8 - Conclusion: regional identity and the elites of north-eastern England

Summary

When William Cuningham wrote his Cosmographical glasse, in 1559, to help readers understand and use astronomy and mathematics for geographical computations, he promised that ‘Regions, Prouinces, Ilandes, Cities, Townes, Villages, Hilles: also the commodities of euerye Countrye, the natures of the Inhabitauntes, Lawes, Rightes, and Customes’ would be ‘exactlye described’. The region, thus, was just one of the geographical terms current in the sixteenth century and only one of several manifestations of the physical space by which the elites of the north-eastern parts of England might have identified themselves. However, the notion of regions was not yet given widespread application. Holinshead dismissed regions as the basis for his Chronicles of England, Scotland and Ireland in 1576, because they ‘are not yet verie perfectlie knowne unto the learned of these daies’. Not until the later seventeenth century were regions defined spatially according to landscapes. Until then they were regarded as units of regnum, or rule. And, certainly, it was as local governors, in their capacity as justices of the peace, aldermen, deputy lieutenants, sheriffs, mayors and (peculiar to the county and towns of Northumberland) members of parliament that the county gentry and urban oligarchies of England's north-eastern parts engaged with their territory.

A close study of those who elected to serve their communities, by actually turning up to sit on the magisterial bench, or by contributing to parliamentary debates on behalf of their constituents, has demonstrated a clear affinity with, and commitment to, the areas for which they were responsible. But this was firmly based on the county or town, with any sense of identity thus engendered defined accordingly. The concept of regions as a foundation upon which to construct identities remains problematic and would confirm Braddick’s scepticism that regional identity and regionalism (which he takes to mean the mobilisation of such identities for political purposes) can be found in early modern England. His concerns are based on the fact that potential forms of identity are likely to have been ‘transactional and situational’, and therefore indiscernible through ‘institutional structures’. It is precisely because these were expressed in terms of county (or parish or hundred, for those further down the social scale), not region, that problems remain. Broader configurations, such as the Council of the North, and the roughly coterminous ‘province’ or archbishopric of York, might be instructive about northern, but not specifically north-eastern, identities.