Holford Matthew, Stringer Keith. Border Liberties and Loyalties in North-East England, 1200-1400 (ENG)
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BORDER LIBERTIES AND LOYALTIES
56
and it is easy to nd examples of such links across the Tyne: we might,
for example, mention Roger Lumley (d. before 1279) who married Sybil,
daughter and heiress of Hugh Morwick, and was buried alongside her in
the Franciscan friary at Newcastle.
189
Nor was it impossible that a man of
Newcastle should be a ‘faithful and constant friend of St Cuthbert’.
190
But if
the focus is narrowed to relationships in the immediate vicinity of the Tyne,
at Newcastle and Gateshead, the picture is more complicated.
Bad feeling between the communities on opposite banks of the river
was certainly a force to be reckoned with. When William Sire contracted
a mason to build a staith reaching north into the Tyne from Pipewellgate
in Gateshead in 1348, he allowed for the possibility that work would be
delayed through damage done ‘maliciously . . . by men of Newcastle’.
191
Sire himself, however, who is described in di erent documents as ‘of
Gateshead’, ‘of Jarrow’, ‘of Pipewellgate’, and as ‘burgess of Newcastle’,
indicates that neither boundaries nor identities were always so clearly
de ned.
192
But although he held a certain amount of property in Newcastle,
the bulk of his interests lay in Gateshead and Hebburn, within the liberty,
and his will suggests it was the liberty that was most important to him. e
priory of Durham apparently received the bulk of the charitable arrange-
ments Sire made while living; of those made in his will, the priory (where
he wished to be buried), and the parish church at Gateshead (where his sons
were buried), were the principal bene ciaries. e only institutions north of
the Tyne to receive bequests were Tynemouth Priory and the four friaries
of Newcastle; and here Sire’s hand was forced by the almost total absence of
friaries between Tyne and Tees.
193
Social and political links across the Tyne did exist; and the contribu-
tion of both Gateshead and Newcastle to the upkeep of Tyne bridge is
a reminder of such connections.
194
e two communities could also, at
times, be united by an ideology of local cooperation: during a dispute of the
1350s, Newcastle appealed to the ‘friendship and neighbourhood’ of South
189
W. M. Ormrod, Political Life in Late Medieval England 1300–1450 (Basingstoke, 1995),
p. 48; GEC, viii, p. 267.
190
Durham Account Rolls, ii, p. 440.
191
DCM, 4.3.Spec.2 (printed, with wrong date, in Surtees, ii, p. 115).
192
For an account of Sire, see Newcastle Deeds, pp. 174–5. For the descriptions, DCM,
1.4.Spec.3–7, 9–12, 14, 17; 4.3.Spec.1, 3, 4, 8, 17; 2.3.Spec.12; Misc. Ch. 4664; Newcastle
Deeds, pp. 174–5.
193
Newcastle Deeds, pp. 174–5; FPD, pp. 5–6. In an earlier will of 1349, Sire requested burial
in the cemetery of St Mary’s, Gateshead: DCM, Cart. I, ff. 225v–6r.
194
Newcastle Deeds, pp. 62–128. For entrepreneurial partnerships between men of Newcastle
and Gateshead, see inter alia Tynemouth Cart., f. 159v (1328); DURH 3/147/3; CPR
1364–7, p. 31 (1364).
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DURHAM: HISTORY, CULTURE AND IDENTITY
57
Shields.
195
ere is, however, no gainsaying either the potential reality of
the boundary between bishopric and county, or its potential signi cance to
the local community. For those who lived near the banks of the Tyne and
gained their income from the river, ‘the liberty of Durham between Tyne
and Tees’ was much more than an ‘imagined community’. Nevertheless
it was the imagined communities and cultural traditions explored above
that formed the basis of their claims and identities. ey knew that it was
as ‘the men of the liberty’ (homines libertatis) that they had free passage in
the Tyne, and that it was to St Cuthbert that a part of the Tyne belonged.
Not for nothing was the southern third of the river known as ‘the water of
St Cuthbert’, and it was naturally Cuthbert who was invoked on ‘the metes
and bounds’ of the liberty on Tyne bridge, which were marked by ‘Cuthbert
stones’ (Cuthbertstanes).
196
On the Tyne, as throughout the liberty as a
whole, cultural traditions based around Cuthbert, the territorial extent of
his liberty, and the privileges of his people, were fundamental both to actual
jurisdictional claims and to the imagination of community.
e rich cultural identity of the liberty of Durham can to some extent
be paralleled in other greater liberties, where historical traditions also
developed to account for their privileged status.
197
But comparisons with
other liberties bring out what was distinctive about the bishopric. First,
Cuthbert’s patronage and the liberty’s historical pedigree gave Durham an
enviable and perhaps unique ability to maintain and develop its privileges,
as is perhaps best illustrated by the Haliwerfolk’s exemption from enforced
military service. Second, Durham’s historical traditions were available to
di erent groups within the liberty, to the priory and the local community,
as well as to the bishop. ese traditions were, in Tim ornton’s words,
‘supportive of the palatine community and its privileges’,
198
and probably
to a degree unmatched elsewhere in England. But they could also support
the potentially con icting privileges of bishop and priory, and might be a
source of dispute as well as of solidarity. On the one hand, con icting tradi-
tions were a factor in the con icts between bishop, prior and local commu-
nity that characterised the nal years of Bek’s episcopate. Yet, conversely,
the liberty’s cultural identity was one factor behind the coherence of ‘the
community of the liberty of Durham’ in the 1310s and 1320s, as we will see
in the next chapter.
195
DCM, 1.3.Spec.38 (summarised in Welford, Newcastle and Gateshead, i, pp. 141–2).
196
Brand, Newcastle, ii, p. 10; C 44/24/7; DCM, 2.1.Reg.5.
197
Below, Conclusions, pp. 427–8; Thornton, Cheshire and the Tudor State, Chapter 2.
198
Thornton, ‘Fifteenth- century Durham’, p. 85.
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58
Durham: Government, Administration and Local Community
2
Durham: Government, Administration
and the Local Community
Matthew Holford
W
e have seen that historical and cultural traditions were fundamental to
the development of Durham’s privileges, and also provided a strong
basis for identification and loyalty through the ‘imagined communities’ of
the Haliwerfolk or ‘the community of the bishopric between Tyne and Tees’.
Equally, however, these imagined communities had a complex relationship
to facts on the ground; and in particular the wapentake of Sadberge had
an ambivalent relationship to the liberty as a whole. As we will find in this
chapter, the wapentake’s ambiguous status was also reflected in the bisho-
pric’s government and administration. Durham and Sadberge were separate
for many administrative purposes, and the liberty lacked strong central
institutions with jurisdiction over the whole area ‘between Tyne and Tees’.
Internal divisions, however, were offset by the status of the entire liberty as
an area where the king’s writ normally did not run. As a rule, all inhabitants
of the liberty answered the bishop’s writs and recognised his ‘royal power’;
they also took their pleas to the liberty’s courts. The liberty’s legal institutions
had their deficiencies, but rather than driving people to seek royal justice,
these deficiencies called forth collective petitions from ‘the community of
the liberty’: the courts were presented as a matter of communal concern
across the bishopric as a whole. In the first half of the fourteenth century, in
fact, ‘the community of the liberty’ was a force with no little institutional and
political reality. In the face of the fiscal and military demands of the crown,
the oppressive regime of Bishop Anthony Bek (1283–1311), and the ransom
payments demanded by the Scots in the 1310s, institutions developed to
make and enforce decisions affecting the entire liberty. Eventually these
institutions became part of episcopal government, but they originated in
genuinely collective action; and such action illustrates the range and depth
of commitment to the liberty ‘between Tyne and Tees’.
roughout our period, the division between the ‘county of Durham’ and
the ‘wapentake of Sadberge’ was fundamental to the administration of the
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liberty.
1
Probably in the thirteenth century, and certainly in the fourteenth,
Sadberge had its own nancial administration and exchequer, and its own
coroner. Its sheri - cum- escheator, while usually the same man as the
sheri of Durham, received separate commissions for business concerning
the wapentake; he conducted a separate tourn within the wapentake, which
also possessed a distinct ‘county’ court.
2
is court was perhaps the most signi cant aspect of the wapentake’s
administrative integrity. e relationship of the county court to the ‘county
community’ has been much debated by historians, not least because little is
known about proceedings and attendance at most courts;
3
and the evidence
from the county courts of Durham and Sadberge is no less di cult to inter-
pret. Suit was widely owed to each court, and also to the ‘great courts’ which
assembled (at least in Durham) three times a year, and which corresponded
to the half- yearly ‘great’ or ‘general counties’ found elsewhere in England.
4
But suit was a burden not a privilege, and many suitors preferred to ne
rather than to discharge their obligations in person; the privileged might
even obtain temporary exemption by episcopal grant.
5
Although we know little of the judicial functions of the liberty’s county
courts, these are unlikely to have been extensive. e rst surviving roll
from the Durham court is from the early eenth century, when debt con-
stituted the overwhelming majority of business, with the sums involved
and the status of the plainti s varying considerably.
6
From earlier extracts
we learn it was in the Durham comitatus that Ranulf Neville impleaded the
prior of Durham for detention of animals in 1293–6 and claimed on one
occasion damages of 100s.; that recovery of a bond for £20 was sought in
about 1331; and that, perhaps most remarkably, Adam Bowes recovered
140 marks from Durham Priory in 1320.
7
But because we have no idea how
1
For a general account of the liberty’s administration in this period, see ‘Office- holders’, i,
passim.
2
Ibid., p. 95; DURH 3/92, m. 17d; DCM, 1.5.Pont.16. Both the wapentake and its court
were sometimes described as comitatus: for example, DURH 3/2, ff. 73v–4r; 20/1; RPD, i,
p. 222; iv, pp. 281, 345–8.
3
For a summary, see M. C. Prestwich, English Politics in the Thirteenth Century
(Basingstoke, 1990), pp. 56–9.
4
DURH 3/2, passim; F. Pollock and F. W. Maitland, The History of English Law, 2nd edn
(Cambridge, 1968), i, p. 540.
5
For the total fines paid in 1335–6 and 1375–6, see DURH 20/1; DCM, 1.5.Pont.16; for a
grant of exemption, NYCRO, ZBO, MG/11.
6
DCM, Misc. Ch. 5722. Debt and trespass were generally the most common forms of
county court litigation in the fourteenth century: R. C. Palmer, The County Courts of
Medieval England, 1150–1350 (Princeton, 1982), pp. 226–8.
7
DCM, Loc.IV.156; Haswell Deed 81; Misc. Ch. 4026. See also FPD, p. 47: pleas of the
wapentake of Sadberge in 1332–3 concerning 10s. owed to the keeper of Tees bridge.
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60
typical such sums were, it is impossible to compare the Durham county
courts with their equivalents elsewhere. Generally in the fourteenth century
the sums claimed in other county courts were small, yet sums of up to £200
sometimes occur.
8
It is possible that the comitatus of Durham and that of
Sadberge dealt with pleas which elsewhere in England would have been
considered in the higher courts; but we cannot be completely con dent
that, as in Cheshire, the ‘county court was a body with much greater power
and judicial importance than its namesakes in other counties’.
9
It was the other governmental functions of the comitatus that – in the
liberty as elsewhere in England – were the source of its real signi cance for
the local community.
10
Admittedly it must be emphasised that in important
ways the two comitatus of Durham and Sadberge could not have mattered as
their equivalents did in other parts of the kingdom, where the emergence of
Parliament and developments in royal government meant that in the four-
teenth century ‘the county court stood more closely than before at the centre
of the county’s political life’.
11
is could not be said of the liberty’s county
courts; but they were nevertheless major forums for the administrative and
public business of the bishopric. First, the county courts – probably held
every two or three weeks
12
– were also the occasion for sessions of gaol deliv-
ery presided over by the sheri . When a sheri was appointed in 1345 he
was instructed to deliver the gaols at each comitatus ‘as was customary’, and
since earlier known sessions of gaol delivery in Durham were always held
on a Monday, the day of the Durham county court, the practice evidently
was customary.
13
e juries required by the various cases necessitated the
presence of a substantial number of gentry and freeholders. us three
cases tried at an undated Durham session were heard before twenty- eight
8
Palmer, County Courts, pp. 227–8.
9
P. H. W. Booth, The Financial Administration of the Lordship and County of Chester,
1272–1377 (Chetham Society, 1981), p. 8.
10
Cf. Pollock and Maitland, History of English Law, i, pp. 554–5; J. R. Maddicott, ‘The county
community and the making of public opinion in fourteenth- century England’, TRHS, 5th
ser., 28 (1978), pp. 33–4.
11
Maddicott, ‘County community’, p. 29.
12
The Quo Warranto proceedings stated that at Norham crown pleas were heard ‘every two
or three weeks at the bishop’s will’ (PQW, p. 604). This would tally with the evidence for the
sessions of the Durham county court. In 1433 two weeks was the specified interval (Storey,
Langley, p. 249), and presentments of crown pleas, apparently associated with the comita-
tus, were heard fortnightly on Mondays in the early fourteenth century: K. Emsley and C.
M. Fraser, The Courts of the County Palatine of Durham (Durham, 1984), pp. 13–14.
13
RPD, iv, pp. 346–7 (cf. DURH 3/30, m. 4d: the gaols of Durham and Sadberge to be deliv-
ered by the sheriff ‘according to the ancient custom of our royal liberty’); JUST 1/226, m.1;
DCM, Misc. Ch. 2640; Loc.V.36; cf. CIMisc., ii, no. 200. By the early fourteenth century,
prisoners detained for homicide were delivered not by the sheriff, but by panels of justices:
‘Office- holders’, i, p. 98.
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di erent jurors, including William son of omas Auford, William son of
omas Barmpton, William Brackenbury (Bishop Kellawe’s chief forester),
Hugh Burdon, John Fallodon (probably later an episcopal justice), John
Hansard, John Nesbit (an important Hartlepool merchant) and omas
Tours. is was not untypical: sessions of 1329 or 1330 required similar
numbers of jurors of comparable status.
14
Furthermore, inquisitions post
mortem were usually held ‘in the full county court’;
15
and the little evidence
we have suggests that inquisition juries were similar in composition.
16
ese
administrative and judicial functions of the comitatus were quite distinctive.
Elsewhere in England it was not unheard of for inquisitions post mortem to
be held in the county court, but it was by no means usual; they were o en
conducted on the estates themselves.
17
Gaols were delivered with varying
frequency by special commissions of justices.
18
If the judicial competence of
the bishopric’s county courts did not make them institutions of particular
importance, therefore, their unique administrative functions amply com-
pensated for this. Furthermore, the liberty’s higher courts may also have sat
on days when the comitatus was in session: at any rate, Monday was a very
common day on which assizes were heard in Durham.
19
Because the county courts were well attended, they were justi ably seen
as the public forums of local society, and it was recognised that business
proclaimed there had in some sense been proclaimed to the whole local
community. It was in the comitatus of Durham, for example, that it was
publicly acknowledged in 1313 that a deed had been fraudulently made, and
the acknowledgement was enrolled in the court’s records.
20
Noti cations of
episcopal pardon, and of some episcopal grants, were given there.
21
Bishop
Bury’s charter of free warren to John Carew was endorsed to the e ect that
14
DCM, Misc. Ch. 2640, mm. 1d–2. For John Fallodon, who first occurs as a justice in 1343,
see the relevant entries in ‘Office- holders’, ii; for Nesbit, C. M. Fraser, ‘The pattern of trade
in the North- East of England, 1265–1350’, NH, 4 (1969), pp. 52–3. Burdon and Tours
probably used armorial seals: G&B, nos. 468, 2456.
15
DURH 3/2, passim. This is often explicitly the case in Durham; it is also significant that
most inquisitions took place on Monday, the day when the comitatus was held. The great
majority of Sadberge inquisitions post mortem occurred on Saturday, and this was evi-
dently the day when that court met.
16
The abstracts of inquisitions post mortem compiled for Bishop Langley (DURH 3/2)
omitted details of jurors; but their names sometimes survive in contemporary or later
copies of the full inquests: DURH 3/30, m. 6; RPD, i, pp. 256–7; DCM, 6.1.Elemos.19;
Bodl., MS Laud Misc. 748, f. 73r.
17
The location of inquests is given somewhat haphazardly in CIPM, vii–viii, and regularly
from CIPM, ix, onwards.
18
R. B. Pugh, Imprisonment in Medieval England (Cambridge, 1968), pp. 255–94.
19
‘Office- holders’, ii, passim.
20
DCM, Haswell Deed 105, dorse.
21
RPD, iii, pp. 239–40, 329, 340–2, 346, 370–1, 416–17.
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BORDER LIBERTIES AND LOYALTIES
62
it had been proclaimed and enrolled in the county courts of both Durham
and Sadberge early in 1340.
22
Particularly important inquisitions of public
concern might also be held in the courts, such as that of 1336 which
inquired into trespasses in the River Tyne ‘against the church and liberty
of Durham’.
23
None of this was unique to the bishopric; county courts elsewhere in
England performed similar functions.
24
What was distinctive about the liberty
was not only that its courts are likely to have been unusually well attended, but
that it had two such institutions. As Bury’s grant to John Carew illustrates, if
the bishop was to communicate with local society through the institutions of
the liberty, he might well have to consider county and wapentake as separate
entities. In fact, the liberty lacked any central court, because its judicial organi-
sation was also powerfully in uenced by the separation between Durham and
Sadberge. When the bishop held an eyre, the justices in county and wapentake
acted independently and le separate records. ‘Pleas of the justices of the
wapentake of Sadberge’ survive, probably from 1242, and it is no coincidence
that the extant records of the 1279 eyre relate only to Sadberge.
25
For other
judicial business the courts of Durham and Sadberge were similarly inde-
pendent: it was in the bishop’s court at Sadberge, for example, that omas
Hay brought an assize of mort d’ancestor against John II Balliol in the late
thirteenth century, and it was in the same court that a series of nal concords
relating to Eggleston was levied in the rst half of the fourteenth century.
26
County and wapentake received separate judicial commissions, even from the
crown during a vacancy of the see; and it is again no coincidence that the 1345
plea roll from the bishopric relates only to the county of Durham.
27
So real, in
fact, was the judicial separation between county and wapentake that formal
arrangements existed by the late thirteenth century for pleas requiring a jury
from both jurisdictions to be heard at Blackditch ‘on the marches between the
counties of Durham and Sadberge’.
28
True, the jurisdictional integrity of county and wapentake was not always
honoured. ere are some suggestions that the court at Durham had a supe-
22
NYCRO, ZQH 2/14/87; cf. RPD, iii, p. 252.
23
Brand, Newcastle, ii, p. 10, from BL, MS Stowe 930, f. 117r–v. For an inquisition apparently
held in the comitatus of Sadberge, see DURH 3/202/1–5 (1361); for inquisitions probably
held in the Durham comitatus, DURH 3/30, m. 8d; 3/202/19, 23, 29, 35, 52.
24
W. A. Morris, ‘The sheriff’, in J. F. Willard et al. (eds), The English Government at Work,
1327–36 (Cambridge, MA, 1940–50), ii, pp. 54–5.
25
‘Durham assize rolls’, nos. 397ff., with D. Crook, Records of the General Eyre (London, 1982),
pp. 93, 104, n. 2; JUST 1/225; cf. Fraser, Bek, p. 83; Emsley and Fraser, Courts, pp. 26–7.
26
BL, MS Lansdowne 902, ff. 74r, 355v.
27
RPD, iv, pp. 88, 331–2; DURH 3/30, mm. 4d, 12d; 13/221.
28
Fraser, Bek, p. 84.
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rior role: the 1242 eyre roll includes a plea from Sadberge which ‘ought to be
determined at Durham’, and the 1235–6 roll contains assizes ‘of the wapen-
take of Sadberge’ heard at Durham.
29
e exchequer at Durham sometimes
dealt with moneys from Sadberge: it was at Durham, for example, that the
rent of 60s. was paid for the manor of Aislaby, according to an inquisition
post mortem of 1363. And business relating to the wapentake was sometimes
proclaimed in the Durham comitatus.
30
Other aspects of administration also
treated the bishopric as a whole: the liberty had a single chancery, and the
bishop’s steward had jurisdiction over the entire liberty; the hallmote court
over which he presided moved freely around the bishopric. Despite these
quali cations, though, the routine administrative and judicial organisation
of the liberty did pay great respect to the division between county and wap-
entake. e hallmote court in particular had very little impact in Sadberge,
where the bishop’s manorial jurisdiction was limited.
31
It is true that the men
who carried out episcopal administration in Durham and Sadberge were,
from at least the mid to late thirteenth century, almost invariably identical.
e same justices were appointed for both areas, just as the sheri and eschea-
tor of Durham was almost invariably also appointed sheri and escheator of
Sadberge, and prepared a single account for the two districts.
32
Unity of per-
sonnel therefore counterbalanced administrative separation; but this did not
necessarily a ect or re ect local sentiment in county and wapentake them-
selves. And there can be little doubt that the liberty’s administrative structures
both re ected and in uenced such local sentiment. As we saw in the previous
chapter, despite the wapentake’s incorporation into the liberty ‘between Tyne
and Tees’, some sense of its distinctive history and identity remained.
33
at
Sadberge retained its administrative integrity must be attributed in some part
to the wishes of its local community; and once its separateness was estab-
lished by administrative routine it could only become increasingly con rmed.
e maintenance of these administrative divisions was certainly a matter of
concern: among the abuses with which Bishop Anthony Bek was charged in
1303 was that men taken in the county of Durham were being imprisoned in
the wapentake of Sadberge, and vice versa.
34
e wapentake can thus be compared with the hundred of Maccles eld
in the liberty of Cheshire. at hundred was held in dower by queens of
29
‘Durham assize rolls’, nos. 36, 38–9, 449, etc.; Emsley and Fraser, Courts, p. 26. See also a
final concord concerning Low Dinsdale, made before the bishop’s justices at Durham in
1236: DURH 3/43, m. 13.
30
DURH 3/2, ff. 73v–4r; RPD, iii, pp. 340–1, 416–17.
31
Hatfield Survey, pp. 194–8; DURH 3/12, ff. 15r, 39r, 46r, 52r, etc.
32
‘Office- holders’, i, p. 95; DURH 20/1; DCM, 1.5.Pont.16.
33
Above, Chapter 1, pp. 46–51.
34
RPD, iii, p. 42 (‘la fraunchise de Duresme’ here denotes the county, not the liberty as a whole).
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64
England between 1270 and 1347; it acquired extensive administrative inde-
pendence during that period; and its inhabitants remained jealous of that
independence even a er the hundred had been reunited with the liberty
as a whole.
35
But if Maccles eld challenged Cheshire’s central institutions,
Cheshire did at least have some claim to possess a central court that was
also the comitatus of the liberty as a whole, and as a result the connections
between the comitatus and the local community were strong and signi -
cant. ‘ e community of Cheshire’ defended the jurisdictional omnicom-
petence of the county court, and the community’s traditional privilege of
giving judgements there that could a ect the whole of local society.
36
In
1259–60, for example, it was in the county court that ‘the barons, knights
and free tenants’ of Cheshire decided which writs could be pleaded in time
of war; and it was there, in response to the appointment of omas Orby as
keeper of the liberty’s forests, that ‘the whole community’ defended the tra-
ditional rights of the court.
37
e Marcher lordships of Wales had similarly
important central institutions. And in England itself the standard county
court was an institution that made possible collective action and negotia-
tion on the part of ‘the community of the county’.
38
is was not, it would seem, the case in Durham. ere was no single
institution, with routine jurisdiction over the liberty as a whole, where the
collective business of the bishopric could be transacted. If the ‘territoriality’
of the local community was moulded by involvement in local administra-
tion, it was by the distinct areas of Durham and Sadberge.
39
e suggestion
that the county court was where ‘the community of the liberty’ naturally
assembled cannot, therefore, be accepted.
40
In fact, it would seem that any
‘community of the liberty’ had little institutional basis. It lacked the ‘strong
sense of administrative . . . identity’ out of which, it has been suggested,
‘county communities’ elsewhere in England developed. It likewise lacked
something else which, it has been argued, was essential for ‘a county com-
munity worthy of the name’ – namely, ‘an institution capable of represent-
35
Booth, Financial Administration, pp. 86–7; P. Morgan, War and Society in Late Medieval
Cheshire, 1277–1403 (Chetham Society, 1987), pp. 69–70; D. M. Clayton, The Administration
of the County Palatine of Chester, 1442–85 (Chetham Society, 1991), pp. 60–1.
36
Booth, Financial Administration, pp. 8–9, 52; cf. Calendar of the County Court, City
Court and Eyre Rolls of Chester, 1259–1297, ed. R. S. Brown (Chetham Society, 1925),
pp. xvi–xix; Palmer, County Courts, pp. 56–74; Clayton, Administration of Chester, pp.
3–11.
37
County Court Rolls of Chester, pp. 1–2.
38
Davies, Lordship and Society, pp. 155–7; Maddicott, ‘County community’, pp. 31, 39–40.
39
For ‘territoriality’, see P. Coss, The Origins of the English Gentry (Cambridge, 2003), pp.
9–10.
40
Lapsley, Durham, pp. 109–14; Emsley and Fraser, Courts, p. 12.
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DURHAM: GOVERNMENT, ADMINISTRATION AND LOCAL COMMUNITY
65
ing gentle society and providing a forum in which the landed classes could
articulate their political concerns’.
41
While the implications of these administrative divisions should not be
underestimated, however, they were counterbalanced by other features of
the liberty’s government and culture which did make the bishopric as a
whole an important focus both for identi cation and for the articulation of
community. First, there was the privileged status of the whole area between
Tyne and Tees, and its enclaves in Northumberland, as a ‘royal liberty’ in
which, for the most part, the king’s writ did not run, and where the over-
whelming majority of government was carried out by the bishop’s men
and in his name. is was a basic fact of the political culture of the liberty,
which impinged on every aspect of local life, even if few people acknowl-
edged its impact as explicitly as William Twizel of Norham did when he
described how he had obtained a mortmain licence from Bishop Richard
Bury ‘exercising his royal power (regia potestas)’.
42
e language and
symbols of government, re ected in the bishops’ writs and seals, embodied
the liberty’s distinctive status. It is true that the well- known ‘palatinate’ seal,
representing on the obverse the bishop enthroned, and on the reverse the
‘prince- bishop’ on horseback in full armour, was a relatively late develop-
ment. It appears rst in Hat eld’s episcopate (1345–81), used for temporal
rather than spiritual business relating to the liberty, and was a product of
that bishop’s administrative reorganisation. It had a precedent towards
the end of Bury’s episcopate (1333–45), when a chancery seal depicting St
Cuthbert enthroned was introduced; but for the majority of Bury’s epis-
copate, and during those of his predecessors, a single seal was apparently
used for all episcopal business concerning the diocese as well as the liberty
of Durham.
43
e iconography of these earlier seals is more varied and less
assertive than the ‘palatinate’ seals, with their obvious echoes of the royal
great seal, and their clear allusion to the bishop’s regalian powers – an allu-
sion that was plain to contemporaries.
44
No such allusions can be read in
the earlier seals, even those depicting St Cuthbert enthroned; and the image
of the bishop enthroned on Bek’s seal is more likely to be a re ection of
his general ostentation and magni cence than a reference to the liberty’s
41
W. M. Ormrod, Political Life in Late Medieval England, 1300–1450 (Basingstoke, 1995),
pp. 48–9.
42
DCM, 4.1.Spec.40.
43
G&B, nos. 3133–4, 3138. Bury was also the first bishop of Durham for whom a separate
seal ad causas is known. It is attached to a document of 1343, and resulted from adminis-
trative reorganisation in the same year: Reg. Langley, i, pp. xiii–xiv. For the earlier bishops,
see G&B, nos. 3108–31.
44
As is revealed by the testimony of some of the liberty’s tenants in 1433: Storey, Langley, p. 257.
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