and the regalian franchise of Durham’,

Speculum, 31 (1956), pp. 329–42; ‘Prerogative and the bishops of Durham, 1267–1376’,

EHR, 74 (1959), pp. 467–76; and (with K. Emsley) The Courts of the County Palatine of

Durham (Durham, 1984).

To minimise overlap with Dr Liddy’s work, the chapters on Durham in this book deal in

a relatively cursory fashion with the period after Bishop Bury’s death in 1345.

Unfortunately the introductory chapters on Tynedale and Redesdale in R. Robson, The

English Highland Clans: Tudor Responses to a Mediaeval Problem (Edinburgh, 1989), are

often misguided.

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BORDER LIBERTIES AND LOYALTIES

 e available sources have also in part determined that the follow-

ing chapters are largely studies of ‘gentry’ societies. We use the term as

a convenient way of describing potential or actual members of political

society between the baronage and the richer peasantry.  ey might be

knighted or unknighted, and armigerous or non- armigerous; they were

o en o ce- holders; and as regards landed wealth, though not necessarily,

in our experience, as regards involvement in local politics and governance,

a distinction can normally be made between greater and lesser gentry.

Sometimes, however, it has been possible and in fact essential to look more

widely and deeply into local society and political life – as, for instance,

in thirteenth- century Tynedale where one magnate family, the Comyns,

took a major role; or in Durham where clergymen were prominent in

secular administration; or in Hexhamshire where most landowners had

few claims to ‘gentility’. In essence, though, local gentry are our dramatis

personae.

It is therefore chie y from their perspective that we have attempted to

establish how far each liberty supplied – or failed to supply – a strong basis

for ‘identity’ and ‘community’.  ese concepts are notoriously elusive and

contested, as is re ected by the vast literature they have generated in history

and the social sciences.

Clearly it would be wrong to search for identi-

ties by presupposing that they were any less multi- centred and ambigu-

ous in the medieval past than they are today. But we do not consider such

a search to be futile, as long as it recognises the possible pitfalls. Formal

proclamations of solidarity, for example, can rarely be taken at face value,

and it is important wherever practicable to delve behind the rhetoric in

order to explore its political context and content. Nor can it automatically

be supposed that ‘the community of the liberty’ was incompatible with

other senses of ‘community’ or, indeed, anything other than contingent.

In assessing such questions, the medievalist almost inevitably turns to the

analysis of networks of socio- political association, on the assumption that

their patterns o er the surest guide to where people’s attachments and

For a recent review of the historiography of medieval England’s gentry, see P. Coss,

‘Hilton, lordship and the culture of the gentry’, in C. Dyer, P. Coss and C. Wickham

(eds), Rodney Hilton’s Middle Ages (Past and Present Supplement, 2, 2007), pp.

37–52.

Key statements include C. J. Calhoun, ‘Community: towards a variable conceptualiza-

tion for comparative research’, Social History, 5 (1980), pp. 105–29; A. Shepard and P.

Withington (eds), Communities in Early Modern England (Manchester, 2000), especially

the editors’ introduction. Our approaches have also been influenced by the work of the

anthropologist Vered Amit: notably ‘Reconceptualizing community’, in V. Amit (ed.),

Realizing Community (London, 2002), pp. 1–15; V. Amit and N. Rapport, The Trouble

with Community (London, 2002).

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INTRODUCTION

allegiances lay.

But the impersonal nature of so much of the evidence

– mainly legal and estate records – also prioritises the signi cance of land-

ownership and related connections at the expense of less tangible aspects of

identi cation; and we have thus tried to acknowledge both the concrete and

the conceptual bases of ‘identity’ and ‘community’.

Finally, though it is not our purpose here to summarise all the issues

raised by this study of the North- East’s major liberties, it may be helpful for

future reference to stress that at root each liberty’s relevance for individual

or collective interests, rights and loyalties depended in equal measure on

its institutional resources and its political modalities.  e legal and judicial

apparatus had to be able to maintain good order and local harmony, and be

su ciently attractive to fend o competition from the royal courts. Much

likewise hinged on the ability of a liberty’s privileges, administratively,  s-

cally or otherwise, to bene t its tenants and residents by shielding them

from unwelcome external interference and impositions; and that rested in

turn on its e ciency in mediating between the locality and the ‘state’. Also

crucial was how far a liberty’s governmental authority and structures gave

coherence to local society by providing for communal participation and

representation. Beyond these (and other) considerations lies the vital ques-

tion of the character and style of the liberty- owner’s rulership. From the

viewpoint of local society, he was expected to govern with due regard to the

common rights and customs of the liberty; he was likewise under a general

obligation to be a good lord by acting as a focus of service, protection and

reward. But governance and lordship were also matters of personality

and practice; and, more especially, there was no guarantee that the lord’s

rule would be masterful and fair.

 e dynamics of liberty- society relationships were thus complex and

unpredictable. If a liberty was well placed to meet local aspirations and

expectations, it might well cement loyalty to its autonomy and traditions,

mobilise an awareness of ‘community’, and develop its own political

ethos. If the converse was true, alternative power- sources and competing

a liations were likely to become more signi cant, to the general detri-

ment of a liberty’s governmental and socio- political integrity. Equally,

however, inadequate lordship might prompt collective action, notably in

the form of appeals to a liberty’s privileges as touchstones of communal

‘liberties’. As such comments may serve to indicate, there were therefore

For the methodologies involved, see in particular C. Carpenter, Locality and Polity: A

Study of Warwickshire Landed Society, 1401–99 (Cambridge, 1992), pp. 281–346.

Compare, for example, A. Paasi, Territories, Boundaries and Consciousness (Chichester,

1996), p. 12: ‘All . . . identities are, in a sense, fictional identities which are connected with

“imagined communities”.’

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BORDER LIBERTIES AND LOYALTIES

important variations in how the greater north- eastern liberties developed

and operated; nor was it unusual for a liberty to be ‘weak’ in some aspects

and ‘strong’ in others. In short, like all local polities these power- structures

had diverse capacities and vulnerabilities, and their individual fortunes

could wax and wane. But it will be seen that even the ‘weakest’ cannot be

discounted as an institutional anachronism or as an irrelevance for local

society.  e world of north- east England from 1200 was to experience

two centuries of profound change; yet liberties would remain basic to that

world.

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PART I

THE ECCLESIASTICAL

LIBERTIES

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