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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where the modalities of governance depended in varying degrees on royal

approval or acquiesce, local custom or convention, and the lord’s rule-

enforcing powers; nor, surely, was it altogether an invented past.

In an exchequer return of 1242–3, Earl Gilbert I was said to hold

Redesdale ‘by regal power’.

 e impressive but imprecise phrase regalis

potestas is also found in a charter relating to twel h- century Redesdale,

which announces that Robert Umfraville (d. c. 1195) granted to his brother-

in- law, William Bertram, the forest of Elsdon and Ottercops ‘in free forest

. . . saving regal power to me and my heirs’. Yet while it can be accepted that

this act was based on a genuine text of about 1185, parts of the wording

were evidently ‘improved’ to meet later requirements.

Moreover, there

are clear indications that the lord’s concern to promote Redesdale as an

exempt and separate jurisdiction developed slowly. Even in the early thir-

teenth century, there was no sense of urgency about making a sustained

case for ‘immunities’. In 1204 Richard Umfraville readily turned to King

John for a charter prohibiting unlicensed use of ‘his forest of Redesdale and

Coquetdale’; and the penalty clause, ‘under the king’s forfeiture of £10’,

may indicate that transgressors would be justiciable in the royal courts.

No less revealing is the matter of Harbottle castle in 1220.

Richard was

accused of strengthening it contrary to royal orders, and Henry III’s minor-

ity government empowered the sheri of Northumberland to have any new

work demolished. Richard protested to the king’s justiciar that Harbottle

was a vital strongpoint for the defence of the Marches; that it had been

constructed in Henry II’s reign (1154–89) with the aid of the county of

Northumberland and the bishopric of Durham; and that it was in no sense

unauthorised because it had been built at the king’s command ‘for the

public good’. Richard side- stepped the accusation – no doubt Harbottle had

been upgraded while Prudhoe was in King John’s hands from 1212 – and,

more signi cantly, he invoked the crown’s superior authority, not his own

jurisdiction. Indeed, in another letter, Richard appealed not to the ‘liberties’

in family tradition by 1207 that the Umfravilles had been in Northumberland since the

Conquest (CRR, v, p. 59).

BF, ii, p. 1121.

NCS, ZSW/2/4; HN, III, ii, pp. 24–5. Note especially phrases such as ‘suits of all kinds of

courts’ and ‘all service in the world’. The handwriting suggests a mid- thirteenth- century

date for this document.

Rotuli Chartarum in Turri Londinensi Asservati, ed. T. D. Hardy (Record Commission,

1837), p. 119.

The remainder of this paragraph rests on RLC, i, pp. 436–7; Royal Letters, i, no. 122;

SC 1/2/16. The episode is also discussed, from rather different standpoints, in D. A.

Carpenter, The Minority of Henry III (London, 1990), pp. 207–10; C. L. H. Coulson,

Castles in Medieval Society (Oxford, 2003), pp. 221–3.

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367

of Redesdale but to the ‘liberties’ of Magna Carta by demanding that the

issue be submitted to ‘the judgement of the king’s court by consideration

of my peers’.

Plainly, however, crown involvement in Redesdale’s a airs was becom-

ing more intrusive, and it was during the next generation or so that its

powers began to be expressed and defended in terms of speci c juris-

dictional rights. What the available evidence suggests, in fact, is that it

was above all the imperious and grasping Simon de Montfort who  rst

asserted Redesdale’s legal- constitutional status and brought ‘the liberty of

Redesdale’  rmly into being. In the Northumberland eyre of 1256, Simon’s

agents upheld his claims, by virtue of his custody of Redesdale, to return of

royal writs, all pleas of the crown and other pleas, and all pro ts of justice.

 e principle was likewise a rmed that Redesdale was entitled to conduct

its own eyres according to the articles of royal eyres.

Nor were matters

le there. Simon’s o cers defended his judicial authority by successfully

claiming a Redesdale suit from Common Pleas; they also went on the

o ensive, so that Coquet Moor, ‘in the northern part of the River Coquet’,

was removed from ‘the body of the county’ and brought under the liberty’s

jurisdiction.

Simon’s policies mirrored his attempts to assert his author-

ity as a liberty- owner elsewhere in England; but nowhere was such mastery

displayed more vigorously than as regards Redesdale itself.

Of course,

he and his ministers had the short- term aim of maximising the  nancial

pro ts accruing from Gilbert II’s wardship (1245–66). Yet this was nev-

ertheless a formative period of institutional de nition; and young Gilbert

clearly learned much from his guardian’s regime. He was proclaiming by

1277 that ‘from the conquest of England his ancestors . . . pleaded all pleas

pertaining to Redesdale by their own justices’; he likewise appropriated as

a central concept the notion that his predecessors had held such a jurisdic-

tion in Redesdale that ‘no crown o cer of any kind might enter it to exer-

cise authority’.

More importantly, in the Quo Warranto inquiries of 1293

Earl Gilbert demanded on grounds of prescription, and – with reservations

– was allowed, substantial privileges: return of writs; all royal pleas; gaol

delivery at will; his own eyre sessions; and all powers of the king’s justices,

sheri s and coroners.

NAR, p. 44.

PQW, p. 594; NER, no. 604; RH, ii, p. 17; NAR, pp. 352–3. On Coquet Moor’s geography,

see E. Miller, ‘Coket Moor’, PSAN, 5th ser., 1 (1955), pp. 189–91.

Cf. Maddicott, Simon de Montfort, pp. 58–9; D. A. Carpenter, The Reign of Henry III

(London, 1996), p. 104.

JUST 1/1238, m. 15; Northumb. Pets, no. 87.

PQW, pp. 593–4; NER, no. 604.

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BORDER LIBERTIES AND LOYALTIES

368

 us in 1293, as in 1256, Redesdale’s customs and usages were de ned

as formal rights, albeit within a framework of ‘liberties’ broadly acceptable

to the English king’s lawyers. What did these rights amount to in legal

theory?  ey exceeded those of an ordinary return- of- writs liberty. Such an

entity lay outside the routine authority of the king’s sheri ; but Redesdale

enjoyed a double layer of shrieval and regalian jurisdiction, and its court

corresponded to both a shire and a royal court. A high ‘franchise’ of this

sort, which was rare in England, entailed signi cant degrees of independ-

ence from crown intervention, and its governance rights put the lord in a

strong position to direct people’s lives and loyalties. Even so, Redesdale’s

institutional authority must not be overstated. Usually it is ranked with

Durham, Hexhamshire and Tynedale as one of the greatest liberties in the

medieval North- East.

Redesdale, however, was not – nor, strictly speak-

ing, did it ever become – a ‘royal liberty’ or regality on a par with those

other jurisdictions.

 e crucial di erence is that Redesdale lacked the advantage of its own

‘royal’ chancery. Technically the king’s writs ran within the liberty; and

though their execution depended on the lord’s cooperation, his own writs

did not supplant and exclude royal mandates. Rather, the lord and his

sta had the lesser right of upholding law and government at the king’s

command, provided that crown o cers made returns of all royal writs con-

cerning Redesdale (an important quali cation).  e liberty was in this sense

shaped and circumscribed by ‘a new de nition of royal sovereignty’.

the same token, the lord’s baili was answerable to the king; and if he failed

to execute royal orders, the sheri of Northumberland could be empowered

by the writ non omittas to enter the liberty and enforce them himself. Nor

indeed was the lord entitled as a normal course to bar all crown agents from

his lands: he commissioned his own justices to plead all pleas in Redesdale;

but the principle had been established by 1256 that a knight of the county,

appointed by royal justices, was to sit with them to ensure that justice was

upheld.

In theory, therefore, Redesdale was a parallel but not an exclusive

local jurisdiction, and its privileges were ‘conditional on the franchise hold-

er’s seeing that the king’s work was properly done by his own o cials’.

 e nearest equivalents, as in the case of Tynemouthshire, are liberties like

Battle, Beverley and Ripon, which by their nature were more subject than

For example, C. M. Fraser and K. Emsley, ‘Justice in north east England, 1256–1356’,

American Journal of Legal History, 15 (1971), p. 164.

M. T. Clanchy, ‘The franchise of return of writs’, TRHS, 5th ser., 17 (1967), p. 59.

NAR, p. 44; PQW, p. 593; NER, no. 604.

H. M. Cam, Liberties and Communities in Medieval England, new edn (London, 1963), p.

192.

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REDESDALE

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‘royal liberties’ to crown authority and government, to the extent that, or so

it has seemed, the lord was e ectively a ‘minister of the king’, whose liberty

‘ tted . . . into a national scheme of administration’.

So much for legal doctrine; what of Earl Gilbert II’s control in reality?

He certainly did not see himself as ruling the liberty in the king’s interest;

nor was its power ever merely an extension of the ‘state’s’ power.  e earl

made the fullest possible use of his authority within and beyond the letter

of the law; indeed, at times he behaved as if he was no more accountable to

the crown than were the ‘lords royal’ of the Welsh March. He might insist

that his own peace was superior to the king’s peace by giving asylum to

fugitive felons and by allowing them to redeem their crimes at his discre-

tion; he (or his o cers) could grant safe- conducts, in one instance through

Redesdale ‘towards the kingdom of England’; and he maintained that none

of his men should be arraigned and  ned save by his servants and for his

pro t. He could also neutralise the sheri ’s supervisory authority and veto

royal writs. He thereby sought to enforce his claim to forfeitures, as when

the sheri ’s baili was imprisoned in Harbottle gaol for entering the liberty

on a non omittas to put Henry III’s grantee, Bernard Balliol, in seisin of

Raylees and Ottercops. He continued Simon de Montfort’s campaign to

usurp ‘all the regality’ in Coquet Moor and brought it  rmly within the

liberty; he presumed to levy tolls on Newcastle merchants ‘against their

rights and to the king’s injury’; and he could have an escaped felon pursued

outside the liberty and beheaded near Simonside ‘in prejudice of the king’s

dignity’.

Earl Gilbert, then, was no king’s minister; and more will later be said of

his assertiveness. Yet, for all its manifestations, the fact remains that both

in theory and in practice there were important limitations on the liberty’s

institutional privileges and capacity.  e earl had to accept that only the

crown could grant pardons to homicides; in 1293 he also surrendered to

its jurisdiction a felon who had  ed to Redesdale from the county, albeit

reserving the right to in ict punishment a er trial ‘in accordance with

his liberty’.

In 1298 he allowed the king’s sub- escheator to attend an

inquest taken in Redesdale; and in 1303, recognising that he needed royal

licence to alienate land in the liberty, he permitted the king’s escheator

Ibid., p. 192. See also M. D. Lobel, ‘The ecclesiastical banleuca in England’, in Oxford

Essays in Medieval History (Oxford, 1934), pp. 122–40.

The above examples are taken from RH, ii, pp. 17, 21–2; NAR, pp. 352–3, 369, 372–3;

Northumb. Pets, no. 87; H. H. E. Craster, ‘An unpublished Northumbrian Hundred Roll’,

AA, 3rd ser., 3 (1907), p. 189. Coquet Moor was assumed to belong to Redesdale in 1325

and 1331, though not in 1381: CIPM, vi, no. 607; vii, no. 390; xv, no. 434.

CPR 1266–72, p. 63; 1292–1301, pp. 373, 606; 1301–7, pp. 8, 154–5; JUST 1/653, m. 21.

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BORDER LIBERTIES AND LOYALTIES

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to hold an inquisition ad quod damnum, though on the liberty–county

boundary.  en, when in 1306 Edward I authorised Gilbert to grant to

his younger son  omas, the king’s esquire, land in Redesdale worth

£20 annually, it was on condition that  omas and his heirs should be

tenants- in- chief of the crown a er Gilbert’s death.

Moreover, his claim

to appropriate rebels’ lands was quashed by Henry III: a er the abortive

grant to Bernard Balliol, Henry gave Raylees and Ottercops to his own

son Edmund, who gained possession through the sheri and, in about

1270, granted the property to William Swinburne ‘for laudable service to

our sister, the queen of Scotland’.

Redesdale also came within the ambit

of the 1274–5 Hundred Rolls inquest into infringements of the crown’s

authority, and cases arising were fully investigated by Edward I’s justices

in 1279.

Likewise, at the Redesdale eyres of 1279 and 1293, the king’s

justices exercised their right to assign observers. On the latter occasion,

the crown was represented by Guichard Charon, a highly experienced

Northumbrian royal o cer; and even if he took a passive role, his pres-

ence broadcast to all concerned that the liberty was not a self- regulating

local jurisdiction.

More serious from an institutional viewpoint were the problems encoun-

tered by a liberty- owner who had no right to control judicial process by

issuing the type of common- law writs available in the north- eastern regali-

ties. Since the ‘royal’ jurisdiction of Redesdale’s court was in this respect

dependent on the king’s writs, tenants were not automatically withdrawn

from the crown’s judicial authority. In e ect, plainti s were able to choose

their own forum, and they might actively seek justice in the royal courts.

Equally the sheri of Northumberland could ignore the liberty and refuse

to release writs to it.

 e lord might endeavour to enforce cognisance:

as Earl Gilbert expressed it, whenever Redesdale suits came before royal

justices, he was entitled to claim them through his baili for pleading in

the curia libertatis.

But the liberty’s intrinsic vulnerability to loss of juris-

diction is highlighted by the return of only eight out of a sample of seven-

teen Redesdale cases begun in Common Pleas in the period 1273–1305.

 ere may have been doubts about the earl’s entitlement to apply for the

several actions sued against him, though he did regain jurisdiction in two

CIPM, iii, no. 461; CDS, iv, no. 1790; BL, Harley Ch. 43.D.8; CPR 1301–7, p. 414.

Northumb. Pleas, nos. 791, 795–7; HN, II, i, p. 105. Raylees and Ottercops were not,

however, subtracted from the liberty.

RH, ii, pp. 21–2; Craster, ‘Hundred Roll’, pp. 189–90; NAR, pp. 352–3, 369–74.

NAR, p. 359; PQW, p. 594; NER, no. 604.

Cf. CCW 1244–1326, p. 2.

PQW, p. 593; NER, no. 604.

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REDESDALE

371

of them.

Nonetheless, while claiming court was axiomatic to ‘the lord’s

power over his men and his right to mediate their quarrels’, it was rarely ‘a

simple matter’ under any circumstances.

But a further complication for the lord of Redesdale was con icting

interpretations of ‘return of writs’. In 1293 the Quo Warranto judges

allowed Earl Gilbert to demand pleas from royal eyres and assizes only for

the time being; while judgement was reserved over his authority to with-

draw cases from Common Pleas because he could not prove his right ‘from

time out of mind’.

Nor were the Umfravilles ever to get explicit royal

con rmation of a form of return of writs that routinely transferred jurisdic-

tion. In general, claims to cognisance were accepted by the crown only a er

searching scrutiny;

and the trouble and expense involved restricted the

lord to defending his judicial superiority selectively. An alternative to cog-

nitio placitorum was non- cooperation with the royal justice system, whose

local e ectiveness was contingent on getting writs served. But it remains

the case that, with no return of writs and actions without exception, the

liberty court was not Redesdale’s sole tribunal. Earl Gilbert himself submit-

ted to Westminster jurisdiction in 1279, when he appeared by attorney in

Common Pleas and judgement was given against him to the plainti , Joan

Gunnerton, for dower in Chesterhope. Nor indeed was he above resorting

to the services of the crown’s courts over Redesdale property: in 1304, for

instance, it was before the king’s justices at York that he had Otterburn

settled on himself and his wife.

In such ways, Redesdale was not as autonomous and self- su cient as

a ‘royal liberty’. Likewise the liberty was in Earl Gilbert’s time, and would

continue to be, subject to the king’s taxes. In 1235 Henry III had conceded

to Gilbert’s father that the fortieth should be levied in Redesdale only if

other Northumbrian liberties contributed. But the thirtieth of 1237 appears

to have been imposed as a matter of course, though Redesdale’s o cers

were allowed to assess and collect it. Nor did Redesdale escape the 1242

Northumb. PDBR, nos. 21, 265, 440, 492, 513, 551, 680, 684; CP 40/58, mm. 14d, 29;

40/78, m. 78d; 40/86, m. 261d; 40/93, m. 110d; 40/142, m. 96d; CPR 1343–5, pp. 356–7;

Northumb. Fines, ii, nos. 18, 134. At the Northumberland assizes in 1277 – though not

in 1284 – Gilbert conceded that his right to claim writs for the liberty excluded ‘those

concerning his person’: JUST 1/1238, m. 15; below, p. 376. More generally, see D. E. C.

Yale, ‘Iudex in propria causa: an historical excursus’, Cambridge Law Journal, 33 (1974),

pp. 80–96.

R. C. Palmer, The County Courts of Medieval England, 1150–1350 (Princeton, 1982), p.

119.

PQW, p. 594; NER, no. 604.

Examples include JUST 1/1238, m. 15; Placitorum . . . Abbreviatio, ed. W. Illingworth

(Record Commission, 1811), p. 227. See also below, pp. 395–6.

Northumb. PDBR, no. 684; Northumb. Fines, ii, no. 112.

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scutage of Gascony.

For the lay subsidies of 1269, 1283 and 1294–5, the

crown again recognised the liberty’s right to be assessed separately from

the county; but its tax- paying obligations had evidently ceased to be open

to debate.

 us Redesdale was regularly taxed towards the   eenths and

tenths in the fourteenth century; it was also subject to the ninth of 1340–1,

the aid of 1346 and the poll tax of 1377. Furthermore, much taxation was

no longer carried out by the liberty’s o cers; and, according to the extant

assessment rolls, the king’s collectors normally taxed its vills as members of

Tynedale ward, an administrative subdivision of the county.

In sum, a liberty like Redesdale did not provide for full ‘regal govern-

ance’, administratively, judicially or  scally. So if we cannot speak of the

liberty- owner as simply a crown agent, to characterise Redesdale as part of a

‘national scheme’ of government would not be entirely inappropriate. Such

was the nature of the position Earl Gilbert II found himself in, and of the

legacy he would bequeath to his successors. Indeed, as the liberty’s experi-

ence of royal taxation serves to indicate, even the basis he had constructed

was not to be immune from encroachments by crown authority a er his

death.

 at, however, is a theme to which we must return, because the issue of

the liberty’s relevance for local loyalty and identi cation is best addressed

in the  rst instance by looking more closely at the situation under Earl

Gilbert II (1266–1307). Undoubtedly there was a price to be paid for the

liberty’s institutional weaknesses. Since it was less privileged than a regal-

ity, it was less able to serve the needs of lordship or those of its tenants and

inhabitants; it was likewise less of an instrument for moulding patterns of

obedience and solidarity. Most obviously, the liberty was not as useful as

Durham, Hexhamshire or Tynedale in protecting local society from the

English crown’s growing  scal appetite. Redesdale’s right to manage its

own tax- a airs in the thirteenth century perhaps bene ted some interests;

but in essence people faced the same tax- burden as their unenfranchised

neighbours. It remains possible that the liberty’s judicial system played a

formative role as a legal and communal reference point; yet the available

evidence – no court rolls survive in the Umfraville archive – is scarcely

conclusive.

On the one hand, Earl Gilbert did have some signi cant success in main-

taining jurisdiction over local litigation, and tenants were thus made more

CR 1234–7, p. 184; 1237–42, p. 45; BF, ii, pp. 1121–2.

Stevenson, Docs, ii, no. 1. The suggestion that Redesdale was not taxed for the 1295 subsidy

(NLS, pp. xiii, 182) is clearly mistaken.

Below, pp. 382, 390–1, 397, 405.

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REDESDALE

373

conscious of the liberty and its power to order their activities and relation-

ships. Royal writs were, it seems, regularly pleaded in the liberty between

1266 and 1271. Gilbert also craved his court at the Northumberland assizes

in 1277, 1284, 1291 and 1305; and, more notably, in 1293 nineteen civil

actions were reclaimed from the Northumberland eyre. All   een demand-

ants, but none of the twenty- three defendants, had appeared in court; and,

on claiming cognisance, Gilbert urged the king’s justices not to punish the

defaulters ‘in violation of his liberty’.

As this episode also suggests, people

might well value the liberty for its ability to shield them from the perils

of being impleaded in the royal courts. A telling instance of how plain-

ti s could thereby be thwarted is supplied by Everingham v. Butticumbe,

a case begun by a family resident in Farnham in the ‘ten towns’ with the

aim of recovering property in Troughend from a local Redesdale family.

 e defendants avoided prosecution before royal justices and alien juries

in 1277, 1290 and 1293, and the dispute was not resolved until it was con-

corded, albeit in Common Pleas, in 1316. Again, in 1285 and 1293 Gilbert

Taylor was saved from having to stand trial outside Redesdale for land

in Elsdon, as was Nicholas Harle for tenements in Otterburn. It was also

when Earl Gilbert successfully sued his court that John and Richard Callan

evaded prosecution in an action of trespass in Common Pleas, and in an

assize of mort d’ancestor at the Northumberland eyre. Nor should it be

overlooked that when a case of assault at Harbottle remained in Common

Pleas in 1302, all four defendants defaulted and the sheri failed to arrest

them because ‘they are not found’; or that when John Harle was sued in

Common Pleas in 1274–6, in a plea of warranty of charter about county

land in Killingworth, he evaded attachment and distraint, notwithstanding

repeated non omittas orders to the sheri . On this view, the liberty’s privi-

leges might indeed protect men’s interests and in uence their loyalties, if

only on an individual basis.

In other respects, however, there was little that was unifying about

Redesdale’s judicial rights and processes. In the more important civil

actions, the liberty did not o er a streamlined service to plainti s. Earl

Gilbert did allow an assize to be heard without the king’s writ.

But this

remarkable case was probably an aberration even by his standards, and

the royal prohibition of impleading sine precepto nostro seems gener-

ally to have been observed. It was therefore necessary to obtain original

Placit. Abbrev., pp. 227, 285; JUST 1/1238, m. 15; 1/1265, m. 7d; 1/659, m. 3; PQW, p. 600;

NER, no. 628. See also, for the remainder of this paragraph, Newminster Cart., p. 160; CP

40/58, mm. 14d, 29; 40/86, m. 261d; 40/142, m. 96d; Northumb. Fines, ii, no. 161; CPR

1343–5, p. 356; Northumb. PDBR, nos. 167, 248, 305, 344, 373.

Below, p. 376.

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writs from the king’s chancery, doubtless at no small inconvenience and

expense; and to individual litigants it may have seemed as practicable to

pursue their suits in the royal courts.  ey might also welcome Redesdale’s

porous jurisdiction in writs and pleas, which could be exploited for tacti-

cal or political reasons; and, in particular, the regularity with which Earl

Gilbert had to claim court leaves little doubt that many litigants were

anxious to sue outside the liberty. Such persons included kinsmen of the

earl, former o ce- holders and ordinary local landowners: all these catego-

ries were indeed represented among those who brought writs into the 1293

Northumberland eyre. Signi cantly, too, it was not only ‘outsiders’ like

the Everinghams who had good cause to criticise the liberty for inordinate

delays in justice.

Nor, of course, was the jurisdiction of the crown’s courts

always excluded.  is also applies to local men committing o ences within

Redesdale. In crown pleas of the 1279 Northumberland eyre, the liberty’s

baili and several co- accused were sentenced to imprisonment and damages

for various misdemeanours. Another example shows that in 1301 royal

commissioners summoned Redesdalers to Newcastle and amerced them for

currency violations, despite Gilbert’s protest that such was ‘to the detriment

of the liberty and to his disinheritance’.

As for the liberty court’s pro ts,

if full  gures were available they would probably reveal important annual

 uctuations; even so, it is striking that in 1307 court issues were valued at

merely £2.

For all these reasons Redesdale, it seems clear, was something

less than a vibrant ‘judicial community’ in the years 1266–1307.

Furthermore, the question of the liberty’s contemporary role as a focus

for identity and loyalties cannot be separated from the style of local lord-

ship and governance; and there is little doubt that Earl Gilbert, especially

in his prime, took another leaf from Simon de Montfort’s book and aspired

to rule ‘like a commissar’.

True enough, the catalogue of charges made

against him in the Hundred Rolls (1274–5) cannot be taken wholly at face

value. Yet it is a litany full of speci c details and evidently based in part on

information collected inside Redesdale itself; nor is the impression that the

earl’s rulership was overbearing and unjust contradicted by other records.

More particularly, the evidence points to a twofold conclusion. First,

Redesdale under Earl Gilbert gained the kind of reputation for lawlessness

See especially NCH, xv, p. 487: a protracted dispute concerning Linshiels, which was ulti-

mately decided in Common Pleas in 1307.

NAR, pp. 369–72; Northumb. Pets, no. 87. Edward I later allowed Gilbert’s right to the

amercements: CDS, ii, no. 1217.

The corresponding figure for Prudhoe barony was £1: C 134/2/21; HN, II, i, p. 109.

J. R. Maddicott, ‘Montfort, Simon de’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford,

2004), xxxviii, p. 803.

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REDESDALE

375

that other Border liberties were not to earn until the mid- fourteenth century

or later.  is much is suggested, for example, by his raid on Fawdon to oust

the Douglas family, which was said to have been launched from Redesdale

in 1267 by ‘about 100 of the king’s enemies, some of them outlaws’; or by

the plight of Denise Bitch eld, who was abducted into the liberty in 1271

in an attempt to force her to marry a son of its baili , Walter Sweethope.

Second, if such behaviour did not directly harm liberty society, other

recorded oppressions were in a di erent class, and indicate that the earl’s

dependants in Redesdale were by no means safe from persecution. He tried

to enforce rights of wardship over lands held by socage tenure.

It was

claimed in 1274–5 that he had imposed new customs on the liberty in the

form of so- called sheri ’s tourns, and for the sole purpose of mulcting the

tenantry. We may also detect genuine concern among the law- abiding in

the charges (again in 1274–5) that the earl had pro ted to the tune of almost

£100 by allowing felons to escape and by harbouring notorious thieves, one

of whom received sanctuary in Harbottle with his entire gang.

No doubt

some of these and other criticisms can be explained by the disturbed condi-

tions in Northumberland during the Barons’ War (1264–7) and its imme-

diate a ermath. Nevertheless it was as if Redesdale’s privileges and powers

were primarily serving its lord’s interests – and his purse.

Such policies hardly promoted collective identi cation with the liberty

as a source of rights bene ting its tenants as a whole. Rather, they tested

people’s loyalties to the jurisdiction and encouraged them to resort to

royal authority in order to protect their ‘freedoms’.  e position becomes

clearer if we return to the relationship between local and royal justice and,

more speci cally, to the large number of plainti s who went to the crown’s

courts.  e liberty’s authority was not overtly rejected in every instance.

Two claimants, Roger Lumley and Robert Neville, were major landowners

and their actions, which remained in Common Pleas, involved many prop-

erties besides estates in Redesdale.

But other suits suggest acute problems

about getting justice from Earl Gilbert and his o cers, and a real demand

for remedies in the royal courts. When, at the Northumberland assizes in

1291, William Sweethope lodged a novel disseisin against Simon Bing eld

for woodland in Highleam, the writ was claimed; but William renewed suit

before the king’s eyre justices in 1293.

Or take the example of Gilbert’s

cousin, Ingram Umfraville, and his di culties in securing his father’s

Northumb. Pleas, no. 776; NAR, pp. 369–71.

CPR 1343–5, p. 357.

RH, ii, pp. 21–2.

Northumb. PDBR, nos. 21, 513, 551.

Placit. Abbrev., p. 285; NER, no. 83.

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