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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and with the crown. Nor can it be doubted that such links could under-

mine allegiance to a liberty, as when – to take a single instance – Geo rey

Hartlepool sued for Edward I against Bishop Bek and attempted to have

Durham pleas transferred to the royal courts. But matters were rarely so

simple. Incomers to a liberty might appeal fulsomely to its ‘regal rights’, as

when William Stapleton invoked Tynedale’s privileges in 1422. And crown

service did not prevent Alan Strother from prizing his powers as Tynedale’s

baili from 1356, or Jordan Dalden from asserting his rights as an inhab-

itant of Durham ‘between Tyne and Tees’ in 1322. For these gentry and

others like them, their wider ties and interests were not inevitably at odds

with some sense of liberty identity.

Such examples also suggest that the extent to which liberties in the

North- East were important for sustaining identities and ‘communities’

a er 1296, and earlier, owed much to institutional and cultural structures;

and some distinction must again be made between the ‘royal’ and the other

liberties. It is a truism that local communities in medieval England wanted

to protect themselves from growing interference by central government;

but that was o en easier said than done.  e regalities, however, had a self-

organising authority that clearly marked o their populations from those

in non- privileged areas; and these jurisdictions might o en be held in high

regard because their rights could serve not just the concerns of lordship but

the common needs and interests of the ruled.  us people were attuned to

the fact that they lived under a lord who ‘enjoys all things pertaining to the

crown’, and where ‘the king’s writ does not run’; they also recognised the

personal bene ts that their membership of a ‘royal liberty’ entailed, notably

in the  scal and juridical arenas. By contrast with the Welsh March and

Cheshire, where local taxes were or became regular and heavy, Tynedale

is known to have experienced communal taxation or  nes only in 1356

and 1364. In this respect it appears to have been similar to Durham, whose

tenants ‘clearly had much to gain . . . from the maintenance of the palatinate’s

 scal independence’.

 e legal machinery of the regalities was also valued.

 is much is indicated by the meagre number of local actions known to have

been pleaded in the crown’s courts. It is shown more plainly by the impor-

tance of the 1279–81 Tynedale eyre to communal concerns and cohesion;

and, a er the eyres had ceased, it is exempli ed by the collective petitioning

from Durham and from Tynedale in support of their judicial rights. All this

gave the ‘royal liberties’ a governmental and political culture, distinct from

that of the wider realm, around which identities and loyalties might coalesce

according to notions of shared freedoms, customs and usages.

Liddy, ‘Politics of privilege’, p. 71.

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CONCLUSIONS AND WIDER PERSPECTIVES

427

Conversely liberties like Redesdale and Tynemouthshire had less capac-

ity to develop their own independent ethos and traditions of institutional

identi cation, and were correspondingly less relevant to local society and

its values. Nonetheless, especially as regards their courts – the hubs of all

liberties – the contrasts must not be drawn too sharply. At this and lower

levels of jurisdiction, it is particularly di cult to learn much about such

tribunals and, not least, to assess their meanings for ‘community’. But the

court of Battle, a liberty on a par with Redesdale and Tynemouthshire,

has been classi ed as both a largely self- su cient ‘miniature royal court’

and a ‘species of parliament in the liberty’.

Indeed, liberty courts every-

where entailed the right to swi justice close at hand, and the possibility of

communal representation and self- regulation free from external authori-

ties.  is helps to explain why, a er Earl Gilbert II’s day, the tenants of

Redesdale had no obvious preference for royal justice over liberty justice;

and local society as a whole might likewise pro t from ‘a shelter, behind

which [its] shortcomings were hidden from the view of experienced and

implacable curial administrators’.

Clearly, however, Tynemouthshire

does not  t neatly into such a model.  eoretically its court ‘of all pleas’

was far more authoritative and useful than any shire court; but since its

powers were a continual source of friction between lord and tenants, it is

no wonder that plainti s o en resorted to the royal courts.  e obvious

conclusion to be drawn is that only when local justice served the needs of

both lordship and ‘community’ could a liberty realise its full potential as a

focus of loyalty and solidarity.

But, on a broader front, we should also acknowledge that liberties in

ecclesiastical as opposed to secular ownership might well possess stronger

legitimising and supportive cultural bases, and thereby have a greater sig-

ni cance for local allegiances and cohesion. Scottish- controlled Tynedale

did bene t from a speci c ‘kingship culture’; and, less exceptionally, all

liberties o ered scope for developing a distinct, sometimes semi- regal,

J. H. Baker, The Common Law Tradition (London, 2000), p. 284; E. Searle, Lordship and

Community: Battle Abbey and its Banlieu, 1066–1538 (Toronto, 1974), p. 393; and see

similarly, on the continued importance of the London courts, P. Tucker, Law Courts and

Lawyers in the City of London, 1300–1550 (Cambridge, 2007). The court of Glamorgan

was referred to by contemporaries as a parliamentum: M. Altschul, A Baronial Family in

Medieval England: The Clares, 1217–1314 (Baltimore, 1965), p. 262.

Searle, Lordship and Community, p. 218; cf. Frame, English Lordship, p. 27: ‘For the

inhabitants of liberties, the regular sessions of their lords’ courts . . . may well have been

preferable to the perilous road to Dublin.’ S. G. Ellis, ‘Civilizing Northumberland: repre-

sentations of Englishness in the Tudor state’, Journal of Historical Sociology, 12 (1999), pp.

112–13, notes the general dearth of Northumbrian cases in Common Pleas up to 1547; but

it is explained purely on grounds of cost.

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BORDER LIBERTIES AND LOYALTIES

428

ideology based on their rules and privileges. Even the lord of Redesdale

could invoke his regalis potestas; he also manipulated the past to con-

struct a historic identity and warrant for his jurisdiction. But naturally lay

lords could not reinforce a liberty’s authority and autonomy by means of

spiritual sanctions and prerogatives, including perhaps rights of diocesan

administration.

In other respects, however, the crucial distinction is

between liberties that were actively defended by religious houses and patro-

nal saints, and those that were not. Durham and Tynemouth priories had

in the authority of St Cuthbert or St Oswin a potent resource unavailable to

the lords of Redesdale and Tynedale – or even to the archbishops of York,

who made little e ort to appropriate the power of Hexham Priory’s saints.

 e importance of patron saints to liberties is elsewhere shown by the role

of St John of Beverley in constructing a recognisable local consciousness

at Beverley, and by that of St Edmund in fostering a strong sense of local

pride and loyalty at Bury.

But while St Oswin may well have helped to

maintain Tynemouthshire’s privileges, his cult was not a signi cant source

of unity for the liberty’s inhabitants. In the North- East, only in Durham was

a patron saint claimed by the ‘liberty community’ as well as by the lord. It

was thus only in Durham that institutional and cultural vitality could and

o en did combine with good or bad lordship to make ‘the community of

the liberty’ a major political concept and force.

Nonetheless the unique attributes of Durham must not lead us to be

unduly dismissive of communal identi cation within other north- eastern

liberties. To be sure, we have to look to liberties such as Cheshire, Copeland,

Gower and Trim for equivalents to Durham’s ‘charter of liberties’ of 1303,

which epitomises how a liberty might become a source for the ‘community’

of the customs and freedoms by which it de ned and defended itself.

Yet

For example, St Albans was highly privileged in such respects, and literally stamped

itself with the papal seal by fixing an impression of it to the top of the abbey’s tower: J. E.

Sayers, ‘Papal privileges for St Albans Abbey and its dependencies’, in D. A. Bullough and

R. L. Storey (eds), The Study of Medieval Records (Oxford, 1971), pp. 57–84. Cf. also C.

Dyer, Lords and Peasants in a Changing Society: The Estates of the Bishopric of Worcester,

680–1540 (Cambridge, 1980), pp. 76–7, for a revealing case involving the excommunica-

tion of a sheriff and resort to the papal Curia.

See most recently S. E. Wilson, The Life and After- Life of St John of Beverley (Aldershot,

2006); A. Gransden, A History of the Abbey of Bury St. Edmunds, 1182–1256 (Woodbridge,

2007).

Cheshire: The Charters of the Anglo- Norman Earls of Chester, c. 1071–1237, ed. G.

Barraclough (Record Society of Lancashire and Cheshire, 1988), no. 394 (1215). Copeland:

The Register of the Priory of St. Bees, ed. J. Wilson (SS, 1915), pp. 547–8 (c. 1280). Gower:

T. B. Pugh (ed.), Glamorgan County History, iii (Cardiff, 1971), pp. 240–1 (1306). Trim:

Calendar of the Gormanston Register, ed. J. Mills and M. J. McEnery (Dublin, 1916), pp.

176–7 (c. 1265).

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CONCLUSIONS AND WIDER PERSPECTIVES

429

the evidence for pre- 1286 Tynedale indicates how good rule might bolster

a liberty’s relevance as a basis of shared loyalties, rights and values.  ere,

as in late- medieval Richmondshire, ‘lordship . . . was not just an alterna-

tive pattern of association; it provided itself another of the means by which

the sense of community was reinforced’.

Unsurprisingly this thirteenth-

century Tynedale ‘community’ made no formal statements of its existence;

but it was arguably as real as, if not more substantial than, any ‘county com-

munity’. Later Queen Philippa’s occasional requests or demands prompted

some collective consciousness in the liberty, just as the ‘community’ of the

Isle of Wight can be found granting aids to the earl of Devon in the mid-

thirteenth century.

More signi cantly, Philippa and her subjects appear to

have joined forces to assert and protect their rights and freedoms in 1336–9,

when Tynedale – and Durham and Hexhamshire – refused assessment for

national taxation because they were ‘royal liberties’.

Nor has this synopsis exhausted the contexts in which communal ideas

might come to the fore.  ere is indeed good reason for stressing that ‘com-

munity’ was not necessarily ‘the arti cial creation of a lord’.

For when

lordship was as tenuous as it became in Redesdale and (more especially)

in Tynedale, we have seen that ‘communities’ were sometimes capable not

only of autonomous coordination: they might assume political or govern-

mental responsibility for the common good; they might also see themselves

as the custodians and embodiments of liberties, in every sense of that

term, for which they relied on no lord save (perhaps) the king. It is telling

that the people of south Tynedale and of Redesdale were able to organise

themselves independently to buy o the Scots in the manner of Durham

and other liberties from Allerdale to Ripon, most of which had su ered less

disruption and were in a better state to levy common purses.

Similarly it

was in Tynedale around 1370 that the ‘community’ took charge of its own

a airs by petitioning Edward III to uphold its right to its own court, as if

to illustrate that it was the absence of active lordship that reinforced ‘the

recognition of franchises as customary rights inhering in the communities

of tenants’.

Nor, as regards early   eenth- century Redesdale, must we

forget the determination of its tenants (or some of them) to prevent intru-

sions by the king’s sheri in prejudice of their customs, and even to claim

A. J. Pollard, The Worlds of Richard III (Stroud, 2001), p. 61.

N. Denholm- Young, Seignorial Administration in England (London, 1937), pp.

100–1.

Carpenter, Locality and Polity, p. 318.

Cf. C. McNamee, The Wars of the Bruces (East Linton, 1997), pp. 133–9.

A. Harding, Medieval Law and the Foundations of the State (Oxford, 2002), p. 220, where

this example from Tynedale is noted.

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BORDER LIBERTIES AND LOYALTIES

430

an enhanced autonomy as members of a territory where the king’s writ did

not run. In this respect, the liberty of Redesdale was as in uential a basis of

collective identi cation and aspiration as were liberties such as Ely, Ewyas

Lacy, Osgoldcross and Stamford, where royal writs and o cials might also

be subject to violent treatment.

For all the necessary quali cations, what evidence of this nature brings back

into view is the important place occupied by liberties in the governmental

and political organisation of the medieval English ‘state’. It was a role they

continued to play until the age of ‘Tudor centralisation’, and even then

old values and habits died hard. Despite their formal disenfranchisement

in 1495, the inhabitants of north Tynedale were said in 1550 to be ‘always

claiming and using the old privileges of that country’; Redesdale’s freehold-

ers could assert as late as 1620 that they were not liable to forfeiture for

any felony committed within its borders.

So, to summarise, how might

we explain the survival of such power- structures over the longue durée,

let alone the resonance they could still have for local society in the early

modern era? Tynedale provides some instructive pointers, notwithstanding

the exceptional di culties it faced a er 1286. Simply put, its prerogatives

were seen to be important and valuable; they might likewise receive broad-

based support and endorsement.  us even a er Tynedale had become one

of the ‘counters on the chess- board of English politics’,

its absentee lords

could appreciate and champion its privileges, as when John Darcy asserted

his ‘palatine’ rights in 1331. And none other than the English queen

herself resisted  scal and other threats to Tynedale’s autonomy. In turn its

residents, however mixed their experiences of English lordship, had good

grounds for prizing the liberty as an essentially tax- free zone and perhaps

as a safe- haven from royal justice. Also, as in about 1370, even landholders

in Tynedale whose concerns and mindsets were primarily focused else-

where could have a vested interest in preserving the liberty’s jurisdictional

powers. Moreover, however much ‘county society’ criticised the liberty for

its perceived failures to uphold good order, that society still had regard for

Tynedale’s freedoms, just as similar complaints about Hexhamshire and

Redesdale took their privileges for granted.

Select Cases in the Court of King’s Bench under Edward I, ed. G. O. Sayles (Selden Society,

1936–9), i, no. 18; Calendar of Ancient Correspondence concerning Wales, ed. J. G.

Edwards (Cardiff, 1935), p. 38; R. C. Palmer, The County Courts of Medieval England,

1150–1350 (Princeton, 1982), pp. 265–7.

S. J. Watts, From Border to Middle Shire: Northumberland, 1586–1625 (Leicester, 1975),

pp. 24–5.

A phrase taken from Davies, Age of Conquest, p. 403.

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CONCLUSIONS AND WIDER PERSPECTIVES

431

And not least the liberty’s enduring signi cance was guaranteed by the

crown’s fundamental concern to observe and defend Tynedale’s custom-

ary rights and independence. Nor was this, as Helen Cam argued, simply

a matter of military expediency.

Even Edward I insisted in 1293, prior to

the outbreak of the Scottish wars, that while the liberty was in his hands

it ‘should remain in the same state as before’, and he went on speci cally

to allow its baili discretion in applying law and customs, albeit ‘nothing

without precedent’.

Such policies were similar to the consideration

Edward I showed to Durham.  us, though he could describe Bishop Bek

as ‘his minister’, in another context he instructed his o cers not to violate

Durham’s rights and depicted himself as St Cuthbert’s minister.

On this

perspective, kingship and local privilege were not intrinsically opposed.

Rather, liberties were power- structures whose traditions and roles both

the crown and its subjects set store by. It was this that led Edward III to

safeguard Tynedale’s judicial privileges; while his servants could also feel

obliged to support its rights, and those of Durham and Hexhamshire,

‘because they cannot enter these liberties since the king’s writ does not run

there’.

 us did the conventions of governance and the needs of society

rest on something other than the cumulative growth of crown institutions.

Or, as Susan Reynolds has expressed it, ‘government consisted of layers of

authority, and loyalties were attracted to each layer accordingly’.

It must be emphasised that to extrapolate freely from the experiences of

the north- eastern liberties would be rash, partly because of their speci c

structures, habitats and histories, and partly because of the need for further

comparative study. In the North- East as elsewhere, there can in any case be

no question of supposing that every liberty became or remained a dynamic

institutional or communal focus; that loyalties and identities were neces-

sarily less complex within liberties than outside them; or that their tenants

were una ected by external opportunities, ties and pressures. But the king’s

shire, even in lowland England, was only one framework where custom,

rights and ‘community’ might periodically interact; nor was it the only

local polity where people’s identities and political culture might be in u-

enced by distinctive structures of jurisdiction and authority. It was Rees

Davies’s familiarity with the liberties of the March of Wales that informed

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

p. 210.

NER, no. 287.

Bek Recs, pp. 92–3; Fraser, ‘Edward I’, p. 338.

E 179/158/7, m. 7d (1336).

S. Reynolds, Kingdoms and Communities in Western Europe, 900–1300, 2nd edn (Oxford,

1997), p. 331.

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BORDER LIBERTIES AND LOYALTIES

his warnings about the distortions that arise from assuming that the ‘state’

was inevitably and everywhere the ‘universal datum’. We would not go so

far as to suggest that Durham, Hexhamshire and Tynedale, and still less

Redesdale and Tynemouthshire, can be categorised as ‘virtual “states”’.

But their experiences provide an important part of the context in which

the history of liberties must be set; they may also serve to encourage a fuller

appreciation of the prominent roles played by liberties in the medieval

English order.

Davies, ‘Medieval state’, pp. 294, 296.

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Index

Places inside the liberties studied in this book are located by liberty; other places are located by modern,

pre-1975 county.  e following abbreviations are used: C = Cumberland; D = Durham ‘between Tyne

and Tees’; H = Hexhamshire; N = Northumberland; R = Redesdale; T = Tynedale; Te = Tynemouthshire;

W = Westmorland; Y = Yorkshire. Place-names such as Little Swinburne, South Shields, etc., are

normally indexed under the pre x. Subject entries will mostly be found arranged under the names of

liberties and their owners.

Abberwick (N), 290, 336n, 408n

Abingdon (Berkshire), abbey of, 2

Acton (N), Henry, 389

Acton, Laurence (d. 1410), 411

Acton, Nicholas, 389

Acton, William (d. c. 1355), 389n

Aislaby (D), 63, 78, 151

Aislaby, William, 78

Akeld (N), 290

Aldbrough (Y), Sir Richard, 70

Aldin Grange (D), 132

Aldithescheles (T), now lost, Hugh, 274n

Alexander II, king of Scots (1214–49), 232, 242n,

250, 250n, 276, 363

as lord of Tynedale, 231, 237, 241, 241n, 249,

257–8

his queen Joan, 232, 276

his sister Marjorie, 241, 241n, 248

Alexander III, king of Scots (1249–86), 232,

242–3, 243n, 244n, 245n, 247n, 249, 251n,

256n, 257n, 259n, 264, 264n, 271n, 280n,

288–9, 300, 384, 384n, 413, 422–3

as lord of Tynedale, 231, 235–6, 246, 249n,

258–9, 270–3, 273n, 276, 277n, 279, 288, 335;

defends rights of liberty, 237, 237n, 238–40,

243, 255, 278; nature of his authority and

lordship, 136, 235–7, 239–42, 252, 254–8,

262–5, 281, 284, 287, 294, 337

his queen see Margaret

his son Lord Alexander, 256

Alfred, king of Wessex (871–99), 35

statue of, 45

Allendale (H), 173

Allendale Town (H), 194n, 201n

Allenshields, John, 86, 121, 129, 130n, 131

Allerdale (C), 260, 262n, 416, 429

receiver of, (named), 403

Allertonshire (Y), liberty of, 20, 418n

Allerwash (N), 185, 196, 266

Alnham (N), 333

Alnwick (N), 213, 301, 391, 411

abbey of, 379–80; abbot of, 342

barony of, 381

lords of, 363

Alston (T), 243, 245–7, 253, 256, 260, 276, 278,

282, 283n, 289, 303, 324n, 330, 346

advowson of, 247

church of, 234

freeholders in, 277

manor of, 238–9, 279

rectory of, 340