Regional Politics, Landed Society and the Coal Industry in North-East England, 1350–1430

Summary

Over the years, historians of the late-medieval English gentry have mapped out several working models to explain the character and behavior of landed society in various localities around the country. While various, two basic models have nonetheless emerged which have served to define the parameters of the debate. On the one hand, some have argued that gentry life was usually dominated by the presence and operation of great aristocratic affinities, which often became stages for the drama of competition between gentry families, and which thereby preoccupied gentry families; they were often left scrambling for fortune and preferment within one or another of the great retinues of the country's increasingly influential baronial families. This view has been challenged by another model for the operation of local landed communities, one which posits a more cohesive, even co-operative, situation in which members of a landed community occasionally put aside mutual antagonisms, instead speaking with a collective voice on matters of local importance. Although they have generally provided the framework for the study of regional landed society, historians in recent years have begun to cast their net beyond these two basic constructions. For example, space has now been made for more significant regional variation, based upon a series of local variables, including but not limited to such factors as a region's geography, its land tenure arrangements, its relative wealth, the presence of one or more great families, royal influence, and the relative ease of financial and/or political advancement. It is upon this final point that this essay will turn, for one such financial variable – the coal industry – was a clear factor in determining the political and financial climate of Northeast England by the latter part of the fourteenth century; it will serve here as a convenient prism as we seek to place the region's gentry within its political economy. Because of the often scant nature of evidence available for certain periods, strong conclusions may have to remain somewhat elusive, but the gathering of this evidence will surely prove useful in suggesting certain avenues of future investigation.