3 - The governance and governors of north-eastern England

Summary

It has been argued that, from the tenth century onwards, the English had a strong sense of regnal identity that was predicated on loyalty to a monarch from whom they derived justice and protection. In the sixteenth century this sense of Englishness was made more explicit, as church and state were fused, parliament devised new local structures designed to integrate England economically, socially and legally, and liberties and franchises were abolished. Traditional analyses of Tudor state formation have concentrated on the southern and eastern parts of England and concluded that their centralising policies were ultimately successful. A reassessment of this Tudor policy, however, has disclosed grave shortcomings. The abiding paradox faced by successive monarchs was that ‘[l]ocal conditions demanded a devolution of power, but political experience, ideology, and administrative practice all suggested increased centralization’. The imposition of the highly centralised administrative structures of lowland England on the borderlands led to serious and continuous tensions between central government and local political communities. How this manifested itself in the north-eastern corner of England is the subject of this chapter, together with an analysis of those who were prepared to serve their towns and counties in the capacity of local administrators and agents of central government. For, notwithstanding Braddick's argument that regional identities must be sought outside the frames set by institutional records, the records can be investigated in such a way as to reveal something about the extent to which elites identified with their town and county and whether or not such identification involved any kind of regional dimension. At the same time, it should be noted that the medieval county of Northumberland – created out of the earlier earldom of Northumbria in 1377, which, in turn, emerged out of the ancient kingdom of Northumbria – embraced all those territories between the rivers Tweed and Tees. What emerged as county Durham was technically just one of the liberties within the county. Therefore, when early modern commentators remarked upon Northumberland, it is reasonable to suppose that, on occasion, they might be referring to all, or a swathe, of the two later counties, which continued to be regarded as a convenient whole by the central authorities. All this adds to the difficulties but also to the potential importance of getting to grips with the kaleidoscopic nature of the north-eastern parts of England, then and thereafter.