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

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BORDER LIBERTIES AND LOYALTIES

his Northumbrian properties.

 e signi cance of these charters should

not be overstated; but they do indicate how the tenurial links that bound

Durham to the other northern counties might complicate the claim that

‘the king’s writ does not run’ in the liberty of Durham.

It was an o en- repeated claim: ‘the bishop of Durham has royal liberty in

his liberties of Durham and Norham, and his writs run there’.

And, despite

the necessary quali cations, it was much more than a ‘half truth’.

All kinds

of writs in the liberty were issued in the bishop’s name, rather than the

king’s, and the concepts of law and justice that were at the heart of medieval

ideas about government were formulated in relation to the bishop. It was

the bishop’s peace which felons violated, and which the bishop extended

in pardons.

A criminal in the liberty might not simply abjure the realm,

but ‘the realm and bishopric’; and since the liberty did not send a repre-

sentative to Parliament, and did not normally contribute to lay taxation,

it might even be distinguished from the wider ‘community of the realm’.

 ere was nothing self- evidently absurd in the idea that the bishop within

his liberty was like a king, or even that, as Bishop Bek’s steward ‘strongly

a rmed’ in 1302, ‘there were two kings in England, namely the lord king

of England, wearing a crown as symbol of his regality, and the lord bishop

of Durham, wearing a mitre in place of a crown as symbol of his regality

in the diocese [sic] of Durham’.

Such claims expressed in contemporary

terms the fundamentals of the liberty’s position, and represented the views

of royal lawyers and the local community as much as of the bishop’s house-

hold and administration.

 e exclusion of the king’s writ from the liberty

justi ed Durham’s freedom from almost all lay taxation; it justi ed the

bishops’ claims to forfeited lands, and to the goods and chattels of outlaws.

 us when Edward II ordered Bishop Kellawe to answer for forfeited lands

of the Templars in the liberty, the king was told that Bek had seized them

‘by reason of his royal liberty’, and it seems that Kellawe retained control

of the estates.

Similarly, in 1351 Bishop  omas Hat eld (1345–81), on

the grounds of his ‘royal liberty’, was able to deny the king the goods of

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

1837), p. 23; CChR, i, p. 454; v, p. 4.

Northern Pets, no. 175.

Pace Scammell, ‘Origin and limitations’, p. 456.

Well illustrated by the model forms of episcopal pardon in an early fourteenth- century

formulary: DCM, Misc. Ch. 5672, m. 1.

See, for example, DURH 3/92, m. 16d; below, p. 27.

Fraser, Bek, p. 98, and n. 5.

Lapsley, Durham, p. 31; contrast Scammell, ‘Origin and limitations’, p. 464, and n. 4.

RPD, ii, pp. 857–8, with BL, Egerton Ch. 550.

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DURHAM: HISTORY, CULTURE AND IDENTITY

outlaws who had  ed to Durham.

And in 1338 Edward III seems to have

accepted that his commissioners ought not to enter the liberty to assess par-

liamentary taxation. Writing to Bishop Bury a er the grant of wool made

in the Parliament of February that year, the king asked Bury to call before

him ‘the community of your liberty of Durham’. He hoped that the bishop

would be able to persuade the community to make its own grant of wools

within the liberty, to be collected by the bishop’s own commissioners.

 e

bishop apparently neglected to execute the writ, and was called to account

in 1342 not only for the 1338 grant but for the   eenth and tenth of 1337;

he answered that ‘the men of the liberty’, who were not represented in the

Commons, ‘were not accustomed to pay anything with the community of

the realm’. Following a search of the exchequer’s records in 1344, his argu-

ment that Durham was a ‘royal liberty’ in which the king’s o cers should

not ‘intermeddle’ seems to have been accepted.

Naturally the liberty was not wholly immune from royal demands.  e

bishops spent a good deal of their energies in the liberty carrying out the

crown’s wishes. Some   y folios of Kellawe’s register – about one-   h of its

contemporary contents – concern royal writs sent to the bishop for execu-

tion, even if not all were acted on without complications;

while through-

out our period many letters close and patent to the bishops were enrolled

by the crown’s clerks. Furthermore, several of the liberty’s privileges were,

on occasion, challenged by the crown or its ministers, for many men had

an eye on the king’s interests.  us it was pointed out, around 1284, that

if Ranulf Neville did homage to the bishop for his lands between Tyne and

Tees before doing homage to Edward I for his other lands, this would be

to the disinheritance of the crown; at about the same time, Robert Tilliol

was allowed to warrant a charter in Cumberland rather than in the liberty,

because to do otherwise ‘would openly fall to the king’s prejudice’.

In the

 rst instance, the warning came from an unknown royal servant; in the

second case, the decision was made by royal justices, even though the king

himself had ordered the sheri of Cumberland to have Robert appear in the

liberty.  e king’s servants could have a sharper sense of royal rights than

E 159/127, recorda, Easter, m. 12–12d.

RPD, iv, pp. 225–8; also printed in Treaty Rolls 1337–1339, ed. J. Ferguson (London, 1972),

no. 110, and cf. ibid., nos. 213, 541.

E 159/120, mm. 168–9, 264; CCR 1341–3, pp. 610–11; with J. F. Willard, Parliamentary

Taxes on Personal Property, 1290 to 1334 (Cambridge, MA, 1934), pp. 29–32, for the

background.

RPD, ii, pp. 835–1124 (including, however, writs concerning the diocese as well as the

liberty of Durham).

SC 1/31/107; Select Cases in the Court of King’s Bench, ed. G. O. Sayles (Selden Society,

1936–71), ii, pp. cxxviii–ix.

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BORDER LIBERTIES AND LOYALTIES

the king himself.

 e liberty’s privileges might also simply be forgotten.

As one royal o cial seems to have found it necessary to remind another

in the later thirteenth century: ‘Sir, you know well that the king’s writ does

not run in the bishopric of Durham. You must make another writ for those

parts according to the tenor of the other writs.’

More important, though, were the occasions on which the bishopric’s

privileges were overridden by the superior claims of royal prerogative, or by

the threat of the ‘disinheritance’ of the crown.  e most dramatic illustra-

tion was Edward I’s seizure of the lordships of Hartness and Barnard Castle

in 1306–7, which contemporaries recognised as a  agrant violation of the

liberty’s rights.

When Robert Bruce was forfeited as a Scottish rebel in

1306 the bishopric was in royal hands, and it was only to be expected that

his estates in the liberty would be used to bene t the king’s servants.

But

these grants also occasioned a royal inquiry into the circumstances in which

Barnard Castle had been forfeited by John II Balliol in 1296. Unsurprisingly

it was found that Bishop Anthony Bek, in con scating Balliol’s estates, had

acted to the prejudice of the crown.  e lands were taken into the king’s

hands and granted in 1307 to Guy, earl of Warwick; and despite subse-

quent twists and turns, the crown’s grantees remained in possession.

But

this was not because the supremacy of royal prerogative was consistently

upheld. On the contrary, when Bishop Lewis Beaumont petitioned for the

restoration of Hartness and Barnard Castle in 1327, Edward III admitted

the justice of the bishop’s claims, and then supported those claims against

the complaints of Robert Cli ord and  omas Beauchamp.

In the event

Beaumont and his successors were not able to recover the lordships, but

they were prevented by the e orts of the Cli ords and Beauchamps, and

by the legal di culties posed by Edward I’s grants, not by concerted royal

opposition.

 e theoretical supremacy of royal prerogative was never translated

into coherent policy, and the crown made no consistent claims to forfeits

in the liberty. Bishop Bek seized lands in Stanhope as war- forfeits, and his

action was challenged only within the liberty itself, in the bishop’s court,

in 1345. When lands in Herrington were forfeited in 1314, Bishop Kellawe

granted them to John Deanham, in whose family they remained.

For a similar example, see SC 1/22/190.

SC 1/28/190, and see similarly RPD, iv, pp. 420–1.

Scriptores Tres, p. 88.

RPD, iii, pp. 58–60; CPR 1301–7, p. 465.

RPD, ii, pp. 795–802.

PROME, iv, pp. 40–2; SC 8/149/7437, 7443.

DURH 13/221/2, m. 1; RPD, ii, pp. 1261–2; DURH 3/2, f. 100r.

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DURHAM: HISTORY, CULTURE AND IDENTITY

we have seen, Bek also seized the forfeited lands of the Templars in the

liberty; Bishop Beaumont exercised rights of forfeiture in Norhamshire.

Admittedly some disputes over forfeits show that the bishop’s subjects

might be ready to exploit the opposing claims of crown and liberty. Walter

Selby forfeited the manor of Felling in 1318 because of his involvement

in the ‘rebellion’ of Gilbert Middleton. Edward II granted the manor to

Ralph Eppleton, while Beaumont granted it to his kinsman Aimery Trew.

Eppleton obtained possession, but he himself forfeited the manor a er the

battle of Boroughbridge (1322). Trew then acquired Felling, and granted

the manor to  omas Surtees, a grant that received royal and episcopal

con rmation. But Walter Selby returned to royal favour and attempted,

albeit unsuccessfully, to oust Surtees by reminding Edward III that forfei-

tures belonged only to the crown.

Any loyalty to the liberty’s privileges

was unlikely to take precedence over securing landed title. For similar

reasons, inhabitants of the liberty were prepared to use the royal courts

when they felt that the legal machinery of the liberty had failed them.

But

if kings were o en invited to challenge the liberty’s privileges, royal respect

for the bishopric might well lead them to decline. When one case was sued

in the royal courts, Edward II was ‘unwilling to do anything that might fall

to the liberty’s prejudice’, and simply ordered that a record of the plea be

sent to the bishop with a mandate to do justice.

Almost exactly the same

language had been used in 1241, when John I Balliol attempted to bring a

plea concerning Gainford before royal justices in eyre at Lancaster: Henry

III was informed by Bishop Farnham that the case pertained to the liberty

court and, unwilling to do anything against the liberty of Durham, the king

ordered his justices to do no more.

It is true that the bishops o en knew when to let their claims lie dormant.

Bishop Beaumont made no attempt to challenge the royal seizure of the

manor of Silksworth, forfeited by an intimate of  omas, earl of Lancaster.

Edward II granted the manor to Richard Embleton of Newcastle in 1323–4,

and it remained in his family’s possession. Indeed it was known around the

North- East that Silksworth was in the king’s gi : Hexham Priory petitioned

for lands there, in about 1323, to compensate it for damages from the Scots,

and believed it could hold the lands ‘of the king, rendering the assized rent

Above, p. 26; Holford, ‘War, lordship, and community’, p. 86; FPD, p. 1.

For the complex story of Felling, see CPR 1317–21, pp. 217, 239, 335; 1330–4, p. 240; C

255/12/2/17; Northern Pets, nos. 184–5, 197–8; Northumb. Pets, nos. 121a, 193; CIMisc.,

ii, no. 880; FPD, pp. 8–10; CCR 1341–3, pp. 98, 642, 692; NCH, ix, pp. 59–61.

Below, Chapter 2, pp. 79–80.

KB 27/246, m. 135.

CR 1237–42, p. 340.

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BORDER LIBERTIES AND LOYALTIES

at the exchequer’.

 e reality of royal authority in the liberty was thus

widely acknowledged. But it is a mistake to expect absolute ‘separateness’

or ‘autonomy’, even for a ‘royal liberty’.

 roughout our period, bishops

were ready to call on royal help in disciplining their more recalcitrant

subjects, and they readily acknowledged the crown’s right to intervene in

default of justice.

In this respect, in fact, the crown had an acknowledged

place in the government of the liberty. But it was a restricted place, and

bishops did expect control of the great majority of the liberty’s adminis-

tration.  e crown’s attitude, as in the Welsh Marches, was one of ‘quies-

cent conservatism’, of ‘acquiescence and respect’; its interventions, when

they occurred, ‘operated along certain acknowledged channels’;

and the

bishops of Durham, for their own part, were usually equally respectful of

the crown’s rights and objectives. By vigorously pursuing their own rights

in some respects, and by tactfully waiving them in others, the bishops nor-

mally maintained a modus vivendi with the crown, which minimised royal

interference in the liberty.

In the usual run of things, then, the bishopric’s privileges were fully

respected. It is true that royal writs were issued in relation to the liberty and

its inhabitants. Even if not all were executed,

royal o cers certainly did

sometimes act in the liberty, and not only in the disputed areas of Hartness

and Barnard Castle.

Nor was the royal chancery always prepared to follow

the liberty’s example in referring to the ‘bishop’s peace’ rather than the

king’s.

It is also true that the bishop of Durham, very o en, owed his

position to royal patronage. As Tim  ornton has pointed out, however,

and as Anthony Bek, Lewis Beaumont and Richard Bury demonstrated

in their di erent ways, royal appointees were not necessarily less vigor-

ous defenders of the liberty.

In the  nal analysis, the liberty’s continued

CPR 1321–4, pp. 292, 398; Northern Pets, nos. 135, 191–2; DURH 13/223, mm. 8–9.

Pace, for example, G. Barraclough, The Earldom and County Palatine of Chester (Oxford,

1953), p. 28.

For examples, see C 81/525/7287; DCM, Loc.XXI.18, m. 4; CCR 1327–30, pp. 55–6;

1337–9, p. 39; E 159/120, m. 255.

Davies, Lordship and Society, pp. 251, 257.

When a royal pardon was pleaded in the liberty, its validity was denied by Bek’s justices;

and a knight in Bek’s retinue claimed that a royal protection had no authority in the

liberty: Fraser, Bek, pp. 97, 98, n. 3.

For additional examples, see CR 1242–7, p. 436; E 142/11, mm. 3, 6 (albeit with an inter-

lineated note that the sheriff of Northumberland ‘cannot intermeddle’ in the bishopric of

Durham); C 145/88/2, 21; 145/89/21.

RPD, ii, pp. 1017–18; Lapsley, Durham, p. 32.

T. Thornton, ‘Fifteenth- century Durham and the problem of provincial liberties in

England and the wider territories of the English Crown’, TRHS, 6th ser., 11 (2001), pp.

95–100.

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DURHAM: HISTORY, CULTURE AND IDENTITY

existence depended on royal favour; but such a statement hardly captures

the real  avour of the liberty’s relationship with the crown.  e sceptical

accounts of some modern historians thus do the bishopric less than jus-

tice.

In the words of a fourteenth- century lawyer, the bishop was ‘as king’

in his liberty;

and the relatively few occasions when royal administration

intermeddled in the liberty can have counted for little when nearly all local

government was carried out by the bishop’s men and in his name.

Asked what warrant they had for their ‘royal rights’, the bishops of Durham

could point only to long usage. In 1351 Bishop Hat eld openly admitted

that he had no speci c charter granting him the chattels of outlaws, claim-

ing only that his ‘royal liberty’ had given the bishops of Durham such rights

from time out of mind.

In attempting to explain why successive kings

respected these prescriptive claims, some historians have emphasised the

direct bene t that ‘royal liberties’ could o er the crown: the great liber-

ties of Durham, Cheshire and the Welsh Marches originated on military

frontiers, it has been argued, and the powers of their lords derived from

the kings’ desire to maximise their own military e ectiveness.

But while

the crown did sometimes draw attention to Durham’s role in the defence

of the North, especially a er the outbreak of war with Scotland in 1296,

much of its concern was focused on the detached part of the liberty in

Norhamshire, on the Scottish Border; and in the fourteenth century the

bishopric’s privileges in relation to taxation and military service probably

hampered rather than enhanced the crown’s military strength. Ultimately

the argument of reciprocity is not a satisfying explanation for the continued

existence and development of Durham’s privileges.

A more convincing argument points to the importance of precedent

and custom, which favoured the continuance of established privileges.

Certainly precedent was usually fundamental to the allowance of the lib-

erty’s claims. In 1342 Bishop Bury was able to show that the crown had

Notably Scammell, ‘Origins and limitations’, passim.

Lapsley, Durham, p. 31.

E 159/127, recorda, Easter, m. 12–12d.

For examples of this argument, see H. M. Cam, Liberties and Communities in Medieval

England, new edn (London, 1963), pp. 210–11; S. L. Waugh, The Lordship of England: Royal

Wardships and Marriages in English Society and Politics, 1217–1327 (Princeton, 1988), pp.

82–3; C. D. Liddy, ‘The politics of privilege: Thomas Hatfield and the palatinate of Durham,

1345–81’, Fourteenth Century England, 4 (2006), p. 65; Storey, Langley, p. 144.

CCR 1307–13, p. 568; 1318–23, p. 697. Cf. Barraclough, Earldom of Chester, p. 29; R.

Somerville, ‘The duchy and county palatine of Lancaster’, Transactions of the Historic

Society of Lancashire and Cheshire, 103 (1952), p. 29.

See in particular Thornton, ‘Fifteenth- century Durham’, p. 100; T. Thornton, Cheshire

and the Tudor State, 1480–1560 (Woodbridge, 2000), p. 80, and passim.

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allowed ‘royal liberty’ to Beaumont; Beaumont, in 1327, had pointed to

Henry III’s allowance of Stichill’s claim to forfeited lands in the liberty, as

had Kellawe in 1316. As Kellawe put it, he and his predecessors had enjoyed

such ‘royal rights’ from time without mind; and while any precedent

brought by Stichill in 1267 has not survived, it was probably on a similar

basis that his jura regalia were recognised by the king’s council.

On that

occasion, the claims of custom and precedent were judged by the king

and his advisers; on others, the crown saw  t to consult the wider political

community: it was in Parliament that Bishop Lisle was ordered to show

his claim to the marriage of Sybil Lumley in 1280.

Custom could also

be determined by a jury: when, in about 1282, a royal escheator could not

discover by inquisition that his predecessors had acted in the bishopric, he

himself refused to do so without special warrant.

Finally precedent might

be established through a painstaking search of documentary evidence. In

1344 such a search established that the bishopric had not usually contrib-

uted to lay subsidies: and, therea er, the liberty was very rarely asked to

contribute to such taxes.

Once customary rights had been established,

by whatever means, the crown was usually ready to respect them; and it is

di cult to accept that ‘the Durham franchise owed its greatest variations

in fortune not to its own theoretical privileges, status or merits, but to the

political vicissitudes of its then bishop’.

While a general respect for custom and precedent favoured many liber-

ties, however, the powerful historical traditions associated with Durham

gave its lord and inhabitants an unusual ability to maintain and develop

their privileges.  ese traditions presented the liberty as a privileged space,

the area ‘between Tyne and Tees’, which belonged to St Cuthbert and was

under his protection.  e inhabitants of the liberty were the Haliwerfolk or

‘the people of St Cuthbert’, who also claimed special rights because of their

relationship to the saint. At the heart of Durham’s distinctive traditions,

therefore, was St Cuthbert.

Cuthbert was, of course, far more than a merely local saint. In the Middle

Ages his shrine at Durham attracted pilgrims from the length and breadth

of Britain.

From an early date, the saint had been presented as a patron

E 159/120, mm. 168–9, 264; PROME, iii, pp. 230–5; iv, pp. 40–2; CPR 1266–72, p. 63.

SC 1/13/90.

SC 1/24/29.

E 159/120, m. 264. For the exceptions, in 1371 and 1436, see below, Chapter 2, p. 94;

Thornton, ‘Fifteenth- century Durham’, pp. 90–1.

Scammell, ‘Origin and limitations’, pp. 472–3.

V. Tudor, ‘The cult of Cuthbert in the twelfth century: the evidence of Reginald of

Durham’, in G. Bonner, D. Rollason and C. Stancliffe (eds), Saint Cuthbert, his Cult and

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DURHAM: HISTORY, CULTURE AND IDENTITY

and defender of England as a whole;

indeed, a late- medieval life written

at Durham devoted a section to Cuthbert as patron of the English, claim-

ing that any proper Englishman ought to worship him.

 e saint’s banner

– apparently  rst recorded in the 1160s and, from 1296, a vital talisman

accompanying English campaigns against the Scots – was a physical symbol

of his status as ‘the protector of the English’.

And the English victory over

the Scots at the battle of Neville’s Cross in 1346 was only the most striking

example of what Durham Priory called the honour ‘done to the realm by

the merit and prayer of St Cuthbert’.

But although Cuthbert was a  gure of national importance and appeal,

he did have distinctive local and regional signi cance. Admittedly this was

not restricted to the liberty, but more widely di used over the North, where

the bulk of churches and chapels dedicated to Cuthbert were to be found.

His feasts in March and September were rent- terms in Northumberland as

well as in Durham, and ships from Newcastle as well as from Hartlepool

were named a er the saint.

At Tynemouth, in 1425–6, the monks were

accused of neglecting their proper patronal saints to perform plays for

the local populace on St Cuthbert’s day, and it was in York Minster that

Bishop  omas Langley of Durham (1406–37) set up a particularly sump-

tuous representation of the saint’s life in stained glass.

In no way, then,

was Cuthbert’s patronal power and in uence restricted to the liberty of

Durham. Nor, indeed, was his the only signi cant cult within the liberty.

his Community to 1200 (Woodbridge, 1989), pp. 465–6; Scriptores Tres, pp. 152–3; DCM,

Misc. Ch. 7159* (c. 1455), partly printed in R. B. Dobson, Durham Priory 1400–1450

(Cambridge, 1973), p. 32.

Historia de Sancto Cuthberto, ed. T. J. South (Cambridge, 2002), Chapters 15–18, 33, and

comment; ‘De Miraculis’, in Symeon of Durham, Opera omnia, ed. T. Arnold (RS, 1882–

5), Chapters 1, 4; Symeon of Durham, Libellus de Exordio, etc. ed. D. Rollason (Oxford,

2000), pp. 110–13, 126–7.

BL, MS Harley 4843, ff. 249v–50r.

On the banner, see Tudor, ‘Cult of Cuthbert’, p. 460; Dobson, Durham Priory, p. 27, n. 3;

R. B. Dobson, Church and Society in the Medieval North of England (London, 1996), pp.

105–7, and the references there given. The quotation is from BL, MS Harley 4843, f. 249v.

Historical Letters and Papers from the Northern Registers, ed. J. Raine (RS, 1873), p. 391.

For accounts of Cuthbert’s role, see the contemporary narratives collected in translation

in D. Rollason and M. Prestwich (eds), The Battle of Neville’s Cross, 1346 (Stamford, 1998),

pp. 132–62; also Poems of Laurence Minot, ed. J. Hall (Oxford, 1897), pp. 33, 108–15.

A. H. Thompson, ‘The MS. list of churches dedicated to St Cuthbert, attributed to Prior

Wessyngton’, Transactions of the Architectural and Archaeological Society of Durham and

Northumberland, 7 (1935), pp. 151–77; Dobson, Durham Priory, pp. 18–19.

Rents: examples include NCS, ZSW/4/75; NCH, ix, p. 77. Ships: BL, MS Cotton Nero

C.VIII, ff. 264v–5v; Dobson Durham Priory, p. 30.

John Amundesham, Annales Monasterii S. Albani, ed. H. T. Riley (RS, 1870–1), i, p. 214;

S. Brown, York Minster: An Architectural History, c. 1220–1500 (Swindon, 2003), pp.

231–2.

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St Hilda’s association with Hartlepool, for example, was commemorated

in the town’s thirteenth- century seals, the main counterseal depicting the

abbess with an inscription invoking her protection of her servants.

 e

seal is probably related to the town’s acquisition of privileges from Bishop

Richard Poore in 1229, and the appearance of Hilda could even be read as

a statement about the town’s separation from episcopal authority in the

wider liberty.

Despite all this, however, Cuthbert did have a distinctive signi cance

within the liberty: he was, in the words inscribed under his statue in Durham

Priory, ‘patron of the church, city and liberty of Durham’.

To some extent,

this was true in Islandshire as well as in the liberty between Tyne and Tees.

Cuthbert had a cenotaph on Holy Island; the cell on Farne possessed books

and other objects which had reputedly once belonged to him; and he gave

his name to the local duck, ‘the bird of St Cuthbert’.

By narrowing the

focus still further, however, it is possible to identify distinctive elements of

Cuthbert’s meaning that were restricted to the liberty between Tyne and

Tees. It is likely that his feasts in March and September were more signi -

cant social occasions in the bishopric than they were elsewhere: the priory

might invite local magnates to the feasts, and expenses connected with

them occur in both priory and bishopric accounts.

Cuthbert’s shrine, fur-

thermore, was the symbolic centre of the liberty, and its signi cance to the

local community was di erent from its appeal to pilgrims from the wider

realm.  e local community – ‘all the men of the bishopric’ – demanded

free access to the shrine from Bishop Bek during the dispute of 1300–3,

and it was at the shrine that ‘each and singular’ of the liberty community

then swore to uphold the public good.

It was with a pregnant sense of

symbolism that a   eenth- century account described how, ‘beside the

shrine of St Cuthbert’, Edward I had commanded Bek to do justice to the

local community.

And the shrine was also a place where local men could

W. de Gray Birch, Catalogue of Seals . . . in the British Museum (London, 1887–1900), ii,

nos. 4976–8; VCH, Durham, iii, p. 275.

Acta 1196–1237, no. 318. For the town’s earlier charters, see VCH, Durham, iii, p. 270.

Rites of Durham, ed. J. C. Fowler (SS, 1903), p. 139 (and cf. p. 131).

E. Cambridge, ‘Why did the community of St Cuthbert settle at Chester- le- Street?’, in

Bonner, Rollason and Stancliffe, Saint Cuthbert, p. 368; Raine, North Durham, p. 347;

Extracts from the Account Rolls of the Abbey of Durham, ed. J. T. Fowler (SS, 1898–1901),

iii, p. 591; J. Raine, St Cuthbert (Durham, 1828), pp. 22–3, 119.

DCM, Bursar’s Accounts 1349–50(A), m. 6; cf. RPD, iv, p. 435, for an invitation to an

abbot copied in Bury’s letter book. For the bishopric accounts, see DCM, Loc.V.32, m. 2.

Material is scattered throughout the priory accounts: cf. Durham Account Rolls, iii, index,

s.v. Cuthbert, feast of.

RPD, iii, pp. 44, 64; Gesta Dunelm., p. 12.

BL, MS Lansdowne 397, f. 11r; cf. Fraser, Bek, p. 181.

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DURHAM: HISTORY, CULTURE AND IDENTITY

make particularly solemn undertakings. Rarely can this have been better

illustrated than by the oath that Gilbert son of William Hulam swore on St

Cuthbert’s shrine on 4 September – the feast of the saint’s translation – in

1341. Gilbert was suspected of entering fraudulently into an exchange of

lands, but an oath at the shrine of the liberty’s patron promised to dispel

such rumours. Gilbert was by no means prominent in local society: because

his seal was little known, those of four neighbours were also a xed to

Gilbert’s letters patent, dated at the shrine and addressed to ‘all the good

men of the royal liberty of Durham’. Even such minor  gures might need,

and be able, to call on Cuthbert’s unchallengeable local authority.

As ‘patron of the church, city and liberty of Durham’, Cuthbert had

responsibilities to bishop, to prior and convent, and to the wider local

community: responsibilities which were o en closely related, but which did

not always prove mutually compatible.  e monks of Durham naturally

revered the saint as a fearsome protector of their priory and its posses-

sions, warning in widely copied couplets of the dire fate awaiting those who

despoiled ‘the lands of St Cuthbert’.

Symeon of Durham’s account of the

death of Gillo Michael, who had persecuted the saint’s followers in the elev-

enth century, was copied verbatim on the eve of the priory’s dissolution as

an exemplum ‘against those who molest the servants of St Cuthbert’; it also

featured in a slightly earlier compilation of miraculous punishments for

violations of Cuthbert’s liberty – and that mostly meant, in this context, the

rights of the priory.

When these rights were threatened, Cuthbert’s name

was readily invoked.  us the priory’s complaints against its treatment by

Bishop Bek and his o cers repeated incessantly the charge that ‘the liberty

of St Cuthbert’ had been damaged: the bishop assigned o cers when the

priory was vacant; his baili let their lands to farm; his o cers exacted

carriage – all ‘against the liberty of St Cuthbert’.

If the priory’s writers and copyists naturally emphasised Cuthbert’s

protection of their particular institution, however, they recognised that he

was equally important to the origin and development of the wider liberty.

According to the priory’s historical tradition, it was Cuthbert’s miraculous

interventions in favour of King Guthred and King Alfred in the ninth

century that had led to the  rst grant of ‘royal liberty’ between Tyne and

Tees, and the saint was equally important in the liberty’s later history.

One story told how William the Conqueror’s con rmation of Durham’s

privileges came a er he had learned about Cuthbert’s life from local men;

DCM, Misc. Ch. 7009. Cf. Dobson, Durham Priory, p. 28, and n. 4, for later examples.

Dobson, Durham Priory, p. 12.

BL, MS Harley 4843, ff. 254v–5r; MS Cotton Claudius D.IV, ff. 101r–15v.

DCM, Loc.VII.4, arts. 5, 15, 18 (and cf. 19); Loc.VII.45, art. 26.

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