3 - Law in North-East England: Community, County and Region, 1550-1850

Summary

It may seem wildly ambitious or exceedingly optimistic to seek sources for regional identity in the early modern period. Most people before the early 1800s lived in small communities, even if they were mobile during their working lives. They spent most of their energies in associating with small numbers of people in what was still largely a face-to-face society, with the possible exception of the social relations of the largest city, London. Nevertheless, through war and the celebration of victories (in part against each other), the English and Scots already had a strong sense of national identity by 1550, and after 1600 conflict with Spain, Holland and above all France sustained a strong sense of Britishness. At the local level after 1600, too, lessons in British nationality were taught.Vagrant Scots, for example, would have learned that they were part of a greater unit, as they were returned to ‘North Britain’ by local English poor law officials (a phrase used throughout the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries to refer to north of the border), rather than to a country called ‘Scotland’. An inclusive national unity, with a continued recognition of many differences, was being constructed within the boundaries of territories ruled by the British state, though after 1750 this proved increasingly hard to extend to the many north American colonies. Few felt completely excluded: even the inmates of jails showed their patriotic loyalty on the occasion of royal weddings, or when news arrived of another victory over the French.

The culture of this newly united nation, it has been argued, revolved around a sense of freedom and the values of equality and justice.This had deep roots in the medieval period but, by the eighteenth century, law and its dramas had replaced religion in the hearts of many Britons: for Douglas Hay, the ‘secular sermons’ of the criminal courts and their judges were by then much more effective than those of the church. Paul Langford agrees, questioning the Anglican church's importance, and claiming that ‘the Church had never provided a truly national religion’, though the power of a shared Protestantism, whatever its form, should not be underestimated.