Ann Kussmaul's classic study of servants in early modern rural England was published in 1981. It built upon the earlier work of J. Hajnal, who mapped out the distinctive features of life-cycle service in north-west Europe, and Peter Laslett, who demonstrated the presence of large numbers of servants in early modern England. Although Laslett and Kussmaul aimed to discuss the whole of the early modern period, the sources they used were heavily weighted to the period from 1660 to 1830. This chapter argues that as a result, they failed to identify important changes in the pattern of servant employment over time in England. Both Laslett and Kussmaul made use of a set of one hundred ‘household listings’ describing the composition of households in particular communities, which were identified and transcribed by the Cambridge Group for the Study of Population and Social Structure. Only five of these dated from before 1660, and three of those related to towns. The main source used by Kussmaul to map the incidence of service in the period before 1660 was the seasonality of marriages recorded in parish registers, which could be measured from the 1550s to the 1830s. She argued that changes in the seasonality of marriage reflected levels of servant employment as many servants married just after leaving service: in areas of southern and eastern England where arable agriculture dominated, servant contracts began and ended at Michaelmas (29 September) after the grain harvest. Thus the prevalence to October marriages indicated the incidence of service over time.

Using this evidence Kussmaul proposed that the incidence of service ‘did not remain fixed, but rose and fell in two major cycles from c.1450–1900’. In the first cycle October marriages peaked around 1560, before declining gradually to the 1630s, and then dipping sharply during the Civil War years of the 1640s and 1650s. In the second cycle the incidence rose quite steeply in the late seventeenth century to a peak in 1740, before declining again over the following century. Kussmaul argued that the underlying cause of these cycles were demographic. As population increased in the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries, so did the cost of living, and real wages fell, as can be seen clearly from the day wage rates for male agricultural labourers compiled by Gregory Clark.

IN FEBRUARY 1784 William Windham's head was full of balloons. An interesting thirty-four year old, Windham came from an old Norfolk family [Figure 4]. After extensive travels and a period in his local militia, he had begun a career in politics. In 1783 he had been appointed by the Fox-North coalition to the post of chief secretary to the Irish viceroy, Lord Northington. He served ably for a few months – he was a lifelong supporter of the cause of Catholic emancipation – before resigning on grounds of ill-health. In April 1784 he returned to politics as MP for Norwich, one of the few Foxite candidates to be re-elected. In February he was mostly in London, dividing his time between seeing people, going to the theatre – he was friends with Sarah Siddons – skating, which he did rather well, and scholarly pursuits. Always a man with a book in his pocket, Windham enjoyed mathematics and the classics. Having just started a diary, he confided to it, like many eighteenth-century people, a sense he was not getting enough done. On 7 February 1784 he wrote:‘Did not rise till past nine; from that time till eleven, did little more than indulge in reveries about balloons.’1 The day was not a vacuous one: he called on Sarah Siddons, then on Fox; he had intelligent company at dinner, in the persons of Edmund Burke, Samuel Horsley and Sir Joshua Reynolds, all members of the Literary Club, along with Samuel Johnson whom Windham fervently admired; and in the late evening, Mrs Siddons and Mrs Kemble paid him a visit. In the pattern of this sociable day, what did it mean to Windham to spend two hours in balloon reveries?

To understand what Windham represented in balloon madness in 1784, his diary gives us some help. Diarists use diaries differently and not everything that matters is written down.

HISTORIANS AGREE THAT the institution of monarchy changed in the eighteenth century. ‘The French Revolution marks the transition of monarchy as a divine institution to a monarchy legitimised by the nation. This process, which had started long before 1789, was associated with a loss of the magical, with a desacralization of the monarchy and a separation between the king and the divine.’ Quite how and why the old order ebbed is ‘anything but a straightforward tale’, though one can point to factors like the power of Enlightenment critiques of absolutism; the growth of the press, which made monarchs less important; and, in Britain, where satire of the king freely circulated, the familiarising of royalty through royal families. At the same time there was also a growth in civic organisations, friendly societies and freemasonry, all variously keen on loyalist and royalist activities. Belief in monarchs as earthly representatives of divine power continued; what weakened was belief in the monarch as embodiment of divine right. In Britain, Queen Anne was the last monarch whose touch was believed to cure ‘the king's evil’, or scrofula; George I thought the idea abhorrent and stopped it. What Antoine de Baecque describes as the transition of sovereignty from the body of the king to the great citizen body was not an even process across Europe, and to complicate matters some monarchies played better in the new order than they had in the old, laying the grounds for monarchy to re-establish itself tenaciously in nineteenth-century Europe. ‘It is easier to document this apparent transformation in the monarchy's public status than account for it,’ says Linda Colley, though she suggests an upsurge in royal and national spectacle in Britain was partly due to an outpouring of patriotic art by Royal Academy painters, which benefited the reputation of their patron, George III, who had encouraged it. Tracking changes in France, Sarah Melzer and Kathryn Norberg also see the Bourbon monarchs benefiting from spectacle, with Versailles as its great theatre.

THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY was a period of nearly continuous wars between European countries. Monarchies realigned, changing alliances and altering definitions of nation. As nations established, contested and extended empires, nation acted as a term that encompassed more ground than simple geographical identities. This was not a new process but its particular components in the eighteenth century included new elements. What defined Britain included four countries, a Hanoverian monarchy and overseas dominions; British interests were therefore also simultaneously European and global, spread across continents and oceans, manifested through conflicts with peoples and treaties with nations. Making the case for Britain as physically and politically European, a historian in 2006 commented: ‘I took the trouble to ask the Map Librarian at the British Library whether he knows of any map of Europe which does not contain Britain. His answer was no. He knows of no map of Europe that does not contain the British Isles.’ Physical maps co-exist with mental maps in complex ways. What difference did it make to add air to land and sea as a place where nations operated? How did a new aerial dimension map on to a world in which European nations jealously guarded interests and zealously extended possessions whenever they could?

In exploring the role of balloons in eighteenth-century war, one must try to understand the world as it was when they appeared. English minds were full of uncertainty about peace. ‘It has been easy for later historians to underestimate the instability and insecurity of eighteenth-century Britain,’ says N. A. M. Rodger, who argues that ‘The motives which first created a dominant English navy in the 1650s, and which kept the British fleet the largest in Europe, were overwhelmingly defensive.

FASHION WAS A well-established idea and practice by the late eighteenth century. The concept, argues Hannah Greig, was a fluid one with meanings too multiple to be explained by one all-encompassing theory. Some historians see the whole century as one of consumer revolution, while others identify surges towards the end of the century. ‘Technical innovations in textile production were crucial in propelling and defining the Industrial Revolution. Fashion, especially fashion in clothing, was central to any remodelling of consumer expectations that preceded, or accompanied revolutionary increases in production.’ John Styles argues magisterially that those consumer expectations were not confined to the rich. Plebeian people took an interest in fashion and were leaders as well as followers of fashion. Literature that complained about luxury emphasised that all classes were too eager to buy and display. If the poor made do with ribbons and fairings rather than lace and jewels, they were nonetheless literate in the language of clothes – not least because many worked in textile-related trades – and contributed to making fashion an important cultural force.

Balloons played into this world in several ways. They inspired particular fashions in clothing, they promoted a new shape for women, and they accelerated the growth of fashion beyond a core category of clothing to encompass new categories including that of newness itself. For some of this there was a ready-made language: French. Ton, beau monde, à la mode were established terms for fashionability in the eighteenth century and applied easily to the latest products from France – of which balloons were one.

In any period, displaying a succession of rulers has always been a sensitive issue, whatever the manner of doing it. However simple this kind of undertaking may seem at first sight, in fact giving a coherent picture of the past requires making choices – occasionally difficult ones. Choices also have to be made in order not to offend the sensitivities of potential readers or viewers. Even a simple list of rulers may be indicative of its author's intentions or opinions. This is even more so when the format adopted is that of a genealogical diagram, whose primary intent is to show as clearly as possible the family ties between individuals. Therefore tracing the genealogy of a royal dynasty over a long period cannot be neutral: indeed, it is bound to reflect explicitly or implicitly upon the foundations of royal legitimacy.

It is with these preliminary thoughts in mind that I would like to analyse the handling of usurpers in the genealogical rolls of the kings of England, one of the most original products of medieval English historical culture. These rolls appeared at the end of Henry III's reign (1216–72) and went on being produced until the end of the reign of Henry V (1413–22), with a peak during the half-century corresponding to the reigns of the first two Edwards (1272–1327) and to the early years of the reign of Edward III (1327–77).

Let us first consider why this unusual form, the genealogical roll, was adopted in England at this time. As far as we know, it had never been used before to trace the history of any other medieval Western dynasty. In England, genealogical rolls of kings were first written in Latin, at the turn of the reigns of Henry III and Edward I, and soon afterwards in Anglo-Norman French. Before then, the only work using a combination of the commented genealogical diagram and the roll format was the Compendium historiae in genealogia Christi, the work of Peter of Poitiers, a French theologian who taught in Paris in the late twelfth century; Peter's aim was to help students understand and memorize Biblical history.

Military prowess formed a central pillar of Scottish national identity in the nine¬teenth century. Although Scottish Highland regiments had been prominent in the British military forces from the early eighteenth century, their fame and public profile increased in the Victorian era and they become even more celebrated as Scot¬land's national icons. As a core ideological focus for British imperial identity, mili¬tarism took on distinctive national characteristics in Scotland during the nineteenth century. The regiments attracted extensive publicity in British imperial artworks, advertising, and in the press; they were the most celebrated of imperial soldiers. The growing ‘Victorian cult of the Highlander’ in the nineteenth century was also the result of the royal patronage and Scotophilia of Queen Victoria, who took a special interest in the Scottish Highlands and ‘her’ Highland regiments. Scottish military activity became increasingly ‘Highlandised’, and in 1881 even Lowland regiments were outfitted with Highland dress – although some had adopted pipe bands and Highland regalia in previous decades. Despite the visibility and vibrancy of Scotland's martial traditions throughout the British Empire, however, military Scottishness is an often neglected aspect of the experience of Scots abroad and the ways in which they connected with and imagined home.

The cult of the Highlander spread into the global Scottish diaspora towards the end of the nineteenth century. Numerous Scottish regiments formed part of voluntary and part-time defence forces in Canada, New Zealand, South Africa, and Australia from the 1860s. The last British forces withdrew from Australia in 1870 and in their place the colonies raised their own armies and militia. Numerous Scottish units were established including the Scottish Company of the Adelaide Regiment of Volunteer Rifles (1866), the Duke of Edinburgh's Highlanders in Sydney (1868), and the Sydney Reserve Corps of Scottish Rifles (1885). The Scottish Volunteer Rifle Corps of Queensland emerged in 1896, and the South Australian Scottish Company in 1899, while there were Scottish detachments of militia units in Western Australia throughout the 1890s.

Examined within the same category as St Andrew's associations, Caledonian societies, Burns clubs, and so on, it is clear that Scottish regiments in Australia drew their culture and identity from a distinctly imperial tradition.

Commemorative monuments are, by their very nature, explicit about the status and general social identity of the people who commissioned or are represented by them. But whoever the patron might be, whether the deceased, family members or executors, the extent of his or her creative involvement must be a matter of conjecture in the absence of documentation. To what extent did patrons expect to be able to influence or direct the final appearance of the monument in order to obtain a bespoke memorial, or were they happy to have an ‘off-the-peg’ product that merely complied with the general requirements of gender, vocation and social status? There is evidence for both extremes of creative input in south Wales, and for a range of attitudes in between.

PATRONAL INVOLVEMENT, STATUS, IDENTITY AND CHOICE

PATRONAL INVOLVEMENT

There are some well-known examples of English patrons exhibiting a high degree of interest in monument design, indicating that they had fairly precise requirements for how the finished article should look. About a dozen contracts between patron and craftsman have survived from the late fourteenth century to the early sixteenth. One of these, an indenture concluded in 1421 between Richard Hertcombe and the alabastermen Thomas Prentys and Robert Sutton for the tomb of the earl and countess of Salisbury at Bisham (Berkshire), lays down the look of the monument in some detail. A ‘patron’, or pattern, had already been drawn up on which the finished product was to be based. Its dimensions, the form of the head- and foot-rests, canopies and angels were all specified, as was the price (forty-three marks), method of payment and date for completion. Such plans presuppose a certain degree of intended involvement in, or even control over, the look of the finished monument on the part of the commissioners. Other monuments, for which no contract or will survives, sometimes point to specific criteria having been insisted upon by the patron. The rather unusual features of the tomb of Oliver, Lord Ingham (d.1344), at Ingham (Norfolk), including his twisting pose, bed of stones and angels supporting the great helm, have been seen as being ‘specially chosen to reflect Oliver's sense of how he wanted to be remembered’.

The fragile Lancastrian state survived through the loyalty, commitment and consistent stalwart service of supporters such as William, Lord Roos. The Lancastrians were beset by many institutional fragilities: rebellions; Henry IV's poor health; tensions within the inner royal circle. There were also societal fragilities – some of them, especially those impinging on law and public order, parallel to the institutional problems. The challenges to religious orthodoxy, for example, which threatened both church and state, reached their peak as Henry V was still establishing himself on the throne. Money was a constant concern. That in 1400 the former crusader Henry IV could afford to give the Byzantine emperor, Manuel II, desperate for help against the encroaching Ottomans, no more than warm words and fine food starkly illustrates the problem. It was, however, not just the difficulties themselves which created fragility: it was their consequences. Executions and deaths in battle robbed the Lancastrians of men who, otherwise, could have been capable political leaders. Significant local areas were left without adequate lordship. Roos offered stability, dependability and experience.

Although Roos never assumed major leadership responsibilities, he played a significant support role through some of the most difficult times for the Lancastrian regime until his death in September 1414. Closer to Henry IV and Archbishop Arundel than to the prince of Wales, he survived the various vicissitudes of the later part of Henry IV's reign, emerging in Henry V's as a zealous prosecutor of lollards. He survived partly because he was not sufficiently important to be removed, so while his influence sometimes waned he never disappeared entirely from the court circle. His survival may be partly attributed to the esteem in which he appeared to be increasingly held by a sometimes truculent House of Commons. Largely, however, it stemmed from his dogged loyalty to the Lancastrian cause and his usefulness not just at court but also through his notable local connections.

Roos had extensive landed interests in north Yorkshire, with a substantial castle at Helmsley, but he was not exclusively a northern magnate. Importantly, he also held lands in Leicestershire, Lincolnshire and Nottinghamshire, giving him considerable influence in these central and eastern areas.

There are few people better qualified than Robert Kavanagh to navigate the contended space of South African theatre. He was the initial driving force behind the radical company Workshop 71 that emerged from his training work at the University of the Witwatersrand in 1971, as well as the politically driven theatre journal S'ketsh, founded in the following year. On top of creating and chairing Theatre Arts departments at the universities of Addis Ababa and Zimbabwe, he was also co-founder of the extraordinary Zimbabwean children's theatre organization CHIPAWO, of which he was Executive Director until 2010. African Theatre 6: Youth includes a superb article by Kavanagh about CHIPAWO's work.

Kavanagh has also been known as ‘Robert McLaren’, as ‘RK’, and as ‘Mshengu’ – partly as a result of the need for anonymity in the charged atmosphere of the 1970s, and partly, I suspect, because a protean life and identity suit a theatre artist well. He moves with extraordinary ease from director and deviser to academic and critic, from administrator to activist, from professor to practitioner. This fluid interaction between performance and the academy is one of many aspects of African theatre that I hugely admire and envy. In British rehearsal rooms, the word ‘academic’ has come to mean ‘something I have chosen to ignore because it's inconvenient to me’; as in ‘that's a bit academic’. The academy, meanwhile, cloaks itself in impenetrable theoretical language that serves to maintain its elevated status at the cost of its accessibility. African theatre enjoys a much more open dialogue between an engaged and politically energized academy and an open, enquiring theatrical community. For people like Robert Kavanagh and myself, who have feet in both camps, the African approach makes so much more sense than the self-serving specialization of the West.

However, the subject of Kavanagh's new book, Gibson Kente, was anything but academic. The productions that he toured through black townships during the apartheid era were populist and sentimental, Christian and conservative in their morality, simplistic in their narrative, clownish in their comedy. As a result, academics and critics have tended to be very dismissive of his work. Aggrey Klaaste, writing about Kente's play Too Late for S'ketsh in 1975, condemned it as a ‘spurious bubble of happiness’, while Andrew Horn talked of Kente's ‘narrowed and absolutist melodramatic vision’.

Since the late1980s, authors associated with the revivalist cultural andpolitical movement known as the ṢaḥwaNubiyya or ‘Nubian Awakening’ have created anew and hybrid form of Egyptian literary expression.Inspired by Nubia's distinct language, culture, history,mythology and geography, their writing makes legible adistinctively Nubian subjectivity that plays a mediatingrole in countering the ‘layered invisibility’ (NixonSlow Violence and the Environmentalism of thePoor: 16) of the Nubian people in postcolonialEgypt after they were forcibly displaced from their homelandto make way for the Aswan High Dam in 1964. TakingNights of Musk: Stories from Old Nubia(Layāli al-Misk al-‘Atiqa), acollection of short stories by the prominent Nubian writerand activist Haggag Hassan Oddoul as a case study, thispaper argues that Nubian literature contests the unitaryfiction of Egypt's Arab identity postulated during theheyday of Arab nationalism by highlighting the nation'smarginalized African identity. As such, it can be seen aspart of a broader trend in modern Egyptian writing known as‘border literature’ which seeks to integrate regional andminority subjectivities into Egypt's national imaginary(El-Refaei ‘Egypt's Borders and the Crisis of Identity inthe Literature of Nubia and Sinai’).

In 1964 thebuilding of the Aswan High Dam forcibly displaced some fiftythousand Egyptian Nubians from their ancient homeland to thearea of Kom Ombo, around seventy kilometres north of Aswan(Dafalla The Nubian Exodus; FahimDams, People and Development). All thatremained of Nubia, a land traditionally falling along theNile between the first and sixth cataracts south of Aswanand north of Khartoum, was submerged under the dam'sreservoir which became known as Lake Nasser – a ‘potentsymbol of postcolonial power etched onto the landscape’(Dimeo ‘Unimaginable Community’: 80). The High Dam'sredemptive symbolism as a reflection of the power,prosperity and progress of the postcolonial state provedhighly popular amongst the Egyptian public who, in 1964,flocked en masse to the parliament crying‘Nasser, Nasser, we come to salute you: after the Dam ourland will be paradise!’ (Nixon: 116). However, this supportwas accompanied by a willed amnesia at national level aboutits long-term impact on Nubian culture and society, such asongoing injustices surrounding compensation for lost landand property; non-recognition of the Nubians as a nationalminority by the state; and the denial of cultural andlinguistic rights.

Political history is never straightforward, and the political history of fifteenth-century England is no exception. From William Stubbs's idea of a great constitutional experiment to K.B. McFarlane's emphasis on aristocratic and princely lordship, the Lancastrians have continued to provide a source of curiosity, uncertainty and debate, both as a noble affinity and as a royal dynasty. While literary scholars such as Jennifer Nuttall and Paul Strohm make a case for a distinct Lancastrian political identity based on contemporary literary sources, most historians remain unconvinced, preferring to stress the continuity of late medieval English politics over any perceived anomalous behaviour between 1399 and 1461, a debate that I shall briefly address at the end of this article.

Such a debate is certainly important, not just in understanding the Lancastrians themselves, but also in gaining a deeper appreciation of the broader political culture of fifteenth-century England and the development of political ideology in the later Middle Ages. However, it is not within the scope of the present article to explore this argument definitively or to make any ambitious claims. Instead, I would simply like to raise some fundamental questions about the Lancastrians and their political ideals through a close examination of one very important set of sources: the addresses or sermons delivered to the estates of the realm, usually by the chancellor, at the opening of each parliament.

Of course, historians have long used these addresses as source material, and some scholarly works have focused on them specifically, notably S.B. Chrimes's English Constitutional Ideas in the Fifteenth Century. For the most part, however, Chrimes gives only a dry sketch of each address, its orator, and the principal biblical references quoted (which he lists in a useful table), and any brief analyses are scattered throughout the book, not gathered into one cohesive section on parliamentary sermons. Indeed, although there are numerous publications concerning the medieval rolls of parliament, to my knowledge there have not been any significant works written explicitly on parliamentary sermons across the longue durée of later medieval English history. Nonetheless, the summaries of sermons included in the parliament rolls, the orators themselves, the biblical references used, and even the points specifically chosen to appear on the official record are all vital in illuminating the complex political ideals and ideological developments that underpinned the Lancastrian regime.

CAST

The Director

Titubi

Deputy Superintendent of Police Salami

Police Corporal

Alhaja Kabirat

Alhaji Buraimoh

Lawyer Isaac

Lati

Warder

Baba

Marshal

Bogunde

Kokondi

Mama Kayode

Mosun

Wura

Molade

Moremi

Niniola

Oronmiyon

Warrior

Titubi's followers

Drummers

Yeye-Oba group

One

(Stage opens on the Dressing Area, marked out by mats and wooden frames, etc, of an evidently ambulant and somewhat amateurish theatre company. A bench. Tables and stools, and possibly a table with a long mirror. Lockers. A flurry of activity: actors making up, trying costumes, reading script, rehearsing gestures, miming some of the later actions in the play. Enter the DIRECTOR, rubbing his hands.)

Director Hurry up. Hurry up. Play opens in five minutes.

An Actor Fair house today?

Director Fair. Better than in the last town we stopped.

Another Actor And no signs of trouble?

Director No signs yet. But don't worry.

Another Actor That's what you said yesterday. Yet we were almost lynched.

Director This time I've sent for the police.

Another Actor The police! Is that a joke?

Director Please hurry up. We're doing nothing illegal. We can seek police protection as much as anybody.

Another Actor I hope you're right. Yesterday was hell.

Director There'll be no disturbance tonight. (He watches them for a while, then steps out of place, and approaches the audience.) Good evening, ladies and gentlemen. We will soon be starting. But while the actors prepare, I will try and give you a rapid summary of our play tonight. The play, as you will soon see, starts in the year 1969, the month of September. That year, if you remember, the civil war was raging in the east of our country, but this play has nothing to do with that. It deals with another war, the one that was later to be popularly known as the Agbekoya uprising, in which ordinary farmers, in the west of the country, rose up and confronted the state. Maybe you remember? Illiterate farmers, whom we had all along thought to be docile, peace-loving, if not even stupid, suddenly took to arms and began to fight against the government! Two, three, four … seven months! And the war was still hot and bitter.

In 1016 or, more likely, in 1018 a battle was fought at Carham (NTB) beside the River Tweed near Coldstream. A host led by Mael Coluim II, king of Scots, aided by Owain the Bald, king of the Strathclyde Britons, met the levies of a Northumbrian earl (perhaps Uhtred) and comprehensively defeated them. Many unanswered questions surround the battle and its political significance, but only one such question need concern us here. After the fighting, where did Mael Coluim, Owain and the Northumbrian warlords return home to, and what form did their residences take?

The reason for which the many Iron Age fortification sites crowding the modern Border area seem largely to have fallen out of use after the collapse of Roman Britain is a problem still requiring to be resolved. South of the Tweed–Solway line, only one is recorded as still being occupied in the eleventh century – the rock of Bamburgh (Figure 10.1), where Earl Uhtred of Northumbria held court, and which had probably been in continuous use since at least as early as the reign of King Ida of Bernicia (547– 59). Excavations there suggest that a Roman site, probably a coastal signal station, was refortified and rebuilt, the buildings eventually including a church. In the small area excavated to date lies a complex of stone buildings and a stair leading down to a postern, from which pottery from Roman times to the Middle Ages has been recovered. Bamburgh was clearly a significant fortress by the eleventh century, but at present it is virtually unique in the region. This situation is by no means unusual for this era, since few fortifications have been identified during and after the Migration Period in Western Europe.

The existence of a considerable number of Roman forts on both sides of the present Border makes it likely that some at least survived as fortified centres in the post- Roman years. Very little of this can be seen now on the ground. A notable exception is Birdoswald (CMB) on Hadrian's Wall, where excavation has shown the complex sequence of re-use of granary buildings, and the construction of major timber halls within the rampart. How long this occupation lasted is still uncertain. Clearly it persisted into the fifth century, but thereafter the site disappears from the record.

The historiography of middle Britain's medieval towns has been ‘nationalised’. There have been few attempts to transcend the Anglo-Scottish Border, and though Ian Blanchard, Richard Britnell and Bruce Campbell have all notably risen to the challenge – it is surely significant that all three are economic historians – many other efforts, despite the best of intentions, have been less successful. The Border remained prominent in, for example, volume one of The Cambridge Urban History of Britain, not only where the geographical division between English and Scottish sections is clear-cut, but also in the telling need to partner English and Scottish specialists for many of those chapters which sought to integrate the study of English and Scottish towns. For the most part, however, the interest of Scottish historians has not stretched beyond the Tweed and their focus has been either on specific Scottish towns or on the towns of the kingdom as a whole, rather than on provincial patterns of urbanisation within the Scottish kingdom. Historians of England, meanwhile, have often claimed Berwick upon Tweed for their own studies, even though the town's constitutional status was unambiguously Scottish until 1296, and thereafter Berwick, though frequently subject to the English crown, was not part of the English kingdom. This peculiarity apart, the historiography of northern England's towns possesses an additional layer, not evident in that of their Scottish counterparts: the region. There are various ways in which region might be defined. ‘The North’ is usually taken to include Cumberland, Westmorland, Lancashire north of the Sands, Northumberland, County Durham and frequently the North Riding of Yorkshire. Sometimes (though not here) it stretches southward to encompass the rest of Lancashire and Yorkshire, and Cheshire, too. Often, however, ‘the North’ has been subdivided into studies of towns in particular counties, or those in groups of counties, and when so usually adhering to an east/west split.

This chapter seeks to explore, among other matters, the connections forged by the towns of middle Britain. It will investigate whether urban bonds, created in some instances by similar law codes and also by migration and monetisation, provided middle Britain with an interconnected urban network – and whether this in turn was instrumental in establishing middle Britain with a distinctive regional identity which transcended the more rigid political boundaries established by the thirteenth century and generally favoured by the existing historiography.