sat under one political roof.
Initially this was a flimsy arrangement, vulnerable to the tremors of dynastic strife. Infighting between the Conqueror’s grandchildren during the Anarchy of 1135–54 saw the Border region ceded to the Scottish king David I, consolidating his own realm on Norman lines. David proceeded to hold court and mint coins at Carlisle. A dip in Scottish power after his death, however, tilted the balance of forces back the way of the English monarchy. A Yorkshire chronicler relates how Henry II, with righteous selfinterest, warned ‘that the king of England should not be cheated of so great a part of his kingdom, and that he could not passively endure such an amputation’. The same source adds that the Scots ‘wisely decided that the king of England had the advantage in this matter, on the merits of the case and in the strength of his forces’.11 An agreement struck at Chester in 1157 returned the frontier to the Solway and Tweed. In a later treaty made at York, the Scots quitclaimed Northumberland, Cumberland and Westmorland to leave only Berwick and a sliver of ‘debatable lands’ in contention.
Viking conquest, regional secession, Scottish annexation – every alternative destiny for the former land of Bede and Alcuin had been closed off. Superior force of arms and feudal settlement had bonded England together at a remarkably early historical juncture compared with other European states, its feudal hierarchy topped by Norman and other French potentates forming part of a cohesive cross-Channel ruling bloc. In France, by contrast, the Capetian dynasty needed several centuries to bolt additional principalities onto its realm, one after the other, while unification of Italy and Germany would have to await the stimulus of modernera nationalist impulses. But just as the Risorgimento, far from uniting the Italian peninsula on an equal footing, subordinated one half of the country to the other, so northern England would languish on the margins of a kingdom which cared little for it. Geoffrey Barrow, a historian of medieval Scotland, writes that
Although the kings from William Rufus to Edward I took very seriously their grip upon Cumbria and Northumbria, they could not spend much time visiting these regions which were remote from the castles, hunting lodges, monasteries and rich trading towns of southern England, Normandy, Maine, the lower Loire valley, Poitou and Gascony whence their power derived and where, one feels, their hearts really lay.12
The character of the territory recovered by Henry II remains to be sketched in. Even by medieval standards it was overwhelmingly rural and underdeveloped, too remote to benefit from either the patronage of the royal court or the commercial stimulant of London, which dominated trade with Continental ports a short hop across the Narrow Sea. Urban life was especially slow out of the blocks west of the Pennines, very much off the beaten track and confined to small-time Irish Sea traffic. Ports on the east coast were better situated to access the prime commercial routes pointing to London and Europe, but they never captured more than a fifth of the available trade. York, Hull and Newcastle, together with Penrith, a market centre in Cumbria’s Eden valley, were the only northern representatives among the fifty richest boroughs of pre-Black Death England. York never recovered its Anglo-Saxon prominence but in a regional context it remained altogether exceptional. Nerve centre of the northern church, an inland port prosperous in the wool trade and a county capital surrounded by good farming country, it vied with Bristol, Lincoln and Norwich for the title of England’s foremost provincial city, yet even York had only one-seventh of London’s taxable wealth in the lay subsidies of 1327 and 1332.13
What about the countryside? Whereas the richer soils and drier climate of southern counties facilitate a judicious mixture of arable and livestock farming, Defoe found north Lancashire ‘all barren and wild, of no use or advantage either to man or beast’. Westmorland was ghastlier still, ‘the wildest, most barren and frightful of any that I have passed over in England, or even in Wales itself’.14 The standard depiction of English feudalism is taken from the champion country of central and southern England, where in a landscape of common-field agriculture and clustered settlements there was virtually a manor for every village. Here, the strength of feudal lordship told in the preponderance of customary over free rents and tenures. Further north, in lowland areas of Yorkshire, Durham and Northumberland, nucleated villages and customary tenures were also the norm, although taxable wealth was lower. Customary tenures were even more prevalent across the Border counties, where Henry I had established substantial lordships. In boggy and isolated Lancashire, on the other hand, free rents were of higher value than customary ones.15
The distinction ought to matter, since by the end of the thirteenth century customary tenants had been declared legally unfree. But delayed subdivision of feudal holdings and the dispersed settlement patterns associated with pastoral farming meant that seigniorial supervision was more thinly stretched in the North, certainly in upland areas. Combined with the lighter labour requirements of animal husbandry and an abundance of reclaimable land into which peasants might flee, this made for less onerous feudal exactions, and no automatic connection ever obtained between customary tenure, servile status and compulsory labour services.16 E. A. Kosminsky cautioned in a classic work that ‘the division of peasants into “villein” and “free”, characteristic of southern manors, can only with difficulty be applied under northern conditions.’17
Some parts of the North did more closely mirror the intense feudalism of the Midlands and the South. The Boldon Book, a Domesday-like survey conducted on the Bishopric of Durham’s estates in the late twelfth century, provides evidence of wellfunctioning demesnes and villeinage with heavy labour services. But as a rule, whereas profit-minded estate holders in the South East might ramp up demesne production to serve the large London market, labour services were less important to the northern feudal economy than money rents and they decayed earlier, in many cases well before the arrival of the Black Death in 1348–9 when severe labour shortages caused landlords everywhere to pull out of demesne cultivation and become rentiers instead.18
The burdens of serfdom, then, were generally lighter in the North, but rural benightedness – the absence of towns and literacy – was correspondingly deeper. Musgrove, citing county-by-county statistical studies by Conan Doyle and Havelock Ellis, argues persuasively that the North was historically marked by a much lower quotient of intellectuals – thinkers, writers, artists – than the South. Jewell supplies supporting evidence, pointing out the monopoly of higher education (Oxford, Cambridge, the Inns of Court) held by the South down to the 1820s, leaving the North in a very different situation than Scotland. As Musgrove puts it, ‘highly productive contexts for the intellectual life do not include militarised frontiers or heavily industrialised towns. It was the misfortune of northern England after the age of Bede that its greatness was based on both.’19
Accounting for no more than one-eighth of medieval England’s population and wealth, the land above the Mersey, Trent and Humber presented too narrow a platform for its magnates to sustain a leading role in the elite revolts which plagued the country’s weaker kings.20 Northumberland and Yorkshire landowners of middling wealth were first to stir against King John, refusing to sponsor or enlist in his attempt to claw back French territories lost to the Capetian monarchy, so that ‘Northerners’ became a tag for the 1215 Revolt as a whole, but estate holders from eastern and southern counties ultimately had the run of the Magna Carta committee.21
It required a large inflow of resources from the centre, continued for many years, to put the northern aristocracy on a stronger footing. Conquest of the principality of Wales in 1284 left Cumberland and Northumberland standing on England’s only land frontier with an independent state. The attack on Scottish independence, beginning with capture of Berwick and victory at Dunbar in 1296, opened up opportunities for rising northern dynasties to accumulate estates and offices at the Crown’s pleasure.22 Even after Edward III pivoted English aggrandisement from Scotland to France in 1337, Anglo-Scottish conflict would rumble on for centuries. Wardens of the march were subsidised by the royal court to hold the North against the Scots using private armies recruited from Durham, Yorkshire and the Border counties. Henry Percy, a Yorkshire magnate who had fought at Berwick and Dunbar, acquired the castle and barony of Alnwick from Antony Bek, Bishop of Durham, in 1310. The Nevilles, descended from Anglo-Danish thegns in County Durham, also won royal favour through