Regions and Regionalism in History

10

THE BISHOPRIC OF DURHAM IN THE LATE MIDDLE AGES

LORDSHIP, COMMUNITY AND THE CULT OF ST CUTHBERT

Regions and Regionalism in History

ISSN 17428254

This series, published in association with the AHRB Centre for North-East England History (NEEHI), aims to reflect and encourage the increasing academic and popular interest in regions and regionalism in historical perspective. It also seeks to explore the complex historical antecedents of regionalism as it appears in a wide range of international contexts.

Series EditorBill Lancaster, University of Northumbria

Editorial BoardDr Richard C. Allen, University of NewcastleDr Barry Doyle, University of TeessideBill Lancaster, University of NorthumbriaBill Purdue, Open UniversityProfessor David Rollason, University of DurhamDr Peter Rushton, University of Sunderland

Proposals for future volumes may be sent to the following address:

AHRB Centre for North-East England History5th FloorBolbec HallWestgate RoadNewcastle upon TyneNE1 1SE

Previously published volumes are listed at the back of this book.

Conyers Falchion (mid thirteenth century)

THE BISHOPRIC OF DURHAM IN THE

LATE MIDDLE AGES

LORDSHIP, COMMUNITY

AND THE CULT OF ST CUTHBERT

CHRISTIAN D. LIDDY

THE BOYDELL PRESS

Christian D. Liddy 2008

All Rights Reserved. Except as permitted under current legislation no part of this work may be photocopied, stored in a retrieval system,

published, performed in public, adapted, broadcast, transmitted, recorded or reproduced in any form or by any means,

without the prior permission of the copyright owner

The right of Christian D. Liddy to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with

sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

First published 2008The Boydell Press, Woodbridge

ISBN 9781843833772

The Boydell Press is an imprint of Boydell & Brewer Ltd PO Box 9, Woodbridge, Suffolk IP12 3DF, UK

and of Boydell & Brewer Inc. 668 Mt Hope Avenue, Rochester, NY 14620, USA

website: www.boydellandbrewer.com

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

This publication is printed on acid-free paper

Printed in Great Britain by Antony Rowe Ltd, Chippenham, Wiltshire

Contents

List of Illustrations viii

Acknowledgements ix

List of Abbreviations xi

1 Introduction 1

2 Land and Power 25

3 Lordship and Society 76

4 Office-Holding 124

5 The Haliwerfolc and the Politics of Community 174

6 Epilogue 236

Bibliography 245

Index 261

List of Illustrations

Plates

Frontispiece Conyers Falchion, mid thirteenth century (Durham Cathedral Treasury): reproduced by permission of Durham Cathedral Library1 Reverse of Bishop Hatfields great seal (DCM, 2.3.Pont.1): 179 reproduced by permission of Durham Cathedral Library

Maps

1 The Palatinate of Durham 182 Ancient Parishes in the Bishopric of Durham: after H.M. Dunsford 36 and S.J. Harris, Colonization of the Wasteland in County Durham, 1001400, Economic History Review 56 (2003), p. 373 Physiographic Units in the Bishopric of Durham: after R.I. Hodgson, 38 Coalmining, Population and Enclosure in the Seasale Colliery Districts of Durham (Northern Durham), 15511810: A Study in Historical Geography, 2 vols (Ph.D. thesis, University of Durham, 1989), Vol. II, p. 984 The Team Valley 1185 Ward Boundaries in the Bishopric of Durham: after S.J. Harris, 156 Wastes, the Margins and the Abandonment of Land: The Bishop of Durhams Estate, 13501480, North-East England in the Later Middle Ages, ed. C.D. Liddy and R.H. Britnell (Woodbridge, 2005), p. 200

Figures

1 Well-Wishers of John Lord Neville (d. 1388) in South-East 90 Durham2 Familial Relationships between the Gentry of the Team Valley 1203 The Senior and Junior Lines of the Nevilles 214

Tables

1 Distribution of Manors among Durham Lay Landholders, 1345 652 Distribution of Manors among Durham Lay Landholders, 1381 663 Distribution of Manors among Durham Lay Landholders, 1434 68

Acknowledgements

The research for this book began with my appointment as a researcher in the AHRC Centre for North-East England History. I am deeply grateful to the members of the appointing committee, chaired by David Rollason, who had faith that an urban historian could learn quickly the intricacies of enfeoff-ments and entails which governed the descent and conveyance of property. I hope that the gamble has paid off. Among those who helped to make the tran-sition from urban to landed society as smooth as possible, I should mention Simon Harris, Peter Larson, Brian Barker, Mark Arvanigian, Lynda Rollason and Michael Prestwich. In Durham, Alan Piper, Michael Stansfield and Joan Williams were expert guides through the various collections of archival mate-rial relating to the bishopric. Jonathan Mackman helped to track down several manuscripts in the National Archives. I should also thank the Right Hon. Earl of Scarbrough for access to the Lumley archive at Sandbeck Park. I have learned much from conversations with scholars in related fields of research. Brian Roberts provided authoritative advice on landscape and settlement in the North East. Melanie Devine, in the early stages of her own career, clarified many points of detail about developments south of the river Tees in Richmondshire. Ben Dodds shared the fruits of his groundbreaking study of the economy of the Tyne-Tees region in advance of publication. Rob Bartlett was a generous source of information on the prince bishops of medi-eval Germany. Len Scales asked characteristically searching questions about collective memory and identity. In the latter stages of the book, Matthew Holfords forthcoming work on the thirteenth-century palatinate provided an invaluable point of comparison. I completed the book as a full-time lecturer in the Department of History at Durham. Without a period of AHRC Research Leave to release me from the demands of teaching and administration, the book would not yet have been finished. But it perhaps would not have started without the input of Tony Pollard, who has been a sounding board for ideas throughout the research and who kindly read the manuscript in draft. Special thanks should also go to Chris Given-Wilson and Richard Britnell, who acted as readers of the manu-script. Their suggestions have helped to make this a much better book. What-ever faults remain are naturally my own. Lisa has been, as ever, a constant source of encouragement, support and advice, but the book is dedicated to my father, Edward: still my mentor and my sharpest critic in matters of style and syntax, he also spent the happiest period of his professional life in the North East.

Durham, August 2007

Editorial Note

All unpublished documents cited here are in the National Archives: Public Record Office, unless otherwise stated.All place names have been modernised, as have locative surnames, with one or two exceptions (e.g. Prior Wessington rather than Prior Washington) where the individual concerned is better known by another name.

List of Abbreviations

AA Archaeologia AelianaAHR American Historical ReviewBek Records of Antony Bek, Bishop and Patriarch, 12831311, ed.

C.M. Fraser (SS 162, 1947)BIHR Borthwick Institute of Historical Research (York)BIHR Bulletin of the Institute of Historical ResearchBL British LibraryCChR Calendar of Charter RollsCCB Church Commission BishopricCCR Calendar of Close RollsCDS Calendar of Documents Relating to Scotland, ed. J. Bain et al.,

5 vols (Edinburgh, 18818)CFR Calendar of Fine RollsCIM Calendar of Inquisitions MiscellaneousCIPM Calendar of Inquisitions Post MortemCP The Complete Peerage, ed. G.E. Cokayne, 12 vols (London,

191059)CPR Calendar of Patent RollsDAR Durham Account Rolls, ed. J.T. Fowler, 3 vols (SS 99103,

18981900)DCL Durham Cathedral LibraryDCM Durham Cathedral MunimentsDEC Durham Episcopal Charters, 10711152, ed. H.S. Offler (SS

179, 1968)DRO Durham Record OfficeDUL Durham University Library (Archives and Special Collections)EcHR Economic History ReviewEHR English Historical ReviewFeudal Aids Inquisitions and Assessments Relating to Feudal Aids, 12841431FPD Feodarium Prioratus Dunelmensis, ed. W. Greenwell (SS 58,

1871)Greenwell Calendar of the Greenwell Deeds, ed. J. Walton (Newcastle- Deeds upon-Tyne, 1927)Greenwell Catalogue of the Seals in the Treasury of the Dean and Chapter Seals of Durham, ed. W. Greenwell and C.H. Hunter Blair, 2 vols (Society of Antiquaries of Newcastle-upon-Tyne, 191121)

xii ABBREVIATIONS

HR Historical ResearchHS Bishop Hatfields Survey: A Record of the Possessions of the See

of Durham, ed. W. Greenwell (SS 32, 1856)IPM Inquisition Post MortemJBS Journal of British StudiesLumley MSS Lumley Family and Estate Collection (Sandbeck Park)MED Middle English Dictionary (Ann Arbor, 1956)NH Northern HistoryNorthern Northern Petitions, ed. C.M. Fraser (SS 194, 1981) PetitionsNYCRO North Yorkshire County Record OfficeP&P Past and PresentPPC Proceedings and Ordinances of the Privy Council of England,

ed. N.H. Nicolas, 7 vols (London 1834-7)PROME The Parliament Rolls of Medieval England 12751504, ed.

C. Given-Wilson, 16 vols (Woodbridge, 2005)Return of Return of the Name of Every Member of the Lower House of Members Parliament 1213-1874, 2 vols (London, 1878)Rot. Scot. Rotuli Scotiae, ed. D. MacPherson et al., 2 vols (London,

181419)RP Rotuli Parliamentorum, 6 vols (London, 1783)RPD Registrum Palatinum Dunelmense: The Register of Richard de

Kellawe, Lord Palatine and Bishop of Durham, 13111316, ed. T.D. Hardy, 4 vols (RS, 18738)

RS Rolls SeriesScriptores Tres Historiae Dunelmensis Scriptores Tres, ed. J. Raine (SS 9, 1839)SS Surtees SocietySymeon Symeon of Durham, Libellus de Exordio atque Procursu istius,

Hoc est Dunhelmensis, Ecclesie, ed. and transl. D. Rollason (Oxford, 2000)

Test. Ebor. Testamenta Eboracensia, ed. J. Raine et al., 6 vols (SS 4, 30, 45, 53, 79, 106, 18361902)

Thomas The Register of Thomas Langley, Bishop of Durham, 1406 Langley 1437, ed. R.L. Storey, 6 vols (SS 16482, 194967)TRHS Transactions of the Royal Historical SocietyVCH Durham The Victoria History of the County of Durham, ed. W. Page,

3 vols (London, 190528)VCH North The Victoria History of the County of York: North Riding, ed. Riding W. Page, 2 vols (London, 191425)Wills and Wills and Inventories, Part I, ed. J. Raine (SS 2, 1835) InventoriesYAJ Yorkshire Archaeological JournalYASRS Yorkshire Archaeological Society Record SeriesYorkshire Yorkshire Deeds I, II, III, IX, ed. W. Brown et al. (YASRS 39, Deeds 50, 63, 111, 190746)

1Introduction

The historic city of Durham has long had its notable admirers, seduced by that familiar tendency: the veneration of the ancient. James Boswell, a guest in the Old Castle in 1788, was inspired to comment about the majesty of the bishop of Durham who, in a previous age, had ruled as a prince of an independent palatinate.1 Regrettably, Boswell did not reflect further upon the nature of the palatinate and treated his readers instead to a lengthy descrip-tion of the plentiful food and drink he consumed at the bishops residence. It was left to the modern editors of his journal to add helpfully, although not altogether accurately, a note to the effect that the medieval bishops of Durham had the authority to create barons, appoint judges, convoke parlia-ments, raise taxes, coin money, and grant pardons of all kinds.

When Daniel Defoe visited in the 1720s, he was also struck by the antiq-uity of Durham and was moved to write that the Bishop of Durham is a temporal prince, that he keeps a court of equity, and also courts of justice in ordinary causes within himself. The county of Durham, like the country about Rome, is called St. Cuthberts Patrimony.2 Few historians today would share Daniel Defoes conviction that the palatinate of Durham, lying between the rivers Tyne and Tees, was comparable to the Papal State in Italy. But Defoe was not alone in seeking to understand the history of Durham in relation to continental exempla. When E.A. Freeman came to discuss the palatinate in his monumental six-volume History of the Norman Conquest of England, published between 1867 and 1879, he chose the term prince bishop to describe the temporal powers of the bishop of Durham who ruled his own independent territory in the middle ages. Durham alone among English cities, with its highest-point crowned not only by the minster, but by the vast castle of the Prince-Bishop, wrote Freeman, recalls to mind those cities of the Empire, Lausanne or Chur or Sitten, where the priest who bore alike the sword and the pastoral staff looked down from his fortified height on a flock which he had to guard no less against worldly than against ghostly foes.3

1 For this and what follows, see Boswell: The English Experiment, 17851789, ed. I.S. Lustig and F.A. Pottle (New Haven, 1986), p. 242.

2 D. Defoe, A Tour through the Whole Island of Great Britain, 17246, published as A Tour through England and Wales, 2 vols (London, 1928), Vol. II, p. 248.

3 E.A. Freeman, The History of the Norman Conquest of England: Its Causes and Results, 6 vols, 2nd edn rev. (Oxford, 186779), Vol. I, p. 291.

2 THE BISHOPRIC OF DURHAM

The observations of Defoe and Freeman alert us to the difficulties which English historians have faced when writing about Durham. Given profoundly held and often deeply cherished beliefs in the precocious power of the English state, it is perhaps no surprise that Durham, an apparent oddity in an English context, could only be explained within a European perspective.4 In the case of Freeman, this perspective assumed a greater importance. Like many of his contemporaries who were insistent upon the Anglo-Saxon roots of the English nation, Freemans interest in, and romanticism of, a shared Germanic past led him to place the palatinate of Durham within a wider European framework of state formation and dissolution. Specifically, he saw in the extensive autonomy exercised by the bishops of Durham some faint shadow of the sovereign powers enjoyed by the princely churchmen of the Empire. Whether the cathedral-castle complex on the Durham peninsula in the loop of the river Wear actually does evoke the hill-fortress of Sitten in the valley of the river Rhone depends, of course, upon the imagination of the observer. Freemans view that the city of Durham was comparable to Lausanne, Chur or Sitten did, however, have a serious purpose. The term prince bishop did not exist in medieval England. It is a literal translation of the German compound Frstbischof. And if the German term Frstbischof a compound word to denote a princely bishop, that is, one who was invested with princely status was not in general use in the medieval period, being of comparatively late development, perhaps of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centu-ries,5 the concept was certainly familiar. The term prince had a technical meaning in medieval Germany as a title with which certain powerful lords were invested from the late twelfth and early thirteenth centuries.6 The medi-eval bishops of Lausanne, Chur and Sitten were ecclesiastical figures who, in addition to their spiritual authority, held temporal power within the Holy Roman Empire and were indeed princes of the Empire. While the powers of such bishops varied from principality to principality, these bishops, almost all of whom were princes, ruled semi-autonomous territorial states with supreme rights over their subjects in law and finance.7

The medieval bishops of Durham, Freeman believed, administered simi-larly extensive powers, which in other parts of the kingdom of England were held by the crown. Such a state of affairs was extremely problematic to Freeman. His Germanophile instincts were tempered by a perception of what he saw as the main themes of the history of the Holy Roman Empire: at best, localised rather than centralised government; at worst, fragmenta-

4 For all subsequent references to Freeman, see his History of the Norman Conquest, Vol. I, pp. 2912.

5 Deutsches Wrterbuch von Jacob Grimm und Wilhelm Grimm (Leipzig, 1878), Band 4.1 (1), p. 851. The Grimms dictionary does not give the date of the earliest usage of the term, but refers instead to the example of the contemporary Prince Bishop of Breslau.

6 I would like to thank Rob Bartlett for discussion of this point.7 For an English study of one late medieval German territorial principality, see H.J. Cohn, The

Government of the Rhine Palatinate in the Fifteenth Century (Oxford, 1965).

INTRODUCTION 3

tion, division and disorder. To Freeman, with a view of English history as a progress towards the triumphant emergence of the English nation ,8 the palatinate of Durham occupied an anomalous position in relation to a more general tendency towards centralisation that separated Englands historical development from that of Germany. If Durham had been the norm rather than the exception, the history of England would have followed a different path and the kingdom would have fallen in pieces in exactly the same way that the Empire did, and from essentially the same cause. In this respect, Free-mans interpretation of Durham was just as much an exercise in historical pathology as that of contemporary views of the Welsh marcher lordships, whose history demonstrated the ills which would have befallen the body politic of England had it succumbed to the fragmentation of authority which prevailed in the March.9

Freeman did not seek to explain Durhams peculiarity, its Sonderweg, since he saw the particularism of the palatinate as a threat to the making of the English nation-state. In a typically evocative passage on the state of England before the Norman Conquest, Freeman considered the significance of the year 995 in the history of the church of Durham. It was in this year that the community of St Cuthbert, led by Bishop Ealdhun, transferred the body of the saint to what became its permanent resting-place in Durham. The year 995 was also a turning-point in the history of the northern diocese because Ealdhuns successors gradually acquired a temporal authority which differentiated the holders of the see from their episcopal colleagues. Like the bishop of Ely on his island in the Fens, the bishop of Durham possessed powers which no other English ecclesiastic was allowed to share. In contrast to the eremitical existence of St Aidan and St Cuthbert on Lindisfarne, their successors at Durham became the Lords of a Palatinate in which it was the bishops peace rather than the kings that was upheld. And in respect of the bishops secular powers, Freeman observed that the translation of the body and community of St Cuthbert to Durham had a wider relevance to the history of England, which was, of course, his main theme. The events of 995 marked the foundation of a state of things which in England remained exceptional, but which, had it gained a wider field, would have made a lasting change in the condition of the country. The bishop of Durhams palatinate evolved as the spiritual counterpart to the temporal palatinate of Chester, ruled by the earls of Chester, and both stood alone in the possession of their extraor-dinary franchises. Durham, however, was even more unusual because the palatine earldom of Chester so early became an apanage of the heir of the Crown. Indeed, from 1254, when Edward, son and heir of Henry III, became earl of Chester, the palatine earldom of Chester was routinely invested in the

8 M. Chibnall, The Debate on the Norman Conquest (Manchester, 1999), p. 59.9 R.R. Davies, Lordship and Society in the March of Wales, 12821400 (Oxford, 1978), p. 6.

4 THE BISHOPRIC OF DURHAM

heir apparent.10 Freeman saw in the development of the palatine jurisdictions of the bishop of Durham and the earl of Chester an alternative and more trou-bling history of his beloved England, in which local particularism would have rendered asunder the progress of national unification under a single ruler. Had all Bishopricks possessed the same rights as Durham, had all Earldoms possessed the same rights as Chester, Freeman concluded, England could never have remained a consolidated monarchy.

It was left to Freemans friend, the great Whig historian, William Stubbs, who shared Freemans belief in the essential continuity of the English constitu-tion from the Anglo-Saxon period, to explain Durhams distinctive character. Although Stubbs only devoted four pages in his three-volume Constitutional History of England to the palatinate of Durham (which is itself instructive),11 his views helped to formulate an approach to the history of Durham which has remained influential. Discussing William the Conquerors policy towards his magnates in the aftermath of the Conquest, Stubbs saw the king as driven by a concern to uphold the unity of the royal authority, to which there were only two key exceptions: the earldom of Chester and the bishopric of Durham. Crucially, Stubbs justified their continued existence in terms of the wider development of England, within a British rather than European context. Like the later lordships of the marches, wrote Stubbs, the earldom and bishopric were a part of the national defence. If the logic of Cheshires creation could be accounted for by the need to keep the Welsh marches in order, then Durham operated as a buffer zone against Scottish invasion, as a sacred boundary between England and Scotland. To Stubbs, Durhams exceptionalism was not so much an intractable problem as a neat solution: the palatinate had a more constructive role in the formation of the nation-state in which the bishop of Durham was allowed to rule independently in the north of England so long as he maintained the regions security on behalf of the crown.

A quarter of a century later, G.T. Lapsley published a history of Durham whose title, The County Palatine of Durham: A Study in Constitutional History, echoed directly Stubbs constitutional history of England and whose approach and conclusions also owed much to the earlier work. Lapsley was primarily interested in the longue dure rather than the ebb and flow of day-to-day politics, tracing the development of the palatinate from its somewhat shadowy existence before the Norman Conquest until its final demise in the nineteenth century, when Durhams palatine jurisdiction was transferred to the crown by an 1836 act of parliament, leaving Durham as a mere county. Lapsleys energies were devoted to delineating the main features of the machinery of palatine government. Underpinning his book was a particular

10 P.H.W. Booth, The Financial Administration of the Lordship and County of Chester, 12721377 (Manchester, 1981), p. 50.

11 W. Stubbs, The Constitutional History of England in its Origin and Development, 3 vols, 5th edn (Oxford, 1891), Vol. I, pp. 2945, 3923.

INTRODUCTION 5

view of the palatinate as a microcosm of the kingdom, whose constitu-tional structure reproduced all the essential characteristics of the central government, including a chancery, which issued writs in the bishops name, an exchequer, which collected the bishops revenue, and a network of local courts, which upheld the bishops peace.12 To Lapsley, the institutions of the palatinate were imitative of the organs of national government at West-minster, and thus he approached the constitutional history of the palatinate using Stubbss model of national political development. For instance, just as Stubbs had argued that English history in the later middle ages was the story of the emergence of the English parliament and its subsequent struggle for supremacy with the crown, so Lapsley sought evidence of a representative assembly within the palatinate with tax-granting powers. He argued that it was in this institution that periodic conflict between the bishops of Durham and their subjects was played out.13 In essence, Lapsleys palatinate was a type of state in which the kings writ did not run, a sovereign state14 whose bishop raised his own taxes and assembled his own army, appointed the same kinds of officers within Durham that the king did elsewhere, and exercised a right of pardon in cases of both manslaughter and homicide. Yet this state was also a failed one. It was a state which did not, and could not, equal the evolving English nation-state. On the one hand, Lapsley believed that the lack of hereditary succession in the palatinate undermined the development of a strong central government within Durham. In a situation in which the bishop was invariably an outsider, with no strong roots in the area over which he ruled, Durham existed as a tiny feudal England where the bishop had to compete for power with his feudatories, who struggled for and obtained a high degree of local independence. On the other hand, the autonomous position of the bishop vis--vis the king could not be tolerated by a Whig historian like Lapsley who was anxious above all to explain how the palati-nate came to be assimilated into the English nation-state. Thus, according to Lapsley, if the period up to the episcopate of Antony Bek (12831311) was one of growth and maturity of the Bishops regality, the crowns attitude towards the palatinate during the fourteenth century was one of perplexed toleration. In the fifteenth century, once the crown was no longer distracted by the Wars of the Roses, the Tudors were able to introduce a vigorous policy of centralisation, and summarily dealt with the palatinate once and for all, leaving only the form and dignity of the institution to survive into the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries as a curious anachronism.15

To a subsequent generation of historians concerned with the evolution of medieval English liberties areas of private jurisdiction which were not

12 G.T. Lapsley, The County Palatine of Durham: A Study in Constitutional History (London, 1900), pp. 2, 1.

13 Lapsley, County Palatine, p. 128.14 Lapsley, County Palatine, p. 76.15 Lapsley, County Palatine, pp. 756, 2.

6 THE BISHOPRIC OF DURHAM

directly administered by the king or his officials Durham was a particular kind of liberty known as a regality, whose holder enjoyed similar rights to the king. But here again, debate focused on the related questions of the decline of feudalism and the process of state formation. If Durham was the greatest liberty long-established in private hands in medieval England, then its signif-icance lay primarily as a test-case with which to examine the effectiveness of monarchy and the possible extent of immunities in medieval England.16 Durhams import lay only insofar as the bishops palatine jurisdiction illumi-nated the nature and extent of royal power. The work of Helen Cam, notably her 1940 article The Decline and Fall of English Feudalism, was extremely influential in this respect.17 If royal charters throughout the thirteenth century placed increasing emphasis upon the administrative responsibilities of the holders of liberties, in whose private hands were now public duties,18 Cam attached primary importance to Edward Is quo warranto proceedings in the story of franchisal development: these inquiries did not amount to an attack on liberties per se, but rather were an attempt to establish the idea of obliga-tion in return for privilege.19 In other words, Edward I sought to remind the holders of liberties that they had important functions to perform on behalf of the crown. The palatinate of Durham could serve his purpose as well as the palatinate of Chester, wrote Cam. Even the Welsh Custom of the March might be useful.20 The fourteenth century, however, saw the crowns relations with the greater franchises enter a difficult phase, exemplified by the emer-gence of the term comes palatinus to describe the holders of the liberties of Durham, Chester and the newly created county palatine of Lancaster. The mere existence of the generic term, wrote Cam, helped to strengthen the self-assertion of the great franchise-holders and diminish the sense of respon-sibility which Edward Is quo warranto policy had inculcated. In admonitory tones, Cam saw such regalian franchises as an invidious threat to the greater public project: the construction of the English nation-state. In the north of England, moreover, the advent of war in the 1290s with Scotland helped to encourage the franchisal pretensions of the lords of Durham, Tynedale, Redesdale and Hexhamshire inasmuch as their strategic significance as a defence against the Scots gave them greater leverage with the crown. In this respect, the greater franchises became a threat to the exercise of royal authority, and so it was left to the Tudors to resume regalities which, like the privileges and alien loyalties of the church, endangered the unique sover-eignty of the crown. The Tudors pursued two policies: first, under Henry VII and with the assistance of the infamous common lawyer and royal minister,

16 Both quotations are from J. Scammell, The Origin and Limitations of the Liberty of Durham, EHR 81 (1966), pp. 449, 452.

17 H.M. Cam, The Decline and Fall of English Feudalism, History 25 (1940), pp. 21633.18 N. Denholm-Young, Seignorial Administration in England (London, 1937), p. 88.19 H.M. Cam, The Evolution of the Medieval English Franchise, Speculum 32 (1957), pp. 427

42.20 Cam, Decline and Fall of English Feudalism, p. 219.

INTRODUCTION 7

Edmund Dudley, the Tudors implemented a stricter interpretation of the legal theory of quo warranto and in the court of kings bench actions were heard for the forfeiture of liberties for non-use, for abuse, for non-claim, for false claim, for failure to prove prescription for one type of liberty, to produce a charter in another; secondly, in the reign of Henry VIII, under the guiding hand of Thomas Cromwell, the Tudors launched a legislative assault upon all jurisdictional franchises in the parliament of 1536. The First Act of Union of Wales with England and the act for recontinuing Liberties in the Crown were of fundamental importance in reconfiguring the relationship between English liberties and the crown and led, in Cams words, to the abolition or absorption of those franchises which sheltered lawlessness or opposed a barrier to the effective sovereignty of the crown.

More recent work has modified aspects of Cams thesis. Particular atten-tion has been paid to the relationship between the palatinate and the crown. R.B. Dobson and A.J. Pollard have argued that the inherent nature of this relationship meant that, despite the potential constitutional autonomy of the palatinate, politically at least Durham could never be independent of royal authority. If, theoretically, the bishop was in possession of several regalian rights, in practice, the bishop was a crown appointee who owed his position to royal favour.21 Indeed, more than that, precisely because the bishop had at his disposal such quasi-regal rights, it was of significance to the crown how this power was deployed; in particular, whether in or against its interests.22 Every bishop, from Richard Bury in 1333 to Thomas Langley in 1406, had previ-ously served the crown as the keeper of the privy seal. Since the bishop was, at the time of his appointment at least, a loyal servant of the crown, Pollard has gone so far as to suggest that the palatinate of Durham provided, there-fore, at one remove, an important extension of royal authority into the far north-east of the realm.23 Strategically vital as Durham was from the early fourteenth century, the crown appointed senior civil servants to the see of Durham: bishops who owed their very appointment to royal patronage could not and would not pursue policies separate from or inimical to the interests of the crown. In normal circumstances, the financial and military resources of the palatinate were placed at the disposal of the crown. Viewed from the perspective of the bishops subjects, the independence of the palatinate has also appeared an illusion. According to Jean Scammell, the inhabitants of the palatinate had nothing to gain from the libertys immunity from royal taxation (since the purchase of exemption from taxation was more expensive

21 B. Dobson, The Church of Durham and the Scottish Borders, 137888, War and Border Socie-ties in the Middle Ages, ed. A. Goodman and A. Tuck (London, 1992), pp. 1301; A.J. Pollard, The Crown and the County Palatine of Durham, 143794, The North of England in the Age of Richard III, ed. A.J. Pollard (Stroud, 1996), pp. 712.

22 A.J. Pollard, Provincial Politics in Lancastrian England: The Challenge to Bishop Langleys Liberty in 1433, People, Places and Perspectives: Essays on Later Medieval and Early Tudor England, ed. K. Dockray and P. Fleming (Nonsuch, 2005), p. 70.

23 Pollard, The Crown and the County Palatine, p. 72.

8 THE BISHOPRIC OF DURHAM

than the tax) and preferred the benefits of central justice to the corruption and inadequacies of the local court system.24 Specifically, the demands of the bishops own subjects for new legal procedures hitherto unavailable within the liberty were instrumental in denuding the palatinate of its jurisdictional autonomy. The record of Edward Is Quo Warranto proceedings, Scammell wrote in respect of Durham, is a tale of a battle already won.

But such revisionism has not altered the overriding picture. In his detailed study of Durham during the Wars of the Roses, A.J. Pollard argued that the appointment of Robert Neville to the episcopate in 1438 marked the crowns surrender of control over the liberty to the junior branch of the Nevilles. Their position, as overmighty subjects, was greatly strengthened by having the financial and military resources of the palatinate put at their disposal. Such a collapse of royal authority, of course, formed a necessary prelude to the restoration of central control over the palatinate by the early Tudors.25 Rees Daviess typically penetrative observation, that the study of Welsh marcher lordships has suffered from their being cast into the oubliette as anomalous appendages of the English state or as seignorial units caught in a time-warp and awaiting absorption into the English/British state,26 also applies to the study of Durham. Cams allusive reference to the feudal irresponsibility of the liberties in the fifteenth century, which had to be corrected by the Tudors, is thus given substance.

Early modern historians, however, have tended to downplay the inevi-table logic and centrist direction of Tudor policy towards liberties such as the palatinate of Durham by drawing a distinction between the attitudes of Henry VII and his ministers and the work of Thomas Cromwell in the 1530s. They have argued, contra Cam, that the Cromwellian-inspired parliamentary legislation did not represent a continuation of a policy begun under Henry VII but was a new development in changed circumstances created, according to one scholar, by the Reformation and, according to another, by new thinking about the nature of sovereignty.27 Most significantly, sixteenth-century histo-rians have begun to emphasise the more piecemeal nature of the changes which the greater liberties, such as Durham and Chester, underwent in the 1530s and 1540s. The language which historians have employed to describe these changes is revealing: instead of suppression and destruction, there is integration and absorption. Thus, Christopher Kitching, in a welcome change of perspective which considered the palatinate of Durham in respect of the needs of the local community rather than of the crown, pointed out that the 1536 act did not end palatine independence, but retained and incorporated

24 Scammell, Origin and Limitations, pp. 4701.25 Pollard, The Crown and the County Palatine, pp. 6787.26 R. Davies, The Medieval State: The Tyranny of a Concept?, Journal of Historical Sociology 16

(2003), p. 294.27 S.G. Ellis, The Destruction of the Liberties: Some Further Evidence, BIHR 54 (1981), p. 161;

T. Thornton, The Integration of Cheshire into the Tudor State in the Early Sixteenth Century, NH 29 (1993), p. 63.

INTRODUCTION 9

palatine courts within a national framework of law enforcement. Local courts continued to flourish because they offered the attraction of justice close to home, and only gradually did the courts of Westminster see an increase in Durham business.28

New work on the palatinate of Chester in the sixteenth century has gone further in suggesting the limited integration of Cheshire into the Tudor nation state.29 Instead of Cams image of a battle between a progressive Tudor state and the feudal irresponsibility of the liberties, Tim Thornton has argued for a new paradigm to explain the process of Tudor state building, at the heart of which was a concept of devolution, or in his words, an easy tension between centralised monarchy and territorial autonomy, an ambiguity which allowed the palatinate of Chester to thrive in the sixteenth century and which, he argues, allowed Durham to flourish in the same period.30 Palatinate jurisdiction was perceived by contemporaries as a solution to, rather than a problem of, government. Thorntons nation-state is a composite rather than a centralised, unified and monolithic entity. Instead of an older view of the process of state formation which was determined by an anachronistic notion of remorseless centralisation producing conflict and competition between the crown and the provinces, Thornton has provided a more nuanced apprecia-tion of the essentially pragmatic nature of relations between local elites and crown ministers, in which the centre did not dominate and ultimately control the locality but accepted and supported the principle of local self-determina-tion. Instead of a predestined and linear process of state building, instead of absorption, integration and uniformity, Thornton has demonstrated the continuing power of local difference and regional diversity in the composition of the pre-modern English state.

Thorntons territorial view of Tudor governance has also offered an impor-tant revision of the core-periphery concept of state building, namely the process by which the periphery becomes subordinate to the political domi-nation of the core, in this case, Westminster. The territories of interest to Thornton were those geographically distant from south-east England such as the palatinates of Durham and Chester, Ireland, Wales, the Isle of Man and Calais, which also were governed separately from Westminster through their own jurisdictional franchises.31 But the core-periphery paradigm has been most explicit in Steven G. Elliss studies on the Tudor state, in which the palatinate of Durham and other liberties are mentioned, albeit more tangen-tially and in a less positive light. Elliss main interest has been the relative

28 C. Kitching, The Durham Palatinate and the Courts of Westminster under the Tudors, The Last Principality: Politics, Religion and Society in the Bishopric of Durham, 14941660, ed. D. Marcombe (Nottingham, 1987), pp. 4970.

29 Thornton, Integration of Cheshire, pp. 4063 at 63.30 T. Thornton, Cheshire and the Tudor State, 14801560 (Woodbridge, 2000), pp. 256, 2434;

Fifteenth-Century Durham and the Problem of Provincial Liberties in England and the Wider Territories of the English Crown, TRHS, 6th series 11 (2001), pp. 83100.

31 Thornton, Cheshire, pp. 2435.

10 THE BISHOPRIC OF DURHAM

strength of the Tudor state which, he has argued, can best be tested by an examination of the enforcement of royal policy in the localities and, in partic-ular, in outlying territories such as the far north (including the palatinate). Viewing their forms of governance in a comparative British context, these borderlands the north, the marches of Calais, Wales and Ireland appear the norm rather than the exception in the Tudor state.32 Unlike Thornton, Ellis has endorsed an older view of the ultimate objective of the Tudor regime the extension of royal authority through the destruction of local autonomy and has argued for a strategy of political centralization, administrative uniformity, and cultural imperialism devised to achieve this aim. In Elliss analysis, Tudor policy was a failure.33 Liberties in the far north of England, such as the palatinate of Durham, were an anachronism and an obstacle to law and order because their lords possessed extensive jurisdiction in which the kings writ did not run and exercised their own quasi-royal power.34 The strategy of centralisation and uniformity could only work in the core region of the Tudor state (lowland England), but it was a manifest failure in the more remote, predominantly upland territories which were more difficult to rule and which constituted the largest territory of the Tudor state.35 Elliss state is, therefore, fragmentary and incomplete, in which central power is projected unevenly in the provinces.

Whether viewed as a virtual state, a liberty, a core or peripheral terri-tory, a special case in an English context or a more characteristic form of institutional arrangement within a British perspective, the dominant narrative of state formation has reduced the palatinate of Durham to the status of, at best, a case-study from which to observe a much larger process of state building and to test the power, intensity, reach and sophistication of the pre-modern state. In this, Durham is not alone. Comparable peripheral and highly autonomous territories have experienced a similar fate. For instance, the premise of James Givens State and Society in Medieval Europe: Gwynedd and Languedoc under Outside Rule was to use the absorption of these two regions into the kingdoms of England and France respectively as a device with which to analyze the dynamics of the process of state-building in medieval Europe.36 Perversely, Lapsleys view that the palatinate can only be understood in relation to central government remains intact. Consequently, historians of Durham have only considered the political life of the palatinate in the monotonous language of autonomy and the restraints imposed on such

32 S.G. Ellis, Tudor Frontiers and Noble Power: The Making of the British State (Oxford, 1995), p. 16.

33 S.G. Ellis, The Limits of Power: The English Crown and the British Isles, The Sixteenth Century, 14851603, ed. P. Collinson (Oxford, 2002), pp. 4780 at 79.

34 Ellis, Tudor Frontiers, pp. 345.35 Ellis, Tudor Frontiers, pp. ixx. See also S.G. Ellis, Civilizing Northumberland: Representations

of Englishness in the Tudor State, Journal of Historical Sociology 12 (1999), pp. 10327.36 J. Given, State and Society in Medieval Europe: Gwynedd and Languedoc under Outside Rule

(Ithaca, 1990), pp. 12.

INTRODUCTION 11

independence by the crown,37 thereby obscuring the potential vitality and diversity of local political culture.

Lapsleys narrative has also received support from another direction in the form of Marxist historiography. Here, Marxs notion of capital as an homogenising and centralising force has helped to explain the decline and destruction of a regional pattern of life.38 Framed within a particular debate about the transition from feudalism to capitalism in the early modern period, Mervyn Jamess Family, Lineage, and Civil Society traced the changing economic and political orientation of the Durham hinterland between 1500 and 1640 as market forces finally broke down local particularism and led to the regions absorption into a nationally based market. According to James, local rebellions such as the 1536 Pilgrimage of Grace and the Northern Rising of 1569 were the response of the region to Tudor centralisation in religious and political affairs, but both were defeated, and the failure of the Northern Rising, in particular, led to the collapse of the traditional pattern of regional politics based upon the power of the great magnates such as the Nevilles of Raby. Royal patronage and market forces, notably the development of the coal trade, saw the emergence of a new kind of society in the region, in which the gentry became an important economic and political force in their own right. As the gentry were absorbed in the national economy, they sought to participate in the national political system based at Westminster, lobbying successfully for the enfranchisement of the county of Durham in the mid seventeenth century. And as the region orientated itself politically towards the capital and its freeholders secured the right to elect MPs for the county, the bishop lost his role as the representative of the palatinate within parlia-ment.39 In this teleological understanding of the development of a regional society and polity, the palatinate served as a prelude to the real story: what a recent historian has referred to as the unification of England under the crown.40

Too much attention has been paid to the nature of the palatinates relationship with the crown. It is now generally accepted that the origins of the palatinate of Durham did not lie in either post-Conquest grant or the hoary myth of border defence and that the growth of the bishop of Durhams temporal jurisdiction between the eleventh and thirteenth centuries was organic and piecemeal, developing largely though prescription rather than charter, as and when opportunities arose.41 The palatinate of Durham was not the creation

37 See, for example, Pollard, The Crown and the County Palatine, p. 6, and Thornton, Fifteenth-Century Durham, p. 98.

38 Cf. N. Thrift, Taking Aim at the Heart of the Region, Human Geography: Society, Space and Social Science, ed. D. Gregory et al. (Basingstoke, 1994), pp. 21116.

39 M. James, Family, Lineage and Civil Society: A Study of Society, Politics, and Mentality in the Durham Region, 15001640 (Oxford, 1974), pp. 18990.

40 S.J. Gunn, Early Tudor Government, 14851558 (Basingstoke, 1995), p. 175.41 G.V. Scammell, Hugh du Puiset, Bishop of Durham (Cambridge, 1956), p. 189.

12 THE BISHOPRIC OF DURHAM

of the crown: it grew gradually out of the privileges associated with the pre-Conquest church of Durham known as the community of St Cuthbert and its territorial power developed from the patrimony of St Cuthbert, that is, the lands acquired by the community of St Cuthbert following Cuthberts death in 687.42 But it is also agreed that the beginning of the Anglo-Scottish war in 1296 a conflict which continued periodically for the next two hundred years marked a decisive turning point in the history of the palatinate. From 1296, Durham acquired a strategic significance as a defence against the Scots. Of real importance here was the bishop of Durhams lordship of Norhamshire and Islandshire at the northernmost point of the county of Northumberland. This was a lordship symbolised by the bishops possession of the castle of Norham, the largest and probably the strongest English fortification on the south bank of the river Tweed. We might, from the perspective of the nation-state, view the military role of the bishop of Durham as a source of political weakness to the crown. National problems of defence in the northern border region forced the crown to concede power to the periphery and to consolidate the autonomy of the palatinate of Durham. According to the modern biogra-pher of Thomas Langley, the fifteenth-century bishop of Durham, the exten-sive privileges of Durham were tolerated because they gave stability and strength to a vital frontier district.43 Financial, administrative and judicial autonomy were the political cost of the royal enterprise of war in the north. We might, on the other hand, view the relationship between the palatinate and war as evidence not of the considerable independence enjoyed by the bishop of Durham, but of precisely the opposite: of the extension to the palatinate of a notion of reciprocity which characterised relations between centre and locality in late medieval England and which was enshrined in the familiar concept of self-government at the kings command. In other words, the constitutional autonomy of the palatinate was conceded by the crown so long as the bishop fulfilled his responsibilities as a royal minister in the waging of war. If the requirements of border defence did not explain the origins of the palatinate, the foreign policy of fourteenth- and fifteenth-century English kings helped to explain the survival of Durham in the late middle ages.

Historians of Durham have thus tended to approach the palatinate prima-rily as a form of devolved government. Though the kings writ did not run in Durham, the bishop was still the kings servant and minister. Evidence to support this concept of devolution might be found in the quo warranto proceed-ings of 1293 involving the palatinate of Durham, which were conducted on the basis that the bishop of Durhams liberty was within the body of the county [of Northumberland].44 A similar rhetoric coloured the crowns later

42 For the territorial expansion of the patrimony, see E. Craster, The Patrimony of St Cuthbert, EHR 69 (1954), pp. 17799; W.M. Aird, St Cuthbert and the Normans: The Church of Durham, 10711153 (Woodbridge, 1998), Ch. 1.

43 R.L. Storey, Thomas Langley and the Bishopric of Durham, 14061437 (London, 1961), p. 144. My emphasis.

44 Bek, p. 40.

INTRODUCTION 13

relations with Durham. In 1376, for instance, when Edward III declared his support for Bishop Hatfield in his dispute with the archbishop of York, he did so on the grounds that the disturbances which the archbishop of Yorks actions would likely inflame could not be tolerated, since the king will not endure such things, being bound to cherish peace and quietness everywhere in his realm.45 There could be no clearer statement of the crowns view of Durham as an integral part of the body politic of England. The kings peace, in this sense, was universal.

In fact, whatever the legal theories of the quo warranto proceedings and whatever the practical realities of war, the crown also recognised that the legitimacy and power of the bishops of Durham was grounded not in royal sanction, but in another source of authority, namely the traditions associated with the church of Durham and with the figure of St Cuthbert, in particular. Most explicitly, the royal charter of 1383 to the bishop of Durham was justi-fied primarily because of the kings devotion to St. Cuthbert patron of the church of Durham.46 Whatever the bishops status as a royal minister, the bishop was also the chief custodian of the church of Durham and the infringe-ment of his privileges was to the disinheritance of his church. It was certainly in this language that Bishops Hatfield, Fordham, Skirlaw and Langley most frequently couched the defence of their privileges from encroachments by others. And these privileges, whilst they could be buttressed by royal charter, were claimed primarily from time out of mind.

Commentary on the interaction and reciprocal relationship between centre and periphery is very much in vogue, but in the case of Durham, the notion of reciprocity is extremely problematic. On occasion, the crown did deploy the rhetoric of military service in its dealings with the bishop of Durham. In 1318, on the election of Bishop Louis Beaumont to the see of Durham, Edward II asked the pope to confirm the appointment on the grounds that Beaumont would be a brazen wall (aeneus murus) against the Scots.47 Five years later, the king instructed Beaumont to return to his diocese in order to supervise the defence of the border, where he would act as a stone wall (murus lapideus) against the Scots. In 1376, when Edward III came to the defence of Bishop Thomas Hatfield in his conflict with the new archbishop of York, Alexander Neville, the king told Neville that he should abandon immediately his intended visitation of the Durham diocese, since the protests it would engender north of the Tees might comfort or encourage the kings enemies of the marches of Scotland bordering upon that bishopric and diocese.48 In November 1437, when Henry VI wrote to the prior and chapter of Durham cathedral priory recommending that they elect Robert Neville,

45 CCR, 13747, pp. 4278.46 CCR, 13815, p. 349.47 For this and what follows, see Scriptores Tres, p. 98; Foedera, Conventiones, Litterae, et Acta

Publica, ed. T. Rymer, 4 vols in 7 (London, 181669), Vol. II/i, p. 506.48 CCR, 13747, pp. 4278.

14 THE BISHOPRIC OF DURHAM

bishop of Salisbury to the see of Durham, he did so on the basis that the church of Durham is oon of the grettest and moost notable churches of oure patronage within this oure Royaume as for hit is nygh unto the marches of Scotland, for which reason, it is right necessare and expedient both for the wele of that countrey and of the said Church to set and pourvey of suche a notable and myghty personne to be heed and Bisshop therof as can and may puissantly kepe thayme best to the honnour of god and defence of this oure Royaume.49

Increasingly in practice, however, the crown acknowledged that the defence of the northern border was a Northumberland rather than Durham responsi-bility. Even from the very beginning of the conflict, it was specifically by virtue of his possession of Norham castle, immediately adjacent to the Scot-tish border, that the crown saw the bishop of Durham as a central figure in border defence.50 Periodically from the mid 1350s until the mid 1370s, Bishop Hatfield spent extended periods of residence, accompanied by his household and retinue, at Norham castle, where he was personally involved in military affairs at the behest of the crown.51 But it was a military role that was gradually assumed by the wardens of the march, and from the mid 1380s, the bishops of Durham no longer served as wardens of the east march.52

Indeed, if we examine more closely the crowns justification of the privi-leges of the palatinate, we can see that the ties which bound, such as they were, were not based upon the expectation of military service. The culture of military and financial obligation and necessity made considerably less impact upon Durham than upon its neighbours in the north of England, especially north of the river Tyne. In Northumberland, the notion of reciprocity shaped, to a considerable extent, the countys collective response to the demands of the war state. From the 1370s and 1380s and continuing throughout the period, the involvement of the people of Northumberland in the front-line of defensive efforts to meet Scottish incursions and the suffering inflicted as a consequence became the basis of petitions from the community of Northumberland seeking exemption from the payment of direct taxation.53 Military participation was the trade-off for financial immunity. This argument was never made in relation to Durham.54

Current opinion views Durham within the framework of a descending model of power, in which the palatinate was subject to the king as its superior

49 DCM, Loc.XXV:96, transcribed in The North of England in the Age of Richard III, pp. 1923.50 A.J. Pollard, North-Eastern England during the Wars of the Roses: Lay Society, War, and Politics

14501500 (Oxford, 1990), p. 150.51 CPR, 13548, p. 347; CPR, 135861, pp. 3223; Rot. Scot., Vol. I, pp. 841, 856, 896, 90910,

952; CCR, 136974, pp. 1819, 361, 464; CCR, 137781, p. 6.52 See below, pp. 1667.53 See, for example, SC 8/19/916; SC 8/129/6439; SC 8/22/1090. See also C. Briggs, Taxation,

Warfare, and the Early Fourteenth Century Crisis in the North: Cumberland Lay Subsidies, 13321348, EcHR 58 (2005), pp. 63972.

54 Cf. the different view of D. Loades, Introduction, The Last Principality: Politics, Religion, and Society in the Bishopric of Durham, 14941660, ed. D. Marcombe (Nottingham, 1987), p. 1.

INTRODUCTION 15

and ultimately sovereign ruler, with the bishop an agent of crown authority exercising delegated royal rights. But this is not what Bishop Robert Neville told King Henry VI at the parliament of 1453, when he was informed that he was to provide a quota of 300 archers from Durham as part of a nation-wide parliamentary grant of 13,000 archers for the defence of England.55 Reacting angrily to the demand for military service, Neville reminded Henry VI that, from time out of mind (both before and after the Conquest), he and his predecessors had been in possession of a county palatine and all manner of royal prerogatives between the rivers Tyne and Tees and in Norhamshire and Bedlingtonshire within the county of Northumberland and in Crayke within the county of Yorkshire.56 According to the bishop, his palatine authority was exercised by a chancellor, justices, sheriffs, escheators, coroners, bailiffs and other ministers such as the king and his predecessors had elsewhere within the kingdom, but they served at the bishops fredame and election distincte and separate frome you and your shires thayne next adioinynge. And the bishops subjects had always been quit of all kinds of subsidy fifteenths, tenths, scutages or tallages whether granted by parliament or on any other authority. In this light, the parliamentary quota of 300 archers was utterly against the privileges, immunities and franchises of the church of Durham and of the county palatine and agains lawe faith and good conscience. Nevilles perception of the palatinate as a form of regalian jurisdiction which was not brought into being by, or delegated from, the centre, but whose origins and growth were much more organic, located as they were in the pre-Conquest period was shared by the local community, which did not see palatine autonomy as bestowed by, or dependent upon, royal sanction, but rather upon Durhams own cultural traditions, notably the concept of the Haliwerfolc. This concept, which literally meant the people of the saint (St Cuthbert), evolved from the pre-Conquest patrimony of the church of Durham: this patrimony did not simply belong to the bishops of Durham, but was also an entity over which the Haliwerfolc enjoyed collective rights.57

There were alternative ideological sources of power, which were inde-pendent of the crown and derived from the symbiotic relationship between the bishop and the church of Durham. This power was available to the bishop of Durham in respect of his role as head of the northern church. Bishops were able to enforce ecclesiastical sanctions to augment their temporal authority when the occasion demanded. Thus, in 1378 Bishop Thomas Hatfield, at the request of one of his sub-foresters of Weardale, ordered his archdeacons to issue in all the churches of the diocese an admonition that those unknown malefactors responsible for the theft of birds of prey within the bishops forest, who might not otherwise be identified by the normal legal channels,

55 Henry VI: Parliament of 1453, Text and Translation, PROME, Vol. XII, pp. 2389.56 For this and what follows, see SC 8/85/4208.57 Aird, St Cuthbert, pp. 58. 231. See also below, Ch. 5.

16 THE BISHOPRIC OF DURHAM

should restore the birds to his chief forester or else face excommunication.58 At the same time, the bishops of Durham saw themselves as the direct succes-sors of St Cuthbert and the custodians of the church of Durham, a role which might lead them to act as the defender and representative of palatine privi-leges and traditions against the depredations of the crown. This was a potent form of power based upon tradition, custom and spiritual sanction which the crown was conscious to respect.59 It was also a type of power which might be contested within Durham, as the bishops subjects appropriated these same cultural traditions, based upon identification with St Cuthbert, to assert their own claims and to seek their own privileges vis--vis their local lord.60

In Lapsleys conception, power within the palatinate flowed downwards through a bureaucratic administration. Although he struggled sometimes to distinguish between the different roles performed by the bishops ministers, whose spheres of competence were not as clearly demarcated as he would have wished,61 Lapsley believed that, in order to understand the day-to-day operation of government in Durham, it was essential to delineate the formal structures of power, or what Tim Thornton has referred to as the physical apparatus of power.62 Following Lapsleys lead, historians have indeed revealed much about the administrative and judicial functions of the various organs of palatine government.63 But the thrust of Lapsleys book, conceived in a firmly constitutional tradition, runs counter to much more recent work on the exercise of political power in pre-modern England, in which it is now generally agreed that, in the absence of anything approaching a profes-sional bureaucracy, rulers were reliant upon local elites for the regulation of local society.64 These elites were essential in the processes of command and enforcement because they possessed land, and land, as a recent commentator has pointed out, was the basis of power in late medieval England. This was a world in which governmental authority could only work through the existing social structure.65 Without a standing army or a permanent police force, rulers had no choice but to turn to local landholders, with private resources of manpower at their disposal, to provide the coercive force required to implement their rulers will. Current understanding of the political history of Durham is, therefore, partial and incomplete.

58 DCM, Hatfields Register, fol. 142v. For a similar case involving the destruction of the bishops park of Wolsingham, see DCM, Hatfields Register, fol. 141r.

59 Thornton, Fifteenth-Century Durham, p. 100.60 See below, pp. 186235.61 Lapsley, County Palatine, Ch. 3.62 Thornton, Fifteenth-Century Durham, p. 85.63 Among the more recent studies of the local courts, see: K. Emsley and C.M. Fraser, The Courts

of the County Palatine of Durham (Durham, 1984), and C.J. Neville, The Courts of the Prior and the Bishop of Durham in the Later Middle Ages, History 85 (2000), pp. 21631.

64 G. Harriss, Political Society and the Growth of Government in Late Medieval England, P&P 138 (1993), pp. 2857; Davies, Medieval State, p. 289.

65 C. Carpenter, Locality and Polity: A Study of Warwickshire Landed Society, 14011499 (Cambridge, 1992), pp. 2835; Davies, Medieval State, pp. 2901.

INTRODUCTION 17

The aim of this book is to write a history of the palatinate which studies Durham in its own right and which does not see it as subordinate to more general questions about the development of the nation-state. What follows is a regional study, focusing upon the territory which was known throughout the later middle ages and into the early modern period as the bishopric of Durham. This was not the same as the diocese of Durham between the rivers Tees and Tweed over which the bishop exercised his spiritual authority as diocesan. The bishopric was the core of the bishops secular franchise the palatinate of Durham and stretched between the rivers Tyne and Tees, although strictly speaking, after the grant of Hexhamshire to the archbisho-pric of York in the late eleventh century, the liberty lay between Derwent, Tyne and Tees. The palatinate encompassed the bishopric and the three shires of Bedlington, Norham and Island north of the river Tyne (known to historians anachronistically as North Durham) and the manor of Crayke some twenty-five miles south of the river Tees.66 Also south of the Tees were the bishops Yorkshire manors of Northallerton in the North Riding and Howden in the East Riding, but here, despite episcopal aspirations, the bishop enjoyed only manorial jurisdiction with the additional franchises of rights of free warren and return of writs, though even the latter was called into question when the crown ordered the sheriff of Yorkshire to summon parties from Howden and Northallerton before the kings courts in the fourteenth century.67 It was the bishopric of Durham which constituted the heartland of the palatinate: geographically, but also, as we shall see, administratively, politically and culturally.

The bishopric of Durham was a territory with an institutional centre at Palace Green in the city of Durham, around which were clustered the chief organs of palatine government: the chancery, the exchequer and the law courts. Such institutional apparatus of power is duly impressive.68 But what was it actually like to be governed by the bishop and his ministers?69 How did palatine government really work? In exploring the relationship between local landholders and the formal administration of the bishop, this book follows in the tradition of the county community studies of pre-modern England. In their meticulous analysis of county society, historians saw the shire as a social unit within which the gentry of late medieval England dominated local office, controlled county politics, monopolised landed wealth and intermar-ried and socialised with each other, forming themselves into self-contained

66 See Map 1.67 C.M. Fraser, A History of Antony Bek, Bishop of Durham, 12831311 (Oxford, 1957), pp. 109

10; Pollard, North-Eastern England, p. 146; K. Emsley, The Yorkshire Enclaves of the Bishops of Durham, YAJ 47 (1975), p. 106.

68 Thornton, Fifteenth-Century Durham, pp. 845.69 Cf. T.N. Bissons review of J.A. Green, The Government of England under Henry I (Cambridge,

1986), Speculum 64 (1989), pp. 4368 at 438.

18 THE BISHOPRIC OF DURHAM

Map 1. The Palatinate of Durham

N

Newcastle

Alnwick

Berwick

Durham

Bishop Auckland

Morpeth

T we e d

Coqu

et

R

ed

e

N o r t h T yn e

S o u t h T y ne

T e e s

T y n e

Bedlingtonshire

No

rham

shire Islandshire

BISHOPRIC OF DURHAMW e a r

0 20miles

S C O T L A N D N o r t h

S e a

NORTHUMBERLAND

CU

MB

ER

LA

ND

Y O R K S H I R E

INTRODUCTION 19

county communities.70 The historians who developed this model of late medi-eval society wrote a form of regional history in which the purpose of their detailed local studies was not to explore events and issues within a regional context but to emphasise a distinctive intra-dependence within the region: the county was a region that was both an administrative unit and what might be described as a zone of human activity structuring social as well as polit-ical action.71

The problem with the late medieval county studies, as a recent critic has pointed out, is that they followed a model of society which had initially been developed in relation to seventeenth-century England. Medievalists, it has been claimed, have accepted too readily that there was a real county commu-nity in the early modern period and that their counties are somehow working towards this.72 Most significantly for our purposes, this teleological view of pre-modern English society had a political dimension in that, in a seven-teenth-century context, it served as the basis of a very different interpreta-tion of English history from the Whig notion of inexorable centralisation: in this formulation, the English polity disintegrated in the civil wars from the particularist forces of localism. And, though the theme was fragmentation rather than unification, it was nonetheless an evolutionary meta-narrative of national historical development.

However, whilst the notion of the county community no longer commands the scholarly respect it once did, the insights provided by this approach to pre-modern English society and politics are vital for a new understanding of the late medieval bishopric of Durham. Although much is now known about the institutional framework of power between the Tyne and the Tees, comparatively little has been written about the people whose lives connected with these formal structures. Instead, historians seeking to adopt such a perspective have been forced to turn to scholarship of a firmly antiquarian nature. First-rate antiquaries though they were, the late-eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century works on the palatinate of William Hutchinson, Robert Surtees and James Raine were largely a series of detailed family histories tracing the descent and possession of property, which were embedded within a parochial framework that inevitably precluded the development of a more thematic and synthetic approach to the subject.73 This is in sharp contrast to

70 C. Carpenter, Gentry and Community in Medieval England, JBS 33 (1994), pp. 34465; D. Crouch, From Stenton to McFarlane: Models of Societies of the Twelfth and Thirteenth Centuries, TRHS, 6th series 5 (1995), pp. 1879.

71 J.D. Marshall, The Tyranny of the Discrete: A Discussion of the Problems of Local History in England (Aldershot, 1997), p. 2; E. Royle, Introduction: Regions and Identities, Issues of Regional Identity, ed. E. Royle (Manchester, 1998), pp. 23.

72 Carpenter, Gentry and Community, p. 380.73 W. Hutchinson, The History and Antiquities of the County Palatine of Durham, 3 vols (London,

178594); R. Surtees, The History and Antiquities of the County Palatine of Durham, 4 vols (London, 1816); J. Raine, The History and Antiquities of North Durham (London, 1852). The first volume of Hutchinsons History was very much the exception, presenting the history of Durham through the lives of its bishops.

20 THE BISHOPRIC OF DURHAM

the historiography of the palatinate of Chester, for instance, where, in addi-tion to the work of Tim Thornton, there have been notable studies of the nobility and gentry by Michael Bennett and Philip Morgan.74

In some ways, there are sound empirical reasons for this relative neglect of lay landed society within the bishopric. The participation of the Nevilles of Raby and Brancepeth in the Northern Rising of 1569 against the govern-ment of Elizabeth I led to the confiscation of the familys estates and the destruction of a large proportion of the familys archive. The lacuna created by the loss of their records is reflected in Charles R. Youngs collective biog-raphy of the family, which stops in 1400 and has very little to say about the administration of the Neville estates, the pattern of Neville retaining or the position of the Nevilles within Durham society.75 The medieval history of lordship in Durham has been mainly concerned with large ecclesiastical estates. The extremely rich archives of the medieval church of Durham, the custody of which was shared between the bishop and cathedral priory of Durham, have generated a steady stream of historical studies. Most relevant in this context are the biographies of two late medieval bishops of Durham, Antony Bek and Thomas Langley, and an outstanding study of the corporate life of the fifteenth-century cathedral under its industrious and committed prior, John Wessington.76 But we should also acknowledge the existence of a fruitful and productive tradition of economic history at Durham stretching from the 1950s to the present and encompassing, in roughly chronological order, the work of E.M. Halcrow, R.B. Dobson, R.A. Lomas, T. Lomas, R.H. Britnell and, more recently, M. Threlfall-Holmes, B. Dodds and P. Larson, all of which has drawn principally upon the archive of the cathedral priory.77

The records of these two great ecclesiastical institutions can tell us consid-erably more about lay landholders within the bishopric. Certainly, the institu-tions of the bishops palatine regime were integrated fully into local society and were not simply the instruments of lordly power and coercion. The rolls of the bishop of Durhams chancery, for instance, which survive as a continuous sequence from the episcopate of Richard Bury (133345), contain abundant evidence of the way in which the Durham chancery was used extensively by the local gentry and nobility to register their own deeds and to enter bonds called recognisances to keep the peace within the bishopric.78 The peri-odic rentals and surveys of the landed properties of the prior and bishop of

74 M. Bennett, Community, Class and Careerism: Cheshire and Lancashire Society in the Age of Gawain and the Green Knight (Cambridge, 1983); P. Morgan, War and Society in Medieval Cheshire, 12771403 (Manchester, 1987).

75 C.R. Young, The Making of the Neville Family in England, 11661400 (Woodbridge, 1996).76 Fraser, History of Antony Bek; Storey, Thomas Langley; R.B. Dobson, Durham Priory, 14001450

(Cambridge, 1973).77 For this literature, see A.J. Pollard, Use and Ornament: Late-Twentieth-Century Historians on

the Late Medieval North-East, NH 42 (2005), pp. 66, 704.78 The extant chancery rolls begin with DURH 3/29. From the episcopate of Thomas Langley, the

rolls followed royal practice of a division between letters patent and close: DURH 3/34, m. 1r, 3/35, m. 1r.

INTRODUCTION 21

Durham, which have tended to be read within that well-established genre of writing on late medieval England the socio-economic study derived from the estate records of major ecclesiastical institutions in the mould of Edward Millers work on Ely or Edmund Kings on Peterborough can also be read in other ways. While it is true that these estate records were compiled in the first instance for the benefit of their lord, the use to which they were later put could not be so easily controlled. These were documents with which members of lay society within the bishopric were extremely familiar, reflecting their engagement with lordship on all levels, both figurative and real. When a certain old esquire of the bishopric of Durham (quidem senex armiger istius episcopatus Dunelmensis) by the name of John Killerby,79 the head of a sub-manorial gentry family of no particular distinction, petitioned the bishop of Durham in the second half of the fourteenth century to complain about the activity of certain of the bishops ministers who had distrained him for a larger annual rent than he was accustomed to pay, Killerby asserted knowl-edgeably that this sum was against the tenor of your rental called Boldon Book (encontre la tenore de votre Rentale appelle Boldonboke), a survey of the bishops landed estate dating from the 1180s.80 Significantly, too, the record of Killerbys petition, which is actually a draft document containing deletions and amendments, is to be found among the muniments of Durham cathedral priory. And it is within the archive of the priory that a large number of gentry deeds and estate papers have survived, particularly among the class of Miscellaneous Charters, as several local families, most notably the Clax-tons, looked upon the cathedral as a more effective safe-deposit box than their own domestic archive.81

At the same time, the local production of a sequence of historiographic texts from the eleventh century about the church of Durham made the priory very much the guardian and repository of the memory and counsel of the bishopric. These texts took the form of a regional narrative which was of relevance not only to the monastic community at Durham, but to the wider community in the land between Tyne and Tees.82 The combination of a rich archive and substantial manuscript library at Durham gave Prior Wessington considerable narrative and documentary material out of which he was able to fashion legal defences of the rights, privileges and corporate identity of the priory, bishop and local community in the first half of the fifteenth century.83

Rather than approach Durham either as a state, albeit an aborted one,

79 DCM, Misc.Ch. 7243.80 DCM, Misc.Ch. 5251.81 The Claxton material is the subject of B.A. Barker, The Claxtons: A Northern Gentry Family in

the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries (Ph.D. thesis, University of Teesside, 2003).82 See below, pp. 18996.83 These libelli, listed in R.B. Dobson, The Priory of Durham in the Time of John Wessington, Prior

141646 (D.Phil. thesis, University of Oxford, 1962), pp. 5806, are the subject of a forthcoming edition by Margaret Harvey and R.H. Britnell.

22 THE BISHOPRIC OF DURHAM

which lacked permanence because of the elective rather than hereditary nature of the bishops rule, or as a liberty, that is, a juridical unit devolved from and legitimated by the crown, this study examines the bishopric through the relationship between lordship and community. The bishop was a temporal lord whose lordship was grounded in his status as a major landholder in his own right and as the supreme landlord within the palatinate from whom all freeholders ultimately held their land. Allied to this potentially formidable territorial position was the possession of what might be described as a public authority comprising quasi-regal rights derived from the highly autonomous nature of the jurisdictional franchise over which he presided. The essential nature of the bishops lordship has sometimes been neglected by those histo-rians who have ventured into Durham landed society and who have deduced the existence of independent county gentry on the basis of participation in the bishops palatine administration.84 In Thomas Hatfield (134581) and Thomas Langley (140637), the pre-Reformation church of Durham possessed two of its longest serving bishops only Hugh Puiset (115395) held office for longer and it is their episcopates which provide the chrono-logical framework of the book. It was also in this period, between roughly the mid fourteenth and mid fifteenth centuries, that the Nevilles of Raby and Brancepeth established themselves as the major landed family within the bishopric, before the bifurcation of the line in 1425 on the death of Ralph Neville, first earl of Westmorland and the outbreak of the Neville family feud. This is a story which, in its local context and in its implications for local society and local politics, has still not yet been properly told.

Current debate about the structure of landed society in late medieval England has polarised around what have been taken to be dichotomous concepts of lordship and community.85 The study of Durham offers an opportunity to explore the operation and, most importantly, interaction of a range of overlapping lordships varying widely in character and intensity palatine, royal, ecclesiastical and lay in an area where the phenomenon of lordship was undeniably prevalent and yet where the framework of political power was also shaped by horizontal associations and a notion of community which periodically acquired a quasi-institutional character in the form of the community of the bishopric of Durham. This was a community, in both its associative and institutional sense, which developed in the context of rather than in opposition to lordship.

Absent from the plethora of studies of the county community in late medi-eval and early modern England has been a consideration of the cultural and ideological foundations of community.86 How, and on what occasions, did

84 For example, M. Arvanigian, The Durham Gentry and the Scottish March, 13701400: County Service in Late Medieval England, NH 42 (2005), pp. 25773 at 263, 265.

85 The tenor of this debate is conveyed in C. Carpenter, The Wars of the Roses: Politics and the Constitution in England, c. 14371509 (Cambridge, 1997), pp. 549.

86 Cf. the comments of Thornton, Cheshire, p. 41.

INTRODUCTION 23

local society within the bishopric of Durham imagine itself collectively? A new history of Durham must consider the collective mentality of local landed society and, in particular, its sense of place and its identification with the traditions of palatine autonomy. It should look more directly for what J.G.A. Pocock has described as an awareness of shared membership,87 which might be articulated in local tradition, myths and history and in the rhetoric which local society employed to express and assert its commonality. Existing work on this subject (slim though it is) has tended to assume a strong correla-tion between immunity, privilege and identity formation, in which the palati-nates separate institutional apparatus underpinned and heightened a sense of belonging.88 This is an assumption which needs to be examined much more fully in the wider context of palatine political culture, especially since it seems to run counter to the prevailing notion in the county studies that the crucible of local communal solidarity and collective identity was the engage-ment of local elites with the institutions of central government, specifically parliament.89

Chapter two charts the changing balance of landed power within the bisho-pric in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, whilst chapter three explores the strength of lordship in the land between the Tyne and the Tees through anal-ysis of the various social networks to which Durhams gentry and magnates belonged. Chapter four focuses upon the operation of the formal structures of power within the bishopric and considers the influence of lordship upon the pattern of local office-holding. Finally, chapter five examines more fully the political life of the bishopric. This is a subject which is of no little signifi-cance in the current debate about the essential character indeed, meaning of politics in late medieval England.

In recent years, historians of national politics have argued that political ideas and the contemporary discourse of political debate mattered. National politics were informed as much by political ideas and constitutional princi-ples as the politics of self-interest.90 Yet where has this left the study of local politics? To historians of the late medieval and early modern county commu-nities in the 1970s and 1980s, politics constituted something which happened outside the shire, at Westminster, whilst the sources of friction within local societies were the ownership of land, the feuds within kin groups which this generated and the distribution of patronage.91 Of what, indeed, did local politics consist? Undoubtedly of the private warfare, feuds, ambushes and forcible entries so often recounted.92 Routine government in this view was

87 J.G.A. Pocock, The Politics of Historiography, HR 78 (2005), p. 12.88 Pollard, North-Eastern England, pp. 1534; Thornton, Fifteenth-Century Durham, pp. 845.89 Carpenter, Gentry and Community, pp. 3778, with references.90 This historiography is reviewed briefly in M. Hicks, Cement or Solvent? Kinship and Politics in

Late Medieval England: The Case of the Nevilles, History 83 (1998), pp. 312.91 Cf. D.H. Sacks, The Corporate Town and the English State: Bristols Little Businesses 1625

41, P&P 110 (1996), pp. 6973; Carpenter, Gentry and Community, pp. 3567, 363.92 M. Hicks, Bastard Feudalism (London, 1995), p. 177.

24 THE BISHOPRIC OF DURHAM

not a political issue, other than competition for office. In these county studies, analysis of local politics took the form of delineating the administrative and judicial careers of particular gentry: serving as sheriff or escheator and sitting on the various commissions of local government, most notably the commis-sions of the peace. Individual gentry rivalries over office and land were the stuff of local politics.93 In this formulation, the local and the national were entirely separate worlds.

Did the bishopric of Durham form such a sub-political world, given its highly autonomous position in administration and justice, its lack of parlia-mentary representation and its exemption from parliamentary taxation? Did the bishops distribution of office, land, money and favour become a political issue and lead to charges of mismanagement and misgovernment? Or were the politics of Durham enmeshed in the politics of the whole realm?94 The bishopric was not an enclosed and self-contained political environment. It did exist within a wider political world, a world focused not upon parliament, but upon the royal court. Leading Durham landholders were from time to time significant players on the national stage, none more so than successive heads of the Nevilles of Raby and Brancepeth. It is doubtful whether John and his son, Ralph Neville, first earl of Westmorland, could have been such good lords in the bishopric if they had not been so close to successive heads of the house of Lancaster and at times highly influential at court in the later fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries.95 It is surely no coincidence that John Nevilles most intensive period of estate acquisition within Durham occurred in the late 1360s and early 1370s, precisely when he was a key figure at court in the last years of Edward III.96 Relationships between bishop and crown and between the crown and the bishops subjects did shape politics in the bishopric. This was certainly true of the period 136981, as I have shown elsewhere.97 But if we look at Durham from the inside rather than privi-lege the notion that politics were bound up inextricably in the mechanisms of central government, another focus of local politics was the relationship between the bishop and the bishops subjects. A much more fundamental feature of political life in the bishopric was the local communitys role as the guardian of local custom, tradition and identity.

93 S.M. Wright, The Derbyshire Gentry in the Fifteenth Century (Chesterfield, 1983), p. 93.94 Pollard, Provincial Politics, p. 76.95 M. Arvanigian, A Lancastrian Polity? John of Gaunt, John Neville and the War with France,

136888, Fourteenth Century England III, ed. W.M. Ormrod (Woodbridge, 2004), pp. 12142, and Henry IV, the Northern Nobility and the Consolidation of the Regime, Henry IV: The Establishment of the Regime, 13991406, ed. G. Dodd and D. Biggs (Woodbridge, 2003), pp. 11737.

96 See below, pp. 667.97 C.D. Liddy, The Politics of Privilege: Thomas Hatfield and the Palatinate of Durham, 134581,

Fourteenth Century England IV, ed. J.S. Hamilton (Woodbridge, 2006), pp. 6179.

2Land and Power

It is a truth universally acknowledged that land was the basis of social and political power in late medieval England. The power of the bishops of Durham was certainly founded upon the possession of land. The origins of the palatinate lay in the pre-Conquest piecemeal acquisitions of property by the church of Durham, principally but not exclusively between the rivers Tyne and Tees. Custody of this property was vested in the church and the quasi-monastic community of St Cuthbert over which the bishop of Durham presided. To this lordship was later added in the local context of the Viking invasions of the late ninth century jurisdictional privilege and immunity.1 After the Conquest, the division of the patrimony of St Cuthbert to form separate estates for the bishop and the newly constituted Benedictine cathe-dral priory reduced the property under the bishops direct control. But the process of enfeoffment for knight service simultaneously enhanced the bish-ops territorial rights over the land between Tyne and Tees.2 In the first half of the twelfth century, as Bishop Ranulph Flambard (10991128) granted land predominantly in the heartland of the palatinate to an incoming Norman nobility, a baronial elite emerged between Tyne and Tees comprising about ten individuals who were known collectively as the barones et fideles sancti Cuthberti and who owed the bishop the service of more than one knight. These barons were the principal tenants-in-chief of the bishop and held their land of him. Their settlement in the land of St Cuthbert (terra Beati Cuth-berti) by the mid twelfth century helped to consolidate the idea that, like the king in the rest of England (saving the palatinate of Chester), the bishop was the universal landlord within the palatinate: all land was held, directly or indirectly, of the bishop.3 In the feudal hierarchy the bishop was himself a subject of the king and a tenant-in-chief who owed military service, as the bishops return to the crowns 1166 inquiry into knight service demonstrated. Within the palatinate, however, the bishop was not only a major landholder in his own right, but he was also the sole landowner: all those in possession of land in Durham, including the prior, were, ultimately, his tenants.4

1 D. Rollason, Northumbria, 5001100: Creation and Destruction of a Kingdom (Cambridge, 2003), pp. 2446.

2 For what follows, see W.M. Aird, St Cuthbert and the Normans: The Church of Durham, 10711153 (Woodbridge, 1998), Ch. 5.

3 G.T. Lapsley, The County Palatine of Durham: A Study in Constitutional History (London, 1900), pp. 545.

4 The lords of the Welsh