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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on them Redesdale with the ‘ten towns’; and the descent was as follows: the

earl’s half- brother  omas I (d. 1387); this  omas’s bastard son  omas II

(d. 1391);  omas II’s son Gilbert (d. 1421); and  omas I’s other bastard

son Robert (d. 1437), the last Umfraville lord of Redesdale.

190

So it was that Redesdale became pivotal to the family’s status in

Northumberland, and such a refocusing of interests might have worked

for a closer correspondence between lordship, liberty and local society.

But the Umfravilles were now reduced to the ranks of the Border gentry,

albeit its upper ranks; it would therefore be a struggle to assert an in uen-

tial and attractive leadership. More serious problems also compromised

their authority. One- third of Redesdale, assigned to Countess Maud in

dower, was under Percy’s rule;

191

while his control of Prudhoe brought all

Redesdale tenants who had lands in the barony directly within the ambit

of his power. Moreover, on  omas II Umfraville’s death in 1391, his son

Gilbert was only four months old, and Redesdale (or the bulk of it) fell

into crown hands for a good twenty years. Countess Maud’s third passed

into Hotspur’s custody when she died in 1398; the rest of the liberty was

managed by Ralph Neville, earl of Westmorland. Admittedly the redoubt-

able Robert Umfraville was captain of Harbottle castle by 1400; and in 1404

he replaced Hotspur as keeper of Otterburn tower and the third part of ‘the

lordship of Redesdale and Coquetdale’.

192

But the liberty was not reunited

under a single lord until young Gilbert received full livery of his inheritance

in 1412.  us, for three decades, Umfraville government of Redesdale was

neither unitary nor continuous; its tenants and inhabitants experienced a

prolonged period of ‘natural’ uncertainty and instability; and, in addition,

their livelihoods were threatened by a resurgence of cross- Border con ict in

the 1380s and from 1399.  is was indeed no basis for building an assured

sense of local solidarity in the service of a liberty and its lord.

Furthermore, the Umfraville estates outside Northumberland now

included important Durham manors, while the barony of Kyme reverted

following Countess Maud’s death.

193

So Redesdale was hardly the sole focus

of the family’s interests and connections; nor was it the main source of its

income and power. In 1381 the liberty had been valued at £53.6s.8d. ‘and no

more, because of the war of Scotland’; in 1391 the Umfraville two- thirds of

190

For the transmission of Prudhoe to the Percies, see Tuck, ‘Northern nobility’, pp.

11–12, where the significance of the defective title of Earl Gilbert’s nephews is, however,

overlooked.

191

CIPM, xvii, no. 1246.

192

Proceedings and Ordinances of the Privy Council, ed. H. Nicolas (Record Commission,

1834–7), i, p. 125; CPR 1401–5, p. 372. Significantly, too, the bailiff of Redesdale is found

claiming a plea at the Newcastle assizes in 1395: JUST 1/1507, m. 8.

193

See most conveniently HC, iv, pp. 687–8 (Thomas II Umfraville’s biography).

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REDESDALE

407

Redesdale were said to be worth merely £6.13s.4d. ‘on account of the war,

destruction and burnings in icted by the Scots’. According to surveys made

in 1421, Redesdale had an annual yield of £13.6s.8d. – and Kyme one of

some £280.

194

 e Umfravilles might still turn in Border society and govern-

ance.  omas II Umfraville played a gentry- style role in Northumberland as

sheri and MP; while Robert Umfraville enjoyed ‘an in uence on the north-

ern marches disproportionate to his actual status’.

195

 e liberty and its

tenants must therefore have received some protection and support, as when

Robert acted as Redesdale’s military champion at Fulhope Edge (1399) and

Redeswire (1400). But the family’s partial retreat from the Borders was by

no means completely reversed a er Earl Gilbert’s death; and nowhere is this

better shown than by the exploits of his great- nephew and namesake, who

made a career for himself in Henry V’s French wars and was elevated by

popular acclaim to the honorary status of ‘earl of Kyme’.

196

Once again, it is di cult to pin down the consequences for ‘liberty

society’; but some important sources can be drawn on.  e  rst is the

retinue- list of  omas Umfraville (probably  omas II) for the 1385

Scottish campaign. As well as Robert Umfraville, twenty- eight men are

named. Some, such as the men- at- arms Robert Farnacres and John Roddom

of Beverley, were from Durham or Yorkshire. At least thirteen retainers,

virtually all archers, belonged to Northumberland; but only four or  ve are

known to have had strong Redesdale connections: John Henryson and John

Russell of Coldtown, Robert Hedley and Robert Johnson ‘of Redesdale’, and

possibly  omas Chaytor, who was to be the liberty’s baili in 1418–19.

John Andrewson of Ingram, Robert Berghalgh of Clennell,  omas Brown

of Sharperton, Hugh Shillmoor, and Nicholas Straker of Clennell came

from the ‘ten towns’; William Cuthbert of Shilbottle, William Gallon of

Trewhitt and John Greenson of Na erton were freeholders elsewhere in

the county. Furthermore, Henryson, Russell and Johnson were them-

selves minor county landowners.

197

Such a directory scarcely suggests that

the Umfravilles were cultivating loyalty and service within a catchment

area de ned by the liberty. Rather, it reminds us of the comment of John

Harding, the family’s   eenth- century panegyrist, that whenever Robert

194

C 136/17/1; 136/67/17; CIPM, xvi, no. 1043; xxi, nos. 832–3. By 1437 the liberty was

described as worth nothing to its lord ‘because of the war that existed between the

kingdom of England and the Scots [and] is still continuing’: C 139/83/57.

195

H. E. L. Collins, The Order of the Garter, 1348–1461 (Oxford, 2000), p. 49.

196

GEC, vii, p. 364.

197

BL, Cotton Roll XIII.8. The main prosopographical source used is Poll Taxes, ii, pp.

262–71; see also CPR 1396–9, p. 72; JUST 3/54/3, m. 3; NDD, pp. 18, 127. Henryson was

a Percy retainer in 1384: E 101/40/5, m. 2.

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BORDER LIBERTIES AND LOYALTIES

408

Umfraville made war on the Scots he depended on ‘the men of the bishopric

and of Northumberland’.

198

We turn next to the proof of age for Gilbert Umfraville taken at Newcastle

in 1412.

199

 e jurors whose local knowledge Gilbert relied on to testify to

his birth in Harbottle castle on 18 October 1390 were a heterogeneous

group. William Butticumbe of Troughend, John Orde of Broomhope,

Robert Lisle of Woodburn (d. 1425) and John Lisle were the only Redesdale

tenants on the panel. John Lisle remembered building a house in Harbottle

at the time of the birth; Orde declared that he had gone to Newcastle to

arrange his daughter’s marriage.

200

In addition, Robert Tempest recalled

riding to summon Elizabeth Heron of Ford to be Gilbert’s godmother;

Wenceslas Dorsteynour said that he had fetched the abbot of Melrose to be

a godfather. Neither of these men had any deep roots in Northumberland,

though both prospered in county circles a er 1390.

201

 e other jurors

were well- established shire landholders: William Cramlington, Richard

Craster of Dilston, Hugh and William Gallon of Trewhitt, Nicholas Turpin

of Whitchester and Edward Wetwang of Dunstan.

202

Like Dorsteynour and

Tempest, all six gave personal statements asserting or implying that they

had been in Umfraville service when Gilbert was born.

203

Hugh Gallon, for

example, recollected escorting Elizabeth Heron from Rothbury to Harbottle

for the baptism; Cramlington recalled his presence in the castle as  omas

II Umfraville’s household steward. Of the Redesdale tenants, however, only

Robert Lisle seems to have been an Umfraville retainer in 1390; and he

would inherit the manor of South Gosforth in the following year, and serve

as MP for Northumberland and its sheri .

204

All in all, the picture is that of a

liberty  rmly integrated into a wider universe, and the world of local county

society in particular.

198

The Chronicle of John Hardyng, ed. H. Ellis (London, 1812), p. 382. Harding’s assessment

is largely confirmed by the composition of Robert’s company for the Scottish campaign

of 1400. Conversely the ‘earl of Kyme’s’ substantial retinue for France in 1417 was drawn

mainly from outside the North- East. See respectively E 101/42/16, m. 10; 101/51/2, m.

33.

199

CIPM, xix, no. 1005.

200

For John Orde ‘of Newcastle’, also a proprietor in Abberwick near Alnwick, see NDD, p.

151; CIPM, xx, no. 153.

201

Tempest, originally from Yorkshire, married into property in Halton and Great

Whittington in 1408, and was sheriff in 1409; Dorsteynour held Fawdon in the ‘ten towns’

by 1428: CPR 1405–8, p. 464; 1408–13, p. 41; FA, iv, p. 88.

202

For Turpin’s career, see HC, iv, pp. 677–8.

203

The jurors’ recorded memories cannot, of course, be trusted implicitly; but most of their

recollections were not formulaic and have an authentic ring. Moreover, William Gallon

and Robert Tempest served under Robert Umfraville in 1400: E 101/42/16, m. 10.

204

For his biography, see HC, iii, pp. 610–12.

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409

But the remaining evidence to be considered supplies strikingly di erent

perspectives. Petitions presented in Parliament by neighbouring counties

in 1414 and 1421 displayed unprecedented concern about the lawlessness

of men from Redesdale.

205

 e lack of continuity in the liberty’s governance

from 1381, coupled with persistent Scottish harrying, may have increased

levels of misconduct – though, to judge from contemporary Newcastle

gaol deliveries, its inhabitants were as likely to be the victims of crime.

206

Here, however, the key issue is the prominence accorded to Redesdale as a

separate jurisdiction.  e Northumberland ‘county community’ reported

in 1414 that the sheri could not enforce writs in the liberty without raising

the posse comitatus; that the shire could no longer sustain this burden; and

that Redesdale was le to its own devices, because the sheri dared not enter

it unsupported ‘for fear of being killed’.  us, as long as crown agents had

the necessary backing, Redesdale was ultimately subject to shrieval author-

ity – a reminder that its privileges were not those of a ‘royal liberty’. But in

practice the sheri ’s disciplinary control had become a dead letter, or so it

was said. In 1421, moreover, the county communities of Northumberland,

Cumberland and Westmorland represented Redesdale as another Tynedale

or Hexhamshire: it was, they asserted, a liberty where ‘the king’s writ does

not run’.

Such evidence is not easy to interpret: it may be, for example, that the

sheri exaggerated the liberty’s intransigence in order to excuse his own

derelictions of duty. Even so, Redesdale was externally de ned as a distinct

local polity with its own institutional ethos and identity. Nor can this con-

struction be dismissed as merely a myth. It was not unusual for liberties to

resist royal o cers by force when they attempted to uphold the crown’s

rights; and, a er all, Earl Gilbert II had employed such tactics in Henry III’s

reign.

207

 us Redesdale’s administrative history may have been, and o en

was, erratic and unpredictable; but it is salutary to  nd that its experiences

continued to revolve around its liberty status. And for explicit corroborat-

ing detail we need look no further than the inquisition post mortem on

Robert Umfraville in 1437. Its jury, which met in Newcastle and included

Northumbrians from outside Redesdale, had no doubt about the enduring

reality of the rights of government and justice ‘allowed to the lord under

Edward I and Edward III’. It testi ed to cognisance of all pleas, return and

execution of royal writs, and gaol delivery at will; it declared that ‘no sheri

205

PROME, ix, pp. 49–50, 296–7; SC 8/130/6459.

206

Storey, Langley, pp. 140–1; cf. JUST 3/54/1/3.

207

Below, Conclusions, p. 430; above, p. 369. See also KB 27/481, m. 16d, which suggests that

in 1381 the sheriff lacked the power to execute the king’s writ in Redesdale by process non

omittas.

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BORDER LIBERTIES AND LOYALTIES

410

or other royal baili should enter the liberty to carry out any o ce’, though

with the rider ‘except in default of the lord’s baili s’. It also mentioned two

yearly views of frankpledge, a three- weekly court, and a biannual court

called ‘forstercourt’, presumably a forest court.

208

What then should the  nal verdict be? Redesdale under the later

Umfravilles, no less than in Earl Gilbert II’s epoch, can be categorised

with some justi cation as a ‘failed’ liberty in terms of its social and politi-

cal topography. People had diverse ties and loyalties; there is nothing to

suggest the presence of a vibrant community with a sustained sense of its

distinct place in the world.  is is perhaps only to be expected of an entity

lacking the superior institutional de nition and collective freedoms of a

regality; and, of course, a more speci c (and exceptional) consideration is

the impact of frontier warfare, which weakened the liberty’s cohesion in

many directions. On the other hand, however, the overall story of medi-

eval Redesdale is not one of remorseless integration into the apparatus of

the ‘state’. So, on a broad view, the liberty had much resilience as a local

jurisdiction, notwithstanding its general lack of socio- political capital.  is

apparent paradox is seemingly made more complex because insofar as the

liberty remained institutionally separate from the rest of the kingdom, so

did its rights and authority continue to in uence people’s attitudes and

assumptions, despite the absence of a strong narrative of identity. How

might these themes be reconciled?

First and foremost, the dominance of the Umfravilles, for all its oscil-

lations, had the capacity to superimpose an organising authority over a

remarkably long period.  eir defence of the liberty’s privileges was not

without its successes; it was also assisted by the practical and other limits

on the exercise of crown power. Indeed, far from systematically encroach-

ing on local prerogative and custom, the king might respect and assist the

liberty, as when (for example) Edward III upheld its right to have a gaol. In

consequence, and in spite of evident complications, an institutional frame-

work existed whose signi cance might be more immediate and relevant

than that of the ‘state’. It might likewise claim part of people’s loyalties

and identities; but how large a part would di er according to circumstance

and need. An obvious illustration is how Scottish aggression in the late

1370s triggered ideas of ‘community’. It is also possible that, during the

years 1381–1421, the liberty became increasingly important to communal

values and interests in order to compensate for or exploit the lack of regular

lordship. We seem to learn as much on  nding that by 1444 the liberty’s

208

C 139/83/57.

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REDESDALE

411

tenants, perhaps thanks to collective representations, were allowed to live

rent free during wartime, save for their service in keeping Redesdale ‘from

wolves and thieves’.

209

Be that as it may, in the early   eenth century people did identify them-

selves with the liberty by closing ranks against crown interference and

controls.  eir numbers and names cannot now be known. But one likely

candidate is  omas Reed, who was baili of Redesdale by 1425 and enjoyed

some notoriety as a Border freebooter. He thus had good reasons to uphold

the liberty’s independence – though he also pursued important concerns

elsewhere, as is underlined by his e orts to secure the Turpin inheritance

in the Tyne valley.

210

William Swan of Linshiels had equally varied interests

and attachments: his home was apparently outside Redesdale in Little Ryle,

and he was receiver of Dunstanburgh in 1404. Nevertheless he may have

been another supporter of the liberty’s powers since he had a well- attested

contempt for crown o cers, two of whom he imprisoned in Alnwick.

211

Similarly Laurence Acton and  omas Herrington identi ed themselves

in di erent ways: as Redesdale landowners, shire gentry, and burgesses.

But when in 1389 they were called on to defend local autonomy as baili s

of Newcastle, they did not hesitate to block a royal writ. No less instructive

is a deed issued by Herrington in Newcastle in 1409, whose terms took

it for granted that, as a power- structure, Redesdale had as much validity

and relevance as the county town and the county itself.

212

In sum, people’s

a liations and identities were hardly less pluralistic in the past than they

are today; but other loyalties did not necessarily con ict with liberty loyal-

ties. And in the last analysis, it can be argued, this is what ‘the liberty of

Redesdale’ was all about.  ough never the whole basis for a society and its

self- identi cation, the liberty managed despite its weaknesses to adapt to

changing times and needs; and so it was that relations with it, even where

they were part of broader and more important ties, still had meaning for

people’s lives and allegiances, however variable that meaning may have

been.

209

C 139/115/30.

210

Reg. Langley, iii, no. 618; NCS, ZSW/1/110; C 1/12/221; HC, iv, p. 678.

211

Tempest, ‘Selby charters’, p. 91; CFR, xvi, p. 19; CPR 1401–5, p. 365; C 1/16/88.

212

CPR 1388–92, p. 298. On Acton, see also HC, ii, p. 9, with Longstaffe, ‘Local muniments’,

p. 30, for his Redesdale property. Herrington’s deed, which carefully distinguishes

between his properties in county, liberty and town, and between witnesses ‘of the county

of Northumberland’ and those ‘of Redesdale’, is DCRO, D/St/D10/11; HN, II, i, p. 170

(misdated).

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413

Conclusions and Wider Perspectives

Matthew Holford and Keith Stringer

o draw conclusions from the foregoing analyses of north- east England’s

major liberties is not straightforward. It is indeed a key finding that they

each had a distinct history contingent on disparities in their institutional

status and a wide range of other variables. Thus all were affected in some way

by Anglo- Scottish warfare from 1296; but Tynedale and Redesdale, because

of their frontier positions, were inevitably the most exposed to Border con-

flict. Again, the political calamity of Alexander III’s death without direct male

heirs led to a vacuum of lordship in Tynedale of the sort that no other liberty

experienced. Conversely the good lordship previously offered by the Scottish

kings in Tynedale was different in its nature and results from the regime

of Earl Gilbert II Umfraville in Redesdale, or those of successive priors of

Tynemouth. Once again, Durham ‘between Tyne and Tees’ had a historic

pedigree, a cultural identity and a powerful saintly patron, which were

more or less unmatched in the North- East. These factors helped to make

‘the community of the liberty’, the Haliwerfolk, a uniquely prominent force;

they likewise assisted the bishops of Durham in defending and extending

their jurisdictional rights, and contributed to ensuring that, of all the north-

eastern liberties, Durham would enjoy the most extensive prerogatives and

powers. Yet while the diverse experiences of individual liberties do require

emphasis, their histories are not without shared themes and trends, and some

wider conclusions and observations are warranted. These can be grouped

under three general (and interrelated) topics: liberties and the ‘state’; liber-

ties, lordship and local society; and liberties, identities and communities.

First, our  ndings con rm and supplement recent critical assessments by

Rees Davies and other scholars of the power and resources of the medi-

Parts of the following analysis draw on K. J. Stringer, ‘States, liberties and communities

in medieval Britain and Ireland (c. 1100–1400)’, in M. Prestwich (ed.), Liberties and

Identities in the Medieval British Isles (Woodbridge, 2008), pp. 5–36, where liberties

outside the North- East are discussed at greater length.

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BORDER LIBERTIES AND LOYALTIES

414

eval English ‘state’.  e picture that has emerged is not, therefore, entirely

novel; but its contours deserve to be highlighted, especially in view of the

crown–centred assumptions that have traditionally dominated the histo-

riography of England’s liberties. Achieving a more balanced judgement

of crown–liberty relations is nevertheless a nice problem, partly because

of the very nature of the associated vocabulary.  e language of ‘liberties’

and ‘privileges’ or, still more, of ‘delegation’, ‘franchises’ and ‘immunities’,

unduly favours the crown as both a source of legitimate authority and a

force capable of imposing at will its own imprint on the localities. Yet such

terminology, for all its shortcomings and distortions, is by no means wholly

anachronistic. Indeed, it has an impeccable medieval provenance, which is

conventionally traced to ‘the age of Bracton’ in the mid- thirteenth century,

when the theorising of Henry III’s jurists was deeply in uenced by notions

of unitary royal rule and the belief that all ‘franchises’ had been delegated

and de ned by the crown. Nor can it be gainsaid that these concepts of

monarchical authority were informed by the actualities of expanding ‘state’

power, or that the growth of royal oversight and regulation could have a

real impact on liberties. Accordingly the crown cannot be counted out. It

would be absurd to suggest otherwise, even as regards the outer margins of

the wider English polity.  e Welsh March enjoyed a remarkable degree of

autonomy from the kingdom of England; yet it was in the ‘context of royal

power and ultimate control that Marcher liberties developed and were

eventually de ned’.

Even more does this apply to English Ireland where

the reach of the king’s jurisdiction meant that Trim was the only liberty

allowed to hold all crown pleas.

By the same token, nor did liberties in the thirteenth- century North- East,

including those in the Borders proper, escape the penetrative in uence of

English royal superiority.  e king of Scots conceded that Tynedale was

subject to the common law of England, and that he could hold eyres in the

liberty only a er jurisdiction had been craved from the English king’s eyre

justices. Redesdale lived more fully within the ‘state’: it was automatically

subject to royal taxation, and its justice system was far from self- contained.

Above all, liberties throughout the English king’s dominions had to adjust

to the consequences of increasingly exalted Bractonian doctrines of the

crown’s supremacy; and at no point did royal attitudes harden more dra-

matically than during Edward I’s reign (1272–1307). We need not dwell

on the lo y claims of the king and his ministers, or on their practical

R. R. Davies, ‘Kings, lords and liberties in the March of Wales, 1066–1272’, TRHS, 5th ser.,

29 (1979), p. 55.

G. J. Hand, English Law in Ireland, 1290–1324 (Cambridge, 1967), Chapter 6.

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CONCLUSIONS AND WIDER PERSPECTIVES

415

applications in the Quo Warranto inquiries in England, in the shiring of

Kildare and Meath, and in the challenges faced by the Welsh Marcher

lords especially in the 1290s. From the liberty- owner’s perspective, Edward

I’s view was encapsulated only too trenchantly in the retort to the lord of

Pembroke that ‘the king was entitled to send justices to hear pleas wherever

he wished’; or in the ruling that Bishop Bek’s seizure of Barnard Castle as a

forfeiture from John Balliol had been a ‘presumptuous usurpation’ and ‘to

the prejudice of our royal right and crown’.

It was a discourse of govern-

ance that subordinated all institutions and power- relations to the dominus

rex as sole keeper of the regalia: sovereignty, in brief, could not be shared.

Yet, in e ect, sermons like these tell us more about how crown authority

might be imagined than about the capacity of the thirteenth- century ‘law-

state’ to enforce its will as ‘a free-  oating superstructure of power’.

Nor

was centralist franchise- theory necessarily the most in uential contempo-

rary thesis, for there were both ‘“royalist” and “anti- royalist” views’.

A er

all, regalities like Durham, Hexhamshire and Tynedale rested not on any

king’s grants but on tenure ‘from time immemorial’.  eir powers might

still be represented by the crown as delegations of regalian authority; but

the liberty- owner and his subjects rarely quali ed their rights in such terms.

Accordingly ‘royal liberties’ could be perceived as something other than

mere subsidiary jurisdictions. Rather, they might have their own rightful

authority as power- bases outside the normal sphere of crown governance,

enjoying their own jura regalia, not ‘privileges’ bestowed at the king’s

pleasure.

 at was why in Durham in 1295 a writ of Edward I was torn

up and trampled into the ground.

It was another way of saying that the

crown should defer to a liberty’s ‘regal rights’; and – most importantly – in

practice such rights were seldom seriously impaired by the growing power

of the ‘law- state’ and its o cers, be it in north- east England or in the ‘juris-

dictional redoubt’ that was the Welsh March.

Much of this has less resonance for return- of- writs liberties like

Davies, Lordship and Society, p. 259; RPD, ii, p. 796.

R. R. Davies, ‘The medieval state: the tyranny of a concept?’, Journal of Historical Sociology,

16 (2003), p. 296.

D. W. Sutherland, Quo Warranto Proceedings in the Reign of Edward I, 1278–1294

(Oxford, 1963), p. 12.

For some broader discussion, see J. B. Smith, ‘“Distinction and diversity”: the common

lawyers and the law of Wales’, in H. Pryce and J. Watts (eds), Power and Identity in the

Middle Ages (Oxford, 2007), pp. 147ff.; also T. Thornton, Cheshire and the Tudor State,

1480–1560 (Woodbridge, 2000), p. 253, where attention is drawn to the ‘uncertainty and

open debate’ evident in discourses in the Year Books about Cheshire’s constitutional

status.

Fraser, Bek, p. 97.

Smith, ‘“Distinction and diversity”’, p. 149.

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