Regional Identities in North-East England, 1300-2000 (Regions and Regionalism in History)

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Author: Adrian Green | A.J. Pollard

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Regions and Regionalism in History

Regional Identities in North-East England, 1300–2000

In November 2004 the people of Newcastle-upon-Tyne, the historic counties of Durham and Northumberland, along with Middlesbrough, Redcar and Cleveland in North Yorkshire, decisively rejected a regional assembly. The referendum came as the culmination of a long campaign for regional devolution, which raised a number of important questions. What sort of a region is and was the North East of England? How deeprooted is the identity of the North East as a region? How can one find a regional identity in the more distant past? This collection of essays, the product of a research project undertaken collaboratively by the five north-eastern Universities, looks for the elusive self-conscious region over many centuries. It suggests that the notion of a single regional identity is a recent phenomenon overlaying a kaleidoscope of sub-regional associations and connections. Today’s region appears to be more fissured and fragile than we like to imagine. The approach and conclusions reached are of significance not only for the history of the old counties of north-eastern England, but also for the wider history of Britain, and hold significant implications for the history of regions and regionalism in general. Dr Adrian Green is Lecturer in History at Durham University Professor A. J. Pollard is University Fellow at the University of Teesside.

Regions and Regionalism in History ISSN 1742–8254 This series, published in association with the AHRC Centre for North-East England History (NEEHI), aims to reflect and encourage the increasing academic and popular interest in regions and regionalism in historical perspective. It also seeks to explore the complex historical antecedents of regionalism as it appears in a wide range of international contexts. Series Editor Dr Peter Rushton, University of Sunderland Editorial Board Fergus Campbell, University of Newcastle Bill Lancaster, University of Northumbria Christian Liddy, University of Durham Diana Newton, University of Teesside Peter Rushton, University of Sunderland Proposals for future volumes may be sent to the following address: North-East England History Institute 5th Floor Bolbec Hall Westgate Road Newcastle upon Tyne NE1 1SE Previously published volumes are listed at the back of this book.

Regional Identities in North-East England, 1300–2000

Edited by Adrian Green A. J. Pollard

THE BOYDELL PRESS

© Contributors 2007 All Rights Reserved. Except as permitted under current legislation no part of this work may be photocopied, stored in a retrieval system, published, performed in public, adapted, broadcast, transmitted, recorded or reproduced in any form or by any means, without the prior permission of the copyright owner First published 2007 The Boydell Press, Woodbridge ISBN 978–1–84383–335–2

The Boydell Press is an imprint of Boydell & Brewer Ltd PO Box 9, Woodbridge, Suffolk IP12 3DF, UK and of Boydell & Brewer Inc. 668 Mt Hope Avenue, Rochester, NY 14620, USA website: www.boydellandbrewer.com A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library This publication is printed on acid-free paper Printed in Great Britain by Biddles Ltd, King’s Lynn

Contents Foreword

The AHRC Centre for North-East England History ANTHONY FLETCHER

vii

Contributors

xi

Preface

xv

Abbreviations

xvii

Introduction

Identifying Regions ADRIAN GREEN and A.J. POLLARD

1

1

North-East England in the Late Middle Ages: Rivers, Boundaries and Identities, 1296-1461 MATTHEW HOLFORD, ANDY KING and CHRISTIAN D. LIDDY

27

2

Borders and Bishopric: Regional Identities in the Pre-Modern North East, 1559-1620 DIANA NEWTON

49

3

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

71

4

A Shock for Bishop Pudsey: Social Change and Regional Identity in the Diocese of Durham, 1820-1920 ROBERT LEE

93

5

Business Regionalism: Defining and Owning the Industrial North East, 1850-1914 GRAEME J. MILNE

113

vi

CONTENTS

6

Competing Identities: Irish and Welsh Migration and the North East of England, 1851-1980 JOAN ALLEN and RICHARD C. ALLEN

133

7

Immigrant Politics and North-East Identity, 1907-1973 D.A.J. MacPHERSON and DAVID RENTON

161

8

Regionalism and Cultural History: The Case of North-Eastern England, 1918-1976 NATASHA VALL

181

Conclusion

Finding North-East England ADRIAN GREEN and A.J. POLLARD

209

Index

227

Foreword I was delighted to accept an invitation to chair the Management Committee of the AHRC Centre for North-East England History in 2000, because the five-year project which had been set up seemed to me both ambitious and immensely worthwhile. As Professor of Modern History at the University of Durham from 1987 to 1995, I had learnt much about the region, had become enthusiastic about many aspects of its past and come to appreciate the quality of the research already being conducted locally. When we met periodically to assess progress of the project, with leaders of the five research ‘strands’ in the forefront, and, as draft work by our five initial researchers came in, it was exciting to see the project’s objective of five substantial monographs unfolding. In fact nine postdoctoral researchers in all worked on the project and, with admirable assistance from our publisher Boydell and Brewer, five substantial monographs have been published. The many meetings held between 2000 and 2005 and the annual conferences, especially the large international one in 2004, were crucial occasions for sharing ideas and arguments about the central themes of all this research. This has been a huge and genuinely collaborative effort. Special thanks go to the five strand leaders. It was always clear to me that they would be the linchpin, in terms of academic leadership and control. They fulfilled their task magnificently. It was equally obvious to me that the keen involvement of senior staff in the five institutions involved in the project was essential. Those who attended meetings of the Management Committee always responded readily and supportively, as we handled the administrative issues before us. The AHRC observers, Professor Barrie Dobson and Professor Harry Dickinson, also contributed much to Management Committee discussions. I would especially like to thank those who successively bore the day to day management of the project with such skill making my task very easy: Professor David Rollason and Dr Bill Lancaster.

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FOREWORD

This volume, which I am very happy to welcome, was designed from the start as the summation of the overall project.We always intended that this was where the researchers would finally address the implications of their particular work, on periods and topics, for the question of regional identity. How far we and they would be able, at the end of the project, to answer the big questions about regional identity in North-East England has long remained uncertain.Yet the final achievement of the contributors to this volume in tackling and producing answers to these questions, brought out in their Introduction and Conclusion by the editors, Adrian Green and A.J. Pollard, is a triumphant vindication of the generosity of the AHRC in supporting this research project over the five years from 2000 to 2005. The editors use their Introduction to explore the conceptual, methodological and historiographical issues behind studying regional identity in the North East over time. Their premise is that it must have changed and developed in ways likely to be very complex. This is the crucial point of departure. This book is not about regionalism as a significant political force. The search is for coherent and self-conscious regional identity, something the contributors expected to find elusive. They have read very widely and deeply. In a concluding essay to the volume, ‘Finding North-East England’, cogently and skilfully argued, the editors come up with their own answer to their question.They claim only that it is ‘provisional and contestable’. One would not like to guess that it will prove definitive, but it will certainly be the starting point for all future work on the regional identity of the North East. So where has this volume taken us? The Conclusion to the volume stresses that ‘human agency makes a region’.The idea of the North East as a region is modern, the sense of self-conscious regional identity emerging slowly and with difficulty in the twentieth century. So this essay is as much about what prevented this self-conscious regional identity from being formed over many centuries, as about how it was finally created. It is about the industrial, social and cultural configurations focussed upon the Tyne which gradually displaced earlier configurations around Northumberland and the county palatine of Durham. It is about Tynesiders and Wearsiders, Newcastle’s hegemony and the peripheries of the region. The denouement is Tyne/Tees as a commercial television company, the submergence of the cloth cap image of the Durham miner in the cultural world of the whippet. Tyneside appropriated the North East; it was Tyneside writ large. Regional identity amalgamated the miner and the Geordie. It also, the authors show, mythologised the past, drawing both border ballads and the cult of St Cuthbert into play for popular consumption.

FOREWORD

ix

There is really no substitute, to grasp how the authors found their North East, for travelling with them on their journey of discovery, a journey through documents, essays, PhD theses and monographs, including the outputs of this Research Centre itself. I cannot recommend this collection more highly than by saying that it is absolutely required reading for all those interested in the history of North-East England.The AHRC has every reason to be more than satisfied with what has been achieved with their money. ANTHONY FLETCHER

The publishers acknowledge the generous financial support of the Marc Fitch Fund in the production of this volume.

Contributors Joan Allen is a Lecturer in Modern British History at Newcastle University, with research interests in British radicalism, the Victorian press and the Irish in Britain. Much of her work engages with the history of North-East England. She was Postgraduate Training Director of the AHRC Centre for North-East England History between 2001 and 2004 and also served as an Associate Director in 2004. She has published an edited collection on the Chartist press with Owen R. Ashton: Papers for the People. A Study of the Chartist Press (2005) and, with Richard Buswell, co-authored Rutherford’s Ladder:The Making of the University of Northumbria (2005). Richard Allen is the Fulbright-Robertson Professor of British History for 2006-07 at Westminster College, Missouri. He was a member of the Publications Committee and a member of the migrations strand of the AHRC Centre for North-East England History from 2002-05. He has published widely on many aspects of Quakerism in Wales and the North East of England, and on migration and cultural identity. Among his recent publications is Quaker Communities in Early Modern Wales: From Radicalism to Respectability (University of Wales Press, 2007). He is currently coauthoring Quaker Networks and Moral Reform in the North East of England for Edwin Mellen Press, and completing research for a new study of early modern Welsh religious emigrants to Pennsylvania entitled, Transatlantic Connections.Welsh Quaker Emigrants and Colonial Pennsylvania, 1650-1766. Adrian Green is a Lecturer in History at Durham University, where he teaches British regional history. He is Durham University’s representative on the North-East England History Institute’s Management Committee and directs its postgraduate programme – the Masters in Research in Regional History. His publications include ‘Houses in North-Eastern England: Regionality and the British Beyond, c.1600-1750’ in Susan Lawrence, ed., Archaeologies of the British: Explorations of Identity in Great Britain and its Colonies, 1600-1945 (2003), and ‘County Durham at the Restoration: A Social and Economic Case-Study’ in Adrian Green et al., County Durham Hearth Tax Assessment Lady Day 1666 (British Records Society 2006, Index Library 119, Hearth Tax Series IV, 2006).

xii

CONTRIBUTORS

Matthew Holford is a Research Associate at Cambridge University and the National Archives, working on the Calendar of Inquisitions Post Mortem for 1442-47. He was previously a research associate at Durham University, funded by the Leverhulme Trust, where he co-authored a monograph on Border Liberties and Loyalties in Thirteenth and Fourteenth Century England (forthcoming, 2007). His other publications include articles on the cultural and political history of Yorkshire and County Durham in the later middle ages. Andy King is a Research Assistant at the University of Southampton, working on the AHRC-funded project ‘The Soldier in Late Medieval England’. He was previously a research associate at Durham University, where he edited Sir Thomas Gray: Scalacronica (1272-1363), Surtees Society 209 (2005), and contributed to Border Liberties and Loyalties in Thirteenth and Fourteenth Century England (forthcoming, 2007). He has published a number of articles examining the political society of fourteenth century Northumberland and the impact on it of the Anglo-Scottish wars, and on identity in the late medieval North East. He has also co-edited a collection of essays, with Michael Penman: England and Scotland in the Fourteenth Century: New Perspectives (forthcoming, 2007). Rob Lee is a Lecturer at the University of Teesside, specialising in nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century regional history. He was a researcher based at Durham for the AHRC Centre. He has recently published two books, Rural Society and the Anglican Clergy 1815-1914: Encountering and Managing the Poor (Boydell, 2006) and Unquiet Country: Voices of the Rural Poor, 1820-1880 (Windgather, 2005), and he is currently working on a comparative study of radicalism and dissent on the landed estates of East Anglia and North-East England. Christian Liddy is a Lecturer at Durham University, where he teaches late medieval history and is Director of the MA in Medieval History. He has published widely on aspects of English urban history, including a recent book, War, Politics and Finance in Late Medieval English Towns: Bristol, York and the Crown, 1350-1400 (Boydell, 2005). Previously an AHRC researcher at the Centre for North-East England History, he has co-edited a volume of essays entitled North-East England in the Later Middle Ages (Boydell, 2005). His new book, The Bishopric of Durham in the Late Middle Ages, will appear for Boydell in 2008.

CONTRIBUTORS

xiii

D.A.J. MacPherson is an AHRC Research Fellow at the University of Warwick, where he is working on the ‘Women in Modern Irish Culture, 1800-2005’ project with Maria Luddy and Gerardine Meaney. Formerly an AHRC researcher at the Centre for North-East England History, based at the University of Sunderland, he is currently writing a book about Irish women’s migration to the North East of England, which reflects on the associational life of women from both Catholic and Protestant backgrounds. Publications include articles in Eire-Ireland and Irish Historical Studies. Graeme J. Milne is Research Editor for the AHRC-funded Liverpool in Print project, a joint venture by the University of Liverpool and Liverpool Record Office. From 2001-03 he was a researcher in the University of Newcastle’s strand of the AHRC Centre for North-East England History. An historian of port cities and maritime business, his recent work includes North East England, 1850-1914: The Dynamics of a Maritime-Industrial Region (Boydell, 2006); ‘Maritime Liverpool’, in John Belchem, ed., Liverpool 800: Culture, Character, History (Liverpool University Press, 2006); and ‘British Business and the Telephone, 1878-1911’, Business History 49 (2007). Diana Newton is a Lecturer and History Research Team Leader at the University of Teesside, where she is also Director of the Centre for Regional and Local Historical Research and Director of North-East England History Institute. She was formerly a researcher of the AHRC Centre for North-East England History. Her North-East England, 15291625: Governance, Culture and Identity (Boydell) appeared in 2006, and she has written several articles and chapters on the early modern north-eastern parts of England. Currently, she is engaged in a study of the impact of reformation in the North East and is editing a volume on the history of Newcastle before 1700. A.J. Pollard retired from full time work at the University of Teesside, where he is Professor of History, in 2005. He was an assistant director of the AHRC Centre for North-East England History from 2000-05. He has written extensively on the history of northern Yorkshire and County Durham in the later middle ages as well as on the North East as a region in the same period. His Imagining Robin Hood:The Late Medieval Stories in Historical Context appeared for Routledge in 2004 and was reissued in paperback in 2007. His latest book, The Kingmaker: Richard Neville, Earl of Warwick, 1428-1471 is being published by Hambledon Continuum in 2007.

xiv

CONTRIBUTORS

David Renton was until recently a Visiting Professor in the Department of Sociology at the University of Johannesburg. He has also been a researcher of the AHRC Centre for North-East England History and an equality official of the lecturers’ union UCU. His most recent books include When We Touched the Sky: The Anti-Nazi League 1976-1982, also (with N. Copsey) British Fascism, the Labour Movement and the State (London: Palgrave, 2005), and Sidney Pollard: a Life in History (London: I.B. Tauris, 2004). He is working on a history of race, migration and NorthEast England. Peter Rushton is Reader in Historical Sociology at the University of Sunderland and Publications Secretary for the North-East England History Institute. He has published widely on aspects of the personal and social relations of early modern England, as revealed in legal and administrative records of North-East English counties. He has written on witchcraft, problems of marriage and family life, the administration and policies of the old poor law and the care of the mentally disabled.With Gwenda Morgan, he has worked on the problems of law and crime in eighteenth-century England and convict transportation to America, co-authoring Rogues,Thieves and the Rule of Law: The Problem of Law Enforcement in North-East England, 1718-1800 (UCL Press, 1998), The Justicing Notebook (1750-64) of Edmund Tew, Rector of Boldon, Surtees Society 205, (2000), and Eighteenth-Century Criminal Transportation:The Formation of the Criminal Atlantic (Palgrave, 2004). Natasha Vall is a Lecturer at the University of Teesside and teaches British and American cultural history. Previously a researcher for the AHRC Centre for North-East England History at Northumbria, she is continuing to research the cultural and comparative history of regions.Together with Rob Lee, she is developing a journal in regional history and is the coeditor of Regions and Regionalism in History: An Agenda for Regional History (Northumbria University Press, 2007). Her publications include, Polishing the Pitmen: A Cultural History of North-East England (Boydell and Brewer, forthcoming), and Post-industrial Society in North European Cities: A Comparative History of Malmö and Newcastle since 1945 (Malmö University Press, 2007).

Preface This work is a truly collective output of research conducted under the auspices of the Arts and Humanities Research Council’s pioneering Research Centre scheme. The North-East England Research Centre, funded for five years between 2000 and 2005, grew out of and continues as the North-East England History Institute (NEEHI), a collaboration of historians at the Universities of Durham, Newcastle, Northumbria, Sunderland and Teesside. The grant from the AHRC enabled the establishment of five research posts to explore aspects of the history of the North East. But its overall research question was to examine whether the North East was a region over the course of the centuries. This volume is the summation of the wide range of research undertaken on different projects, here specifically directed towards answering that one question. It is the culmination of a process that involved two workshops, in which the approaches, concepts and conclusions were discussed and shared by the contributors, and the continuous interchange of ideas between editors and contributors. The developing ideas and conclusions were also put to a gathering of fellow historians whose responses and suggestions further shaped the volume.While written by many authors, it has a single focus. The editors and contributors approached the question of regionality with different emphases, which lie in the debate about the nature of regions and identity. They hinge on the differences between an approach which bases regional cultures in demographic, landscape and economic configurations and one that focuses on the politicisation, construction and communication of consciously articulated identities. We have arrived at a synthesis, which we believe leads to a convincing resolution and provides a sound basis for enquiry into the existence of regional identities in England in the past, not only of the region known as the North East.

xvi

PREFACE

The editors are grateful to the contributors for their efficiency, tolerance of heavy editorialising, and above all the quality of their research. We would also like to thank many others who participated in the work of the Research Centre in the five years, and who have made invaluable and continuing contributions to our debate about regional identity. In particular we would like to thank those who steered the research at the five universities in the same direction, especially David Rollason, the director for most of the time, his successor, Bill Lancaster, Tony Hepburn and Patrick Salmon. Many others, too numerous to name, gave willingly of their time as internal and external members of the ‘Strand’ committees which oversaw the continuing research at each university, but we would particularly like to thank John Belchem, Rob Colls, Charles PhythianAdams and Keith Wrightson for their engagement with the development of this volume, the conclusions of which they will not necessarily share. And on behalf of the Centre as a whole we would like to record our gratitude to Anthony Fletcher, who chaired the Management Committee established by the AHRC and drove us forward to our milestones, for his support and encouragement. This volume would not have been possible without the confidence expressed in us by the Arts and Humanities Research Board, as it was in 2000. We gratefully acknowledge the generosity of the grant made available to the Research Centre. We are also grateful to the Marc Fitch Fund for a significant grant towards publication costs; to Lisa Liddy, Hilary Rodgerson and Chris Walker in preparing the typescript for publication; and to Peter Sowden for steering it through the press. We hope that this volume, as the Research Centre’s summative output addressing the overarching question, does justice to the commitment that all these people made to the project and that, in the words of the AHRC, the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. ADRIAN GREEN A.J. POLLARD

Abbreviations AA

Archaeologia Aeliana

Add Ch

Additional Charters

APC

Acts of the Privy Council of England, ed. J.E. Dasent et al. (London, 1890-1964)

BBC,WAC British Broadcasting Corporation,Written Archive Centre BL

British Library

BPP

British Parliamentary Papers

CChR

Calendar of Charter Rolls

CCR

Calendar of Close Rolls

CIPM

Calendar of Inquisitions Post Mortem

CPR

Calendar of Patent Rolls

DCLHSB

Durham County Local History Society Bulletin

DCM

Durham Cathedral Muniments

DRO

Durham County Record Office

DUL

Durham University Library

EHR

English Historical Review

GCRO

Glamorgan County Record Office

HJ

Historical Journal

HMC

Historic Manuscripts Commission

JHoC

Journals of the House of Commons

JHoL

Journal of the House of Lords

NECIEST North East Coast Institution of Engineers and Shipbuilders Transactions NEEHI

North East England History Institute

NH

Northern History

xviii

ABBREVIATIONS

NRO

Northumberland Record Office

NTCS

Records of the Newcastle and Tyneside Cymmrodorion Society

NUI

National University of Ireland

RP

Rotuli Parliamentorum, ed. J. Stachey et al. (6 vols, London, 1767-77)

SP

State Papers

SR

Statutes of the Realm, ed. A. Luders et al. (11 vols in 12, London, 1810-28)

SS

Surtees Society

THSC

Transactions of the Honourable Society of Cymmrodorion

TNA

The National Archives

TRHS

Transactions of the Royal Historical Society

TWAS

Tyne and Wear Archive Service

WHR

Welsh Historical Review

Map 1. Late Medieval and Early Modern North-Eastern England.

Map 2. Modern North-Eastern England.

Introduction: Identifying Regions ADRIAN GREEN and A.J. POLLARD

In November 2004 a referendum was held to determine whether the people of Newcastle-upon-Tyne and the historic counties of Durham and Northumberland, along with Middlesbrough, Redcar and Cleveland in North Yorkshire, wanted a regional assembly. Nearly 50% of the electorate voted decisively against the proposal by 3:1. The vote was somewhat enigmatic. To have nearly 50% concerned enough about the proposal to vote suggests some sort of regional engagement; the overwhelming majority against the proposal either suggests that there was no desire for regional devolution, or represents a reaction to the insultingly meagre degree of delegation offered – even less than London. Clearly, however, regional devolution in the North East had been on the agenda. The referendum was the climax of a decade-long campaign, during which the advocates for a regional assembly claimed,‘The north-east is different.The people of the region share a history and a culture which is unique.’1 The idea that there is a unique history was the most frequently stated justification for regional government. Peter Hetherington opened a piece in The Guardian on 16 June 2003 entitled ‘Geordies look to saint for inspiration’ with the words,‘With a distinctive history, culture and musical heritage, it is a region set apart from the rest of England.’ Hetherington proceeded to quote amply from an unreferenced article by John Tomaney who invoked St Cuthbert as a symbol of the region’s political and cultural identity and asserted a long record of self-determination going back to the middle ages.2 Peter Scott, vice-chancellor of Kingston University, singing from a slightly different hymn sheet for The Guardian on 2 April 2002, declared more cautiously that: 1

2

Let the People Decide: The Case for the North East Assembly (North East Regional Assembly, 2001). Parts of the following discussion are also rehearsed in A.J. Pollard’s Introduction to North-East England in the Later Middle Ages, ed. C.D. Liddy and R.H. Britnell (Woodbridge, 2005), pp. 1-12. John Tomaney, ‘In Search of English Regionalism: The Case of the North-East,’ Scottish Affairs 28 (1999), pp. 62-82.

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ADRIAN GREEN AND A.J. POLLARD

Regions are difficult to define…. The north-east can claim coherence based on mish-mash memories of the age of Bede, its boundaries established by the ambitions of Northumbrian warrior kings, and when the industrial revolution was engineered on the banks of the Tyne.

The supposed coherence of contemporary north-east regional identity is claimed on the basis of ‘mish-mash memories’. And those memories apparently run back for fourteen centuries. In claiming that the North East is an historic English region, these authors appealed to a highly selective history to demonstrate a contemporary identity. Testing this late-twentieth-century assumption about the history of the region was the central purpose of a research centre for North-East England History funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council from 2000 to 2005. The Centre was formed by historians from the five North-East Universities: Durham, Newcastle, Northumbria, Sunderland and Teesside. Its overall aim was: To address the question: can North-East England, which is widely perceived as possessing one of the most distinctive present-day regional societies, be proved to have been a coherent and self-conscious region in the historical record from the beginning of the middle ages to the present day, and if so, what were its origins and how did its regional identity change over time?

This was the overarching question: a big question with major implications for the understanding of regions and regionalism in modern British history. The Centre set out to do this by establishing five research strands based in each of the partner universities, to examine in depth particular aspects of the history of ‘the North East’ – defined primarily as Newcastle-uponTyne, the historic counties of Durham and Northumberland and the far north-eastern corner of Yorkshire. Researchers were recruited in the following broadly defined strands:‘Time, Space and Boundaries’ (Teesside), ‘Peoples and Migrations’ (Sunderland), ‘Power, Politics and Religion’ (Durham), ‘North-East Culture’ (Northumbria) and ‘External Relations’ (Newcastle). Owing to movement of personnel there were nine researchers ultimately engaged, and they each proposed, refined and developed their own projects. The initial five, each with the aim of producing a major research monograph, were on the following topics: North-Eastern Elites, 1569-1640; Scots and Irish Migration to the North East, c.1871-1961; Landed Society in the Palatinate of Durham, 13451437; Regional Culture in North-East England, 1918-1970; and NorthEast England as a Maritime Urban Region, 1850-1914. Subsequently, new projects came on stream on Irish Women’s Migration, 1870-1970; the Church of England and the Durham Coalfield, 1810-1920; and International Migration to the North East, 1945-2002. Other separately

INTRODUCTION: IDENTIFYING REGIONS

3

funded projects were also affiliated to the Centre, notably a study of the Liber Vitae of Durham Priory in the middle ages; a study of the Border Liberties in North-East England in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries; and an isonymic analysis of urban Irish communities. Six publications, including this volume, are to appear in the ‘Regions and Regionalism in History’ series established by the Centre.3 To bring the work being undertaken in the separate strands together, the Centre organised a series of meetings and annual conferences in which progress of the projects was reported and developing ideas discussed in comparison with the histories of other English regions: the fourth of these, in 2004, was a major international gathering considering regions and regionality on a wider scale.4 The culmination of this process is the publication of this collection of essays specifically to address the overarching question above as to whether the North East of England was ‘a coherent and self-conscious region in the historical record from the beginning of the middle ages to the present day’. It was, it now seems, somewhat ill-judged to suppose that one might prove the existence of a region.Yet enquiring into whether there had been a region over the longue durée was and remains a bona fide historical question. This volume represents the attempt to provide an answer to which many of those who have been engaged on specific projects both funded directly by the AHRC and affiliated to the Centre have contributed, some in single authored essays, others jointly. The authors were asked to reflect upon their individual research and the conclusions they were reaching, and to apply their reflections to the overarching question. What had their research, in their particular aspect of the history of the North East, revealed about regional identity? Two workshops were held to exchange thoughts on these issues and to present ideas for this volume as they were developing. As the research presented here demonstrates, the selective use of histories to justify a certain regional point of view is nothing new. What we have aimed to uncover is not simply the historical depth of contemporary regional identities, but how people behaved and thought in 3

4

The following monographs have been published or are currently in the press or preparation: D.R. Newton, North-East England, 1569-1625: Governance, Culture and Identity (2006); G.J. Milne, North-East England, 1850-1914: The Dynamics of a Maritime Industrial Region (2006); N. Vall, Polishing the Pitmen: A Cultural History of North-East England since 1918 (forthcoming); R. Lee, The Church of England and the Durham Coalfield, 1810-1926: Clergymen, Capitalists and Colliers (forthcoming); C.D. Liddy, The Land of the Prince Bishops: The Bishopric of Durham in the Later Middle Ages (forthcoming); J. MacPherson, Irish Women’s Migration to the North-East: Domesticity, Ethnicity and Associational Life, 1870-1930. Other publications emanating from the Centre include D. Renton, Hostility or Welcome: Migration to the North East since 1945, Paper in North Eastern History 15 (Middlesbrough, 2006). Regions and Regionalism: An Agenda for Regional History, ed. B. Lancaster, D.R. Newton and N.Vall (Newcastle, 2007).

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terms of what we now call ‘a region’ during their times. By looking at one region over a long time period, we have been able to focus on the issue of whether regional identities existed over the longue durée, and when, how and in what ways geographical identities have developed, changed, been sustained or replaced over the medieval and modern eras. We should also make clear that while contemporary politics and culture have provided an inescapable context for this research into regional identity, it is not our primary justification. Investigating regional identity is useful because what we are interested in is how people in the past behaved and thought about themselves. Was there a regional dimension to this, which the relentless interest in the nation or the state has downplayed? How then does one identify an English region? Regions are slippery, their definition varying with perspective and subject, and this kaleidoscopic quality makes them difficult to grasp historically.Yet regions seem to be a necessary part of people’s conception of the world around them. Regions provide a means to differentiate geographical areas and social associations at a level between the immediate locality and the nation. They are a necessary feature of scholarly efforts to organise knowledge of society past and present. Even if most historians have tended to use the term region in a fairly casual way, they cannot easily do without it. Regions are also an important part of contemporary consciousness because of their role in government policy, the operation of the economy, the promotion of cultural and leisure activities (especially the arts and sport), and are made all the more obvious by regional television and newspapers. What is less clear, is how far back in history regions have mattered to people. Regional identities, as we know them, appear to be a relatively modern feature of society; they may even be described as an aspect of ‘modernity’. But we can also identify equivalent forms of geographical identity, albeit less stridently expressed, in previous eras. Thinking in terms of regions raises important methodological issues for historians, who have not generally placed geography at the centre of their enquiries. Despite the example of the Annales school and the significance of landscape to studies of English local history inspired by W.G. Hoskins,5 documentary historians have tended to focus on social actors with only an attenuated sense of their geographical setting, rarely giving close consideration to the role of space in social action.The nation, with its local components of county, town and parish, provide a geographical framework that has rarely been questioned, and is regularly reinforced by the ways in which these administrative units structure the 5

See P. Burke, The French Historical Revolution:The Annales School 1929-89 (Cambridge, 1990); C. Phythian-Adams,‘W.G. Hoskins and the Local Springs of English History’, The Historian 45 (1995), pp. 9-12.


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archive.The region represents an alternative mode of entry into historical enquiry, one that shifts study away from units of government (though it should incorporate their significance), and offers a more flexible and holistic approach to historical experience, for both individuals and communities. Studying regions is necessary if we are to explain variation in experience and action. Regions appear as areas of variation; they are larger than the immediate locality but are not usually defined as administrative areas. They do not have a simple relationship to landscape or economic activity, but rather emerge as areas of cultural variation within wider society. The questions posed by this volume are whether individuals identify with such regions, and how this mode of geographical identity – between the nation and the immediate locality – has developed over the medieval and modern eras. Regions have rarely had a formal significance in English history. Consequently, the local history tradition, focused on studies of individual counties, towns and villages, has had greater prominence, with an apparently greater purchase on historical development. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries antiquarian histories were focused on the county and the town, as the corollary of national histories.6 In the twentieth century W.G. Hoskins promoted local history as an academic discipline, founding the Department of English Local History at Leicester University. Hoskins was not directly interested in ‘regions’, and his approach placed an emphasis on landscape and society that eschewed the relevance of frameworks of analysis that were political or constitutional. Hoskins also wrote a pioneering village study – The Midland Peasant – and such community studies have in particular transformed our understanding of early modern society.7 These sorts of local studies aimed to illuminate the national picture, yet regional history in England has generally developed as a reaction against the limitations of local history, and more recently against the distortions of national historiography. The Conference of Regional and Local Historians (CORAL) was established in 1978 to counter parochialism in local studies, to promote a consideration of theoretical issues and to encourage through the local the development of history in the round.This theme was eloquently addressed by John Marshall in The Tyranny of the Discrete: A Discussion of the Problems

6 7

R. Sweet, The Writing of Urban Histories in Eighteenth-Century England (Oxford, 1997) and her Antiquaries: the Discovery of the Past in Eighteenth-Century Britain (London, 2004). W.G. Hoskins The Midland Peasant: The Economic and Social History of a Leicestershire Village (London and New York, 1965); M. Spufford, Contrasting Communities: English Villagers in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (London and New York, 1974); K. Wrightson and D. Levine, Poverty and Piety in an English Village:Terling, 1525-1700 (New York, 1979).

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of Local History in England.8 As Marshall observes, studying the documentation of one place can conjure a misleadingly coherent community, and he suggests that it is the movement of people between places that shapes geographical identities. Historical approaches to community and locality have also been revised in the light of cultural geography’s stress on their lack of boundedness.9 Historians have, moreover, begun to question the coherence of the nation-state as the most appropriate unit of study. David Cressy offered a caveat (and call for further research): ‘the local variations and regional patterns of English cultural history need thorough investigation. We need to know whether it is reasonable or audacious or simply wrong-headed, to treat early modern England as a single cultural area.’10 Regional variations, indeed, may be central to understanding a national culture, as for instance in the expansion of the British overseas. David Armitage has proposed a model of transatlantic relations linking place to place, and region to region, rather than mother country to colony.11 As Keith Wrightson has written: ‘If we seek to understand class in the societies of the British Atlantic world, then we need first to examine more closely the social dynamics of those regional and local cultures within which class identities and class relations were structured and most immediately experienced.’12 This refers both to the regions of Britain from which people migrated across the Atlantic and to the new regional cultures created in colonial contexts. The importance of understanding regional variations within English or British society and culture is also evident in the current effort to relate local and regional identities to the history of national identity. Alexander Murdoch has highlighted the need to investigate the ‘forgotten dimension’ of cultural variation within England when considering cultural and political relationships across the British Isles.13 This incorporation of the regional with the national represents an advance upon the ‘new British history’, focused upon the interactions of the nations that occupy the British Isles and together formed the British state. John Pocock launched 8 9 10 11 12

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J.D. Marshall, The Tyranny of the Discrete:A Discussion of the Problems of Local History in England (Aldershot, 1997). See, for example, Communities in Early Modern England, ed. A. Shepard and P. Withington (Manchester, 2000). D. Cressy, Birth, Marriage and Death: Ritual and the Life-Cycle in Tudor and Stuart England (Oxford, 1997), pp. 481-2. D. Armitage, ‘Three Concepts of Atlantic History’, The British Atlantic World, 1500-1800, ed. D.Armitage and M. Braddick (Basingstoke, 2002), pp. 11-27. It is called the ‘cisatlantic’ model. K. Wrightson, ‘Class’, ed. Armitage and Braddick, British Atlantic World, p. 153. See also J.T. Lemon, ‘Spatial Order: Households in Local Communities and Regions’, Colonial British America: Essays in the New History of the Early Modern Era, ed. J.P. Greene and J.R. Pole (Baltimore and London, 1984), pp. 86-122 and D.H. Fischer, Albion’s Seed: Four British Folkways in America (New York, 1989). A. Murdoch, British History 1660-1832: National Identity and Local Culture (Basingstoke, 1998).


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this approach to British history, but recognised that ‘it is possible and legitimate to envisage the growth of an alternative historiography focused on demography, social structure, community, material culture and the like.’ Pocock’s reservation was that such a Braudellian approach has a ‘tendency to relegate politics to the surface realm of mere events’ when in reality ‘politicization is a major engine in the transformation of human consciousness’.14 Our approach to regional history in this volume evokes Braudel in attending to the longue durée, though we are cautious about the role of ‘geographical constraint’ as a structuring factor.15 We actually find politics (including governance and the law) to be central to any understanding of consciously articulated regional identities. Regions can be identified on the basis of geographic, economic and social patterns, but conscious expressions of regional association are articulated most acutely when they become a political issue. This politicisation invariably occurs when regionalised values are in conflict with external influences, most often in the form of centralised authority. Unlike Hoskins’ approach to local history, which rejected the relevance of political history, regional history – and regional identity – can only be fully understood by incorporating politics along with the study of landscape and economy.This requires political and social historians to overcome their differences. As Julian Hoppitt has observed,‘The historiography of national, regional, and local identities is in a state of flux, with the meanings of “Britishness” being much more fully explored than other collective politico-cultural identities.’16 This volume is in part an effort to resolve that state of flux. Until recently the relationship between regional and national identities was assumed to be antagonistic, as the nation-state was believed to have a corrosive effect on traditional regional habits. In the 1980s Ernest Gellner argued that nationalism ruptured traditional associations, while John Breuilly claimed that nationalist ideologies require the interests and values of the nation to come before all other interests and values.17 According to Linda Colley, British national identity took priority during the eighteenth century and local identities only persisted among those who had not been drawn into the nation – most especially through war. Colley provides a caveat at the end of Britons to say that even in the nineteenth century, ‘particularly in the more rural and remote parts of Britain, in the Scottish 14 J.G.A. Pocock, ‘The Limits and Divisions of British History: In Search of the Unknown Subject’, The American Historical Review 87.2 (1982), pp. 311-336, quoting pp. 316 and 317. See also C. Harvie, ‘English Regionalism: The Dog that Never Barked’, National Identities: The Construction of the United Kingdom, ed. B. Crick (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991), pp. 105-19. 15 F. Braudel, ‘History and the Social Sciences: The Longue Durée’, On History, trans. Sarah Matthews (London, 1980), pp. 25-54. 16 Julian Hoppitt, A Land of Liberty? England 1689-1727 (Oxford, 2000), p. 520. 17 E. Gellner, Nations and Nationalism (Oxford, 1983); J. Breuilly, Nationalism and the State (Manchester, 1982).

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Highlands, in central Wales, in Cornwall, East Anglia and in much of the North Country, intense localism remained the norm, at least until the coming of the railways, if not the more violent intrusion of conscription in the First World War.’18 Regional identity is never akin to national identity in this sense; regional identities do not appear to have ever exerted an exclusive sense of priority over all other interests and values. Indeed, in England, regionalism (seeking regional self-government) has never been a significant political force. Even Cornwall, which has strong claims to be a ‘people’ and a nation with its own language, has rarely desired full independence from the English or British state.19 But this does not mean that we should dismiss regional and local identities as peripheral and residual, limited to those least engaged with the nation – a leftover identity for those left out in the homogenising process of modernisation. The assumption that national identity and modernisation have a corrosive effect on regional identities has recently been overturned. Since the early nineteenth century, when regions first became a focus of scholarly attention, the history of regions has been related to theories of modernisation. Commentators in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries perceived, and feared, that modernisation (industrialisation, railways, urban expansion, mass communications) undermined and destroyed traditional differences, so that diversity would disappear, leading to a, usually unwanted, cultural uniformity. Despite innumerable convergences, no such trend to total uniformity, on a national or even global basis, has in fact emerged as yet. Rather than the bureaucratic state and capitalist economy suppressing regional difference, regional identities have in fact been strengthened in the face of twentieth-century centralisation and commodification.20 The historical region is usually seen as a locus for traditional, pre-industrial habits, with a rural spatiality and a vernacular culture evident in language, dress, building, cooking and craft techniques. The modern region, which might also express itself through dialect, clothing, architecture, food and work, is the outcome of industrialisation, focused on an urban-industrial centre. For Vidal, modernisation transforms the region from a rural, locally based spatiality to the region whose motor 18 L. Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation, 1707-1837 (London, 1992), p. 372. For earlier forms of national identity see C. Kidd, British Identities Before Nationalism: Ethnicity and Nationhood in the Atlantic World, 1600-1800 (Cambridge, 1999). 19 M. Stoyle, West Britons: Cornish Identities and the Early Modern British State (Exeter, 2002); P. Payton, ‘Introduction’, Cornish Studies, 2nd ser. 10 (2002), pp.1-23. On England’s lack of regionalism in European context, see Lancaster, Newton and Vall, eds, Regions and Regionalism. 20 Celia Applegate,‘A Europe of Regions: Reflections on the Historiography of Sub-national Places in Modern Times’, American Historical Review 104.4 (1999), pp. 1157-82; Eric Storm, ‘Regionalism in History, 1890-1945: The Cultural Approach’, European History Quarterly 33.2 (2003), pp. 251-65.


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is urbanised industrial capitalism.21 In the context of globalisation, however, it appears that capitalism is not, as Marx believed, an homogenising force.22 Pat Hudson has suggested that ‘as outside influences get stronger regional and local character and differences tend to be transformed’ and crucially ‘they are as likely to be reinforced as reduced’.23 It may be this process of intensified interaction – between outside influences and a defined area – that produces a consciousness of modern regions. Encounters with others in the modern world increase and intensify rather than diminish the sense of particular distinctiveness.As A.P. Cohen has argued, community boundaries beyond the legal or physical lie in the mind, and consciousness of any community is encapsulated in the perception of its boundaries. In this way, existing in the mind of the beholder, regions can reassert their boundaries symbolically.24 Historians can identify the existence of regions in earlier times, but awareness of the region in England and elsewhere appears to be a modern phenomenon. It has only been a matter of regular concern to geographers, administrators and politicians since the early nineteenth century. Regional discourse is thus perhaps a reflection of modernisation itself, shaped in response to the growth of central government and the tendency for national and international markets to generate regional specialisation in the economy. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries regions were less politicised precisely because local elites were more directly bound into the process of state formation.25 Modern regions have often been linked to economic specialisation – and consequent occupational identities and pride in processes and products – which formed as a part of the increasingly integrated national market (with London’s growth at its core) in the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries.26 Yet, as Daniel Defoe observed, economic specialisation bound the nation together, since ‘tho’ all our manufactures are used and called for by almost all the people, and that in every part of the whole British dominion, yet they are made and wrought in several distinct and respective Counties of Britain.’27 This national integration in consumption, based upon regional specialisation in 21 See N.Thrift,‘Taking Aim at the Heart of the Region’, Human Geography: Society, Space and Social Science, ed. D. Gregory, R. Martin and G. Smith (Basingstoke, 1994), pp. 201-9. 22 Ibid. and A. Giddens, The Constitution of Society: Outline of the Theory of Structuration (Cambridge, 1984), pp. 110-44, 318-19. 23 Pat Hudson, ‘Regional and Local History: Globalisation, Postmodernism and the Future’, Journal of Local and Regional Studies 20.1(1999), pp. 5-25. 24 A.P. Cohen, The Symbolic Construction of Community (Chichester, 1985 and London, 1993) pp. 11-15. 25 M. Braddick, State Formation in Early Modern England, c.1550-1700 (Cambridge, 2000). See also Newton, North-East England, 1569-1625, pp. 44-66. 26 K. Wrightson, Earthly Necessities: Economic Lives in Early Modern Britain, 1470-1750 (Newhaven and London, 2000) cogently outlines this process. 27 Daniel Defoe, The Complete English Tradesman (London, 1727) Vol. I, pp. 324-5.

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production, was furthered by a shared frame of reference to London as the benchmark for consumer habits in the early eighteenth century. By the later eighteenth century both urban and rural areas were more inclined to celebrate themselves as unequivocally distinct from metropolitan values and codes of conduct. This sense of provincial independence developed further in the nineteenth century; particularly evident in the industrial towns of the north, but also apparent in the celebration of rural particularity in the south. From the middle of the nineteenth century we see the need to discover a distinctive country of one’s own within the burgeoning state.28 We can trace the development of the idea of the region as a geographic space to the late-sixteenth century when antiquaries began to see a close relationship between landscape and the culture of indigenous peoples whose lives were shaped by it.This approach can be seen in Camden, who commented of the borders with Scotland,‘The ground it selfe for the most part rough, & hard to be manured, seemeth to have hardened the inhabitants…. So that by these means they are a most warlike nation, & excellent good light horsemen.’29 As David Rollison has pointed out, in the late seventeenth century this way of looking at regions in England, in an effort to map England topographically, was developed into a precise scientific classification of regions by landform, geology, soil, flora and fauna.30 The association of culture with landscape had classical roots, but in its seventeenth-century context emerged as an aspect of the social polarisation between elite educated culture (ultimately centred on London and Oxbridge) observing popular culture (as what would in the nineteenth century be identified as ‘vernacular’).31 This system of categorisation reached its apogee in the nineteenth century when not only landscape, flora and fauna, but also material culture, ‘vernacular’ building, dialects and economic and social organisation of indigenous cultures, were seen to be all interrelated.The answer lay in the soil, or more precisely the interrelationship between soil and people. Paul Vidal, with his idea of the pays as a cultural region, in which landscape shaped the indigenous 28 See R.A. Butlin, ‘Regions in England and Wales, c.1600-1914’, An Historical Geography of England and Wales, ed. R.A. Dodgshon and R.A. Butlin, 2nd edn (London, 1990), pp. 22354, who stresses ‘the intensification of regional identity’ – and highlights regional novels – in the nineteenth century. 29 William Camden, Britain, or a Chorographicall Account of the Most Flourishing Kingdomes, England, Scotland and Ireland, trans. Philemon Holland (1610), p. 799.30 30 David Rollison, ‘Exploding England: The Dialectics of Mobility and Settlement in Early Modern England’, Social History 24.1 (1999), pp. 3-5. See also M. Hunter, John Aubrey and the Realm of Learning (New York, 1975). 31 In the early eighteenth century, according to Henry French, those on the cusp of learned and local culture had some flexibility in their orientation (Henry French, ‘“Ingenious and Learned Gentlemen”: Social Perceptions and Self-fashioning among Parish Elites in Essex, 1680-1740’, Social History 25 (2000), pp. 44-66).


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cultures of separate pays, was the founder of the modern study of regional geography. Out of his work developed the conventional approach to regions and the view that economic, social and cultural differences between regions, though shaped by human agency, were determined ultimately by the landscape. It followed, therefore, that regions had always existed, literally as old as the hills (and rivers, plains and marshes).32 The perception of the North East as a region determined by landscape is deeply entrenched and needs little elaboration. We assume that the Tweed, the North Sea, the Tees and the Pennine watershed have, if not always, then for at least a millennium, formed its boundaries.33 It is clear that watersheds (and their underlying geology) are very significant for shaping patterns of economic and social behaviour. But there is an alternative geographical approach. Brian Roberts has recently stressed the old division between highland and lowland which ran on a north/south axis through County Durham and which has led over the centuries of human occupation to different land uses, different cultivation and field systems, different settlement patterns, different building materials and, deriving from these, different cultural associations.The two zones abutted on a line linking Gateshead in the north, through Chester-le-Street, Durham, Bishop Auckland and Barnard Castle, running on south to Richmond and north through Hexham and Morpeth. It is no accident that these are all old market centres, strategically placed for the exchange of goods between the two zones. Thus on the one hand the counties of Durham and Northumberland were divided east and west; on the other the two halves were bought together through the markets.34 And this in itself changed over time as the development of the great northern coalfield created a different configuration focused on the Tyne. A substantial body of writing by both economic historians and regional geographers has focused on the phenomenon of the formation between 1750 and 1850 of industrial regions in many parts of Europe, including 32 Paul Vidal de la Blache, La France de l’Est (Paris, 1917); see also Thrift,‘Taking Aim’, pp. 202-10. 33 See for instance R.A. Lomas, North-East England in the Middle Ages (Edinburgh, 1992), p. v, ‘together they (the historic counties of Northumberland and Durham) are obviously distinct from their immediate neighbours’. There has, of course, been a wealth of writing on the history of the two counties, of which see in particular Northumbrian Panorama: Studies in the History and Culture of North-East England ed.T.E. Faulkner, (London: Octavian Press, 1996); Liddy and Britnell, North-East England; H. Berry and J. Gregory, Creating and Consuming Culture in North-East England, 1660-1830 (Aldershot, 2004) and Northumbria: History and Identity ed. R. Colls, (Chichester, 2007). See also A.J. Pollard, ‘Use and Ornament: Latetwentieth-century Historians on the Late Medieval North-East’, NH 42 (2005), pp. 61-74. The Northern Review contains essays discussing north-eastern identity. 34 See B.K. Roberts, ‘Time and Tide in North-East England’ Regions and Regionalism, ed. Lancaster, Newton and Vall, forthcoming, and B.K. Roberts, H. Dunsford and S.J. Harris, ‘Framing Medieval Landscapes: Region and Place in County Durham’ in Liddy and Britnell, North-East England, pp. 221-37.

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Britain, out of the looser and more numerous kaleidoscope of counties and countries (or pays) characteristic of pre-industrialised societies.35 ‘The growing coherence and unity of character in different industrial regions’, wrote John Langton in a seminal paper,‘can be generally recognised in the early nineteenth century.’ Class and power structures were regionally shaped. Politics was regionalised. Regional cultures were forged on this basis. Industrialisation and modernisation were, at this time, processes which tended to entrench and embed regional distinctiveness and differences. ‘The mid-nineteenth century’, Langton concluded, was the period when ‘regional cultural consciousness reached its zenith’. But the forces of modernism, especially the development of the railway system and then all the other media of mass communication subsequently reversed the process.36 The twentieth century witnessed the erosion of regional economic, political and cultural distinctiveness and independence. The industrial region, so defined, Pat Hudson has suggested, may have been but an interlude in British history.37 Yet many of these regions had their genesis in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. As far as the North East is concerned, it is the configuration created by coal mining as it grew from the mid sixteenth century and declined in the twentieth which has dominated recent perceptions of a region. Norman McCord argued as early as 1980 that during the century and a half after about 1750 a regional economy developed that exhibited a high degree of independence and autonomy. It was based on the Great Northern Coalfield, but developed many interlocking commercial, financial, social and political features which separated it to a significant extent from other parts of England. This level of autonomy, however, declined in the twentieth century with the collapse of the staple industries and the intervention of the central state.38 Keith Wrightson has recently taken this 35 Alan Everitt identified eight separate English pays, or ‘natural regions’, complicated and transformed in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries by the rise of successive ‘human regions’. (Alan Everitt, ‘Country, County and Town: Patterns of Regional Evolution in England’, TRHS, 5th ser. 29 (1979), pp. 81-8, 107). 36 John Langton, ‘The Industrial Revolution and the Regional Geography of England’, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, new ser. 9 (1984), pp. 145-67, esp. pp. 157, 164. 37 Pat Hudson, ‘The Regional Perspective’, Regions and Industries: a Perspective on the Industrial Revolution in England, ed. P. Hudson (Cambridge, 1989), pp. 3-38, esp. pp. 34-8. See also Edward Royle,‘Regions and Identities’, Issues of Regional Identity, ed. E. Royle (Manchester, 1998), pp. 1-13. 38 N. McCord, North-East England: The Region’s Development 1760-1960 (1979); McCord, ‘North East England: Some Points of Regional Interest’, Region und Industrialisierung, ed. S. Pollard (Gottingen, 1980), pp. 37-51. See also McCord, ‘Regional Identity of North-East England in the Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries’, Issues, ed. Royle, pp. 102-17, which gives more emphasis to the integration of the nineteenth-century region in the nation as a whole and more stress on internal diversity; D.J. Rowe,‘The North-East’, The Cambridge Social History of Britain, 1750-1950, Vol. I, Regions and Communities, ed. F.M.L. Thompson (1990), pp. 355-414; N. Evans,‘Two Paths to Economic Development:Wales and the NorthEast of England’, Regions and Industries, ed. Hudson, pp. 204-15.


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perception further back in time and argued that a region of North-East England, likewise founded on coal, developed from the seventeenth century and was in existence by 1760. An industrial zone emerged between the rivers Blyth,Wear and Derwent, characterised by a distinctive demographic pattern, an integrated economy and wealth that knitted the area together. Newcastle was its cultural centre, especially for its gentle and mercantile elites. While the term ‘North East’ was not used by contemporaries, ‘it was a north east; a distinctive regional society with an established sense of its own special identity and the essential foundation for all that was to come’.39 This North East was essentially northern Durham and southern Northumberland focused on the rivers Tyne and Wear. It was a ‘micro’ North East, the core of the modern region. The argument can be as forcefully made that northern Northumberland and the Tees valley were separate, or at least semi-detached. It has been convincingly shown that in the eighteenth century Stockton-on-Tees lay at the heart of a different economic configuration that was not based on coal: Stockton, like London, imported coal from the Tyne.40 In the early nineteenth century, with the first development of railways and the opening up of the south Durham coalfield, there was a moment when this Tees-focused area threatened to challenge the Tyne for supremacy.41 The one region as it came to be perceived in the late twentieth century did not exist, on this analysis, until much later. And even in the early twenty-first century the engagement of the Tees valley in this region remains fraught. The construction of a region as based on coal in the Tyne and Wear valleys was and remains a contested phenomenon. We may, as an alternative to the topographically grounded or industrially shaped region, look at regions as politically formed. Indeed, the earliest meaning of a region was as an area of rule. Leaving aside the late-twentieth-century invention of new regions for governmental purposes, we run into major problems, for the imprint of regions as former units of rule in England is very faint. It helps to draw a comparison with one or two modern European states where there are clearly demarcated 39 Keith Wrightson, ‘Elements of Identity: The Remaking of the North-East, 1500-1700’, Northumbria, ed. Colls, forthcoming. For the cultural development and role of Newcastle in the eighteenth century see H.M. Berry,‘Promoting Taste in the Provincial Press: National and Local Culture in Eighteenth-Century Newcastle upon Tyne’, British Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies 25 (2002), pp. 1-17, in which she concludes (p. 14) that Newcastle ‘created a distinctive and influential regional platform for the exchange of ideas about cultural value in the eighteenth century’. See also the further discussion in ‘Conclusion’, below pp. 211-12, 218-19. 40 Tony Barrow, The Port of Stockton-on-Tees, 1702-1802, Paper in North Eastern History, 14 (Middlesbrough, 2005). 41 Winifred Stokes, ‘Regional Finance and the Definition of a Financial Region’, Issues, ed. Royle, pp. 18-53; John Banham, Backhouses Bank of Darlington, 1774-1836, Paper in North Eastern History, 9 (Middlesbrough, 1999).

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regions having distinct histories that stretch back to the not too distant past when they were independent or quasi independent ‘regnums’. In the case of the Low Countries some of the provinces united under Valois and then Habsburg government developed signs of what we might call regional identity under princely rule in the seventeenth century. In the case of Germany, before unification in the nineteenth century, there were several states, which to this day form the basis of distinctive units in its federal structure – the most dynamic being Bavaria. In the case of France, before the modern state was forged in the sixteenth century, there were quasi-independent duchies and principalities which enjoyed varying degrees of self rule under the king; here the most distinctive perhaps was Brittany, with Gascony and Provence not far behind. In these parts of France regional identity so formed is enhanced by linguistic and, in Brittany, ethnic difference. This is even more marked in Spain, especially Catalonia, which historically, and still in the minds of its northern inhabitants, straddles the Franco-Spanish border. The fact that the watershed, more or less, is now the international boundary between France and Spain is the result of war and conquest in the seventeenth century, not a physically pre-determined fixture.42 Whereas the United Kingdom has such regions (England, Scotland and Wales), England itself does not. In fact the regio in England was the county, and the most distinctive was, and still is, Cornwall, with an identity as strong as that of Brittany. But we do not treat English counties, the historic ones that is, as regions (except perhaps Yorkshire).This may be because of the early centralisation of the kingdom of England, arguably the achievement of the West Saxon kings who united it in the tenth century.They were responsible for shiring the kingdom.And their shires were superimposed on, and in part were designed to obliterate, the remnants of older Saxon kingdoms, especially Mercia and Northumbria. In this both they and their successors, the Normans, were successful. Thus the county became the principal intermediary administrative unit (to which were added the principal cities as counties, including Newcastle in 1400) in the kingdom of England for nigh on a millennium. But they are not, conventionally, our regions. 42 From an extensive historiography see in particular R. Esser, ‘“Concordia res parvae crescent”: Regional Histories and the Dutch Republic in the Seventeenth Century’, Public Opinion and Changing Identities in the Early Modern Netherlands, ed. A. Spicer and J. Pollmann (Leiden, 2006); P.C. Hartmann, Bayerns Weg in Gegenwart. Vom Stammesherzogtum zum Freistaat heute (2nd edn, Regensburg, 2004); G. Ford and I. Farr, ‘Bavaria’s “German Mission”: The CSU and the Politics of Regional Identity, 1949-c.1962’, Regions and Regionalism, ed. Lancaster, Newton and Vall, forthcoming; M. Keating, ‘Rethinking the Region: Culture, Institutions and Economic Development in Catalonia and Galicia’, European Urban and Regional Studies 8 (2001), pp. 217-34; and Nationalism and the Nation in the Iberian Peninsula: Competing and Conflicting Identities, ed. Clare Mar-Molinero and Angel Smith (Oxford and Washington DC, 1996), esp. pp. 1-30. See also Christopher Harvie, The Rise of Regional Europe (1994).


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In the nineteenth century, as the scope of central government stretched ever further, departments of state began to organise themselves and collect and publish statistics regionally. Concurrently, pressure groups and political associations organised and campaigned on extra-county bases. Regional awareness became more explicit when issues arose which made forming regionalised associations politically advantageous.Thus began to be shaped a political outlook, both from within central government and in the provinces which conceived of England being in some respects a patchwork of regions. This process was, it has been argued, closely linked to the formation of industrial regions.43 But the result was a growing tendency to think politically in terms of regions, a tendency which led to the formation of regional government agencies and the first testing of the water in regional government at the end of the twentieth century. It was through the administrative pressures on the state and political action in the provinces, it can be argued, that the modern idea of the English region was first articulated. Ultimately however we are searching for the elusive sense of identity with a region: how in day-to-day existence people saw themselves in relationship to the wider geographic space in which they lived; not just how they and their forebears have shaped the landscape and society, but how they reflected upon them and their past.This reflection, which must necessarily include a sense of place, lies at the core of regional identity. But the perception and the representation of what is called a regional identity in political action (‘regionalism’), in memory and through artefacts and works of art, are also important.While patterns of interaction, particularly face-to-face contacts, are also fundamental to regional identity, these do not necessarily have to be actual encounters; identity encompasses imagined encounters created through word of mouth, written word or visual image. And it is not just how people see themselves; it is also how others see them. In this way it can be said that the region is ‘imagined’, in the sense that it is an image of association carried in the mind. The relationship between the physically determined and the culturally shaped is complex.There is a continuous interaction between the two.The French concept of terroir involves more than a sense of place, or familiarity with landscape features, since it is the human use of landscape which has a fundamental role in shaping patterns of behaviour. How self-conscious people are about the reasons for their behaviour is difficult to know, and a division of view exists as to whether we can distinguish the physical from 43 Langton,‘Industrial Revolution’, pp.150-9; but see Royle,‘Regions and Identities’, pp. 9-10, ‘What the nineteenth century did see in England was not the growth of regionalism but the rise of provincialism’ … ‘Regional identity in England … has lacked a political dimension.’ See also D. Eastwood, Government and Community in the English Provinces, 1700-1870 (Basingstoke, 1997), who emphasises parish, town and county as the paramount units of provincial government up to 1870.

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the cultural.The region, in one view, is grounded (almost literally) on the physical. Charles Phythian-Adams articulates a sophisticated version of this in his notion of cultural provinces. ‘Social space (or cultural identity) is tethered, however distantly, in real space, to the realities of the relevant region of origin.’44 Alternatively, it can be argued, the social and cultural awareness of regional difference and distinctiveness is not dependent upon an underlying topography, fixed physical features and the resulting landscape. The region is what contemporaries see it to be. For while the landscape certainly has a structuring effect, people have agency – they can choose to cross rivers, watersheds or the sea, and they usually have good reason for their engagement with – or estrangement from – a sense of regional identity. The region is not grounded, it is imagined in the Andersonian sense; it is created in the minds of those who thereby experience it. It is apparent that scholars themselves have been active in the imaginative process.The very idea of a region as topographically grounded is not neutral. ‘Landscapes, like traditions’, Rollison concludes, ‘are invented, constructed and reconstructed.’45 Scholars of landscape have to confront the fact that not everyone engages as intensely with the sensory experience of landscape variation and the cultural and physical differences these can signify. It is no accident that it was during the second half of the nineteenth century that geographers, anthropologists and even historians, and not just folklorists, began to conceive of local and regional history as a means of recording and thereby hopefully helping to prevent the loss of presumed identities threatened by modernisation. In so doing they became part of the action, helping to create what they claimed only to be observing. Historians and geographers have thus played their part, alongside novelists, artists and the state, in what might be termed the discursive formation of regional identities. One might go so far as to propose that this regional discourse, as conceived by modern scholars, could not and did not exist until commentators began to participate in it in the nineteenth century.The possibility emerges therefore that a sense of regional identity was not simply formed by the process of industrialisation itself, but took shape in the mind as one of the responses to it.46 We may well ask, therefore, whether it is possible for the region to exist in itself before it exists for itself. Can there be a region before there is a 44 ‘Introduction: An Agenda for English Local History’, in Societies, Culture and Kinship, 15801850: Cultural Provinces in English Local History (Leicester, 1993), pp. 1-23. ‘Identities arise from real circumstances and are therefore incomprehensible without reference to those circumstances.’ See also his ‘Frontier Valleys’, The English Rural Landscape, ed. J. Thirsk (Oxford, 2000), pp. 240-54. Compare Braudel, ‘History and the Social Sciences’, esp. p. 29 on structure and the longue durée, where he stresses ‘geographical constraint’. 45 Rollison, ‘Exploding England’, p. 3. 46 See Butlin, ‘Regions in England and Wales’, pp. 223-54.


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consciousness of a region and thus a sense of regional identity? As Alan Everitt wrote in 1979, ‘There is a clear distinction between what one might call a “conscious” region, on one hand, an area with a sense of its own identity, a sense of belonging together, and on the other hand, a region which is rather a perception of historians and geographers.’47 Anssi Paasi puts it slightly differently: ‘it is useful to distinguish analytically between the identity of a region and the regional identity (or regional consciousness) of the people living in it or outside of it.’48 This is a matter to which there can be no one solution. But in searching for identity, we have searched in this volume for conscious identity; for regional identity as distinct from identity of a region. This is not to deny a complex interaction between the physical environment and the way in which people place themselves in relationship to one another in the territory they inhabit. It is also necessary to recognise that the scale of a region with which people might identify, assumed to be larger than a county or conurbation, varies from place to place and varied from time to time. Territorial proximity shapes, and shaped, patterns of interaction and social intercourse of all kinds. Distinctive associated groupings over a wider area than the strictly local can be plotted from marriage patterns, legal transactions, newspaper circulation, membership of societies, business links and so forth. But this does not in itself reveal how people viewed themselves; and in particular whether they shared what we could call a regional awareness. The challenge is to discover whether they saw themselves in what we might today recognise as a regional association, differenced from others outside that association and also seen by others to have a distinctive difference which amounts to a regional identification. ‘Identity’, Pocock has recently stressed, is ‘an awareness of shared membership’.49 Indicators of this could be in the form of ethnicity, language, customs, foundation myths, collective memory or other attributes. How one finds it is problematic. Is it to be found articulated in day-to-day discourse? Is it to be found articulated more by the outsider looking in, or the insider reflecting on his or her shared membership? Is it to be found in particular moments of crisis or common purpose when by their rhetoric people reveal what they share which is not normally articulated? It follows that regional identity is not exclusive. It usually operates mutually with other forms of association and identity. Regional identity will therefore relate to – and not necessarily be in opposition to – other 47 Everitt, ‘Country, County and Town’, p. 80. 48 A. Paasi, ‘Region and Place: Regional Identity in Question’, Progress in Human Geography 27.4 (2003), p. 478. 49 J.G.A. Pocock, ‘Politics of Historiography’, Historical Research 78 , no. 199 (2005), p. 12. See also the discussion in Milne, North-East England, pp. 2-5.

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forms or scales of identification – such as those based on settlement, topography and administrative units (above all the parish, county and nation). These other geographical entities – and identities – can coalesce with regionalised behaviour and identities and lend support to them. Though like other forms of identity, regional identities can be a resource for conflict and exclusivity. Whether tethered or roaming free, an important element in the mental construction of the region is the history imagined for it. Memory of the past is deployed, selectively and creatively, as one means of imagining identity. The history we tell ourselves is thus itself one way in which we establish our shared membership. History, as a constructor of memory, is often used to construct and maintain memories of localities or regions; including deliberate elision and loss as a part of the reinvention of tradition, such as the way in which St Cuthbert has become associated with the Palatinate of Durham when originally he was celebrated across a wider north.We choose the history we want, to show the kind of region we want to be. Thus in the mid twentieth century the history of the Durham coalfield, especially the customs and way of life of the coalfield mining communities, was deployed as an indicator of the particular character of the modern North East as a region, notwithstanding the fact that it was characteristic of only part of the whole in terms of both social class and territory. But it was adopted as a defining cultural phenomenon of what it meant to be north-eastern in the late twentieth century. In this respect Rob Colls is also right to pick up on the borders and the Armstrong works as described in the late nineteenth century to signify a new Northumbria.50 Someone else’s Northumbria, imagined in a different way, will have a different history. This is exactly what happened in the 1830s when a group of antiquaries decided to form the Surtees Society, in honour of their late friend Robert Surtees, to publish materials for the history of Northumbria, which they defined as the ancient kingdom at its furthest extent; a Northumbria which included Yorkshire, Lancashire and southern Scotland.51 But the point is that history, in this way, as a perception of the past in different presents, becomes an indicator of identity in the now, not of identity in the then.This is very close to what Pocock has recently proposed for a national identity, or, as he prefers, awareness of shared membership as a nation.52 History, paradoxically, is at one and the same time a myth about origins and continuity – contestable, subject to rearrangement and retellable – and a ‘scientific’ enquiry purporting to cut through the mythological to the ‘truth’.The history of 50 R. Colls,‘Born-Again Geordies’, Geordies, ed. R. Colls and B. Lancaster, 2nd edn (Newcastle, 2006), pp. 3-8. 51 A. Hamilton Thompson, The Surtees Society, 1834-1934, SS 150 (1939), p. 2. 52 Pocock, ‘Politics of Historiography’, p. 12.


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a defined society will be told to, and by, members of that society in terms of a public language, what we call its history, that that society has formed for itself. Regions in the past, if they are to be found, will have histories in this sense, and histories that are similarly contested as well as retellable.And through the centuries, regional histories will have been articulated and retold, encompassing the myths and heroic narratives of their past in a shared public language that ought to be recoverable. It is from these past histories that one might discover past regional identities.53 ‘The north-east is different,’ it is claimed. ‘The people of the region share a history and a culture which is unique.’ The very origins and use of the phrase ‘North East’ can itself be historically located, appearing at a particular moment and imparting a particular set of meanings. An examination of the deployment of the words in The Times is revealing.54 The term began to be used by correspondents, in advertisements or in reports of speeches and government publications, to distinguish the north-eastern parts of England from other parts of Britain in the 1840s. Weather reports by 1870, reflecting real differences between the weather either side of the Pennines, distinguished between the ‘North East’ and ‘North West’; the Board of Trade regularly reported wrecks on the north-east coast. The first usage with a modern ring to it appeared in an advertisement of 1869 by a London firm in the hop trade for a commercial traveller for the North East of England. What the ‘North East’ encompassed was not always specific. An Inspector of Factories’ report, covered on 7 May 1887, which compared the state of shipbuilding in the ‘north-east of England’ with the Clyde, had Tyneside in mind. A report of 20 April 1901, however, reveals that the phrase was also used to describe the wider industrial region. A deputation of Unionist MPs said to be representing constituencies in the North East of England met the Chancellor of the Exchequer at Westminster to protest against the coal tax.The deputation was composed of representatives from the Newcastle, Tyneside, Tynemouth, Sunderland and Stockton constituencies. In 1912 the Cleveland iron mines were described as feeding the furnaces of North-East England, a district ‘somewhat wider’ than Cleveland alone. For the Agricultural Organisation Society, the ‘North East’ in December of the same year included the North Riding of Yorkshire; and the GNR (Great Northern Railway) continued to promote Yorkshire as part of the ‘North East’ in the inter-war years.The 53 In such a way ethnologists and folklorists in nineteenth-century Spain ‘discovered’ deeprooted separate racial and linguistic identities for Galicia, Andalucia, Catalonia and the Basque Country, each appealing to mythological histories and imagined ‘golden ages’ in the past (Mar-Molinero and Smith, Nationalism and the Nation, pp. 7-10). 54 This paragraph draws on an unpublished preliminary survey undertaken by Tony Nicholson using the Times Digital Archive. We are grateful for his permission to use it. See also the evidence unearthed by Graeme Milne, below pp. 117, 126-9, 132.

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more precise boundaries of the modern region first appear at the same time. It was in the minds of the Electricity Commissioners in 1929, when implementing the Electricity (Supply) Act 1926, who designated a North East area of England covering the counties of Northumberland, Durham and part of the North Riding (presumably industrial Cleveland). Occurrence of the phrase ‘North-East England’ in the pages of The Times shows that it was sometimes specific to the coast, and that on occasion it could encompass Yorkshire. An ambivalence as to whether in the minds of correspondents, politicians and government offices it was primarily Tyneside hovers in the background. Moreover, it appears, the idea of the North East was shaped as much by central government agencies and in the presentation of statistics as it was used by inhabitants and local organisations themselves. But it is clear there was in circulation a perception of there being a ‘North East of England’, both in London and in those parts of England, from the mid nineteenth century, which by the mid twentieth century had settled on its subsequent more limited delineation.55 This analysis fits neatly the conclusions concerning the formation of industrial regions reached by John Langton. It implies that one should be wary of identifying a region before 1850. But the words are not necessarily the same as the concepts; unless one makes the assumption that the signified, the concept of such an entity of the North East of England, could not exist before the signifier; that the phrase itself created something new in people’s minds only when it was expressed. Should one accept Joyce’s assertion that experience (in this case, of a region) is not prior to and constitutive of language, but is actually constituted by it?56 Or, alternatively, should we assume that the region existed before the people who lived in it, or saw it from elsewhere, were conscious of it being a region? Was the experience prior to the language? One answer is that everyday practices have had implicitly inscribed regionalised experiences since at least the late middle ages.57 Giddens illuminates the dilemma this 55 And yet many of those living there described what we call the north-east as simply the north of England. A review of the Middlesbrough News and Cleveland Advertiser in the mid nineteenth century demonstrates that the local press was more attached to this usage. See, M.J. Huggins,‘Sport and the Social Construction of Identity in North-East England, 18001914’ in N. Kirk, ed. Northern Identities (Aldershot, 2000). On northernness in general see, H.M. Jewell, ‘North and South: The Antiquity of the Great Divide’, NH 27 (1991), pp. 125; Idem, The North-South Divide: The Origins of Northern Consciousness in England (Manchester, 1994); Dave Russell, Looking North: Northern England and the National Imagination (Manchester, 2004); and Baker and Billinge, Geographies of England, passim. 56 Patrick Joyce, Visions of the People (Cambridge, 1991).The works of Quentin Skinner would, however, suggest that concepts can exist before there is a specific word for them. 57 Miri Rubin, ‘Identities’ in A Social History of England, 1200-1500, ed. R. Horrox and W. Mark Ormrod (Cambridge, 2006), pp. 383-412, discerns certain signs of late medieval ‘regional identity’, while Sarah Rees Jones (reviewing Liddy and Britnell’s North-East


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implicit regionality raises for historians. We might infer from his account that people could tell us about such things as their sense of regional affiliation, if only we could ask them.58 He illuminates the dilemma, but does not resolve it. We might approach this another way. Was there other language, other ways of expression, which denoted a similar experience, and in particular what we might understand as a shared awareness of a region? For instance, while the phrase ‘the North East of England’ might be new, other words and phrases may have been used which signified the same or a similar experience. ‘Northumbria’ was adopted as such a word. As used by the founders of the Surtees Society59 it is remarkably like the widely defined North East of the LNER (London and North Eastern Railway) in the 1930s. On the other hand an announcement in The Times on 10 May 1929 by the organisers of the North East Coast Exhibition at Newcastle, advertising its opening by the Prince of Wales, suggests a much narrower perception. Come to Newcastle, the organisers proclaimed, ‘the centre of the Romance, History and Industry of Northumbria’.60 One might go further. Is there any a priori reason why what came to be seen as one region, the North East, in the twentieth century, was always perceived as one? Could earlier generations, generations before the nineteenth century, who lived in these parts of England have formed different attachments and identities with either larger or smaller areas, which were the equivalent of regions? Medieval and early modern men and women spoke of their ‘country’ and frequently expressed an attachment to it.Writing from London on 23 January 1461,‘in haste and not well at ease’ to his brother John in Norfolk, Clement Paston reported preparations being made to face the threat of an unruly army advancing from the north. The ‘contre’ was in readiness to send horse and footmen when requested; it was important, especially for his ‘worship’, Clement advised, that John came with more men, better arrayed than other men of that ‘cwntre’. In this country, he repeated, everyone was willing to serve.The trouble was that the people of the north had been licensed to pillage all this country and to give away all men’s goods and livelihoods in all the ‘sowthe cwntry’.The lords on the spot had as much as they could do to keep control of ‘all thys cwntre more than iiij or v schers’ (4 or 5 shires). Unfortunately for us, we cannot be sure which England in the Later Middle Ages in The Medieval Review 06.06.14, http://name.umdl.umich.edu/baj9928.0606.014) identifies a tension between ‘modern scholars who are not self-consciously concerned with identity, and those of their subjects in the past who lacked the advantage of historical hindsight’. See also below n. 63. 58 Giddens, The Constitution of Society, pp. 90-2, 281. 59 R. Sweet, ‘“Truly Historical Ground”: Antiquarianism in the Long Eighteenth Century’, Northumbria, ed. Colls, forthcoming. 60 The Times, 10 May 1929.

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countries, other than Norfolk and the south country as a whole, Clement had in mind.Was he referring to what we now call the ‘Home Counties’? Presumably the recipient, John, had a clearer idea of what these overlapping countries were.61 A less life-threatening crisis beset Dobson, a Cambridge undergraduate from Durham in c.1600, who ‘carried himselfe very respectiuely til hee had perfitly learned all the customes and fashions of the Uniuersitie’. Though abused in the public schools by a Welshman, Dobson subsequently became the debating champion of northern undergraduates in a ‘controuersie decided betwixt the Northerne companies & Kentishmen. ...And because it concerned the credit of himselfe and all his countriemen, he kept his actes with asmuch good order and formality as hee could possibly make shewe of.’62 This fictional account in Dobson’s Drie Bobbes (1607) reveals that regional identities were an aspect of honour and target for humour in early modern England.The Kentish and the Cornish were the most definable ‘peoples’ within early modern England, while the equivalent regional identity for the north was the north country. ‘Country’ in the later middle ages or early modern era did not mean nation or state. It was used in a way similar to the French ‘pays’. But it tended to be applied more loosely than the area we associate with region. Sometimes it was localised, sometimes it overlapped with ‘county’, or even went beyond in terms, still surviving, of the ‘North Country’, the ‘West Country’ or, more specifically, the ‘Black Country’. It may be, therefore, that a person’s awareness of their ‘country’ and, related to it in one usage, a sense of belonging to a county community, was akin to an identification with a region in modern times. But it was a flexible term. If ‘country’ was the nearest late medieval and early modern concept to the modern sense of ‘region’, the question arises as to whether perceptions of what we call a region changed over time, and the possibility emerges that the geographical space that we call a region is not fixed, but changes in size, formation and identity over the centuries.63 Where there was in the late61 The Paston Letters, ed. J. Gairdner, (6 vols, London, 1904),Vol. III, pp. 249-50. For the context see Helen Castor, Blood and Roses:The Paston Family in the Fifteenth Century (London, 2004), pp. 140-1. See also M.L. Holford, ‘Pro Patriotis: “Country”, “Countrymen” and Local Solidarities in Late Medieval England’, Paregon 23.1 (2006), pp. 47-70, esp. at p. 55, in which it is argued that people might have imagined their countries in terms of overlapping areas, of which one might be what we perceive as a region, but that the central focus was a more localised area of their birth. 62 Dobson’s Drie Bobbes: A Story of Sixteenth Century Durham, ed. E.A. Horsman (London, 1955), pp. 85-91. 63 See Alan Everitt’s comments that ‘regions are not necessarily constant or static units,’ that ‘expressions like… the North East have no lengthy lineage’ and his warning that reading such a term back into the past ‘usually imposes the wrong kind of regional pattern upon the landscape of history’ (‘Country, County and Town’, pp. 79-81). ‘Counties’, he suggested, ‘surely ceased to be simply administrative units and in many cases became (in the early modern period) genuine self-conscious regions’. His own emphasis was on the emergence


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twentieth-century mind one region of the ‘North East’, how many were there in the sixteenth-century mind and earlier, less than one or even more than one? And can we find the words and phrases that constituted these? Thus, because the conceptualisation of regions is contingent upon specific historical contexts, we need to pay very careful attention to the different ways in which regionality arises as an issue in different periods. Finding regional identity in the past, in any region in England, is problematic. The region is elusive and it is protean. Whichever way we choose to look at it, it is unlikely to be all inclusive, all embracing or continuous.We have multiple social identities and look different ways, deal with different agencies and move in different directions according to the different aspects of our lives. Family and religion may, for instance, generate particular spatial ties. Yet we generally have a sense of belonging at the same time to a locality (a neighbourhood, village, parish or town), to something wider, and to the state. The in-between we might, as a shorthand, call a region. And for that we can always find a validating history if we want to. It is hard enough to find the region so perceived in the present; can we ever hope to find it in the past?64 The contributors to this volume draw upon their specific research to consider the broader question of regional identity. The contributions come from a long chronological span and arise out of research in different aspects of history. It was never intended to create a comprehensive chronological coverage and it was not anticipated that a uniform sense of identity over eight centuries would emerge, or that contributors would find the same boundaries to their region. Holford, Liddy and King, for example, bring together reflections from three different projects. Lee, Milne, Newton and Vall draw more directly on the individual research projects on which they were engaged as researchers in the Centre. Here, they address directly the implications of their findings for the question of regional identity. Rushton and the Allens have, meanwhile, brought the of the Hanoverian county town as ‘a kind of regional capital’ (ibid, pp. 89-105). Anthony Gross, ‘Regionalism and Revision’, Regionalism and Revision, The Crown and its Provinces in England, 1250-1560, ed. P. Fleming, A.J. Gross and J.R. Lander (London, 1997), pp. 1-11 explores further the idea of the county community as a focal point of regional study. Note too, that in considering identities in late-medieval England, Miri Rubin (‘Identities’, pp. 4026) finds no intermediary communal association between the local and the county and the realm.While she acknowledges that local communal identities varied by ‘region’ (undefined), she stresses that the key difference was between being English and not being English. 64 See also J.Allen, D. Massy and A. Cochrane, Rethinking the Region (1998); Hudson,‘Regional and Local History’; and Alan H.R. Baker and Mark Billinge, ‘Cultural Constructions of England’s Geography and History’, Geographies of England:The North-South Divide, Imagined and Material, ed. Baker and Billinge (Cambridge, 2004), at p. 182, advocating ‘a new approach to regional geography, one which sees regions as constituted of spatialised social relations, and narratives about them, which … work to reshape social and cultural identities and how they are represented … conceived as being a series of open, discontinuous spaces constituted by social relationships which stretch across spaces in a variety of ways’.

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results of other, unrelated research to bear on the question. The diverse range of the contributions reflects the richness of research encompassed within and stimulated by the Centre. Matthew Holford, Andy King and Christian Liddy, in their essay ‘North-East England in the Late Middle Ages: Rivers, Boundaries and Identities’, explore the tension between the apparent institutional unity of Northumberland and Durham as technically being one royal county (albeit containing several liberties) and one diocese and the separation administratively, politically, socially and culturally between the two, marked by the boundary of the river Tyne in the later middle ages. Diana Newton, in her essay ‘Borders and Bishopric: Regional Identities in the PreModern North East’, explores how this far corner of the land was viewed by the elites themselves and from Westminster at the end of the sixteenth century to discover whether one coherent sense of the North East as a region had by that moment emerged. Peter Rushton, ranging more widely over the three centuries from 1550 to 1850, asks whether in particular aspects of their lives, engaging with the law, either standing before it or seeking to amend it, the people of the two counties revealed any awareness or consciousness of acting within a region. These three essays, with their focus on the North East in the late medieval and early modern periods, question and challenge the presumption that there was as yet a region which could be recognised in the twenty-first century. Lee and Milne in their chapters on the nineteenth and twentieth centuries explore aspects of the experience of the ‘mature’ industrialised North East: the familiar modern region formed on the basis of the coalfield and railways. Robert Lee in ‘A Shock for Bishop Pudsey: Social Change and Regional Identity in the Diocese of Durham, 1820-1920’, examines the Church of England’s responses to the consequences of industrialisation. Lee traces how the Church attempted to provide a spiritual anchor for the ‘migrant hordes’ and examines how far the Church’s mission might have as a result contributed to a regional consciousness. Graeme Milne, in ‘Business Regionalism: Defining and Owning the Industrial North East, 18501914’, shifts attention away from the staple industries which have dominated so much of the historiography to consider the relationship between the day-to-day reality of business activity and the rhetoric of regional promotion – which employed the term ‘North East’, as defined in competition with other business regions, from the later nineteenth century. Still in the same period the Allens, along with McPherson and Renton, turn the spotlight on migration and the impact of widespread immigration on the communities of the North East. In ‘Competing Identities: Irish and Welsh Migration and the North East of England’, Joan and Richard Allen undertake a comparison of the contrasting Irish and Welsh communities after 1850 to consider the relationship between these vigorously sustained


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ethnic identities and those of their host communities. Jim MacPherson and David Renton focus on the specifically political aspect of this relationship and examine two campaigns – one a by-election fought by John O’Hanlon in Jarrow in 1907 and the other the campaign for racial equality in the later twentieth century – to consider how migrant identity could be modified by regional identity. Bringing the chronological span of the volume up to the later twentieth century, Natasha Vall, in her chapter on ‘Regionalism and Cultural History: The Case of North-Eastern England, 1918-70’, focuses on the manner in which broadcasters and broadcasting shaped regional identity. In the concluding chapter the editors draw out some conclusions from these papers which, somewhat to their surprise, provided more of an agreed narrative than any of us expected.We also endeavour to fill the gaps in that narrative that were inevitably left by the way in which the volume was formed. What emerges is an answer to the overarching question, but an answer that is bound to be provisional and contestable. We hope too that it contributes not just to an understanding of the history of the North East of England as a region, but additionally to the continuing debate about regions and regionality in history.

1 North-East England in the Late Middle Ages: Rivers, Boundaries and Identities, 1296-1461 MATTHEW HOLFORD, ANDY KING and CHRISTIAN D. LIDDY Introduction A good case could be made that it was in the late middle ages that the North East enjoyed its greatest coherence as a region. Recent work has argued for the status of the historic counties of Northumberland and Durham as a distinct ‘cultural province’ within pre-modern England, delineated by two major rivers, the Tees and the Tweed.1 To the north of the region lay the drainage basin of the river Tweed and to the south was the river Tees, which cut across eastern England for around 100 miles to the sea, following a course through the enclosed environment of Teesdale in the west to the northern edge of the North York Moors in the east. These two physical features and the landscape associated with them, it has been argued, helped to create and define the region of North-East England, within which there was a regional pattern of settlement and network of towns. The North East, in this view, was a single region, determined by natural features of rivers and watersheds. In the later middle ages, however, Durham and Northumberland were united not simply by natural features but by administrative and cultural connections. From the perspective of Westminster, the historic counties of Northumberland and Durham comprised a single county. For the routine purposes of government, Durham was simply a liberty within this county, a form of devolved local authority whose ruler, the bishop, was ultimately accountable to the crown. In certain circumstances the sheriff of Northumberland could assume jurisdiction there.2 Northumberland and Durham also formed a single ecclesiastical unit, the diocese of Durham. This administrative unity was reinforced by strong cultural links.The cult of St Cuthbert, whose earlier associations with Scotland tended to be 1 2

For this view, see C. Phythian-Adams, ‘Frontier Valleys’, The English Rural Landscape, ed. J. Thirsk (Oxford, 2000), pp. 236-62. See, for example, the crown’s use of the writ non omittas, issued to the sheriff of Northumberland in 1310 and discussed in C.M. Fraser, A History of Antony Bek, Bishop of Durham, 1283-1311 (Oxford, 1957), pp. 224-6.

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MATTHEW HOLFORD, ANDY KING AND CHRISTIAN D. LIDDY

conveniently forgotten, provided common cultural identity within the region. Cuthbert was a northern, even a national, saint, but it seems that he was particularly important within the diocese of Durham. In the early twelfth century the monk and historian, Symeon of Durham, wrote a polemic on the pre-Conquest church; in it he explained that the people who helped to clear the site of the new church on the Durham peninsula in the late ninth century and who also assisted in its construction constituted ‘a multitude of people from the whole area between the river Coquet and the river Tees’, a broad geographical area encompassing all of Durham and about half of Northumberland.3 And when a battle was fought against the Scots in 1018 on the south bank of the river Tweed at Carham, Symeon noted that it was the ‘people of St Cuthbert’, that is,‘the whole people between the river Tees and the river Tweed’, who waged the unsuccessful campaign.4 The Northumbrian past also offered a shared history for the whole region, as reflected in the interest shown in the Anglo-Saxon kingdom by two local lay historians, Sir Thomas Gray (d. 1369) and John Hardyng (d. c. 1464).5 It is even possible that the learned first earl of Northumberland had in mind the pre-Conquest kingdom of Northumbria in 1405, when ^ he formed his fantastical conspiracy with Owain Glyn Dw r and Edmund Mortimer to depose Henry IV and partition England; the portion allocated to the earl included all of the northern counties and some of the midlands.6 That ancient Northumbria was susceptible to recollection and refashioning as a regional myth is also suggested by the example of the Nevilles of Raby and Brancepeth, the major landed family in the bishopric of Durham in the late middle ages. The Nevilles, according to William Camden, the Tudor antiquary, traced ‘their Descent from Waltheof Earle of Northumberland’.7 Waltheof was a powerful Anglo-Saxon nobleman, actively involved in the major northern rebellion of 1069 against the building of royal castles at York, symbols of the new Norman regime of William the Conqueror. In 1072 Waltheof became earl of Northumbria, a position previously held by his father. His rule lasted until 1076, when he was once more implicated in a revolt against the king, and summarily executed.Was there ever a better symbol of Northumbrian separatism than 3 4 5

6

7

Symeon of Durham, Libellus de Exordio atque Procursu istius, Hoc est Dunhelmensis, Ecclesie, ed. and trans. D. Rollason (Oxford, 2000), pp. 148-9 and n. 10. Ibid., pp. 156-7. Late medieval concepts of the kingdom of Northumbria are more fully discussed in A.J. Pollard and A. King, ‘Northumbria in the Later Middle Ages’, Northumbria: History and Identity, ed. R. Colls (Chichester, 2007). The plot is discussed by R.R. Davies, The Revolt of Owain Glyn Dw^ r (Oxford, 1995), pp. 166-9.The conspirators’ agreement is printed by H. Ellis, Original Letters, Illustrative of English History (4 vols, 2nd Series, London, 1827),Vol. I, pp. 27-8. W. Camden, Britain, trans. P. Holland (London, 1610), p. 737.

NORTH-EAST ENGLAND IN THE LATE MIDDLE AGES

29

Waltheof, the ‘last native earl of Northumbria’, who twice rebelled against the crown?8 Despite the significant historical and cultural links between Durham and Northumberland, however, a single, coherent north-eastern region did not in fact develop between the thirteenth and fifteenth centuries. The crucial explanation for this is to be found in the separate administrative identity and organisational structure of the areas north and south of the Tyne. The county of Northumberland contained several ‘royal liberties’ where the king’s writ did not run and which enjoyed a substantial measure of autonomous government, including Hexhamshire, Redesdale and Tynedale. By far the most important liberty was that of the palatinate of Durham, the core of which was the land between the rivers Tyne and Tees, otherwise known as the bishopric of Durham.While the bishopric could be presented as part of ‘the body of the county’, and the sheriff of Northumberland could be given jurisdiction therein, it was in practice a separate entity. It was not represented in the lower house of parliament; and its inhabitants were usually able to avoid paying national lay taxation, and often resisted demands for military service. It was an area with a single lord, the bishop of Durham, who jealously defended his jurisdictional privileges, often with the assistance of the monks of Durham priory, the guardians of St Cuthbert’s bones. It was an area whose local community, the Haliwerfolc, or ‘people of the saint’ (St Cuthbert), could also express a strong sense of its own privileges. Bishop, priory and local community all drew on strong cultural and historical traditions in asserting their claims: traditions that emphasised the ancient integrity of the lands ‘between Tyne and Tees’ and the particular protection which their patron, St Cuthbert, provided. Northumberland and Durham may have formed a single diocese, but its divisions into the archdeaconries of Durham and Northumberland mirrored the separation of the county of Northumberland and the liberty of Durham between Tyne and Tees: indeed, ‘the bishopric of Durham’ customarily referred not to the diocese but to the liberty. If we seek evidence of regional identity in the late medieval North East, the geographical territories to which people felt that they belonged, and with which they most closely identified, were Northumberland and Durham. It is to the communities north and south of the river Tyne that we must turn.The first part of this essay, therefore, looks at the emergence of the river Tyne as a political boundary between the liberty of Durham and the county of Northumberland and uses disputes over rights of jurisdiction to demonstrate how they fostered a distinct sense of belonging north and south of the river. The relationship between the liberty of 8

For Waltheof, see W.M. Aird, St Cuthbert and the Normans:The Church of Durham, 1071-1153 (Woodbridge, 1998), pp. 74-5, 91-4.

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Durham and the county of Northumberland is then considered in the rather wider context provided by the impact of Anglo-Scottish warfare upon the communities north and south of the Tyne. It might be thought that the interests of local and national defence and the demands of the greatly expanding royal ‘war state’ would draw the inhabitants of the wider region closer together. In fact, this was not the case. Warfare served to accentuate, rather than lessen, the political and cultural differences between Durham and Northumberland.War with Scotland led to the militarisation of Northumberland society and to the development of the east march as a separate governmental institution and legal jurisdiction; in Durham, war led to successful local claims for immunity from demands for military service. The River Tyne By the late middle ages, the river Tees was a boundary marker of great antiquity. The river marked the boundary between the early medieval kingdoms of Bernicia and Deira, which in about 600 had joined together to make the united kingdom of Northumbria.9 After the fragmentation of this kingdom following Viking invasions in the second half of the ninth century, the northern border of the new Viking kingdom of York became the river Tees.10 The river Tyne was different: it was not among the ‘historic major boundary lines’ identified by Charles Phythian-Adams.11 It was only in the post-Conquest period, as the separate political organisation of the area between the Tyne and the Tees acquired a more definite shape under the control of successive bishops of Durham, that the Tyne became a significant border in matters of jurisdiction: the Tyne marked the point at which the bishop of Durham’s powers ended and the earl of Northumbria’s powers began.12 Two episodes dating from the 1070s and early 1080s and retold by Symeon of Durham make this point very clear.The first is the story of the three monks from the abbeys of Evesham and Winchcombe who, inspired by Bede’s Ecclesiastical History of the English People, travelled to the North East to pursue monastic reform, and who settled on the north bank of the river Tyne at a site which would later become known as Newcastle; or in Symeon’s words, at a ‘place which although it belongs to the bishopric of Durham is under the jurisdiction of the earl of Northumbria’. With this 9

Phythian-Adams,‘Frontier Valleys’, p. 240; D. Rollason, Northumbria, 500-1100: Creation and Destruction of a Kingdom (Cambridge, 2003), pp. 6, 43-4. 10 Rollason, Northumbria, pp. 212-13. 11 Phythian-Adams, ‘Frontier Valleys’, pp. 237-8. 12 D.W. Rollason, Sources for York History to AD 1100 (York, 1998), p. 79. Strictly speaking, after the grant of Hexhamshire to the archbishop of York in the late eleventh century, the liberty lay between Derwent, Tyne and Tees. Only the lower reaches of the Tyne formed the boundary between Durham and Northumberland.


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in mind, Bishop Walcher (1071-80) invited the monks ‘to accept a place to live which was rather under the jurisdiction of the church than under that of secular power’.13 The second episode involves the murder of Bishop Walcher in 1080 at Gateshead, on the south bank of the river Tyne. On his appointment as earl of Northumbria in 1075, the bishop had extended his authority north of the Tyne, which led to bloody conflict between the bishop’s regime and the people of Northumberland. A meeting was arranged at Gateshead, on the border of the earldom and bishopric, between Bishop Walcher and his retinue and representatives of the Northumbrians – the people ‘who lived beyond the Tyne’ – to secure peace. The attempted reconciliation failed, and Bishop Walcher was cut down by the Northumbrians.14 Precisely because its role as a formal boundary was comparatively recent, the Tyne marked one of the most clearly defined and most actively foughtover administrative divisions in later medieval England. By the time of Henry I (1100-35), when the first detailed account of jurisdictional divisions in the river Tyne was produced, the river was already the scene of conflict between the communities to its north and south. Soon after the Norman Conquest, and perhaps even before it, the river was the boundary between ‘the men of the liberty of Durham’ and ‘the men of Northumberland’. Dispute between Bishop Ranulph Flambard (10991128) and ‘the people of Northumberland’ (Northumbrenses) over the fisheries established in the river was resolved by the sworn verdict of ‘the eldest men of the entire Haliwerfolc (as the area between the Tyne and the Tees was described) and Northumberland’. This stated that the southern third of the river belonged to the bishop of Durham in respect of his liberty of Durham, the northern third to the earl of Northumbria in respect of the county of Northumberland, while the middle third was common to all.15 In the time of Henry II (1154-89), a similar dispute led to an identical judgement, again on the verdict of ‘the eldest men of Haliwerfolc and Northumberland’. An early twelfth-century historical memorandum asserted that these had always been the divisions of the river. Dispute over jurisdiction in the river emphasised that these communities either side of the river were separate entities, and led to the belief (or at least the assertion) that the Tyne had been a ‘boundary’ (marchia) ‘for all time’ (ab omni tempore). By around 1300 we might expect these documents to have had a decidedly antiquarian air, but nothing could be further from the truth. They were widely copied during these years, and continued to be copied 13 Symeon, Libellus de Exordio, pp. 200-3. 14 Ibid., pp. 216-19. For the historical context, see Aird, St Cuthbert, pp. 94-8. 15 For this and what follows, see J. Brand, The History and Antiquities of the Town and County of the Town of Newcastle upon Tyne (2 vols, London, 1789),Vol. II, pp. 4-6.

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in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries; and their claims were widely repeated. A document recording the verdicts from the times of Henry I and II, together with an historical memorandum on the earlier history of the river, was brought to Durham in the time of Bishop Antony Bek (1283-1311).16 At Gateshead in 1329 a jury recited the document almost verbatim. Bishop Richard Bury repeated its claims in 1344, prefacing the appointment of a commission to inquire into the destruction of fishing nets on the south bank of the Tyne with a declaration that the southern half of the river Tyne between the county of Northumberland and the county of Durham lay within ‘our royal liberty of Durham’. In 1383 Bishop John Fordham received a comprehensive package of liberties from the king including ratification of his right to moieties of the Tyne and the Tees and ‘divers profits therein, together with the mooring, loading and unloading of ships, boats and other vessels on his side of the same’. On Henry V’s accession in 1413, Bishop Thomas Langley secured royal confirmation of the charters of Henry I and Henry II to Bishops Flambard and Le Puiset concerning episcopal rights which had been claimed by the men of Northumberland as belonging to their county (quas homines Norhumbrenses de comitatu esse dicentes), including the taking of certain customs in the river Tyne. And when Thomas Langley’s rights were challenged by one of his own subjects in 1433, the bishop asserted again, before parliament, that the bishops of Durham had had possession from time immemorial of the liberty between Tyne and Tees, and moieties of the rivers of Tyne and Tees themselves.17 The documents were copied, and their claims repeated, because disputes over the river were on-going. In the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, these disputes, which emphasised the divisions between the communities north and south of the river, became if anything more heated. In 1329, for example, three of the bishop’s fisheries in his share of the river were broken. And in 1344 the bishop’s fisheries at Gateshead, Whickham and Ryton were broken and his boats seized and unloaded of their merchandise outside the liberty, whilst other boats were prevented from loading and unloading goods all along the south bank of the Tyne, 16 A copy of this was made in the cartulary of Tynemouth priory, compiled in the fourteenth century and printed in Brand, History and Antiquities,Vol. II, p. 5.Versions were copied into the register of Bishop Richard Kellawe:T.D. Hardy, ed., Registrum Palatinum Dunelmense:The Register of Richard de Kellawe, Lord Palatine and Bishop of Durham, 1311-1316 (4 vols, Rolls Series, London, 1873-8),Vol. III, pp. 39-41. Copies were made later at Durham priory and elsewhere: Brand, History and Antiquities,Vol. II, pp. 6-7, printing BL, Stowe MS 930, fol. 116; H.S. Offler, ed., Durham Episcopal Charters, 1071-1152, SS 179 (1968), pp. 62-3; DCM, Misc.Ch. 6588, Loc.II:3, and Reg. IV, fol. 93*r; Bodleian Library, Laud. Misc. 748, fol. 34v; TNA, E 36/173, fol. 120. 17 Bodleian Library, Laud. Misc. 748, fol. 74; Registrum Palatinum Dunelmense,Vol. IV, pp. 334-7; CPR, 1381-5, p. 362; CChR, 1341-1417, pp. 454-5; RP,Vol. IV, p. 427.


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where fishermen were also prohibited from selling fish caught in the southern half of the river.18 These disputes were rather different from the twelfth-century conflicts between the liberty and ‘the people of Northumberland’ because they involved two new parties.The first was the crown which, from the mid fourteenth century, began to issue commissions to survey and remove fish-traps in response to parliamentary complaints about the construction of fishing weirs and other obstacles to river navigation.19 In 1344, when the crown appointed the sheriff of Northumberland and the mayor of Newcastle (among others) to survey and remove the fishing traps which had recently been erected ‘on either side’ of the river Tyne, the operation of the commission in the liberty’s share of the Tyne was actively resisted, since its activities directly infringed the bishop’s right of lordship in the southern half of the river.20 The king’s commissioners found themselves prosecuted before Bishop Richard Bury’s own justices, specifically for interfering in the supervision of the southern half of the river Tyne; the bishop’s justices asserted that it belonged to the bishop of Durham as it lay within his liberty of the bishopric of Durham. Although the royal officials pleaded their innocence to such a charge, they were tried, found guilty and sentenced to imprisonment. The second party was the town of Newcastle-upon-Tyne and, in particular, its ruling elite, to whom control of the entire river Tyne was, for political and economic reasons, a desideratum. Indeed, the 1344 royal commission to inquire into the state of the Tyne was issued specifically to address the commercial interests of Newcastle, which, it was claimed, were directly affected by the presence of fishing devices such as kiddles and weirs in the river: these fisheries, on both sides of the river, restricted the passage of ships, boats and merchandise to the town.21 Control of the river mattered so much to Newcastle because of the trade which flowed up and down it, notably coal, much of which was mined south of the river in the bishopric of Durham.22 Newcastle’s civic officials sought to exercise jurisdiction over the whole river Tyne in order to channel this increasingly valuable trade through their own port rather than through the bishop’s borough of Gateshead on the opposite bank of the Tyne, over which they 18 Bodleian Library, Laud. Misc. 748, fol. 74; Registrum Palatinum Dunelmense,Vol. IV, pp. 334-7. For other disputes, see J. Spearman, An Enquiry into the Ancient and Present State of the County Palatine of Durham (Edinburgh, 1729), p. 9; Brand, History and Antiquities,Vol. II, p. 10, note y. 19 For parliamentary interest in the state of England’s rivers, see RP,Vol. II, pp. 229, 240, 277, 305, 331, 333-4, 346, 366, 372; Vol. III, pp. 46, 201, 282, 371-2, 438-9. For the crown’s legislative response, see SR,Vol. I, pp. 315-16, 393. 20 CPR 1343-5, pp. 392-3; CCR 1343-6, pp. 465-6; Spearman, County Palatine, p. 9;TNA, C 260/128. 21 CPR 1343-5, pp. 392-3. 22 J.B. Blake, ‘The Medieval Coal Trade of North East England: Some Fourteenth-Century Evidence’, NH 2 (1967), pp. 1-26, esp. 24-6.

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had no authority.And in 1314 Edward II was obliged to remind the town’s mayor and bailiffs of the immemorial rights of the bishops of Durham and their subjects to trade freely in the river Tyne along the entire coastline of the bishopric (per totam costeram episcopatus praedicti) because of their efforts to force ships and boats in the river to load and unload at Newcastle.23 Almost all those accused in 1344 of preventing the docking of ships on the south side of the river Tyne can be identified as men of Newcastle.24 The centrality of the coal trade to the growing political tensions between the rulers of Newcastle and the bishops of Durham is made abundantly clear in the bitter dispute of the 1380s between Bishop Fordham and the town of Newcastle.25 Fordham, who claimed that he had been prevented from receiving any profit from coal, was granted a royal charter guaranteeing that ships should be allowed to moor, load and unload coal and other merchandise on the southern side of the river Tyne without any kind of impediment from the men of Newcastle.26 Despite Newcastle’s vigorous opposition,27 the dispute petered out, almost certainly in favour of the bishop.28 Newcastle’s response was immediate: the construction of a new tower on the southern half of the Tyne Bridge. We know of the tower because of the lawsuit which Bishop Langley instigated against the mayor and community of Newcastle in 1410. In this year Langley petitioned the king in parliament to complain that, whereas from time immemorial he and his predecessors had held a moiety of the Tyne Bridge between the towns of Newcastle and Gateshead in 1384, the community of Newcastle, led by its mayor and bailiffs, had started to build a tower on the southern half of the bridge adjacent to Gateshead.29 This building work was completed in the episcopate of Langley’s predecessor, Bishop Skirlaw, and Newcastle’s civic officials had also removed and appropriated certain stones lying in the middle of the bridge, which formed the ‘ancient’ boundary between the bishopric of Durham and the town of Newcastle. According to Langley, the whole of the bridge up to the borough of Gateshead was claimed by the men of Newcastle as lying outside the bishopric of Durham and within the newly constituted county of the town of Newcastle. Without a doubt, the erection of a new tower on the Durham side of the bridge symbolised the townsmen’s growing confidence in their own corporate identity in the late fourteenth century. 23 24 25 26

Registrum Palatinum Dunelmense,Vol. II, pp. 1014-15. Ibid.,Vol. IV, pp. 335-6. For this and what follows, see C.M. Fraser, ed., Northern Petitions, SS 194 (1981), pp. 169-73. CChR, 1341-1417, pp. 290-1. The crown issued an order to the mayor and bailiffs of Newcastle on the same day: CCR, 1381-5, p. 349. 27 C.M. Fraser, ed., Ancient Petitions relating to Northumberland, SS 176 (1961), pp. 257-8. 28 CCR, 1381-5, p. 573. 29 TNA, SC 8/108/5361.


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Such confidence was expressed elsewhere in the town’s elevation to county status in May 1400, which separated Newcastle, in matters of law and administration, from the county of Northumberland.30 Newcastle’s pretensions were inflated by political crisis and judicial dispute about control of the river Tyne, which helped to create a sharpened sense of collective belonging for those who lived within the town. It is also significant that when Thomas Langley brought his plea over the Tyne Bridge before the royal court in 1414, he claimed that a jury from Northumberland would be favourable to Newcastle. First, the Northumbrians themselves (as we have seen earlier) had formerly claimed certain rights in the river, claims that might influence their verdict. Secondly, before its incorporation as a county in itself (when the tower had first been built), Newcastle had been part of Northumberland; and if the town’s liberties were confiscated it might again become part of the county. Langley therefore implied that local solidarities might also influence a Northumbrian jury’s verdict. Naturally enough such claims were rejected by Newcastle itself; but the court seems to have found them plausible enough, and a jury was eventually summoned from Cumberland and Westmorland.31 The importance of the Tyne as a boundary militated against any sense of regional identification with a wider Northumbria. Drawing upon the fourteenth-century chronicle of John of Tynemouth, the Historia Aurea, Durham priory argued, in defence of its rights at South Shields in the early fifteenth century, that the Tyne had divided Northumbria into two provinces – Deira stretching from the river Humber up to the river Tyne and Bernicia between the Tyne and the Firth of Forth – and that relations between the two had been far from harmonious:‘there was continual war and discord between the two kingdoms’.32 No matter that, in reality, it was the river Tees rather than the Tyne which had divided the two earlier Northumbrian kingdoms of Bernicia and Deira, this selective historical understanding of the region’s past articulated a powerful contemporary perception of the Tyne’s role as a frontier valley. South of the river, Newcastle’s claims posed a serious threat not only to the jurisdictional rights of the bishop of Durham, but to the economic livelihood of its lord and inhabitants. In 1383 the ‘great profit’ which the bishops drew from coal shipped in the river was stressed, but the bishops were far from being the only parties within the bishopric with investments in the liberty’s mineral resources.33 The fishermen of the bishop at 30 CChR, 1341-1417, pp. 397-8. 31 TNA, KB 27/614, mem. 15. 32 DCM, Loc. II:3; see also DCM, Misc.Ch. 7071i. For the reference to the Historia Aurea, see Lambeth Palace Library, MS 10, fol. 18r. 33 CChR, 1341-1417, pp. 290-1; M. Arvanigian, ‘Regional Politics, Landed Society and the

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Pipewellgate – part of the bishop’s borough of Gateshead stretching westwards from the Tyne Bridge parallel with the river – and those of Durham priory at South Shields suffered from restrictions on their trade.34 Priory, bishop and local landholders were all united by interests in the fisheries in the southern half of the Tyne, some of which were of considerable value.35 One of the numerous minor gentry families in the bishopric, the Marleys of Marley Hill in the parish of Whickham abutting the river Tyne, leased from the priory of Finchale a fishery which they shared with their neighbours, the Mashams of Gibside, and which they in turn leased out in 1359 for eight years in return for an annual rent of over £2 and seven salmons.36 Given that the Marleys’ annual landed income was less than £10,37 the fishery in the Tyne represented a major commercial opportunity. Different interest groups in the liberty were likely to be united by threats to these common interests; and it is no surprise to find Bishop Hatfield supporting the priory’s claims in the Tyne in 1352, or the prior of Durham, engaged in a conflict with the men of Newcastle about their rights and principally at South Shields on the south bank of the Tyne, demonstrating in the early fifteenth century that keepers of the south part of the river should come from the bishopric of Durham.38 The definition and defence of the liberty’s boundaries was thus far from being a matter of only technical or antiquarian interest. It had real economic implications. But it was also bound up with the assertion of the wider privileges and collective identity of the liberty. It was a liberty most closely associated with the figure of St Cuthbert. The origins of the territory over which the bishops of Durham presided lay in the estates accumulated by the pre-Conquest church of Durham and granted to St Cuthbert, mostly after his death. The land between Tyne and Tees constituted the core territory of the patrimony of St Cuthbert: the land belonged, in a very real sense, to St Cuthbert. It had, therefore, to be protected at all costs, which explains why Bishop Langley pursued the seemingly prosaic dispute about the Tyne Bridge so relentlessly for seven years. Whatever St Cuthbert’s wider regional cult, it was with the liberty between Tyne and Tees that he was most closely connected.The southern third of the Tyne belonged ‘to St Cuthbert and the bishopric of Durham’,

34 35

36 37 38

Coal Industry in North-East England, 1350-1430’, Fourteenth Century England IV, ed. J.S. Hamilton (Woodbridge 2006), pp. 175-91. BL, Stowe MS 930, fol. 117r-v; DCM, 1.3.Spec.38 and Cart. III, fol. 1r. In 1348 William Syre and William Enocson paid £62 13s 4d for a two-year lease of the bishop’s fishery in Gateshead: DCM, Cart. I, fol. 216r. See also Registrum Palatinum Dunelmense,Vol. IV, p. 335. DRO, D/St/D 5/1/5. TNA, DURH 3/2, fol. 80r. DCM, Reg. Hatfield, fol. 11v; DCM, 1.3.Spec.38; J. Raine, ed., Historiae Dunelmensis Scriptores Tres, SS 9 (1839), Appendix, p. cclxxi.


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and was called ‘St Cuthbert’s water’.39 Whether challenges to the liberty’s jurisdiction came from ‘the men of Northumberland’ or ‘the men of Newcastle’, disputes over the Tyne encouraged identification with the liberty and assertion of its historic identity and privileges.The people who lived south of the river knew that it was as ‘the men of the liberty’ (homines libertatis) that they had free passage in the Tyne. Conflict over rights of lordship in the river Tyne almost certainly led to the installation of boundary markers in the middle of the Tyne Bridge, known as ‘Cuthbert stones’, to denote the northern border of the bishopric.40 Dispute about economic and political control of the river Tyne served to heighten an awareness of the cultural differences between those living north and south of the river.The people south of the river enjoyed certain privileges which were denied those who occupied the land north of the Tyne. Perhaps the most valuable to its inhabitants was Durham’s exemption from royal taxation.41 It was a privilege that attracted considerable comment from outsiders. In 1384, when the town of Newcastle-uponTyne petitioned the crown about the grant of a recent charter to Bishop Fordham concerning trading rights on the river Tyne, its rulers drew a marked contrast between their own desperate financial predicament and the fiscal immunity of the bishopric: whereas the men of Newcastle paid almost as much as the city of York, no taxation whatsoever was forthcoming to the king within the bishopric. Unless the king revoked the bishop’s charter, the men of Newcastle warned, the inhabitants of the town would move to Gateshead on the south bank of the river Tyne and within the bishop’s jurisdiction.42 To the northern neighbour of the bishopric, therefore, Durham was a tax haven. The privileges of ‘the liberty of the bishopric of Durham between Tyne and Tees’ were therefore a fundamental factor in preventing the emergence of a sense of north-eastern identity throughout the later middle ages. These privileges were enjoyed not just by the bishop, but by the bishop’s subjects, who claimed them in respect of their residence between the Tyne and the Tees and, more importantly, by virtue of their special relationship with the founding father of the bishopric of Durham, St Cuthbert. They were the Haliwerfolc, an Old English word meaning the ‘people of the saint’. In its Latin form (populus sancti or populus sancti Cuthberti), this term is encountered numerous times in Symeon of Durham’s history of preConquest Durham, to denote the tenants of the church of Durham who

39 Brand, History and Antiquities,Vol. II, p. 5; DCM, 2.1.Reg.5. 40 DUL, Mickleton and Spearman MS 1, fol. 186r. 41 C.D. Liddy,‘The Politics of Privilege:Thomas Hatfield and the Palatinate of Durham, 134581’, Fourteenth Century England IV, pp. 61-79. 42 Fraser, Ancient Petitions, pp. 257-9.

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came under Cuthbert’s protection.43 By the early twelfth century, charter evidence indicates that the concept of the Haliwerfolc had acquired a precise geographical meaning as the land between Tyne and Tees as well as the people who lived there. The territorial sense of the word is amply conveyed in an episcopal charter of 1116x1119 addressed to omnibus baronibus et amicis suis de Euerwicscire [Yorkshire] et de Haliwerefolc et de Norhumberland.44 Between the late thirteenth and early fifteenth centuries, the Haliwerfolc regained its original meaning as the ‘people of the saint’. It was ‘the community of the liberty of Durham between Tyne and Tees’ that was sometimes identified as the Haliwerfolc or ‘people of St Cuthbert’. In the early fifteenth century, when the prior of Durham answered complaints from Newcastle about South Shields, he did so first of all with a reference to the ancient foundation of the bishopric of Durham.45 In 883, according to the prior, the whole land between the rivers Wear and Tyne was given to St Cuthbert and his church;‘immediately afterwards’ St Cuthbert and his church received the whole land between the Tees and the Wear; ‘and then, a royal liberty was granted in the said land to St Cuthbert, his bishop and the ministers of his church, and the people called Haluwerfolk’.Though the idea of the Haliwerfolc had a far from continuous history, it provided the inhabitants of the bishopric with a politicised collective group identity more potent than any wider appreciation of a Northumbrian past. The Haliwerfolc could be jealous of the distinctive association with St Cuthbert which underpinned their privileged autonomy from the crown in matters of law, finance and administration; and liberty and county developed independent administrative systems which both reflected and maintained their separate identities. Durham had its own sheriff, coroners and county court; indeed, its privileged status entailed the possession of an entire legal and governmental system where writs ran not in the king’s name but in the bishop’s, and where the local populace was accustomed to plead not before the crown’s justices but before the bishop’s.46 It is possible to debate the significance of some of these institutional structures,47 but in the broad view there can be little doubt that they encouraged, among the 43 Symeon, Libellus de Exordio, pp. 112-17, 122-5, 126-7, 130-1, 140-1, 144-5, 146-7, 196-9. The origins and subsequent use of the term ‘the Haliwerfolc’ are explored more fully in C.D. Liddy, The Land of the Prince Bishops: The Bishopric of Durham in the Late Middle Ages (Woodbridge, forthcoming). 44 Offler, Durham Episcopal Charters, p. 75. 45 For what follows, see DCM, Cart. III, fol. 1r. For a brief account of the dispute, see R. Welford, History of Newcastle and Gateshead (3 vols, London, 1884-7),Vol. I, p. 260. 46 For the formal structure of administration in the bishopric, see R.L. Storey, Thomas Langley and the Bishopric of Durham, 1406-1437 (London, 1961), pp. 57-92. 47 See, for example, J. Scammell,‘The Origin and Limitations of the Liberty of Durham’, EHR 81 (1966), pp. 449-73.


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liberty’s inhabitants, an awareness of the distinctive privileges they derived from dwelling between Tyne and Tees. Certainly, in the mid fourteenth century, an attempt by royal commissioners to enter the liberty in order to conduct a judicial inquiry was resisted by the local freeholders, acting in the name of the Haliwerfolc, who stated that the king’s writ did not run in the liberty.48 Furthermore, even when the liberty’s administrative systems were found inadequate, it is arguable that identification with the liberty was strengthened rather than weakened. Around 1345 ‘the men of the liberty of Durham and Norhamshire’ petitioned the king to complain that various legal writs could not be used within the liberties to the disadvantage of the local community.The petition appealed to the crown’s duty to see that justice was done to all, but it is a mistake to suggest that it reveals ‘neither awareness of its particularity nor concern for its perpetuation’ or that the local community had ‘little to gain from the franchise’s continuance’.49 Had the local community been happy to see the liberty’s institutions decay, they would hardly have bothered to petition for their renewal; rather, concern for the viability of local institutions was presented as something shared by the whole community. Finally, as this petition indicates, the privileges of the liberty led to further complications for any ‘north-eastern identity’.The privileges of the bishopric, Bedlingtonshire and Norhamshire were closely related. Sometimes collective action was necessary to defend these privileges, as when the communities of Durham and Norham petitioned the crown to protest against an impending royal judicial visitation.50 And so, when ‘the community of the liberty of Durham’ acted collectively with other northeastern communities, it was not with the county of Northumberland, but only with two connected liberties within it. In another revealing episode, also from the 1330s, the men of the liberty of Durham and Norham asked the crown to excuse the debts they owed for the purchase of victuals.Their argument was that the county of Northumberland had been excused, and that the liberties were parcel of the county and should have the same treatment.51 Here, it is true, we can see how the county of Northumberland could on occasion provide the basis for a broader northeastern identity. But although the men of Durham and Norham might claim to be part of the county, their entrenched administrative separation meant that in practice they were treated separately from it, and were forced to act separately.

48 49 50 51

CIPM,Vol.VIII, pp. 383-4. As argued by Scammell, ‘Origin and Limitations’, p. 470. RP,Vol. II, pp. 99-100; cf. Fraser, Northern Petitions, pp. 229-32. Fraser, Northern Petitions, p. 217.

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Anglo-Scottish Wars Such were the jurisdictional structures which were the fundamental forces inhibiting the development of north-eastern identity in this period. It might be supposed that, after 1296, the Scottish wars would override the significance of these structures. Warfare certainly led to the development of new governmental institutions with little respect for liberties – commissions to array infantry and commissions to assess tax. Indeed, it led to the creation of royal officers with powers extending over the whole area north of the river Trent.52 However,Anglo-Scottish warfare did not in fact bring the North East together as a region, and it did little to prompt the articulation of any north-eastern identity. Warfare served only to accentuate difference rather than promote unity within the region. There were many reasons for this. Whilst Northumberland was, sporadically, a war zone during the fourteenth century, the impact upon Durham (while hardly negligible) was not on the same scale. The first skirmish of the wars was fought in Northumberland in Easter 1296, and in the following year the county was devastated by a Scottish army led by William Wallace. Durham, however, did not suffer Scottish invasion until 1311; it was invaded on several occasions between then and 1322, again in 1327, in 1346, in 1388 and finally in 1461, but otherwise Scottish raiding was largely confined to north of the Tyne. More immediately, Northumbrian political society was disrupted by the abrupt removal of the strong links between England and Scotland which had flourished during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Unsurprisingly, such cross-border links had flourished particularly in Northumberland, the northernmost English county, where Tynedale was held as a regality by the kings of Scots, and many held lands on both sides of the Anglo-Scottish border.53 In peacetime the divided loyalties which this entailed were not a problem; however, the outbreak of war in 1296 rendered cross-border landholding increasingly untenable, a development which was completed by the rebellion of Robert Bruce in 1306. One result of this was a crisis of lordship in Northumberland, as many estates in the county were forfeited to the crown by lords who opted for allegiance to Scotland, while conversely, many Northumbrian lords were impoverished by the loss of lands in Scotland.54 Durham, on the other hand – excepting the major forfeitures of John Balliol at Barnard Castle and Robert Bruce at Hart – was much less affected. 52 See, for example, Rotuli Scotiae, ed. D. MacPherson et al. (2 vols, London, 1814-19),Vol. I, pp. 147-8, 169. 53 See especially K. Stringer,‘Identities in Thirteenth-Century England: Frontier Society in the Far North’, Social and Political Identities in Western History, ed. Claus Bjørn, Alexander Grant and Keith J. Stringer (Copenhagen, 1994), pp. 28-66. 54 J.A.Tuck, ‘Northumbrian Society in the Fourteenth Century’, NH 6 (1971), pp. 22-4; J.A. Tuck,‘The Emergence of a Northern Nobility, 1250-1400’, NH 22 (1986), pp. 1-7;A. King,


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The strong cross-border ties between Northumberland and Scotland may indeed have impeded the development of a stronger sense of regional identity in the North East of England. Until 1296, Northumbrians tended to look north across the Tweed to Scotland rather than south across the Tyne to Durham;William Swinburne, for instance, established his family’s prominence through service to Alexander III of Scotland, and as a client of the Comyn family (who held extensive estates in Tynedale).55 The significance of the Tyne as a boundary meant that the severing of these cross-border ties did not lead to a greater sense of unity with Durham, despite the crisis which faced the whole of the north of England from Scottish raiding after 1311. The vacuum left in Northumberland by the removal of many of the county’s leading magnates (such as the Comyns) was not filled from Durham. The administrative machinery of warfare – the assessment of tax, the levying of troops, the creation of new officers such as the wardens of the march – may have ironed out some of the jurisdictional complexities within the region. The greater liberties of Hexhamshire, Redesdale and Tynedale were all incorporated to some extent in commissions of array and tax-assessment.56 There are thus some grounds for thinking that the opportunities and demands of Anglo-Scottish warfare were a vital factor in drawing together the different interests and jurisdictions of Northumberland into something approaching a cohesive county community.57 ‘The poor men of the community of Northumberland’ (les poures gentz de la communaute de Northumbreland) had of necessity to act together to defend themselves, and to ensure that their concerns were addressed by the English crown.58 In Durham, however, it was different, and the pressure of the English war-state in fact served to harden the liberty’s privileges and to strengthen the local community’s identification with them. The bishop’s liberties north of the Tyne, Norhamshire and Bedlingtonshire, were included within the east march, or the county of Northumberland, but despite the ambitions of the wardens of the east march, the liberty between Tyne and Tees was immune from the wardens’ jurisdiction, an immunity which was confirmed by the crown. Thus, in

55 56 57

58

‘War, Politics and Landed Society in Northumberland, c.1296-c.1408’ (unpublished Ph.D. thesis, Durham University, 2002), pp. 1-32. See M.L. Holford and K.J. Stringer, with A. King, Liberties and Loyalties: North-East England, 1200-1400 (Edinburgh, forthcoming). For details, see ibid. King, ‘War, Politics and Landed Society’, pp. 234-55; M.L. Holford, ‘War, Lordship and Community in the Liberty of Norhamshire’, Liberties and Loyalties in Medieval Britain and Ireland, ed. M.C. Prestwich (Woodbridge, forthcoming). The phrase is from a petition to the crown of 1327, begging for the pardon of debts to the exchequer incurred during the wars, as the men of the county had been ‘entirely ruined by the Scottish enemies’: Fraser, Ancient Petitions, p. 191.

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1433, in response to vigorous lobbying from Thomas Langley, bishop of Durham, Henry VI sent a writ to Henry Percy, second earl of Northumberland, as warden of the east march, ordering him not to compel the bishop or his subjects living within the bishopric to appear before the warden’s court on the grounds that neither the bishop nor his men and tenants had been obliged or accustomed to plead in any court within the liberty apart from the bishop’s, or in any court beyond the Tyne and Tees.59 Durham did not contribute to national taxation; it also claimed special privileges in relation to military service.This was quite different from the situation in Northumberland where the military jurisdiction of the wardens imposed obligations upon the local community. These are illustrated by a writ of July 1356, sent to the veteran warrior Robert de Ogle, informing him of the appointment of Henry Percy and Ralph Neville as wardens of the marches, and ordering him, on pain of forfeiture, ‘to march with them against the Scots, our enemies, if they should presume to invade the marches, to repel their malice, with the aid of God’, with as many men-at-arms, hobelars and archers as possible.60 Furthermore, despite the legal obligation to serve, military service was frequently waged by the crown. This stick and carrot of obligation and payment, coupled with the dire military necessity of defending the county against invasion, ensured that most of Northumberland’s gentry took up arms, giving the ‘county community’ a decidedly militaristic bent.61 It also brought the men of the county into close and regular contact with the crown, as in December 1302, when ‘the barons, knights and good men and the whole commonalty of the county of Northumberland’ did manage to act collectively to agree terms with Edward I’s treasurer, Walter Langton, for serving on a foray into Scotland – and to ensure that this agreement was not to be taken as a precedent.62 This was not the case in Durham where responsibility for raising troops within the bishopric was devolved upon the bishops, who thus acted effectively as a buffer between the crown and the men of the bishopric. In addition, the obligation of the liberty between Tyne and Tees to contribute to military service was not firmly established. In 1300 the local community rebelled against the bishop’s transmission of the crown’s demands for military action in Scotland, claiming that they were 59 DCM, Reg. III, fol. 167v. 60 NRO, ZSW 1/68. See also A. King, ‘“Pur Salvation du Roiaume”: Military Service and Obligation in Fourteenth-Century Northumberland’, Fourteenth Century England II, ed. C. Given-Wilson (Woodbridge, 2002), p. 26. 61 King, ‘“Pur Salvation du Roiaume”’, pp. 13-31. 62 J. Stevenson, ed., Documents Illustrative of the History of Scotland, 1286-1306 (2 vols, London, 1870),Vol. II, pp. 181-2; King, ‘“Pur Salvation du Roiaume”’, p. 14.


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Haliwerfolc who held their lands ‘for the defence of the body of St Cuthbert’ and who ‘ought not to go beyond the boundaries of the bishopric, namely beyond Tyne and Tees, for king or bishop’.63 There is no earlier evidence for such a claim or custom, and it was most likely a reaction to the particular circumstances of 1300. Nonetheless, the pressures of Edward I’s developing war state had provoked a renewed assertion from the local community of its distinctive identity and privileges. It was an identity which the crown was conscious to respect rather than challenge. This is why Edward III wrote to Bishop Louis de Beaumont in 1333 specifically to promise that the military forces which he had sent on several occasions to serve in Scotland, at the king’s request,‘outside his liberty, the bishopric of Durham’, would not be to the loss of the bishop’s liberty or to the prejudice of the men of the liberty.64 And even though the liberty did supply soldiers later in the fourteenth century, its privileges continued to be recognised by the crown. Royal commands to successive bishops of Durham acknowledged that the liberty of Durham should not ‘be prejudiced or in any way diminished by the present command’ and that the liberty ‘should always remain safe’.65 The political and administrative developments which followed in the wake of warfare had an unmistakeable impact upon local identities. This militaristic divide across the Tyne found expression in stone. A survey of Northumberland’s fortifications in 1415 lists thirty-seven castles and seventy-five towers;66 and over half of the castles, and the vast majority of the towers, had been built since 1296. These included fashionably showy courtyard castles, such as Ford, licensed by Sir William Heron in 1338, and Chillingham, licensed by Sir Thomas de Heton in 1344; and elaborate solar towers, such as the luxuriously appointed tower added to the hall-house at Edlingham by Sir William de Felton, probably in the 1350s.67 While the need to protect against the attentions of Scottish marauders provided a certain imperative for castle building in Northumberland, these castles were also intended as a statement, providing suitably martial dwellings for knights and men-at-arms such as the Herons, Hetons and Feltons, who had made or maintained their fortunes fighting against the king’s enemies, and who were determined that their neighbours should not forget this. By contrast, Durham’s gentry generally chose not to express their status through fortification. Aside from the building works of the Nevilles at 63 64 65 66

Raine, Historiae Dunelmensis, p. 76. Registrum Palatinum Dunelmense,Vol. IV, p. 173. Rotuli Scotiae,Vol. II, pp. 54, 70-1. Printed by C. Bates,‘The Border Holds of Northumberland’, AA, 2nd Series, 14 (1891), pp. 13-19. 67 A. Emery, Greater Medieval Houses of England and Wales, 1300-1500: Volume I: Northern England (Cambridge, 1996), pp. 65-7, 88-90, 94-5.

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Brancepeth and Raby, the only major castles constructed in late medieval Durham were Lumley, built by Ralph Lord Lumley and licensed in 1389; Hylton, built by Sir William Hylton in the 1390s; and Witton le Wear, built by Sir Ralph Eure, retrospectively licensed in 1410.68 Of these,Witton is an exception which proves the rule, for Eure had extensive interests in Northumberland, having twice served as sheriff of the county (in 1389-90 and 1397-99).69 Furthermore,‘the march’ was undoubtedly a concept with which men of Northumberland identified. Thus, writing in the 1350s, Sir Thomas Gray, the author of the Scalacronica, a chronicle of British history, referred to his fellow Northumbrians not as ‘Northumbrians’ or as ‘men of Northumberland’, but as ‘marchers’ or ‘men of the marches’.70 Gray is a particularly pertinent example, for his main family estates lay in Norhamshire and he held lands between Tyne and Tees; he also served the bishops of Durham as steward of the bishopric and as constable of their castle of Norham.71 Nevertheless, Gray seems not to have identified himself with the community of the bishopric. Certainly, he had very little to say about the impact of the Scottish wars upon Durham, between Tyne and Tees; rather, he tended to concentrate upon events in Northumberland, north of Tyne, or across northern England generally. Conversely, the Durham chronicler, Robert Graystanes, writing in the 1330s, related Scottish depredations in Durham in great detail, but was largely unconcerned with events north of the Tyne; and when he did mention Northumberland, he was mostly concerned with Norhamshire and Islandshire.72 This parochialism is best demonstrated by their respective accounts of Gilbert de Middleton’s robbery of the cardinals in September 1317.At first sight, this nationally notorious incident might appear as evidence of regional identity in action, for the plot encompassed much of the area between the Tees and the Tweed. The cardinals were ambushed near Rushyford on the road from Darlington to Durham, while Middleton was a knight whose lands lay north of the Tyne. Although the cardinals were stripped of their goods, the target of the ambush was Louis de Beaumont, 68 Ibid., pp. 107-9, 117-21, 155-7. 69 For Eure’s career, see J.S. Roskell, L. Clarke and C. Rawcliffe, eds, The House of Commons, 1386-1421 (4 vols, Stroud, 1992),Vol. III, pp. 38-43. 70 A. King, ‘Englishmen, Scots and Marchers: National and Local Identities in Thomas Gray’s Scalacronica’, NH 36 (2000), pp. 223-4. See also A. King, ed., Sir Thomas Gray: Scalacronica (1272-1363), SS 209 (2005). 71 For Gray’s career, see A. King, ‘Scaling the Ladder: The Rise and Rise of the Grays of Heaton, c.1296-c.1415’, North-East England in the Later Middle Ages, ed. C.D. Liddy and R.H. Britnell (Woodbridge, 2005), pp. 57-73. 72 Graystanes’s ‘Historia de Statu Ecclesiae Dunelmensis’ is printed in Raine, Historiae Dunelmensis, pp. 33-123.


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bishop-elect of Durham, whose consecration the cardinals had been on their way to witness when the party was ambushed. Beaumont and his brother Henry were taken away across the Tyne to captivity in Mitford Castle near Morpeth. According to John of Tynemouth, the author of the Historia Aurea, Middleton even subsequently claimed the title of ‘Duke of Northumbria’ (ducem Northumbrie).73 But if he was motivated by a desire to emulate the ancient earls of Northumbria, whose authority had once extended over both Northumberland and Durham, the reality of his power was rather less impressive.The great majority of those who seem to have been involved in the revolt were from north of the Tyne; and the plot had its roots in Northumberland, where Beaumont’s brother Henry was an unpopular court favourite who had recruited a number of knights from the county into his retinue, including Sir Thomas Gray, father of the author of the Scalacronica. Whatever the precise cause of the plot, which seems at heart to have been a factional dispute at Edward II’s court,74 Graystanes and Gray both portrayed the affair in terms of the politics of their own particular localities. Graystanes related the episode firmly to the bishopric, linking it to the intended consecration of Louis de Beaumont which the cardinals had hoped to perform at Durham. By contrast, Gray asserted that Middleton was motivated by anger at the arrest of his cousin, Adam Swinburne, held by the king because ‘he had spoken too plainly to him concerning the state of the marches’.75 Other aspects of Middleton’s revolt provide further evidence for the fundamental divide represented by the Tyne. Middleton extorted at least 450 marks of protection money from ‘the community of the bishopric of Durham’, and his accomplice Adam Swinburne (having been released from royal custody) squeezed an even greater sum out of the same community.76 Thus did the inhabitants of the land ‘between Tyne and Tees’ both represent themselves and act as a distinctive community. Such ransom payments, sadly, were a common feature of the 1310s, although they were more commonly paid to the Scots than to fellow Englishmen. The organisation of such payments provides particularly powerful evidence of how contemporaries articulated local and regional identity, because the areas that collaborated in paying off the Scots had to be sufficiently coherent and united to be sure that they would be able to 73 Lambeth Palace Library, MS 12, fol. 226r. 74 A. King, ‘Bandits, Robbers and Schavaldours: War and Disorder in Northumberland in the Reign of Edward II’, Thirteenth-Century England IX, ed. M. Prestwich, R.H. Britnell and R. Frame (Woodbridge, 2003), pp. 125-8. 75 Raine, Historiae Dunelmensis, pp. 100-1; King, Sir Thomas Gray: Scalacronica, p. 79; King, ‘Bandits, Robbers and Schavaldours’, p. 126. The Middleton affair is one of only two references to the recent history of the liberty in Gray’s work. 76 DCM, Misc.Chs 4049, 5053.

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raise the sums they had promised. Revealingly, therefore, it was ‘the men of Northumberland’ who were able to negotiate collectively with Robert Bruce for peace between 1311 and 1313. North of the Tyne such collective action ultimately broke down, and it increasingly fell to individual Northumbrian villages and lordships to negotiate blackmail payments on an ad hoc basis, such as the £270 offered by the ‘men of Bamburgh ward’ to the earl of Moray for a ‘soeffrance de guerre’ around 1315.77 Conversely, between Tyne and Tees, ‘the community of the bishopric of Durham’ was able to organise large payments to the Scots between 1311 and 1317, in 1327 and in 1343, and so avoided most of the ravaging and pillaging which afflicted Northumberland.78 Conclusion The Anglo-Scottish wars were arguably the most significant influence upon north-eastern England in the later middle ages, but they did little to engender a great sense of regional identity in the face of danger. Rather they served to deepen the jurisdictional chasm which separated Durham from Northumberland, and which ensured that a sense of wider northeastern identity did not develop.We do not wish to deny that the men of Northumberland and the men of Durham could unite in the face of Scottish invasion, to great effect; the spectacular English victories at Neville’s Cross, near Durham (1346), and Homildon Hill, in the foothills of the Cheviots in Northumberland (1402), were won by forces from across the North East. Nor do we wish to argue that the role of the Tyne as a jurisdictional boundary was neatly reflected in social, political or economic life. Social links across the Tyne did, of course, exist; they are appropriately symbolised in the contribution of members of both communities to the upkeep of the Tyne Bridge.79 Prosperous Newcastle burgesses such as Roger Thornton acquired property both north and south of the river.80 Also, the political communities north and south of the Tyne, again, were far from being wholly distinct.We might illustrate this from Gilbert de Middleton’s rebellion, for Middleton’s main accomplices, John de Eure and Walter de Selby, each held lands on both sides of the Tyne. In this respect we might return once more to Bishop Langley’s claim to a moiety of the Tyne Bridge. Eventually, in January 1417, Langley recovered possession of the disputed part of the Bridge.81 The ceremony 77 Fraser, Ancient Petitions, pp. 26-7. 78 J. Scammell, ‘Robert I and the North of England’, EHR 73 (1958), pp. 385-403; C. McNamee, The Wars of the Bruces: Scotland, England and Ireland, 1306-1328 (East Linton, 1997), pp. 129-40; Registrum Palatinum Dunelmense,Vol. I, p. 97, and Vol. IV, pp. 273-7. 79 A.M. Oliver, ed., Early Deeds relating to Newcastle-upon-Tyne, SS 137 (1924), pp. 62-128. 80 House of Commons, IV, pp. 596-8. 81 R. Surtees, The History and Antiquities of the County Palatine of Durham (4 vols, London, 1816),Vol. II, p. 110.


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was witnessed by a suitably august company, including twelve knights and twenty-one esquires ‘of the bishopric of Durham’ and four knights ‘of the county of Northumberland’.82 Here, from one perspective, was an assembly of north-eastern society, and the group illustrates the web of connections north and south of the Tyne. All four Northumbrian knights called upon to witness the event, Sir Robert de Ogle, Sir John Bertram, Sir John de Widdrington and Sir John de Middleton, were officers of Thomas Langley in the bishop’s lordship of Norham, in the northern-most outpost of the palatinate: Ogle had held the offices of constable of Norham castle, steward, sheriff, escheator and justice of Norhamshire and Islandshire jointly and continuously since 1403, whilst Bertram, Widdrington and Middleton were all palatine justices.83 The range of these men’s associations, which can be examined more fully in their recent biographies,84 cautions against any overly-simplistic assessment of their local identities; it reminds us that the complexity of such identities can never be adequately reflected by the straitjackets of administrative (or, indeed, geographical) units. Nevertheless, it is important to remember that it is not only modern historians who sometimes feel the need to put people into such straitjackets; individuals were similarly identified by their contemporaries, and made such identifications themselves, both individually and collectively. The assembly on Tyne Bridge in 1417 was not brought together by shared regional concerns, or conceptualised in terms of broad north-eastern identity. It resulted from dispute, it defined boundaries, and it took shape in terms of the two distinct ‘county communities’ of Durham and Northumberland.‘The men of the liberty of Durham’ and the ‘men of Northumberland’ were concepts which had contemporary meaning and significance. It was in these terms that contemporaries articulated their identities, and where perhaps the equivalent to a self-conscious regional identity might be found.

82 DCM, 3.3.Pont.3; Raine, Historiae Dunelmensis, Appendix, pp. ccvii-ccviii. 83 Ogle:TNA, DURH 3/33, mem. 31r; Bertram,Widdrington and Middleton:TNA, DURH 3/34, mem. 6d,TNA, DURH 3/38, mems 5r, 7r,TNA, DURH 3/36, mems 4r, 5r. 84 House of Commons, Roskell,Vol. II, pp. 211-14; III, pp. 731-3, 859-62; IV, pp. 853-6.

2 Borders and Bishopric: Regional Identities in the Pre-Modern North East, 1559-1620 DIANA NEWTON An anonymous appraisal ‘concerning the abused government and afflicted estate of Northumberland’, written to the queen late in 1597, opened dramatically and graphically by referring to the county’s ‘gastlie visage, her feared hart, and wasted lyms, so tattered and consumed that no man hathe art no[r] no arte hathe tearmes to unfold her diseases’.1 Even so, the reporter managed a further four pages, cataloguing shortcomings in every aspect of Northumberland life. The Church and religion were inadequately catered for; there was minimal provision of education at all levels; local justice was discharged irregularly and unsatisfactorily; the conduct of trade was not properly regulated; felons were inappropriately bailed; fines were not levied; sheriffs, wardens and their deputies were defrauding the crown of its dues, while the recent commission appointed to inquire into conditions in the middle march was composed of the worst offenders in that respect; the custodians of castles were not resident in them; Scots held tenements in England; days of truce were not held; and the English warden was openly colluding with his Scottish counterpart, to the detriment of the county. Above all, it declared that ‘our deseases are manifold & grievous bothe in bodye, sowle, and abylitie, seaminge tedious to all men, strange to many, and uncurable to the moste; and therefore it is that they are not undertaken, but desparatelie left as unknowen maladies to amend by tyme and leasure, which will destroye the whole bodye’. It was a woeful portrayal of a wretched and beleaguered part of England, which threatened the well-being of the entire kingdom. The approaches to Durham were regarded by those from further south as similarly dire, albeit expressed in less sensational terms. An account of Toby Matthew’s journey from Oxford to take up his appointment as dean of Durham, in 1583, recorded that the excruciatingly awful night spent at

1

TNA, SP 59/36/223

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DIANA NEWTON

an inn in Northallerton confirmed every rumour heard about the North.2 The noise, the dirt, the hardness of the beds and what was in the beds left the author feeling that three days in prison would have been preferable to that single night. Nearly thirty years later, when King James’s cousin, Lady Arbella Stuart, was committed to the custody of Matthew, now bishop of Durham, for contracting a marriage in defiance of the king, she made valiant efforts to resist what she regarded as banishment to the outer extremities of the kingdom. She appealed to the law, resorted to pleading extraordinary and life-threatening ill-health and, in a mixture of desperation and repugnance, lamented at her ‘harde doome’ in being ‘cleared to remote parts whose Courts I hold unfitter for the tryall of my offence’.3 The implication was that even its courts of law were inferior to those of southern England.Yet Arbella Stuart had spent most of her life in the North Midlands,4 which suggests that prejudices about the northeastern reaches of the kingdom were not confined to the South East. This chapter, which draws upon my monograph, concentrates on the elites of England’s north-eastern corner.5 It will examine observations and judgements made by those from other parts of the kingdom and, in particular, it will look at the ways in which the north-eastern counties, as well as Newcastle, were regarded as political, administrative and ethnic units, both individually and as part of a wider, generic ‘North’. It will go on to consider how the native gentry and urban oligarchies projected their own image of those parts, politically, administratively and culturally. It will reflect upon the consequences of these external and internal judgements, and those making them, when they collided and came into conflict. And, finally, it will discuss social, economic and religious divisions within the north-eastern counties and Newcastle. In so doing it aims to uncover aspects of regional identity in the pre-modern North East which may or may not have been consciously or subconsciously embraced by its elites. 2

3

4 5

H. Gee,‘A Sixteenth Century Journey to Durham’, AA, 3rd ser. 13 (1915), p. 106.This was based on a Latin poem entitled Iter Boreale, composed by Dr Eedes, who accompanied Toby Matthew. See also Rob Lee’s discussion of this episode in his chapter below, p. 106. BL, MS Add 34727, fol. 12. After prevaricating for four days at Highgate, early in 1611 the privy council instructed her custodian, Sir James Croft, ‘to carry hir bed and all into hir litter’ to continue her journey north.Although she never completed the journey, the bishop of Durham submitted a bill for £300 for his expenses. BL,Add Ch 17357. See also, BL, MS Harleian 7003, fols 104-5, 152 and passim and BL, MS Add 4161 passim.This episode was anticipated when the countess of Oxford endeavoured, equally strenuously, to avoid ‘a winter holiday in Wensleydale’ as an alternative to surrendering her estates to Richard of Gloucester in 1473. See A.J. Pollard, ed., ‘Introduction’, The North of England in the Age of Richard III (Stroud, 1996), p. xi. See H.M. Jewell, The North-South Divide: The Origins of Northern Consciousness in England (Manchester, 1994), esp. Chapter 1, ‘Where does the divide take place?’. Diana Newton, North-East England, 1569-1625: Governance, Culture and Identity (Woodbridge, 2006).

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‘The Remnant’ of the Kingdom: Outside Perceptions of the North East Reports about Northumberland and Durham presented a onedimensional picture of a part of the kingdom that was portrayed as uniformly grim; a sweeping impression that seemed to have been widely and unquestioningly accepted in the southern parts.That both the northeastern counties were part of a wider North, which was regarded as a single entity, with a correspondingly single identity, by those outside them, was confirmed in Shakespeare’s King Henry IV, part I, which was first performed sometime early in the same year as the anonymous report on Northumberland.6 It concerned the rebellion against Henry IV by his one-time allies, including Henry Percy, earl of Northumberland. Against this were set their two sons, Prince Hal and Harry ‘Hotspur’, as protagonist and antagonist. Hotspur had a reputation as a proven warrior but, having rebelled against his king, he was killed on the battlefield by Prince Hal. On one level, the play reflected contemporary concerns and perceptions about the North, whose perfidious inhabitants posed an abiding threat to legitimate authority. But this was a generic North, which, from a southern perspective, was rather vaguely and imprecisely defined as ‘the remnant northward lying off from Trent’.7 Notwithstanding the ramifications of the pejorative ‘remnant’, Shakespeare’s northern territories otherwise were indeterminately conceived, while his (southern) audiences were unlikely to be much exercised by their exact location or composition. Even when the two north-eastern counties were subject to William Camden’s more empirical and systematic approach in his Britannia, begun in 1577, they were presented as part of the Anglo-Saxon kingdom of Northumberland, which was composed of ‘the counties of Lancaster, Yorke, Durham, Cumberland, Westmorland and Northumberland, and the Countreys of Scotland to Edenburgh-frith’.8 This conformed to the notion that the North in its entirety, rather than the North East, was a recognisable entity in the late sixteenth century.9 But when Camden came to deal with the individual counties, he further organised them according to the peoples that first inhabited them, and a rather surprising picture emerged. For the ‘bishopric of Durham’, together with Yorkshire, Lancashire, Westmorland and Cumberland, was found to have been inhabited by the Brigantes, while Northumberland 6

7 8 9

It was entered on the Stationers’ Register in February 1598. See William Shakespeare, King Henry IV, part I, ed. David Scott Kaston,Arden Shakespeare (London, 2002), p. 76. King Henry IV, part II went on to deal with national identities. These were the lands that Hotspur expected to be given in act three, scene one. William Camden, Britain, or a Chorographicall Account of the Most Flourishing Kingdomes, England, Scotland, and Ireland, trans. Philemon Holland (London, 1610), p. 157. This still remains the case among some historians. See Jewell, North-South Divide, passim.

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was alone in having been peopled by the Ottadini; making the two northeastern counties quite different racially. The classical authorities, upon which Camden relied, had portrayed the Brigantes as ‘right valiant’ and ‘of especiall note among ancient Authors’, while the Ottadini were noted for having ‘called in the Caledonians to assist them and take arms with them’ against the Britons.10 This clear contrast between the honourable Dunelmians and the perfidious Northumbrians, was reinforced by the way in which they behaved and were perceived thereafter. The bishopric and city of Durham’s longstanding reputation throughout the kingdom for piety was clearly established in a hexastichon (or six lined poem) by John Johnston, the eminent Scottish poet, who concluded: Of Armes or of Religion may other boast, I grant, For Armes and for Religion both, this City makes her vaunt.11

Here was the familiar juxtaposition of the pious warrior, which epitomised the enduring and distinctive palatinate associations of Durham; when the bishopric was a semi-autonomous regality which was regarded as a bulwark against the Scots. This was in direct contrast to the more treacherous Northumberland. The perception of the very far northeastern reaches of the realm, occupied by the impious, or treacherous, warrior, was bolstered by reference to its landscape and situation, which had clear ramifications for the formation of its character. There the land was ‘for the most part rough’ which ‘seemeth to have hardened the inhabitants, whom the Scots their neighbours also made more fierce and hardy’. The only parts of Northumberland with any redeeming features were those that yielded sea coal, around Newcastle. There ‘a little cultivation makes the country on the coast and Tine agreeable to live in’.12 As far as the kingdom’s north-eastern extremities were concerned, its ethnic make-up and its disposition was quite clearly predicated on its geography. But, more importantly, the two north-eastern counties emerged as quite distinct from one another in Camden’s Britannia. In the wider popular imagination the North may have been an illdefined and homogeneous part of the kingdom, but its people had a very clear identity.Thus Camden contended that it was the ethnic character of Northumberland, in particular, which had formed the warlike spirit of its people: a spirit embodied by Shakespeare in his Hotspur. But the distinction was not quite as clear cut as that. Less than ten years before Camden began his Britannia, it was the ‘right valient’ Brigantes who had risen up against lawful authority, in the so-called northern rising. For the 10 Camden, Britannia, pp. 685, 796. 11 Ibid., p. 741. 12 Ibid., p. 799.


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venture had attracted most support from throughout northern Yorkshire and Durham, and was particularly concentrated in the Tees valley, with virtually no participation by men from Northumberland.13 This suggests that, in respect of ideology and religion, identity was as likely to be shared between men from northern Yorkshire and Durham as between Durham and Northumberland. The dissimilarity between the two north-eastern counties was given further expression by Bishop Richard Barnes soon after his arrival in Durham, in the same year that Camden made his ethnic differentiation. In sharp contrast, Barnes wrote to the queen’s principal minister, Lord Burghley, commending the obedience of the people of Northumberland, which he compared with ‘those stubborn, churlish people of the county of Durham and their neighbours of Richmondshire’.14 These contradictory verdicts on the relative bellicosity of Durham and Northumberland expose an ambiguity in the thinking of the central authorities about the two counties. For they coincided almost exactly with the time that the crown’s officials were criticising that part of the kingdom for being insufficiently militarised, with the ‘decay of service’ and decline in standards of border defence a recurring cause for reproach. Paradoxically, the earl of Huntingdon, lord president of the Council in the North, had maintained that close Anglo-Scottish relations were intrinsic to the decline in standards in 1580, and again in 1593. Suspicions about collusion between the English and Scots left Sir John Carey, deputy warden of the east march, in no doubt that amity between the English and Scots was jeopardising the security of ‘this countrye’ in 1603.15 This ran directly counter to Camden’s argument about the role of the Scots in moulding Northumberland’s character, and was another example of contemporaries’ confused understanding of the north-eastern parts of the kingdom. Contemporaries also questioned the extent to which those parts conformed to the kind of general ‘English civility’ that was perceived as desirable in the early modern period, and through which the Tudors endeavoured to achieve their ambitions of state formation.16 Their efforts 13 Out of almost 450 group pardons issued in its aftermath, only one contained the names of men from Northumberland. CPR, Elizabeth 1 (London, 1966),Vol.V, 81n.The pardons are nos 585-1019, especially nos 81-114. Reasons for the lack of support for the rising in Northumberland can be found in M.E. James, ‘The Concept of Order and the Northern Rising, 1569’, Past and Present 60 (1973), pp. 49-83 at pp. 71-5. 14 J. Raine, ed., The Injunctions and Other Ecclesiastical Proceedings of Richard Barnes, Bishop of Durham, 1575-87, SS 22 (1850), p. x. 15 TNA, SP 59/20/194; SP 59/28/88; SP 59/41/223.And see Newton, North-East England, p. 96. 16 For early modern concepts of civility see Anna Bryson, From Courtesy to Civility: Changing Codes of Conduct in Early Modern England (Oxford 1998), and John Gillingham, ‘From Civilitas to Civility: Codes of Manners in Medieval and Early Modern England’, TRHS 12 (2002), pp. 267-90.

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were ultimately doomed to failure in the marcher societies of the borderlands, especially in Northumberland: a failure, explained by Tudor officials, because its inhabitants were not really civil Englishmen at all.17 An early seventeenth-century commentary on border government began: As it was at the firste, in all other uncivill places, Soe can it not now be expected, that those people can yet for some few yeares (notwithstanding what good mean soever) be reduced to like civll obedience, as the other partes of this kingdome are, that have ever lived in subiection to lawe & Justice, for (being even from their cradells bredd and brought upp in theft, spoyle and bloode), they are by use and custome, become thereunto even naturallie inclined, havinge (as is too well knowne, and the late Judges of that Northern circuite can well reporte, what good proofe & testimonie thereof was given them) never almoste tasted of anie lawe civell or devine.18

The correlation between obedience and civility (or lack thereof ) was also clearly evident in Durham. In the aftermath of the northern rising, Sir Thomas Gargrave, sheriff of Yorkshire, considered that ‘until they are thus made lawful subjects’ (both temporally and spiritually), it was dangerous to deal with the rebels in south Durham and north Yorkshire.19 Newcastle, too, displayed dissident tendencies, notwithstanding Camden’s verdict on it as more agreeable than elsewhere in the north-eastern parts. An early draft of a proclamation to regulate the export of coal and control its quality, in 1591, made the point that the increased demand for coal by the domestic market meant that it ‘cannot conveniently be spared’ for export and, furthermore, that the ‘better sort’ was being conveyed out of the realm, leaving insufficient for ‘our natural and lovinge subjects’.20 It would seem that the commercialism of the Newcastle coal owners conflicted with England’s best interests just as the lawlessness of the county gentry did. Indeed, the nascent ‘capitalism’ of Newcastle was as unacceptable to the crown as the ingrained ‘feudalism’ of Northumberland. The association of sedition and incivility ultimately was employed to justify the crown’s centralising policies,21 which impacted badly on the 17 Steven G. Ellis, ‘Civilizing Northumberland: Representations of Englishness in the Tudor State’, Journal of Historical Sociology 12 (1999), pp. 103-27. 18 TNA, SP 14/5/43. For the theme of civility in official discourse see Keith Brown, Bloodfeud in Scotland:Violence, Justice and Politics in Early Modern Society (Edinburgh 1986), and Anthony Goodman,‘Religion and Warfare in the Anglo-Scottish Marches’, Medieval Frontier Societies, ed. Robert Bartlett and Angus MacKay (Oxford 1989), pp. 262-6. 19 Calendar of State Papers, Domestic, Addenda: 1566-1579, p. 218. And see K.J. Kesselring, ‘Mercy and Liberality:The Aftermath of the 1569 Northern Rebellion’, History 90 (2005), pp. 213-35. 20 BL, MS Lansdowne 65, fol. 22. 21 These were precisely the arguments being propounded to defend the crown’s brutality against the Irish. In 1596 Edmund Spenser produced his treatise called A View from the Present State of Ireland, offering a detailed strategy to ‘shock and awe’ the Irish by famine and transplantation.


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north-eastern counties. The composition of the commissions that were regularly empanelled to look into deficiencies in those parts reflected the government’s aims, as natives of Durham and Northumberland increasingly were excluded from them. This carried with it another inherent contradiction. For on the one hand the north-eastern confines of the kingdom were being criticised for being turbulent, untamed and a threat to the health of the body politic, on the other, its natural governors were regarded as ineffectual and unfit to determine its own affairs. Yet Westminster’s determination to exert greater control over those parts was also a tacit acknowledgement of their distinctiveness or separateness, which carried with it the potential for independent action that must be curbed, if not suppressed. It has been demonstrated that the border was often more imaginary than real to native inhabitants, who recognised it only when it suited them and even enjoyed close personal relations with their Scottish counterparts.22 But it was very real to the central authorities and their representatives on the ground, who viewed this cross-border concord with dismay, even though such informal intercourse was essential to its effective government.23 It was probably no coincidence that Henry IV, part I was first performed when the privy council was attempting to impose a metropolitan civility on the north-eastern frontier and bypassing or excluding the native elites of Northumberland from the government of their county. More worryingly, the temporary alliance that had been forged between Percy and the Scottish earl Archibald Douglas against Henry IV had potential parallels in the late 1590s, when Scotland conceivably might join forces with England’s enemies in Ireland. The unpredictable and unreliable border zone, as a very particular entity, continued to perplex the central authorities. They retaliated by cracking down on both north-eastern counties; for, ultimately, the governors of the kingdom were constrained by its administrative make-up. Yet the area which was causing most concern did not correspond neatly to the counties of Northumberland and/or Durham. It was quite specifically their upland parts: Redesdale and Tynedale in Northumberland and Weardale and Teesdale in County Durham. In August 1595 the bishop of Durham, together with judges Beaumont and Drewe, in Durham for the assizes, and Ralph, Lord Eure, wrote to the earl of Huntingdon.Their purpose was to express their concerns about the deplorable state of the counties of Durham and Northumberland where both English and 22 See, for instance, M.M. Meikle, A British Frontier? Lairds and Gentlemen in the Eastern Borders, 1540-1603 (East Lothian, 2004), esp. Chapter 8. 23 This is dealt with in Steve Ellis,‘Tudor State Formation and the Shaping of the British Isles’, Conquest and Union: Fashioning a British State, 1485-1725, ed. Steve Ellis and Sarah Barber (Harlow, 1995).

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Scottish outlaws ‘conspired together to make this Busshoprick of Duresme an open spoile and prey to the utter impoverishing and undoing of the poorer sorte, and to the Endangering of such persons of the better sorte’.24 They put the blame for this state of affairs squarely upon the wardens of the west and middle marches; thereby conjoining the highland parts of the borders as different from the more peaceable east march. For shared culpability was with Bewcastle and Gisland in the west marches. The bishop, judges and Eure quite clearly identified two distinct subregions within the north-eastern parts of the realm: the one corresponding with lowland Durham and Northumberland; the other with the western upland parts of County Durham, in cahoots with the highlanders of Northumberland as well as with those of Westmorland and Cumberland. Over twenty years later a proclamation ‘for the better and more peaceable government of the middle shires of Northumberland, Cumberland and Westmorland’25 reiterated that all writs should run in Hexhamshire, North and South Tynedale and Redesdale (as well as Bewcastle), notwithstanding any pretended claims of liberty or franchise they might assert. Thus, the Pennine uplands and the Tyne valley represented a particular subregion in the North. Rather than the racial factors identified by Camden determining the militant nature of county Northumberland’s population, it seemed to be the physical landscape, which both underlay and extended beyond any administrative boundaries, that was of greater significance.26 All this makes Professor Phythian-Adams’s reminder, that landscapes and social interaction ‘bleed’ from one territory into another,27 especially germane in the north-eastern parts. Meanwhile the government’s focus of attention was shifting within the north-eastern parts, again expedited by its geological make-up. The enormous growth of coal-mining on Tyneside from the mid sixteenth century was accompanied by a concomitant increase in migrant workers, not just from the former liberties, such as Redesdale and Tynedale, but also from further afield, together with the associated problems such rapid population movement brought with it. It introduced yet another contradictory identity into those parts, as the culturally sophisticated Newcastle elites were juxtaposed against its miscreant immigrant 24 TNA, SP 59/30/117. 25 Stuart Royal Proclamations, ed. James F. Larkin and Paul L. Hughes (Oxford, 1973), pp. 37481.This enlarged a law made in 1495. 26 See, for instance, Brian K. Roberts, Landscapes of Settlement: Prehistory to the Present (London, 1996), p. 58, fig. 3.8:‘Landscapes and Territories’. Both the physical regions and the types of landscape bisect the north-eastern parts of England, north to south, and extend into the north-western parts. 27 Charles Phythian-Adams, ‘Differentiating Provincial Societies in English History’, Regions and Regionalism: An Agenda for Regional History, ed. B. Lancaster, D.R. Newton and N.Vall (Newcastle, 2007), forthcoming.


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workforce. Even the ‘elite within the elite’ that emerged during the 1580s and 1590s in Newcastle proved to be no more amenable to central government than the county gentry, requiring its intervention to settle internal conflicts on several occasions. Both Newcastle and the middle march’s relations with the capital and central government demonstrate how, on occasion, the national interest would coincide with the regional, at other times the two might be in conflict and, sometimes, different interest groups within the region might be at odds with each other. All of which adds to the amalgam of identities apparent in the north-eastern reaches of the kingdom. Reinforcing Outside Perceptions of the North East from Within Clearly, gauging identity cannot feasibly be achieved without listening to the subjects themselves. Yet when the north-eastern elites reported to central government about conditions in their part of the kingdom, they were often as likely to reinforce its gloomy image as belie it. Even after the union of the crowns, the gentlemen of Northumberland’s ‘articles … shewing the cause of our present miserie and weake estate’, sent to the privy council in 1604, complained about ‘the dayly and continuall theft, wherewith we are nightly opprest contrary to all expectation, beinge nowe greater, then hath bene dyvers yeares heretofore’ [my italics], and registered their difficulties in countering the upsurge in lawlessness.28 They concluded by claiming that this made it impossible for them to contribute to the privy seal loan issued in July, showing that their motives for writing conformed to their habitual plea for special financial treatment on account of the peculiarly difficult conditions in their corner of the kingdom.Throughout Elizabeth’s reign both counties had been exempted from paying parliamentary subsidies, or contributing to privy seal loans, in return for their services on the borders defending the realm from the Scottish enemy.29 The fact that there had not been an official Scottish enemy since the middle of the century meant that the residents of the north-eastern counties were driven to embellish the dismal picture painted by outside observers to achieve their ends. Accordingly, the unofficial Scottish enemy was regularly exhibited as evidence of the far North’s particular 28 TNA, SP 14/9A/230. Ultimately they were unsuccessful. The fiscal immunity of Durham already was being relaxed in the 1590s, so it was expedient for Northumberland to continue labouring its deleterious state. See APC, 1590-1591, p. 187; APC, 1597-8, pp. 558-9. But while none of the Northumberland gentlemen’s names appeared on the registers of receipt for the 1604 loan and they were not subject to the subsidy of 1606, in 1609 they were required to contribute to a forthcoming loan. See TNA, E 401/2584-5; 3 Jac I, c26 in SR, Vol. IV, Part II, pp. 1124-5; NRO, 1DE7/18 and 1DE7/20-22.They continued to be liable thereafter. See TNA, SP14/67/45; APC, 1613-1614, pp. 491-6; APC, 1619-1621, pp. 2913; APC, 1621-3, pp. 176-8. 29 1 Elizabeth I, c21 and repeated regularly throughout her reign.

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vulnerability, in the guise of the desperate marauders who preyed upon its inhabitants; a menace that was over and above the unruly nature of the northern counties’ native population. And they continued strenuously to defend their exemption from contributing to national levies, even after the union of the crowns when, technically, the border, with its attendant exigencies, was set to vanish.Thus, their negative accounts appear to have been deliberately manufactured in order to maintain the favourable financial arrangements they enjoyed with the crown. Even so, these fiscal concessions, together with the unusual situation pertaining there, were not peculiar to the north-eastern counties. For they were shared by the other northern counties of Westmorland and Cumberland, making the common experience more northern than north-eastern, with concomitant implications for fostering a specific north-eastern identity predicated on adversity. Where the north-eastern parts did claim distinguishing features was through their own peculiar traditions. In the bishopric of Durham, the legend of its adopted saint, Cuthbert, was regularly told and retold, as he was portrayed as the defining spirit of the north-eastern diocese. Robert Hegg, writing in the 1620s, was fully alive to the crucial role of St Cuthbert’s celebrity in the consciousness of the north-eastern parts, from Lindisfarne and Norham in the North through to ‘the Land betweene the Rivers of Tees and Weer’, in the south.30 By highlighting St Cuthbert’s abiding concern for the area’s well-being, he thereby attributed a clear geographic association of the saint with the north-eastern corner of England, especially that part which was ‘girded almost rownd with the renowned River of Weer’.31 Eventually, and most notably, the veneration of St Cuthbert became a part of the so-called ‘Rites of Durham’.Although these were the product of more than one hand, they were the work of one mind, very probably that of William Claxton who died in 1597.32 For the difficult years of the 1590s, marked by economic distress and foreign wars, as well as the deleterious effects of Tudor state formation, appear to have triggered a concerted effort to recover the ‘glories’ of Durham’s past. So that, as well as the life and legacy of St Cuthbert, which occupied much

30 The Legend of Saint Cuthbert or the Histories of his Churches at Lindisfarne, Cunecascestre, and Dunholm, by Robert Hegg 1626, Darlington 1777, repr. in Robert Henry Allan, Historical and descriptive view of the city of Durham, and its environs.To which is added a reprint of Hegg’s Legend of St Cuthbert (London, 1824), p. 10. See also above pp. 27-9, 36-9. 31 Legend of Saint Cuthbert, p. 22. 32 For the various manuscripts of the 1590s see Newton, North-East England, pp. 177-8. See also, A.I. Doyle, ‘William Claxton and the Durham Chronicles’, Books and Collectors, 12001700, ed. James P. Carley and Colin G.C.Tite (London , 1997), pp. 347-9.They were printed in J.T. Fowler, ed., A description of all the ancient monuments, rites and customes belonging or beinge within the monastical church of Durham before the suppression; written in 1593, SS 25 (1903).


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of the work, they dwelt, at considerable length, on the magnificence of the cathedral church of Durham, the domestic buildings of the monastery and the lives of the monastic community that lived and worshiped there.The whole was rounded off by a description of the processions held on certain holy days, when the citizens of Durham joined in tribute to the city and bishopric of Durham, marching behind the banner of St Cuthbert. By contrast, the people of Northumberland ‘prided themselves on being different from other English folk, projecting their menfolk as a warrior elite’;33 most notably in ballads, some of which were known throughout the kingdom, where, contrary to Camden’s assessment, it was their chivalrous heroism that was venerated. In his ‘Apologie for Poetrie’, which appeared in 1595, the widely travelled Sir Philip Sidney noted that it was customary in Hungary for ‘songes of their Auncestors valour’ to be a feature of their feasts and other such meetings.34 When he came to provide an English equivalent he turned to the kingdom’s north-eastern extremities. Famously, he declared that ‘I never heard the olde song of Percy and Duglas that I found not my heart mooued more then with a Trumpet.’ The heroic secular past was regularly conjured up through these ballads which stressed ‘the role of localism in regions where strong and necessary outside influences and interventions were regarded ambivalently’.35 Such localism was reflected in the cultural subregions of Northumberland and Durham, which transcended administrative divisions, and reflected their quite distinct identities.Thus, St Cuthbert and all that his cult represented was most closely associated with the bishopric, while the martial exploits celebrated in the border ballads encapsulated a specific society with its idiosyncratic characteristics predicated on its frontier location. Newcastle, meanwhile, already part of a commercial Newcastle/London nexus, was both a receptor and conduit for a national culture, which spread beyond the town into the north-eastern counties. Hence, commerce offered another ‘north-eastern identity’ in addition to the secular warrior and spiritual saint who represented the traditional, and highly provincial, embodiment of the north-eastern counties and/or the diocese. This was superimposed onto existing subregional identities, with the potential, at one and the same time, to dilute and enrich the mix of the north-eastern corner of England. Aside from these consciously articulated cultural identities, regional identities are particularly difficult to pin down in the early modern period. 33 Anthony Goodman, ‘Border Warfare and Hexhamshire in the Later Middle Ages’, Hexham Historian 13 (2003), pp. 50-1. 34 Sir Philip Sidney,‘An Apologie for Poetrie’, Elizabethan Critical Essays, ed. G. Gregory Smith (Oxford, 1904),Vol. I, p. 178. 35 Anthony Goodman, ‘Introduction’, War and Border Societies in the later Middle Ages, ed. Anthony Goodman and J.A.Tuck (London, 1992), p. 23.

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The task is rendered more challenging by the fact that ‘sentiments of locational belonging, never define themselves; they can only be understood specifically as long-term reflections of past and present societies inhabiting particular contexts.’36 But how far do the ‘particular contexts’ of the northeastern reaches of the kingdom conform to notions of a region? Until the later seventeenth century regions tended to be regarded as units of regnum, or rule.37 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 of Northumberland, for Durham had no parliamentary representation in the Commons) members of parliament – that the elites of England’s north-eastern reaches engaged directly with their territory. The dismal reports to central government tended to concentrate on the poor performance of the local governors whose laxity in executing their administrative obligations and duties seemed to be axiomatic to the ills of the north-eastern counties.38 Yet the traditional picture of those parts, habitually described as being virtually ungovernable, and its justices of the peace censured because they ‘appeare not at their quarter sessions in any due order, and often kepe non at quarter days’, is not borne out by the surviving records.39 For they manifestly show that the performance of a fair proportion of the county administrators of both Durham and Northumberland was exemplary, while levels of crime were no greater than in other English counties. For example, a comparison of extant presentments and indictments before quarter sessions in Northumberland and Worcestershire reveals a similar rate of petty crime while the incidence of murder was not markedly worse in Northumberland than in Hertfordshire or Sussex.40 Furthermore, a close study of those justices of the peace who elected to serve their communities by actually turning up to sit on the magisterial bench (rather than simply being named on the commission of the peace)41 has shown that they had a clear affinity with, and demonstrable commitment to, the areas for which they were responsible. 36 Phythian-Adams, ‘Differentiating Provincial Societies’. 37 David Rollison, ‘Exploding England: The Dialectics of Mobility and Settlement in Early Modern England’, Social History 24 (1999), pp. 3-4. 38 For example, Sir Francis Walsingham to the Queen in 1580 (TNA, SP 59/20/198) and the return of the commission empanelled to inquire into the state of the middle march in 1595 (BL, MS Cotton Caligula D, ii, fols 230ff, supplemented by BL, MS Harleian 4648, fols 250ff). 39 TNA, SP59/36/223. Records for Northumberland are in the Vetera Indictamanta and the Delaval family papers, NRO, QS1; 1 DE/7 fols 48ff.Those for Durham are at DRO, Q/S/I 1-82, and printed in Durham Quarter Sessions Rolls 1471-1625, ed. C.M. Fraser, SS 199 (1991). 40 NRO, QS1, passim; J.W.Willis Bund, ed., Worcestershire County Records: Calendar of the Quarter Session Papers, 1591-1643, Worcestershire Historical Society (1900); J.S. Cockburn, ed., Calendar of Assize Records: Sussex Indictments, Elizbeth I, James I, (2 vols, London, 1975); J.S. Cockburn, ed., Hertfordshire Indictments, Elizabeth I, James I, (2 vols, London, 1975). 41 Membership of the commission of the peace, some of whom were named by courtesy and others ex officio members, is useful only for identifying who were regarded as principal


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These obligations were undertaken in addition to serving as sheriff, deputy lieutenants, wardens and deputy wardens of the east and middle marches and, after the union of the crowns, as border commissioners and as members of parliament.42 The same names feature as incumbents of all these positions in Durham, Northumberland and Newcastle, whose diligence can be interpreted as another measure of identification with their territory. But, in every instance, office-holding 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 Professor 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’.43 It is precisely because these were expressed in terms of county (or parish, for those further down the social scale) rather than region, that the region remains elusive. 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 specific north-eastern, identities. The only institution of a regional nature in the north-eastern parts was the diocese of Durham. As an ecclesiastical organization its personnel was composed of clerics, who were far less likely than their secular counterparts to be composed entirely of native north-easterners, with concomitant implications for their embracing a sense of identity predicated on their physical location. Moreover, Durham, as a diocese, a county, a palatinate and a city, embraced a truly kaleidoscopic range of identities; with its bishop, who was the temporal and administrative overlord of the city, county and palatinate and the spiritual leader of both County Durham and Northumberland, personifying this ambiguity. After the accession of Queen Elizabeth the complexion of Durham’s entire ecclesiastical personnel was altered. Increasingly, they were appointed from without Durham; prebendaries were recruited from a much wider area than the monks they replaced and they were drawn from higher up the social scale. Thus these were outsiders who regarded themselves as the social equals of the resident gentry.44 This might have resulted in stresses residents. For the performance of Durham and Northumberland’s JPs see Newton, NorthEast England, pp. 70-6. 42 Records of these office holders are to be found in volumes of AA, 4th ser., compiled by C.H. Hunter Blair between 1935 and 1950. 43 M. Braddick, ‘Elite and State Formation’, Regions and Regionalism, forthcoming. 44 David Marcombe,‘The Durham Dean and Chapter:The Old Abbey Writ Large?’, Continuity and Change: Personnel and Administration of the Church in England 1500-1642, ed. Rosemary O’Day and Felicity Heal (Leicester, 1976), p. 136; idem,‘“A Rude and Heady People”:The

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and strains between the clerical community and the indigenous secular elites; not least that they might have represented a challenge to the county gentry’s sense of being a discrete and coherent entity. But the threatened strife was never seriously realised, largely because they were functioning in different spheres. Kaleidoscopic Identities Where conflicts did arise was when outside influences were introduced in direct competition with its native elites. It has been argued that ‘identity is often easier to recognise by its absence than for its presence. Even if they are not sure what they have in common with one another, human groups can define themselves in their opposition to those who are not like themselves.’45 The experiences of both Thomas Sutton and Lord Eure suggest that such ‘encounter theories’ can be applied to the north-eastern reaches of the kingdom. In 1577 Sutton, one of the wealthiest commoners in England, acquired the queen’s 79-year lease of all the bishop of Durham’s valuable coal mines in Gateshead and Whickham through the offices of his patron, the earl of Leicester.46 Five years later he secured a 99year lease which he sold to Henry Anderson and William Selby, two of Newcastle’s most influential citizens, for a sum thought to be as much as £12,000.47 Anderson and Selby were the ‘front-men’ for a consortium of so-called ‘grand lessees’. Originally numbering about 60 persons, they quickly ‘compounded and made over their right to a far less number … to about 18 or 20’,48 thus creating an elite within an elite.That Sutton, the avowedly astute businessman, was persuaded to relinquish his interest in such a potentially lucrative lease was something of a mystery, unless he is considered as an interloper into Newcastle’s mercantile community. For Newcastle had long been determined to protect its interests against encroachments from outsiders. In 1529 it had negotiated a statute which gave it a virtual monopoly of buying and selling coal on Tyneside, which was then further consolidated into the hands of members of the hostmen’s

45 46

47

48

Local Community and the Rebellion of the Northern Earls’, The Last Principality: Politics, Religion and Society in the Bishopric of Durham, 1494-1660, ed. David Marcombe, Studies in Regional and Local History, No. 1 (Nottingham 1987), p. 122ff. E. Royle, ‘Introduction: Regions and Identities’, Issues of Regional Identity: Essays in Honour of John Marshall, ed. E. Royle (Manchester, 1998), p. 10. For a lively account of Sutton and his coal-mine owning enterprise see Trevor-Roper,‘The Bishopric of Durham and the Capitalist Reformation’, Durham University Journal, new ser. 7.2 (1946), pp. 45-58. And for a thorough treatment of Whickham, see David Levine and Keith Wrightson, The Making of an Industrial Society:Whickham, 1560-1765 (Oxford, 1991), passim. J.U. Nef, The Rise of the British Coal Industry (London, 1932; 2nd impression, 1966), pp. 1504; Roger Howell, Jr, Newcastle-upon-Tyne and the Puritan Revolution: A Study of the Civil War in North England (Oxford, 1967), pp. 23-4. BL, MS Lansdowne 65, fol. 38.


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company.49 Sutton, finding himself seriously disadvantaged by his exclusion from the privileges enjoyed by the politically powerful Novocastrians, no doubt thought it most prudent to cut his losses and bow out of the Newcastle coal trade. Lord Eure’s dismal experience of trying to govern the middle march in the 1590s was a direct result of his inability to identify with the area. He was appointed to replace the aged Sir John Forster, who had antagonised many of the Northumbrian gentry over his thirty-five year period as warden of the middle march. So that, although his career had been focused almost entirely upon Yorkshire, Eure began with a considerable fund of goodwill. He managed to squander it remarkably quickly, however; for he soon proved himself to be quite unequal to the task of managing the sensitively placed borders. From the beginning he misunderstood the middle march. His letter acknowledging his appointment made plain his unfamiliarity with the area beyond his understanding that most of the Northumberland gentry were associated with the Scottish outlaws either by marriage, by ‘tryste’ or by some other agreement to ensure the safety of their persons and their goods.50 He further compounded his difficulties by neglecting to cultivate any appropriate allies amongst the native gentry. For instance, he found himself rather more closely identified with Catholic members of the Gray family than might be deemed suitable for an avowed champion of Protestantism and opponent of recusancy, while his association with them placed him at odds with a number of powerful Northumberland families, including the Widdringtons and Selbys. His decision to replace Northumberland gentlemen with Yorkshiremen in key offices not only reinforced the gulf between himself and those he was required to govern, it had disastrous consequences which culminated in his resignation within two years of taking up his post.51 On the one hand, Eure’s experience appeared to illustrate ‘encounter theory’ at work: the definition of identity through opposition to others which, in turn, can intensify a sense of commonality.52 Yet the argument that no single model of ‘social belonging is entirely applicable to any community’53 is similarly 49 21 Henry VIII, c.18 in SR,Vol. III, pp. 302-3; HMC, Salisbury,Vol.V, p. 267; F.W. Dendy, ed., Extracts from the Records of the Company of Hostmen of Newcastle upon Tyne, SS 105 (1901), pp. xiii, xxviii, 9-17. 50 TNA, SP 59/30/162. 51 For the course of this episode see Diana Newton,‘The Impact of James I’s Accession on the North-East of England’, Renaissance Forum: An Electronic Journal of Early-Modern Literary and Historical Studies 7 (2004), pp. 10-19. 52 See, for example, Phythian-Adams, ‘Introduction: an Agenda for English Local History’, Societies, Cultures and Kinship: Cultural Provinces and English Local History, ed. Phythia-Adams (Leicester, 1993), p. 9 and Peter Sahlins, Boundaries: The Making of France and Spain in the Pyrenees (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1981), pp. 110-13. 53 Sahlins, Boundaries, p. 113.

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demonstrated in the fact that the Northumberland gentry had been instrumental in the downfall of Sir John Forster, and thereby contributed to Eure’s advancement.54 Thereafter it was the alliance between families, such as the Widdringtons and Selbys, who were not natural allies in normal circumstances,55 which brought about his downfall. One can see here the existence of more nuanced social, as well as political, relations in England’s north-eastern corner, which were subtler than mere hostility to outsiders. When it comes to defining identities, people adopt different identities at different times for different purposes.This was graphically demonstrated with the accession of the king of Scotland to the throne of England in 1603. The border between the two sovereign states of England and Scotland was to be obliterated and its outlook poised to alter fundamentally, as it became the focus of his desire that the area would be transformed from an international border to a heartland. As such it would no longer be a periphery: it would be the core; especially if the new king realised his ambition to move the capital to York.Yet existing divisions reemerged, even as the north-eastern members of parliament debated the formal dissolution of the border. For example, the inclusion of an antiremanding clause in the bill for the abolition of the hostile laws (a heterogeneous group of laws that were intended to define relations between England and Scotland) provoked a sharp division between the member for Northumberland, Sir Henry Widdrington, and Sir William Selby representing Berwick. Widdrington was deeply opposed to the extradition of offenders, while Selby sought to retain the practice.56 Not only did this spell the end of the temporary alliance between Widdrington and Selby, these contrasting opinions highlighted the differences between the sub-regions within Northumberland. On the one hand was Selby, the strict disciplinarian, who lived in the relatively peaceful, and more easily governed, lowland east march. On the other was the arguably more pragmatic Widdrington, whose views were formed in relation to his experience as a resident of North Tynedale’s lower reaches, as one-time deputy warden of the troubled middle march and as deputy lieutenant of Northumberland.57 Thus were neatly illustrated multi-layered and shifting interests (and identities) as local considerations superseded wider concerns. Local governors patently represented the interests of their county or town, but, in certain respects, their shared concerns were with only a very narrow section of the individuals that they governed. Justices of the peace, aldermen and deputy lieutenants were exercised by the need to maintain 54 For Forster see M.M. Meikle, ‘A Godly Rogue: The Career of Sir John Forster, an Elizabethan Border Warden’, NH 27 (1992), p. 126ff. 55 See below and Newton, North-East England, p. 110. 56 JHC, 1547-1714 (London 1742),Vol. I, p. 377. 57 BL, MS Cotton Titus F IV, fol. 105r.


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law and order and keep the populace at large under their control, while members of parliament represented directly the interests of only a very limited electorate. Newcastle’s exclusive oligarchies – hostmen, merchant adventurers and the grand lessees – fiercely guarded their privileges against encroachments from less advantaged entrepreneurs on Tyneside and Wearside as well as from further afield. The town’s social and economic divisions were palpably exposed by the conflict between the grand lessees and other of its chief residents, specifically designated as ‘non grand lessees’,58 which reached a climax in 1597 when Lord Burghley and the privy council were obliged to arbitrate.59 Rather than reach any kind of accommodation with their fellow merchants within the town, the grand lessees preferred to secure mutually advantageous trading arrangements with Londoners who had similar interests to their own. For instance, in 1604 the overriding argument put forward by Newcastle’s members of parliament against a bill that challenged the coal mine owners’ trading monopoly, was that it would jeopardize the supply of coal for London.60 Their diligence was thus more a determination to foster their own particular highly privileged interests than a demonstration of concern about the welfare of Newcastle, let alone their region. Like their counterparts throughout the rest of the kingdom, elite interests, and concomitant identities, were sectional rather than territorial, and tended to have more in common with those of a similar social and economic standing rather than with their immediate neighbours. In furthering their political, commercial and pecuniary interests, the north-eastern elites were driven by many different considerations.This was the case at a more personal level as well. An analysis of marriage alliances forged by the elites of the north-eastern counties might be a significant gauge of territorial association, which could, in turn, expose a sense of regional identity. However, there were relatively few marriages contracted between the county families of Durham and those of Northumberland, with gentlemen from Durham twice as likely to choose a bride from Yorkshire than Northumberland. There were even fewer marriages between those from Newcastle and the gentry of either county. Instead, marriages were overwhelmingly formed within circumscribed social parameters between those of a quite distinct social milieu. A survey of marriage settlements reveals similar contradictions. Ostensibly of a purely territorial nature, they also reveal additional concerns that were brought to bear by those drawing them up. For they were concluded across counties, 58 BL, MS Lansdowne 81, fol. 104. 59 BL, MS Lansdowne 85, fol. 55;TNA, SP 12/263/72; SP 12/264/117; SP 12/266/60; HMC, Salisbury,Vol.VIII, p. 419; APC, 25, pp. 381-2; 26, pp. 512-13; 28, pp. 225-6, 627-8; 29, pp. 181-2, 199, 295-6, 357-8. 60 TNA, SP 14/18/79; SP 14/18/81.

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which were as likely to include Cumberland,Westmorland, Lancashire and Yorkshire, as well as Durham and Northumberland, while witnesses to such contracts were chosen according to personal rather than geographical considerations. Furthering the interests of their families within their socioeconomic world was quite clearly the dominant factor in the decisionmaking processes of both the county gentry and the urban oligarchs in matrimonial matters, with little evidence of regional orientation at all.61 Cutting across all the identities and administrative and topographical boundaries in the north-eastern parts of the kingdom were confessional variations that had emerged in the century following reformation. In many respects, religious identities transcend other identities. On the one hand, they can be shared identities that stretch beyond the region and, even, the kingdom. On the other, they can mark a clear sense of distinctiveness within the physical boundaries of a region: a region that, in this instance, the counties of Durham and Northumberland, was more or less coterminous with the diocese of Durham. Its fluctuating religious complexion, initiated by its bishop, reflected and inspired shifting identities throughout the north-eastern reaches of the kingdom. For each alteration was accompanied by corresponding readjustments as religious identities were calibrated in reference to their ideological counterparts. But the subject of religious identities is more complex than a simple dichotomy between Catholic and varieties of Protestant. In the uplands of both north-eastern counties there was a mosaic of religious identities, which followed a pattern of alternation rather than uniformity.Thus, John Bossy was able to define the area dale by dale on his denominational map, which, by and large, reflected the confessional stance of the resident local elites.62 Nor was there a monolithic, north-eastern, Catholic stance. They embraced a diversity of opinions which went beyond the purely doctrinal; a further example of the fractional nature of allegiances and identities. For instance, the Catholic North was as disunited over the oath of allegiance, following the gunpowder plot, as were their co-religionists throughout the kingdom.63 In Newcastle the antagonistic relationship between its more privileged merchants and others – each with unequivocal Puritan leanings – demonstrated not only the complex and shifting factionalism within the citizenry of Newcastle, but also similarly complicated ideological identities as political and commercial issues superseded doctrinal or confessional ones. Religious divisions also transcended kinship groups. An account of the state of religion in Northumberland in 1607 reported that the Ogles were ‘some Protestants, some papists’, as were the Fenwicks, the Carrs and the 61 This paragraph summarises the fuller analysis in Newton, North-Eastern England, pp. 25-31. 62 John Bossy, The English Catholic Community (London, 1975), pp. 88-9. 63 See M.C. Questier, ‘Loyalty, Religion and State Power in Early Modern England: English Romanism and the Jacobean Oath of Allegiance’, HJ 40 (1997), pp. 322-6.


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Selbys.64 Familial networks or commercial concerns were far more important and generally overrode confessional considerations. There is very little to indicate a marked regional identity grounded in a particular doctrinal stance, except insofar as Protestant non-conformists or adherents to Roman Catholicism found themselves at odds with the central authorities; another example of resistance to the civilising mission of the state.Above all, religious identities were as varied and manifold in nature as any other identities. Embodying this melange of identities was Thomas Chaytor, who lived from 1554 to 1618. His father, Christopher, the son a Newcastle merchant adventurer, had become very wealthy through the astute execution of his office as surveyor general for the northern counties and had been able to buy the Butterby estate, close to Durham, from John, Lord Lumley. His mother was Elizabeth, heiress of William Clervaux of Croft-on-Tees in Yorkshire, who had kinship connections throughout County Durham and in Northumberland. Thomas’s first bride was Eleanor Thornell, another Yorkshire woman, from East Newton near Helmsley, and, after her death, he married Jane, the daughter of Sir Nicholas Tempest of Stella, west of Gateshead. Further Chaytor marriages were contracted in Durham, Northumberland and Newcastle, as well as in Yorkshire,Westmorland and Cumberland.Thomas’s diary, extant for the years between 1612 and 1617, offers an illuminating insight into his life and career as registrar of the Durham consistory court and surveyor general of the northern counties.65 The execution of his offices took him to Durham, Chester-le-Street, Corbridge, Morpeth, Alnwick and Berwick, which indicate a regional dimension to those responsibilities. But he also served on the magisterial bench of Durham, an indicator of identification with his county.This was further reinforced by the fact that he inherited books from William Claxton, who had synthesised the ‘Rites’ associated with St Cuthbert and collected and copied other Durham chronicles.66 Thomas Chaytor’s diary also throws considerable light on the intricacies of his personal life, which embraced Durham, Newcastle and Northumberland, as well as extending into Yorkshire. In addition to possessing at least one house in Durham, his family retained a presence in Newcastle, where his mother welcomed Thomas and his second wife and family for extended visits, especially over the Christmas period. On other occasions they went to Stella for family gatherings, where they were often accompanied by Sir Bertram Bulmer of neighbouring Tursdale, who was married to Jane’s sister, Isabel.A study of his mother’s family in the second half of the fifteenth century found that their circle of kinsmen and friends 64 HMC, Salisbury,Vol. XIX, pp. 3-5. 65 His diary for the years from 1612 to 1618 is in DUL, Add MS 866. 66 Doyle,‘Claxton and the Durham Chronicles’, p. 335;W. Greenwell, ed., Wills and Inventories, SS 38 (1860), pp. 272-3.

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focused on the Tees valley, but also stretched into Wensleydale, down to York and up to Durham.67 Thomas’s social circle was similarly, if not more widely, spread. He stayed with Sir Ralph Gray at Chillingham in the far north of Northumberland, and was part of a circle of gentlemen who dined with the bishop, William James. He was a passionate devotee of horse racing which found him engaged with Henry Madison of Newcastle, the Conyers of Sockburn in the far south of Durham, Sir John Fenwick and Sir Henry Widdrington of Northumberland and Lord Scrope of Bolton Castle in Wensleydale. Race meetings took him to venues throughout North Yorkshire and Durham, where more serious races were enlivened by a contest between a horse and a puppy on which was wagered £200. An otherwise charitable man,Thomas delighted in the downfall of the earl and countess of Somerset in 1615, which may have been another example of native resentment at outsiders prospering in the north-eastern parts, for they held the lordships of Barnard Castle, Brancepeth, Raby and other valuable crown possessions. Finally, his family epitomised the relative insignificance of confessional identities among the elite. For despite his position at the heart of the diocesan establishment, his second wife was a Catholic and at least two of their daughters were christened at Croxdale church, most probably according to Catholic rites. In the normal way this connection did not present a problem; except in 1613, when there was a temporary alarm about a Spanish invasion, and he was threatened with the sequestration of his office. Not only did this come to nothing but he remained on excellent terms with the bishop thereafter. Thus, Thomas Chaytor easily embraced the broad spectrum of identities that were apparent in the early modern north-eastern corner of the kingdom, with only that pertaining to his administrative and judicial offices in any sense analogous to a region. Conclusion The idea of the region was current in the sixteenth century. For instance, when William Cuningham wrote his Cosmographical Glasse in 1559, 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’.68 But the notion of regions was not really given widespread application. Raphael Holinshead dismissed them as the bases for his 67 A.J. Pollard,‘Richard Clervaux of Croft: A North Riding Squire in the Fifteenth Century’, Yorkshire Archaeological Journal 50 (1978), pp. 151-69 and reprinted in A.J. Pollard, The Worlds of Richard III (Stroud, 2001). 68 William Cuningham, The Cosmographical Glasse: Conteinyng the Pleasant Principals of Cosmographie, Geographie, Hydrographie, or Navigation (London, 1559).


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Chronicles of England, Scotland and Ireland in 1576 because they ‘are not yet verie perfectlie knowne unto the learned of these daies’.69 An analysis of Christopher Saxton’s surveying techniques demonstrates that he adopted the administrative county rather than topographically homogeneous areas for his Atlas of England and Wales, produced in the same year. He presented his maps of northern counties as a sweep of the entire North, beginning with Yorkshire, then Durham, Lancashire, Westmorland, Cumberland and finally Northumberland.70 No attempt was made to conjoin Durham and Northumberland, or to suggest that they represented any kind of coherent whole or region. Although the region was potentially one of several territorial manifestations by which those of England’s north-eastern parts might have identified themselves, there is little evidence for their doing so; largely because there were no obvious forums for the articulation of regional identities in this period. At the same time, from outside the north-eastern reaches of the kingdom, the counties of Northumberland and Durham formed part of a wider generic North that included Westmorland and Cumberland, on occasion Yorkshire, and sometimes extended as far south as the Trent. Not only was this the case in the popular imagination, it was true of proto-geographers as well as of royal officials. So that, even though Eure and others recognised the distinction between the highland (or inland) parts of his wardenry and the rest, nevertheless, he was inclined to regard the whole area with the same jaundiced eye. The plethora of administrative, political, geographical, geological, economic, religious, cultural and social regions, each with their own identities, can best be regarded as a kind of warp and weft of subregional identities adopted by those individuals who happened to occupy the north-eastern corner of England in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. The contention that ‘spatial structures are compounded of many wavelengths, some of which do and some of which do not mesh together,’71 was given an extra twist with the union of the crowns in March 1603, when the receiver was re-tuned and another dimension was added to the multiplicity of identities already in existence. This myriad of identities could be apportioned or selected and blended in many and varied combinations to create unique identities that were 69 Raphael Holinshead,William Harrison et al., The Chronicles of England, Scotland and Ireland … Now Newlie Augmented and Continued … to the Yeare 1586 … by John Hooker (London, 1596), p. 257. 70 William Saxton, Atlas of England and Wales, 1576. Gordon Manley, ‘Saxton’s Survey of Northern England’, The Geographical Journal 83 (1934), pp. 308-16. Keith Wrightson, ‘Elements of Identity: The Re-making of the North East, 1500-1760’, New History of Northumbria, 600-2000, ed. R. Colls (Chichester, 2007), forthcoming makes the same point. 71 J.F. Hart, ‘The Highest Form of the Geographer’s Art’, Annals of the Association of American Geographers 72 (1982), pp. 1-29.

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particular to anyone at any time. But the vagaries of the historical record mean that these kaleidoscopic identities, which were transfigured and reconstituted at every turn, are only discernible as snapshots. For they record a brief instant, exposing a split second in the longer-term, bigger picture, leaving gaps that can all too conveniently be filled by imposing an artificial regional identity on the subject.

3 Law in North-East England: Community, County and Region, 1550-1850 PETER RUSHTON 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’.1 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.2 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 1

2

K. Wilson, A Sense of the People: Politics, Culture and Imperialism in England, 1715-1785 (Cambridge, 1995), and ‘Citizenship, Empire and Modernity in the English Provinces’, in her The Island Race: Englishness, Empire and Gender in the Eighteenth Century (London, 2003), pp. 29-53; Linda Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation, 1707-1837 (London, 1992); Stephen Conway, ‘War and National Identity in the Mid-Eighteenth-Century British Isles’, EHR 116 (2001), pp. 863-93. Newcastle Courant, 8 May 1736, report from Morpeth jail 30 April, inmates celebrating the Prince of Wales’s marriage.

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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.3 The law courts offered many opportunities for people and localities to express their identities, reconcile their conflicts or establish their differences: litigation at all levels also enabled people to participate in many processes of governance.4 This rich and complex range of possibilities was probably at its greatest in the period before 1700 when the variety of legal forms was astonishing. With each type of court and process, as Edward Coke observed, there was a specialised lawyer, in fact almost as many types of lawyers as there were types of law, reinforcing the differences between (among others) civil, criminal and ecclesiastical courts.5 If local jurisdictions of manor and borough are also included, there was an even greater range of courts to which people could turn. While the assize courts, locally held but supervised by judges travelling from London, reflected the formal training of professionals in statutes and procedures, local courts often possessed their own way of doing things and settling problems.The varied forms of law, therefore, also involved differing levels of reliance on statute law and custom, and varied ways of doing business. Such diversity could sometimes engender rivalry and conflict. In 1729 there was a case at the assizes between the town of Newcastle and Sir Henry Liddell about the ferry tolls. In assize week it was the custom for the mayor and aldermen of Newcastle to take the judges along the Tyne to the river mouth and back on the mayor’s ceremonial barge, a trip that reflected Newcastle’s formal control over the river navigation. On the way, Mr Justice Page, who had tried the case, had ‘some hot words’ with the mayor about the dispute, and ‘thereupon the judge threatened to commit the mayor, and the Mayor in return told the judge he would commit him, being then upon the water and in his peculiar jurisdiction. This squabble occasioned a discontinuance of the custom of going to 3

4 5

Colley, Britons, stresses the core importance of Protestantism; Douglas Hay, ‘Property, Authority and the Criminal Law’, Albion’s Fatal Tree: Crime and Society in Eighteenth-Century England, ed. D. Hay, P. Linebaugh, J. Rule, E.P.Thompson and C.Winslow (London, 1977), p. 29; Paul Langford, A Polite and Commercial People: England, 1727-1783 (Oxford, 1989), p. 258; see Philip Jenkins, ‘The Anglican Church and the Unity of Britain: The Welsh Experience, 1560-1714’, Conquest and Union: Fashioning a British State, ed. Steven G. Ellis and Sarah Barber (London, 1995), pp. 115-38. See Steve Hindle, The State and Social Change in Early Modern England, c.1550-1640 (Basingstoke, 2000), p. 87. Christopher Brooks, ‘The Common Lawyers in England, c.1558-1642’, Lawyers in Early Modern England, ed.W.R. Prest (London, 1981), p. 42: Coke listed sixteen varieties of lawyer.

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Tynemouth.’6 Boundaries in rights and powers were ever defended fiercely. Because law is always dynamic, there cannot be a static picture. Between 1500 and 1800 older legal forms were changing their purpose while new ones were created. In addition, laws were being manufactured on almost every aspect of local social life, particularly in the eighteenth century, from enclosure to highways, sheep theft to the poor law, and parliamentary legislation often created new administrative bodies at the local level. In this complex and changing scene, law was a pattern of jurisdictions, a system of prosecution and litigation, and a means of innovation.The very diversity of jurisdictions forces an examination of whether there were clearly distinct roles between the different courts and, if not, how plaintiffs and prosecutors chose one rather than another. Even in cases of witchcraft there were several courts and very different consequences depending on which was chosen.With other areas of misconduct, insult or unneighbourly behaviour, the decision might be between criminal or civil proceedings, between a private case or public prosecution.7 A central focus here will be how courts were used, and by whom: in effect, their role in the social and political framework of individuals and communities. Finally the making of new laws, particularly those aimed at local improvement, provided opportunities for local people to express their interests and local identities. Judicial Integration and Local Adaptation The area between the River Tees and the Scottish Border contained a curious patchwork of jurisdictions, reflected in a collection of different systems of laws and courts: there were the standard forms of law and court found everywhere in early modern England side-by-side with unique institutions and processes such as the civil courts of the Durham palatinate and the seventeenth-century Border laws. From Henry VIII to Victoria, there seems, superficially at least, to have been a steady if uneven process of integration and ‘normalisation’, by which the northern counties were rendered a standard part of England. No such attempt was made to integrate Scotland, which in many ways was permitted to create and sustain a different set of institutions out of an inheritance of several incompatible legal traditions. The British state did not depend on legal 6

7

William Hutchinson, The History and Antiquities of the County Palatine of Durham (London and Newcastle, 1823) Vol. 2, p. 482 and n.; see also Daniel Klerman, ‘Jurisdictional Competition and the Evolution of the Common Law:An Hypothesis’, Boundaries of the Law: Geography, Gender and the Jurisdiction in Medieval and Early Modern Europe, ed. Anthony Musson (Aldershot, 2005), pp. 149-68. Peter Rushton, ‘Women,Witchcraft and Slander in Early Modern England: Cases from the Church Courts of Durham, 1560-1675’, NH 18 (1982), pp. 116-32, esp. p. 128; also ‘Crazes and Quarrels: The Character of Witchcraft in the North East of England, 1649-80’, DCLHSB 31 (1983), pp. 2-40.

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uniformity across all its constituent nations.8 In England, the process took the form of many central initiatives, new statute laws, and their imposition by agents from London, primarily through the actions of the travelling royal judges. One apparently decisive break was the Franchise Act of 1535 which brought an end to the situation in Durham by which, in effect,‘the Palatinate had a judicial system virtually sealed off from the rest of the kingdom’. In theory, criminal law enforcement in the county increasingly resembled that elsewhere, performed in the king’s, not the bishop’s, name, with the bishop reduced to reissuing the warrants for the circuit judges and even his control over appointing magistrates was lost. But Durham’s separate system of civil courts remained distinct from those of Westminster. Also, the exercise of central authority in the palatinate was limited, as in the agreement that the early seventeenth-century laws against monopolies could not apply there, and that Durham sheriffs raising Ship Money were answerable to the bishop, not the king.9 Central interference in criminal matters did occur, but was intermittent and directed at particular crises or crimes. Times of rebellion – such as 1536, 1569, 1715 and 1745 – provoked prosecution and pardon.The king’s pardon had to be exercised almost immediately after the 1535 Act, in relation to the rebellious participants in the Pilgrimage of Grace of 1536. Though integration within a national system implied an immediate communication of central intentions, more characteristic was a pattern of occasional exhortation. Regarding both social and criminal laws, Joanna Innes observes that by the eighteenth century new statutes were ‘speedily acted upon’, the key force or influence being the circuit judges who ‘sometimes brought pressure to bear on local magistrates to make them implement legislation’. On occasion more direct political intervention occurred, as governments made available lawyers and agents to assist local authorities with the investigation and prosecution of cases, particularly in dealing with issues of national importance such as riots or forgery. In the latter, threats to the currency were a concern to both the Mint and the Bank of England, and identification of counterfeits was a matter of 8

9

‘Scottish law’ was largely an eighteenth-century creation in the view of Lindsay Farmer, Criminal Law Tradition and Legal Order: Crime and the Genius of Scots Law, 1747 to the Present (Cambridge, 1996). Christopher Kitching, ‘The Durham Palatinate and the Courts of Westminster under the Tudors’, The Last Principality: Politics, Religion and Society in the Bishopric of Durham, 14911600, ed. David Marcombe, Studies in Regional and Local History, No. 1 (Nottingham, 1987), pp. 49-70, p. 49; Marcus Knight,‘Litigants and Litigation in the Seventeenth Century Palatinate of Durham’ (Unpublished University of Cambridge Ph.D, 1990), pp. 76, 86; J.S. Cockburn, A History of English Assizes, 1558-1714 (Cambridge, 1972), p. 43; Gwenda Morgan and Peter Rushton, Rogues, Thieves and the Rule of Law: The Problem of Law Enforcement in North-East England, 1718-1800 (London, 1998), Chapter 1; on aspects of the medieval background, see Constance Fraser, ‘Justice in Northumberland in the Middle Ages’, Tyne and Tweed 59 (2005), pp. 3-13.


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specialist expertise. Riots also provoked government attention: Newcastle’s ‘seditious’ riot on Shrove Tuesday 1633, mostly involving apprentices, was the subject of anxious correspondence between the town’s authorities and Secretary Edward Coke.With regard to the industrial riots and strikes that punctuated the eighteenth century, the government was always willing to offer supporting troops to help the local authorities cow the working classes. In areas such as smuggling, too, it is clear that local customs officers were continually seeking guidance from the head office in London on the conduct of prosecutions.10 This intimate relationship of the central to the local state was, in comparative perspective, unusual, for few continental countries could match the capacity of early modern English government ‘to devise and comprehensively institute neighbourhood-level institutions’, particularly with regard to religion and welfare.11 Every parish constituted a ‘welfare republic’, as parish officers – ordinary citizens – became the instrument of centrally instigated aid for the poor.12 This process depended on the local authorities being both culturally and legally trained to administer this structure at the county as well as the parish level.The magistrates were the key local source of authority and influence on policy. This involved what Braddick has termed ‘elite formation’, a process by which authorities at the local level were also part of a wider development of state formation in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.This was not entirely the outcome of loyalty or obedience to the central power, since local elites relished the chance to manage their localities. Their implementation of central policy involved them adopting the habits of ‘civility’, as it was known, the common culture which united all local rulers, and through which authority was often expressed and recognised.13 With regard to legal integration, however, matters were not that simple – we are, after all, talking about 10 Kitching, ‘Palatinate of Durham’, p. 51; Joanna Innes, ‘Parliament and the Shaping of Eighteenth-Century English Social Policy’, TRHS, 5th ser. 40 (1990), pp. 63-92, pp. 71, 75; Randall McGowen,‘The Bank of England and the Policing of Forgery, 1797-1821’, Past and Present 186 (2005), pp. 81-116; Roger Howell, Puritans and Radicals in North England: Essays on the English Revolution (Lantham, New York, 1984), p. 20; Morgan and Rushton, Rogues, Thieves and the Rule of Law, Chapter 9 on riots; for correspondence between Sunderland customs officers and London, see TNA, CUST 85/1. 11 Joanna Innes, ‘The State of the Poor in Eighteenth-Century England in European Perspective’, Rethinking Leviathan: The Eighteenth-Century State in Britain and Germany, ed. John Brewer and Eckhart Hellmuth (Oxford, 1999), pp. 226-80, p. 243. 12 Steve Hindle, The State and Social Change in Early Modern England, c.1550-1640 (Basingstoke, 2000), p. 146-7, and On the Parish? The Micro-Politics of Poor Relief in Rural England, c.15501750 (Oxford, 2004); see also Richard Connors, ‘Parliament and Poverty in MidEighteenth-Century England’, Parliamentary History 21.2 (2002), pp. 207-31. 13 Michael J. Braddick, State Formation in Early Modern England, c.1550-1700 (Cambridge, 2000), pp. 341, 347; Karen Ordahl Kupperman,‘Presentment of Civility: English Reading of American Self-Presentation in the Early Years of Colonization’, William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser. 54.1 (1997), pp. 193-228.

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English law, much of which was customary and often helped to define local social practices. In some ways, however, the counties of northern England became ‘normal’, at least in form, during the late Elizabethan and early Jacobean period. This was part of the extension of the ‘shire’, first to the English and Welsh margins and then to Ireland and the colonies.This might be interpreted as either a form of internal imperialism or, less severely, a form of cultural conversion, as much as an administrative change.14 The government tried to implement and enforce standard practices in criminal law, ecclesiastical jurisdiction and, rather more variably, the poor law. Significantly, the first depended on the creation of loyal groups of magistrates, and the others on the vigorous success of the Church of England. These combined in the poor law to create a system throughout England, if not immediately after the 1601 Poor Law Act, then at least by the Civil War.15 The uniformity of county administration still left great scope for local diversity of implementation in both the fields of criminal law and poor relief. This flexibility was in some ways the key feature of early modern administration, either a triumph of adaptability, according to view, or, as the Webbs saw it, the source of weakness that undermined any notion of ‘system’ at all.16 With regard to new directions in the criminal law, it is clear that the northern counties ranged from successful innovation and experimentation to conservatism: this varied pattern reflected the widespread discretion at the heart of the judicial system. For example, Northumberland and Newcastle embraced the 1718 Transportation Act and their magistrates sentenced petty thieves to the American colonies in small but steady numbers in the 1720s and 1730s, in part because transportation had been adopted before 1718 as a means of dealing with vagrants and gypsies. By the 1740s these authorities also made widespread use of imprisonment for petty thieves. In Newcastle, perhaps because of the high proportion of women among those convicted, imprisonment came to replace whipping after 1750. In County Durham, however, corporal punishment remained the standard punishment inflicted by the magistrates on local thieves until the 1750s, after which transportation was gradually adopted.17 The same varieties of policy and style affected the implementation of the poor laws. Braddick rightly comments that ‘local officeholders were undoubtedly quick to take up aspects of these measures, 14 Myron C. Noonkester,‘The Third British Empire:Transplanting the English Shire to Wales, Scotland, Ireland and America’, Journal of British Studies 36 (1997), pp. 251-84; Steven G. Ellis,‘Civilizing Northumberland: Representations of Englishness in the Tudor State’, Journal of Historical Sociology 12 (1999), pp. 103-27. 15 Peter Rushton, ‘The Poor Law, the Parish and the Community in North East England, 1600-1800’, NH 25 (1989), pp. 135-52, esp. p. 137; Hindle, On the Parish. 16 S.Webb and B.Webb, English Poor Law History: Part 1 – The Old Poor Law (reprint, London, 1963). 17 This is a summary of Morgan and Rushton, Rogues,Thieves and the Rule of Law, Chapter 3;


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but were slow to implement the full range – they seem to have used their discretion in judging the appropriateness of general measures to local conditions,’ often developing policies which stood halfway between punishment and relief.The paradox was that while central direction was at its lightest, in the sense that legislation binding local authorities was relatively sparse, particularly in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, the parishes were closely governed.18 Yet the ‘parish’ contained a capacity to divide as well as unite: for our purposes, not even this apparently ‘natural’ community could ensure local loyalties. Parishes in Durham and Northumberland were often huge, including several settlements, and this led to conflict in the eighteenth century, as some parts refused to pay for the relief of ‘strangers’ elsewhere in the same parish. Parishes could break into several separate townships. Even with closely connected parishes, division rather than co-operation remained the norm. In what is now Sunderland, the poor were often removed ‘across the water’ a few hundred yards to the other bank of the River Wear, as though to a foreign country. Nothing divided early modern England more than the costs of the poor, though all were united in agreeing they were a troublesome problem.19 The only legal system that included all the territories from the Tees to the Tweed in a single judicial authority was that of the Durham church courts, covering the entire diocese. They had authority over many moral and religious offences, albeit with reduced powers of punishment after the Reformation, validated or annulled marriages and also administered wills and testaments. In most areas of England the church courts were reinvigorated after the Reformation, with the system maintained almost unchanged since the middle ages. Durham was no exception, though it was the reign of Elizabeth before good ministers and coherent patterns of court practice were in place.20 The church embraced, if it did not precisely unite, this area within a coherent structure, though there were limits to its reach. On the Borders at the beginning of the period, the disorders of the reivers and a resistant Catholicism set limits to Church of England influence. By the eighteenth century a Scottish force far more effective see also Peter King, Crime, Justice and Discretion in England, 1740-1820 (Oxford, 2000); J.M. Beattie, Policing and Punishment in London, 1660-1750: Urban Crime and the Limits of Terror (Oxford, 2001), particularly his analysis of female crime, pp. 20, 66-70; Gwenda Morgan and Peter Rushton, Eighteenth-Century Criminal Transportation: the Formation of the Criminal Atlantic (Basingstoke, 2004). 18 Braddick, State Formation, pp. 114, 117. 19 DRO, EP/BiW 142, p. 166 (1727); Rushton, ‘Poor Law’, pp. 149-50; A.L. Beier, Masterless Men: The Vagrancy Problem in England, 1560-1640 (London, 1985); Paul Slack, Poverty and Policy in Tudor and Stuart England (London, 1988); Hindle, On The Parish, p. 300ff on techniques of exclusion. 20 Ralph Houlbrooke, Church Courts and the People During the English Reformation, 1520-1570 (Oxford, 1979); for a simple introduction to the Durham courts, see Peter Rushton, ‘The Church Courts in North-East England in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries: An

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than the reivers, the Presbyterian church, had eaten into Anglican communities in northern Northumberland, making this area seem more like Scotland to some visitors.21 In Durham and Northumberland the systematic visitations by archdeacons and the chancellors heard many deviants, but, by setting standards through their exemplary disciplining, were also able to establish the rules of conformity. The structure of the church courts did not, however, provide a vehicle for the development of regional identity. The diocese was carefully divided into two archdeaconries, matching the division into two major counties, Durham and Northumberland.The odd survival of a strip of the old palatinate on the border in northern Northumberland – Norhamshire and Islandshire – was dealt with by a special ecclesiastical commissary.22 In its administration, therefore, the diocese did not transcend, but merely replicated, the secular divisions. Moreover, this was not overcome by any of the personal actions of the bishops: despite the many interests of bishops such as Lord Crewe in Northumberland, most acted only within Durham, serving as custos rotulorum and appointing the sheriff or chair of the quarter sessions bench, and serving politically to support Durham interests.23 This is reflected in the political organisation of Durham’s county meetings which the bishops orchestrated at the end of the eighteenth century.24 In the substance of their business, too, the church courts did not seem to reflect any particularly distinctive local character which characterised the diocese: there were, perhaps, more problems with Catholics in Northumberland and puritans in Durham, but this hardly marked them out as unique. In their efforts to control the morals of local people, the perpetual problems of irregular marriages, pre-marital fornication and adultery dominated, as did suits for defamation brought mainly by women to defend their sexual reputations. Some have argued that ideas of a wave of puritanical anxiety and repression concerning sexual matters in times

21

22 23

24

Historical Gossip Column?’, Sunderland's History No. 5 (1989) [Vol. XXXII of the papers of the Sunderland Antiquarian Society], unpaginated; M.M. Meikle, A British Frontier? Lairds and Gentlemen in the Eastern Borders, 1540-1603 (East Lothian, 2004), pp. 201-2, for visitations of the clergy in 1578 and 1600; Susan M. Keeling, ‘The Reformation in the Anglo-Scottish Border Counties’, NH 15 (1979), pp. 24-42; Martin Ingram, Church Courts, Sex and Marriage in England, 1570-1640 (Cambridge, 1987). Newcastle Central Library, SL253, Bishop Chandler’s Notes on Visitation of 1736: in Elsdon, northern Northumberland, 237 of the 337 families were Presbyterian (more than 70%); Colley, Britons, p. 16. DUL, Special Collections (henceforth Sp. Coll.) DDR/EJ/CCA/3/1 and 2, and DDR/A/A/CAN/1 and 2. Crewe in fact managed to regain the Lord Lieutenancy of the county for a while; Edward Hughes, North Country Life in the Eighteenth Century:The North-East, 1700-1750 (London, 1952), p. 329. Newcastle Courant, 4 August 1792, Durham County Meeting, called by the bishop; the bishops were certainly in attendance at earlier meetings, though they may have not convened them, Edward Hughes, North Country, pp. 287-9.


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such as the seventeenth century ignore the evidence for similar periods of moral clampdown in earlier times.25 In other respects, too, such as the quality of the clergy, visitations were continually producing similar cases over the centuries. Certainly the problems found in the eighteenth century look remarkably like those of previous times, particularly with regard to official failures. Ministers were negligent, absent, drunk or mad. Parishioners refused to serve as churchwardens, and even when they did serve, often refused to offend their neighbours by presenting them before the courts. One in Bamburgh in the early seventeenth century admitted that he knew of ‘dyvers offences but would not reveale anie of them till he were called in question’. In Morpeth in 1732 the rector was out of his mind and the curate had absconded with a parishioner’s wife.26 Both these were in Northumberland, but it was perhaps with some despair that the churchwardens of Middleton in Teesdale in Durham in 1793 presented thirteen fornicators, among them two men who had each offended with two women, and asked for the court to respond with severity: The Churchwardens request that some censure be inflicted upon these Persons as they believe that it would be productive of some Benefit to their Parish as well as of the Reformation of the Lives of their People.They also declare that they do not Frame their presentments through any Malice but for the good of their youth and inform the Court that if no Notice be taken of these Misdemeanors they apprehend that they will shortly have no regular proceedings in their Parish.

In some ways nothing had changed. Equally important is that in these proceedings little by way of distinctive local identity, except perhaps in the relationships of an individual parish, was sustained.27 Judicial Distinctiveness – Identity in the Law? Alongside the standard features of any county or diocese of England, there were also unique forms of law sustained in the North in the sixteenth and seventeenth century. Not only was the civil legal system of the Durham palatinate preserved through the disturbances of both the Reformation 25 Peter Rushton,‘Property, Power and Family Networks:The Problem of Disputed Marriage in Early Modern England’, Journal of Family History 11.3 (1986), pp. 205-19, and ‘Women, Witchcraft and Slander’; Diana O’Hara, Courtship and Constraint: Rethinking the Making of Marriage in Tudor and Stuart England (Manchester, 2000), which draws extensively on the Durham church courts; Margaret Spufford, ‘Puritanism and Social Control?’, Order and Disorder in Early Modern England, ed. Anthony Fletcher and John Stevenson (Cambridge, 1985), pp. 41-57. 26 DUL Sp. Coll., DDR/EV/VIS/2/7, fol. 155v; DDR/A/ACN/1, fols 6, 53; DDR/A/ACN/2, fol. 92, 1622; DDR/EV/VIS/51732/1/3. 27 DUL Sp. Coll., Visitation Book of the Archdeacons of Durham, 1775-99 (photocopy), ASCRef B1 CHU, p. 77; pp. 78, 278; Martin Ingram, ‘Reformation of Manners in Early Modern England’, The Experience of Authority in Early Modern England, ed. Paul Griffiths, Adam Fox and Steve Hindle (Basingstoke, 1996), pp. 47-90.

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and the Interregnum, but new forms of legal powers were granted through the seventeenth-century Border Laws to reinforce legal order in Northumberland. Both were at times fiercely defended, movements which signify a high degree of local loyalty to these institutions: however, loyalty does not always reflect ‘identity’ in any simple fashion – it may be a bid to create an identity, in fact.28 Palatinate power is by no means easy to define, as few of the three, Cheshire (with Flintshire), Lancaster and Durham, had much in common.29 In the medieval period Durham had many pretensions to being a local version of the royal state, a kingdom in miniature, and Lapsely once interpreted it seriously in this way, but by the sixteenth century what remained most conspicuously was the system of civil law courts available to local people.30 The anomaly of the palatinate power might therefore easily be exaggerated (as we have seen, criminal legal processes were steadily integrated). Braddick argues that some of the distinctive characteristics of early modern law, particularly the continuance of apparent throw-backs or historical survivals, are deceptive. By the Elizabethan period ‘the great palatinate jurisdictions are best seen as local expressions of royal authority rather than delegations of it.’Together with the councils, such as the Council of the North, they could bring ‘the benefits of royal government to populations physically distant from the privy council and the Westminster courts’. Despite the prestige of Westminster, palatinate jurisdiction flourished, at least as far Durham is concerned, and the business of its courts did not decline until the eighteenth century.31 As W. J. Jones has remarked, these courts were ‘to some extent mirrors of Westminster’, minus the presence of a parliament, and were inundated with business in the early modern period. This fits in with the essential characteristic of civil litigation in the Stuart period in that it was both massive in volume and dispersed to major provincial courts. Some legal cases were drawn into the central courts in the sixteenth century, as Durham people became accustomed, or were compelled, to go to London to settle cases. For the period up to 1700, though, the speed and convenience of local courts such as those of Durham were matched by the equally important fact that they could deal with a very similar range of problems, particularly in

28 Morgan and Rushton, Rogues,Thieves and the Rule of Law, Chapter 1 for Border Laws; G.T. Lapsley, The County Palatine of Durham:A Constitutional History (Cambridge, Mass., 1900) for the civil courts. 29 W.J. Jones,‘Palatinate Performance in the Seventeenth Century’, The English Commonwealth, 1547-1640: Essays in Politics and Society Presented to Joel Hurstfield, ed. P. Clark, A.G.R. Smith and N.Tyacke (Leicester, 1979), pp. 189-204, p. 189; Knight,‘Litigants and Litigation’, p. 70. 30 Lapsley, The County Palatine of Durham. 31 Braddick, State Formation, p. 353; see also T.Thornton,‘The Integration of Cheshire into the Tudor Nation-State in the Early Sixteenth Century’, Northern History 19 (1993), pp. 40-63.


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the field of equity, as those in Westminster.They were far from a dead letter.32 The key feature of the Durham courts in this period was that business was confined to the problems and people within the palatinate – the county of Durham and its offshoots along the border (Norhamshire and Islandshire). In no sense could the local loyalty to, or concern about, these courts be shared by a wider group of people in the region. Unlike their Westminster counterparts, therefore, these courts could not enjoy much scope for expansion to include a wider spread of population.33 Most of the business of the Durham courts involved debts and the recovery of goods. Matters of equity before the Chancellor concerned problems such as the industrial developments associated with the coal industry, where the courts occasionally tried to mitigate the potentially disastrous side-effects of some changes, and family matters where married women’s property rights were supported by the courts against the common-law assumption of the husband’s patriarchal rights to control all the marital property. In many cases the wife’s right to separate possession was upheld.The speed of the cases, and the fact that over the seventeenth century an increasing proportion of them came to a firm decision, probably enhanced the attractiveness of the courts, as much as the substance of the policies adopted.34 It has been thought that after the early 1700s there was a steep decline in the number of cases brought before the courts, because by then ‘Westminster was beginning to cast its shadow’.35 Analysis of the cases sent to London suggests, however, that from at least the middle of the sixteenth century, and certainly by 1600, Durham people had become accustomed to think of alternatives to the Durham courts, and that a number of factors may be discerned in the way that apparently purely local matters were directed to London. It is clear that the London courts could hear many personal and community disputes as well as commercial problems from the remotest corners of the land: it is more than possible that the judges attracted cases by promising an escape from local bias.36 Some cases had to go to the London Chancery (the High Court) because new legislation often specified it as the court of appeal. One such area was in the administration of charities, and there are cases in London from County Durham involving problems in Monkwearmouth (now 32 Jones, ‘Palatinate Performance’, pp. 189, 192, 195; Kitching, ‘Durham Palatinate’, pp. 51-2. 33 Jones, ‘Palatinate Performance’, p. 200; K. Emsley and C.M. Fraser, The Courts of the County Palatine of Durham (Durham, 1984) ; Knight, ‘Litigants and Litigation’. 34 Knight, ‘Litigants and Litigation’, p. 84 and particularly the key chapters on familial obligation (Chapter 7, pp. 347ff) and pp. 189-90; Emsley and Fraser, The Courts, p. 45. 35 Emsley and Fraser, The Courts, p. 39. 36 See, Kitching,‘Durham Palatinate’, at least 200 chancery cases went to London from Durham between 1535 and 1596; Klerman, ‘Jurisdictional Competition’ argues that courts sought business by favouring plaintiffs, p. 149. For examples of the local going to the central, see Christine Churches, ‘Business at Law: Retrieving Commerical Disputes from Eighteenth-

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Sunderland). One case shortly after the Restoration concerned the legacy of Sampson Aire, who left £10 for the poor of Monkwearmouth: the money had either been lent to a local man who had absconded or (an alternative allegation suggested) appropriated by parish officials.While this was dealt with by a local charity inquisition involving senior men in the Durham diocese and Thomas Craddock, the attorney general of the Durham palatinate, the appeal against their judgment went to London. This was reinforced by further problems involving the transfer of charitable funds from Lord Hilton’s bequest, which developed into a suit against the lord mayor and aldermen of the city of London who, because they were not resident in the county, could not be sued in the Durham system.37 Other cases were perhaps taken out of Durham because they affected the status of institutions set up by the palatinate, particularly in matters of the authority of ecclesiastical boroughs set up by the bishop. The problem was the almost uncharted status of many of these boroughs, which had control over tracts of land and waterways.Their ‘customs’ were therefore subject to potential challenge in the courts, but it was not uncommon to accept uncharted boroughs as ones ‘by prescription’, even if they exercised powers against the norms of the common law.38 Sunderland’s borough was a matter of repeated contention in the London courts between the Restoration and the 1830s, as its control over the land of the town moor was challenged. However, there was no clear resolution before the burgesses sold their remaining assets to the new Victorian borough council in the mid nineteenth century.39 The conclusion to be drawn from these kinds of cases is that many local disputes went to London for attempts at legal resolution because the courts there were inherently of a higher jurisdiction, leaving the Durham courts with lesser Century Chancery’, HJ 43.4 (2000), pp. 937-54, ‘False Friends, Spiteful Enemies: A Community at Law in Early Modern England’, HJ 71 (1998), pp. 52-74, and ‘Women and Property in Early Modern England:A Case Study’, Social History 23 (1998), pp. 165-80. More dramatic was the case of Anne Gunter, J.A. Sharpe, The Bewitching of Anne Gunter: A Horrible and True Story of Football,Witchcraft, Murder and the King of England (London, 1999). 37 TNA, C 93/34/12, dated 25 Car II (1673-4), inquisition under 43 Eliz I for mismanagement of charitable lands before John Sudbury D.D. Dean of Durham, Richard Wrench B.Div., Thomas Craddock Attorney General, and C 91/16/16, 1 Jac II (1685-6); Gareth Jones, History of the Law of Charity, 1532-1827 (Cambridge, 1969), p. 56. 38 Joanna Innes,‘The Local Acts of a National Parliament: Parliament’s Role in Sanctioning Local Action in Eighteenth-Century Britain’, Parliament and Locality, 1660-1939, ed. David Dean and Clyve Jones (Edinburgh, 1998), pp. 23-47, p. 30; Jones,‘Palatine Performance’, p. 199. 39 M.H. Dodds, ‘The Bishop’s Boroughs’, AA, 3rd ser. 12 (1915), pp. 81-185, pp. 125-6; the cases are Hincks against Clerk, Michaelmas 31 Car II (1678) in Sir Creswell Levinz, The Reports of Sir Creswell Levinz, Kt, late one of the Judges in the Court of Common Pleas at Westminster; In French and English. Containing Cases Heard and Determined in the Court of King's Bench… (London, 1722), Part II, p. 252;TNA, E 134/5 GEO2/MICH28, 5 Geo II (1732), Sir William Myddleton Bt and William Ettrick of High Barnes against the Borough and Town of Sunderland; Rev.Thomas Randell, ‘Depositions in a Lawsuit against the Freemen


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matters of debt and distraints. While the local issue could literally be a parochial matter, its resulting litigation could not be dealt with locally. After the early 1700s, therefore, the cases before Durham courts were confined to simpler, personal disputes from within the county boundaries.40 If older forms of the legal system were gradually losing their business to the central state, it was also the case that central authority granted to local magistrates new and exceptional powers in the name of law enforcement along the Borders (including both Northumberland and Cumberland). It was recognised that the Borders were, as a unit, ‘alike in physical characteristics, history and customs’.41 Special measures were taken after the union of 1603, and partly renewed after the Restoration. In 1605 five English and five Scottish gentlemen were given special commissions by James I (VI) to pacify the Border, each group to be assisted by twenty-five unpaid horsemen. They had powers to seize and try offenders in whichever country their crimes had been committed. Consequently, disorder should have disappeared soon after the accession of James of Scotland. Some historians have thought so: ‘Border problems melted like the snow on the Cheviots in spring’ says one.42 Certainly, these measures isolated Cumberland and Northumberland from their neighbouring counties to the south, perhaps marking them out stereotypically as areas both more lawless and with authorities who were ‘sharp against thieves’: yet there is little evidence that crime was worse there than elsewhere in England, at any period.43 The law of the 1660s was kept alive through repeated legislative renewals until almost the middle of the eighteenth century. This legislation provided for greater revenueraising powers to fund even larger patrols than those of 1605, managed by a county ‘Keeper’, and greater compensation for those suffering animals

40

41 42

43

and Stallingers about 1730’, Antiquities of Sunderland 5 (1904), pp. 10-33; The King against Ogden and Four Others, 1829, The English Reports, Vol. CIX, King’s Bench Division (Edinburgh, 1910), pp. 436-7; Hutchinson, History (1787 edition), Vol. II, p. 522; George Garbutt, A Historical and Descriptive View of the Parishes of Monkwearmouth and Bishopwearmouth and the Port and Borough of Sunderland (Sunderland, 1819), p. 144. This material was collected as part of the revived Victoria County History of Durham: thanks to colleagues Gwenda Morgan, Gill Cookson, Christine Newman and Maureen Meikle. On the decline in litigation after 1700, see Prest, ‘Litigation in Eighteenth-Century England’, and Christopher Brooks, ‘Litigation, Participation and Agency in Seventeenthand Eighteenth-Century England’, The British and their Laws in the Eighteenth Century, ed. D. Lemmings (Woodbridge, 2005), pp. 133-81. Keeling, ‘Reformation in the Anglo-Scottish Border Counties’, p. 24. A. Calder, Revolutionary Empire: The Rise of the English-Speaking Empires from the Fifteenth Century to the 1780s (London, 1981), p. 108; S.J.Watts and Susan Watts, From Border to Middle Shire: Northumberland, 1586-1625 (Leicester, 1975), pp. 138-40. Lord Francis North’s observation, in Roger North, Lives of the Norths, (3 vols, London, 1890),Vol. I, p. 179; Morgan and Rushton, Rogues,Thieves and the Rule of Law, pp. 63-6, and above pp. 55-7, 60.

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stolen. Unfortunately no link was made between successful prosecution for theft and the payment of compensation, so that many ‘victims’ received money for animals that were never proven in court to have been stolen. It is hardly surprising that this was a wildly popular measure until the 1740s, when a series of corruption scandals seem to have led to its demise. By then, there had been sufficient evidence of malpractice, and some criminal convictions of the county officers, to lead to the conclusion that this exceptional measure against crime was in fact merely encouraging it. The magistrates and county authorities in Northumberland were under popular pressure to perpetuate it, but they repeatedly managed to ignore the petitions until the legislation lapsed.44 Like the palatinate and its powers, the Border and its supposed lawlessness lingered as a kind of local memory, to be revived in nineteenth-century novels and stories. Legislation and Local Loyalties The northern region was an area where many new laws were focused after the Restoration, as local authorities engineered acts for various industrial and other purposes. Before the nineteenth-century age of reform, there was an age of ‘improvement’, and the key instrument for this was the local act of parliament designed to change the industrial and economic environment, physical infrastructure or welfare facilities. However, there was rarely a ‘regional’ unity over these measures. On the contrary: Joyce Ellis has pointed out that eighteenth-century society was ‘notoriously competitive’, with towns active in promoting improvements for their own benefit ‘often equally concerned to defend their comparative advantage by campaigning against schemes that might benefit local rivals’. Urban rivalry was in fact just one aspect of a much wider framework of local competition or, rather, part of a pattern of competing localities.45 This was true in the North from before the sixteenth century, when Newcastle made a serious attempt to control key Durham towns such as the port of Hartlepool and, more threateningly, Gateshead, which was the object of a takeover bid by Act of Parliament in Edward VI’s reign.Though the law was repealed under Mary, this expansionist attempt reflected Newcastle’s dilemma as a coal centre without its own coal mines. Coal, which seems to have united the 44 This is a summary of the lengthy research in Joanna Bath,‘County Keeping, Corruption and the Courts in the Early Eighteenth-Century Borders: The Feud of William Charlton and William Lowes’, NH 40.1 (2003), pp. 113-27, Morgan and Rushton, Rogues,Thieves and the Rule of Law, Chapter 1, and particularly C.M.F. Ferguson, ‘Law and Order on the Scottish Border, 1603-1717’ (University of St Andrews Ph.D., 1981). 45 Joyce Ellis,‘“For the Honour of the Town”: Comparison, Competition and Civic Identity in Eighteenth-Century England’, Urban History, 30.3 (2003), pp. 325-37, pp. 326, 334, for friction between Newcastle and Sunderland, and between Hull and York. Note the word ‘locality’ here has no sense of permanent structural significance: see John Urry, ‘Localities, Regions and Social Class’, International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 5 (1981), pp. 456-74.


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North in the nineteenth century, in fact provided the focus for some of the most profound conflicts in the early modern period. Even more ordinary links, such as the Tyne Bridge, provoked disputes between Newcastle and Gateshead over its upkeep in the sixteenth century, which had to be resolved by the assize judges and the Council of the North.46 After the Restoration, Parliament became the primary means of local improvement – and a forum for rivalry. As Rosemary Sweet puts it, the proliferation of local acts of parliament often shows ‘how the interests of a particular local community were constructed or expressed’. Behind the ‘national’ identification of parliament, in fact, lay a ‘complex range of locally defined identities, including county, town, civic, corporate and customary’.47 River against river, local industry against other rivals in the area, English manufacturers against their Scottish competitors – the petitions to government and parliament are a rich source of information on the way that the politics of improving legislation divided rather than united. The issue might be highly local – a road between two places or more complex, such as the improvements to the River Wear, deepening and narrowing the river to make it more navigable up to the coalmines, which engaged all from the river mouth upstream to the city of Durham itself. Other issues might transcend locality and become a matter of dispute between different parts of Britain.The crucial aspect of all this activity was that local laws were a major part of parliamentary legislation, instigated almost entirely by local initiative.This in a sense reversed the relationship of centralisation and the enforcement of uniformity by the government which had been seen in processes of ‘normalisation’ before 1700 described earlier. In the eighteenth century laws re-shaped localities, as their leaders used parliament as a resource of authority and endorsement of their actions. New measures, particularly those levying tolls on industries, highways or rivers, were taken through specific acts of parliament. As Joanna Innes points out, this was the outcome of the seamless mutual dependence of the local and the central in the eighteenth-century state: just as the state needed the local, particularly the parish and the county, to raise taxes, so the local authorities needed government and parliament to enable them to take measures for local fundraising and improvement.48 Initiatives from the locality thus reinforced central authority yet also counter-balanced it. They might also be a means of establishing local dominance: though analysis is difficult, it is clear that Newcastle and 46 Kitching, ‘Durham Palatinate’, pp. 61-4. See also pp. 30-5, 37-9, 47. 47 Rosemary Sweet, ‘Local Identities and a National Parliament’, Parliaments, Nations and Identities in Britain and Ireland, ed. Julian Hoppit (Manchester, 2003), pp. 48-64, p. 49. 48 Joanna Innes, ‘The Local Acts of a National Parliament’, pp. 23, 33, 34; J.V. Beckett, ‘Parliament and the Localities:The Borough of Nottingham’, Parliament and Locality, 16601939, ed. David Dean and Clyve Jones (Edinburgh, 1998), pp. 58-67.

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Sunderland dominated the efforts at proposing legislation, at least after the late seventeenth century, when compared with other places in Northumberland and County Durham.49 The monopoly of the coal trade proclaimed by Newcastle generated fierce rivalry between the Tyne and the Wear, which flared in 1717 as the proposed legislation to improve the latter evoked the Newcastle coal traders’ fear of local competition. Newcastle’s merchants used all the dirty spoiling tactics at their disposal in sabotaging the bill as it made its way through parliament. However, the bill was passed, and the Wear became a much more powerful coal exporter as a result.50 This dispute might suggest a permanent division in the ‘region’ within the same industry but that would be deceptive, for this incident was but a part of a much wider political framework of alliance and competition embracing much of the north. Petitions for and against proposed legislation reveal collective loyalties and rivalries, but is there a ‘north-east’ loyalty reflected and expressed in any of these representations? Behind the conventional phrases claiming national interest or public value, the petitions disguised the intense divisions at the most local level, and it was the task of parliamentary scrutiny to disentangle the rhetoric from the reality.At times the representatives of the two coal rivers could unite, as they did in 1740 when a bill was proposed to control the coal market in London by giving command of the price of coals in the Thames to the Court of the Mayor and Aldermen of the city of London – in effect, surrendering market forces to political expediency. Almost the whole of the coal shipping interests of the north combined to protest against this, as masters and shipowners from Newcastle and the Tyne, Sunderland and even Scarborough petitioned the House of Commons that such measures would ‘greatly injure and oppress them’. As well as the price of coals, the mayor of London might also determine the wages of the seamen, which would have had interesting consequences when strikes interrupted the coal supply from the north. Here the industry seems to have acted as a concerted whole.51 In their general rhetoric, north-east petitioners would present their affairs as vital to the national interest, not just because of coal, but because of the need for trained sailors: Sunderland’s first, unsuccessful, plea for legislation to improve the Wear claimed that if the measure were 49 Innes, ‘The Local Acts of a National Parliament’, p. 33; the tables of failed legislation in Failed Legislation, 1660-1800, Extracted from the Commons and Lords Journals, ed. Julian Hoppit (London, 1997), clearly suggests the dominance of Newcastle and Sunderland, though it is hard to produce comparable data for successful legislation. 50 Edward Hughes, North Country Life, pp. 290-303; Stuart T. Miller, ‘The Progressive Development of Sunderland Harbour and the River Wear, 1717-1859’ (MA Econ, University of Newcastle, 1978);TWAS, DF.HUG/4, 1-10, and DF.HUG/5, 1-22. 51 JHoC 23, p. 521, 16 April 1740.


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allowed, the place would provide a ‘settled Nursery for Seamen’.52 National imagery was more restricted in some protests by northern industrialists, as the ‘nation’ turns out to be just England, the rivalry expressed in the petition suggesting that, industrially, there was not yet a united kingdom. In 1768 the glass manufacturers on the Tyne and Wear petitioned the Treasury against unfair competition from their Scottish rivals.They did not mince their words: Your Petitioners have, for a long time past, been greatly injured in their trades by the Increase in Glass Bottle Manufactoryes in Scotland; owing in a great Measure, as your Petitioners apprehend, and believe, to the ascertaining the Duty upon Glass Bottles there, much different from the Manner of ascertaining it in England ... by which difference of ascertaining that Duty, the Manufacturers in Scotland, are exempt from a very considerable part of that Duty we the Manufacturers in England have always paid and do now pay, to the manifest Diminution of your Petitioners Trade and will ... be the utter Ruin thereof.

This provoked a detailed investigation by a team sent to Scotland to take evidence and examine any unfairness in the way that the revenue was raised. In the midst of technicalities about impurities, residues and different types of coal, they concluded that the Scots were not cheating in this particular game.53 As well as passing and helping to implement legislation, therefore, parliamentarians and government officials could find themselves dealing with divisions and rivalries within a region or between old kingdoms. Other grievances that might unite the rivers of the North East concerned the way that, through taxing the coal trade, the government had raised revenue for the improvement of harbours and ‘havens’ further down the east coast. Every measure to continue or repeat the levy on coal shipments which subsidised Whitby harbour provoked protests from the coal exporters of the North East about their potential ruination. In 1750, as the statute came up for renewal, parliament received a petition from Sunderland protesting against the financial burden, and opposing the imposition of a halfpenny per chaldron on all coals vended from Newcastle, Sunderland and Blyth for the maintenance of the piers and harbour of Whitby: they already had had to pay 4d a chaldron under the 1717 Act to improve the River Wear and, after 1747, 2d per chaldron. All this was too much for them.The Sunderland petition also induced support from Seaton Sluice, Cullercoats and ‘any other harbour, Colliery or Place, reputed to be a Member of the Port of Newcastle on Tyne’, and was

52 The phrase recurs throughout the century; JHoC 15, p. 106, 23 January 1706. 53 TNA,T 1/470/307 and 308.

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accompanied by a similar petition from Newcastle.54 In the next attempt at renewal in 1766, an advance copy of the proposed bill was obtained and discussed by the River Wear Commissioners, and within a month a counter-petition was prepared and delivered to parliament. Again they complained of the halfpenny tax imposed for Whitby, whose ‘further continuance’, they alleged, would be ‘a heavy Charge upon the same Port, and tend to Discouragement of Trade there ... it will greatly affect the Trade and Property of the Petitioners and many others’. But again, despite this organised response, they were unsuccessful.55 On other occasions, however, the merchants and captains from Scarborough and Whitby, whose ships were a vital part of the coal trade, would support the coal owners of the Wear or the Tyne in their parliamentary activities. In the case of Richard Lyddell’s new machinery designed to dump the ballast sand carried by returning coal ships at sea off the Tyne rather than on land, divisions opened up at the most local level within the Wear itself. Faced with a measure in 1755 to provide legislative support for this technique, the chairman and commissioners of the River Wear objected on the grounds that so many Sunderland ships had to load at sea that the mouth of the Tyne was a necessary refuge, and anything that impeded that harbour would be detrimental to their interests: ‘great and irreparable Damage may be done to the Port and Harbour of Shields by the said Richard Lyddell’s continuing to employ his said Machines in taking Ballast out of the Ships in the River Tyne’.They were supported by the fishermen of Cullercoats to the north, who pointed out that the dumping disrupted their fishing grounds. By contrast, the ‘Owners and Masters of Ships belonging to the Ports of Shields and Sunderland’ who had to put up with the difficulties of casting the sand onto the shore, petitioned: that if all the Ballast that is brought into the Port of Shields, was to be carried out into Fourteen Fathom Water and not less, it would be of great Advantage to the River Tyne, and the Haven of Tinmouth, and the Coal Trade in general; and that the present Method of carrying Ballast from Ships by Keels, and landing it upon the Wharfs, is very detrimental to the Harbour of Shields; but, by the Machines invented by Mr Lyddell is intirely remedied.

The parliamentary committee was obviously in some difficulty in the face of all these contradictory statements, and eventually had to ask the House 54 JHoC 25 (1749-50), pp. 968, 1009, 1010, 1031, 1087, 1115. 55 TWAS 202/1111, 13 February 1766; JHoC 30, pp. 637-8, petition of the ‘Coal Owners, and Coal Fitters of the River Wear’, 10 March 1766; see David Dean, Law-Making and Society in Late Elizabethan England:The Parliament of England, 1584-1601 (Cambridge, 1996), pp. 2423 for examples of contentious harbour improvement proposals involving Whitby, Hartlepool and Sunderland.


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how to proceed with these petitions, one of which alleged that ‘the Town of Newcastle, under Pretence of being Conservators of the River Tyne, and for cleansing the said River and Harbour, have grievously assessed the Petitioners, and all other Owners and Masters of Ships using the said Port, to the great Detriment of the Petitioners, and the Public in general,’ and the committee was discharged from ‘proceeding upon the allegation’. In the end, they did not approve the new method, given the evidence of its harmful effects.56 Local division could therefore be provoked by the most innocentsounding legislative proposal. Partly this was a matter of the size of operation: on both the Tyne and the Wear the small fishermen (using open offshore ‘cobles’) found their interests threatened by dredging and dumping of ballast, or the development of large quays and wharves which intruded upon their traditional fishing grounds and moorages. Conflict could occasionally break out even between old friends and former allies: the mayor and council of Durham were always keen that the improvements to the River Wear were extended to the city, but feared that they would be confined to the profitable lower reaches of the harbour and broader parts of the river. In 1747 the city of Durham and its ‘trading inhabitants’ petitioned over the wording in the bill renewing the improvement of the River Wear, objecting to the phrase ‘or so far as can be effected’ when the proposal was to extend the navigability towards their city, the words in their view being ‘unreasonable, unnecessary and dangerous’. Hearing of the objection, the Wear commissioners counterpetitioned, because they apprehended ‘that if the Bill which the Mayor and Aldermen and Inhabitants of the City of Durham have petitioned should pass into a Law, the same would interfere with and obstruct the Execution of the Powers and Authorities vested in them’.Yet, more than a hundred years after the commissioners had been established, one of their Sunderland critics was right to say that ‘the upper parts of the river have derived no advantage’ from all the legislation and the investments. Durham’s capital never obtained a navigable river.57 Despite this kind of dispute, north-eastern localities were highly successful in their legislative efforts, able to muster political support for the laws they required. At least 56 JHoC 27 (1755); pp. 122, 134–5, 137, 143-4, 154, 213, 235-42; TWAS 202/1111, 19 March 1753, the River Wear commissioners discussed a copy of the bill. In 1765 Richard Lyddell again, JHoC 30 (1765), pp. 147, 167: again, the River Wear commissioners were keen that the ballast was dumped only on land. 57 JHoC 25, pp. 311-2, 6 March 1747;TWAS, 202/1111, undated petition to House of Commons about 1747 bill, objecting to the city of Durham’s clause; they repeated these anxieties with regard to the 1759 legislation, JHoC 28, 1759, bill to make the Wear navigable from Biddickford to Durham, p. 380, 26 January 1759, city of Durham’s petition, supported by Gainsborough p. 466, 8 March, and Norwich, p. 473, 12 March; John Pemberton, A Letter on the River Wear Navigation Act,Addressed to John George Lambton Esq (Sunderland, 1819), p. 14.

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fourteen acts were passed in the eighteenth century to the advantage of Sunderland and its fellow parishes at the mouth of the Wear, even though the place was not an incorporated town or represented directly in parliament. Laws were directed at the problems of improving not just the river itself, but the highways in all directions, building the great iron bridge and reshaping the poor law.58 Newcastle had led the way in the late seventeenth century, demonstrating that a close relationship with parliament could bring local benefits such as a water supply, lighting and watch-keeping, as well as the town council’s control over the charity hospitals.59 In the nineteenth century local tensions were largely removed by the ending of Newcastle’s powers over the Tyne, and the spread of parliamentary representation after the Reform Act. A crucial element on Tyneside was the breaking of Newcastle's stranglehold on the whole Tyne harbour, which in earlier years was marked by a determination to exploit the chartered rights to subsidise the town from harbour revenues and to impede the development of any rival ports.

In 1832 Gateshead, South Shields and Tynemouth all became parliamentary boroughs. Perhaps at this point the interlocked industries of coal, iron and steel, shipbuilding and engineering provided the basis for some kind of common regional loyalty which had scarcely existed before.60 Law, Loyalty and Identity before 1850 Law and legal processes provided many different, often contradictory, opportunities for people to express their interests and solve their problems, and rarely did this involve an expression of a united front or common identity. It is possible that the ecclesiastical or criminal laws embodied common moral standards across society – that is, they were a vehicle for the expression of a national consensus.Yet in many areas there was limited public support. In prosecuting sexual matters or smuggling, for example, law was also a means of imposing highly selective, almost alien, values. Early modern law was prone to these contradictions because laws were passed by the central authorities in Parliament, but implemented and acted upon locally. The centre could only ‘impose’ if the locality collaborated and instituted changes, but equally the locality could only achieve the 58 There were also many voluntary forms of local policy: see Joanna Innes,‘The State and the Poor in Eighteenth-Century England’, p. 244 on local initiatives on welfare; Connors, ‘Parliament and Poverty’, p. 230. 59 JHoC 12: 1697-1699 (1803), pp. 182-3, 30 March 1698; JHoL 19: 1709-1714, pp. 418-19; JHoL 20, pp. 621-2. 60 Norman McCord, ‘The Regional Identity of North-East England in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries’, Issues of Regional Identity: Essays in Honour of John Marshall, ed. E. Royle (Manchester, 1998), pp. 102-17, p. 109.


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legislation which local conditions (or local bigwigs) demanded if it had sufficient forceful support and organisation at the centre.To that extent the centre – parliament – was as much a force of local action as a means of controlling it. Consequently, law could be a lightning rod for the release of local tensions. The loyalties revealed in some of these conflicts were not derived from narratives of a common past which formed ‘imagined communities’ or ‘theatres of memory’ to bind people together: rather, loyalty was tactical, a community of convenience for the immediate purposes of self- or collective presentation.61 People were from a parish, a town, a county, a river or its industry: they had nested and overlapping memberships of different groups and networks, and none was fixed for all social or political occasions. Which loyalty they proclaimed at any one time might in part stem from the nature of the issue in dispute, and the identity of the opponents.The next issue might involve them uniting in a common cause. No definition of the ‘other’ shaped an identity which embraced all the territory from the Tees to the Tweed, though ‘strangers’, variably defined, were subject to various forms of exclusion from parish and poor law. Nor were rituals of boundary-maintenance, such as Rogation processions or beating the bounds, possible on so large a scale to embed the sense of ‘region’ in popular consciousness.62 There were far too many divisions and resulting feelings of edginess to overcome. Rivals, friends, strangers or allies were therefore flexible identities, and it would be fair to say that loyalty would be a more applicable concept than identity. Representatives ‘stood for’ their industry, their town or their county. Consequently, it seems implausible that in the early modern period people felt subjectively, or experienced in any practical way, a ‘regional’ identity, at least in standing before the law or in the public process of its creation.63

61 Benedict R.O’G. Anderson, Imagined Communities: A Reflection on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London, 1983); Raphael Samuel, Theatres of Memory (2 vols, London, 1999),Vol. II, Island Stories: Unraveling Britain. 62 See K.D.M. Snell, ‘The Culture of Local Xenophobia’, Social History 28.1 (2003), pp. 1-30 for one of the few studies of the popular culture of local hatreds; David Rollison, The Local Origins of Modern Society: Gloucestershire, 1500-1800 (London, 1992), pp. 4, 71 on the creation of locations of memory in communities; Hindle, On the Parish?, pp. 313-20 on methods of exclusion. 63 Steve Hindle,‘A Sense of Place? Becoming and Belonging in the Rural Parish, 1550-1650’, Communities in Early Modern England: Networks, Places, Rhetoric, ed. Alexandra Shepard and Phil Withington (Manchester, 2000), pp. 96-114, p. 103.

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XX Footnotes

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4 A Shock for Bishop Pudsey: Social Change and Regional Identity in the Diocese of Durham, 1820-19201 ROBERT LEE In January 1874 the Newcastle Weekly Chronicle fantasised about resurrecting a long-dead churchman. How would it be, the newspaper wondered, if Hugh Pudsey – the twelfth-century Prince Bishop responsible for the Church’s first grants of land and coal rights in 1180 – could be taken to the highest tower of Durham cathedral and invited to look at the social and environmental repercussions of his initial piece of business? He would open his ghostly eyes with astonishment at the sight of the numerous collieries which now virtually surround the ancient city. On well nigh every hill top, and on the sides of well nigh every valley, are to be seen the lofty chimneys, gigantic engine-houses, and monstrous refuse heaps, which are the signs manual of the great modern monarch King Coal, whose satellites care little or nothing for the picturesque, but sink their shafts and erect their gearing upon the most lovely spot of a lovely landscape if their divining rods indicate the presence beneath of the dark mineral now so precious.2

Of course, the Chronicle was not an opponent of coalmining per se: it would have had too acute an awareness of the centrality of the industry to the lives of the vast majority of its readership. But it was a newspaper that was alive to the social cost of coal, and the price of its extraction that was daily being paid in the quality of human life. In a series of articles entitled ‘Our Colliery Villages’, which ran from October 1872 to April 1874, the Chronicle reported on the living and working conditions of the region’s mining families and described, more often than not, a scene of social and spiritual crisis. At least part of the crisis was attributable to the shifting rootlessness of the migrant coalfield population, for whom senses of identity and belonging seemed at once threadbare, yet ineffably complex. 1

2

This article is derived from a research monograph, entitled The Church of England in the Durham Coalfield, 1810-1926: Clergymen, Capitalists and Colliers. Researched and written under the auspices of NEEHI while the author was in post at Durham University, 2003-2006. Newcastle Weekly Chronicle, 24 January 1874.

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The Newcastle Weekly Chronicle expressed general reservations about the effectiveness of the Church of England’s intervention in this crisis. While commending the hard work of individual clergymen, the newspaper took the view that Anglicanism in the coalfield was too often characterised by a sense of remoteness and distance: the Church had an arm’s-length relationship with the people of the coalfield, most of whom had already turned to the more welcoming embrace offered by a host of other denominations. But the fact that the Chronicle should take such a view in the early 1870s sets up something of a paradox, for in the decade immediately preceding the ‘Our Colliery Villages’ series the Church of England had begun to address its problems in the Durham coalfield with considerable vigour. Its task (as the Church saw it) was to attempt to provide the rootless, migrant hordes with some kind of spiritual anchor. This chapter is concerned to trace the broad trajectory of that task, and also to examine how far the Church’s quest might have contributed to a regional consciousness in the north-east of England. The Diocese of Durham As a diocese, Durham faced a peculiar and extreme set of circumstances in the nineteenth century. It was responsible for the pastoral care of Britain’s most rapidly expanding population, facing a constant influx of migrants who disappeared into new mining townships that bore no geographical relation to the existing infrastructure of parishes and parish churches.3 At the same time Durham cathedral administered an income from landownership and mineral extraction that had, by 1831, made it the wealthiest diocese in the United Kingdom. These factors combined to make the Church of England in Durham at once inaccessible and unpopular. In 1851 the diocesan authorities digested the bleak evidence of the Religious Census, which depicted Anglican churches and Sunday schools that were ill attended and inadequate, occupying remote medieval buildings in locations that had minimal relevance for the new centres of population, and which could not accommodate the working poor even if they were minded to turn up. Many of the clergymen were absentees or pluralists, and even those who were technically resident often lived so far away from outlying churches and chapels that they could not reach them in inclement weather. Only something approaching 8.5% of the county population attended Anglican worship on Census Sunday:4 the evidence could no longer be ignored that within the Durham diocese there were 3

4

County Durham’s population increased by 795% between 1811 and 1921, compared to an increase of 273% in the population of England and Wales as a whole. Durham County Local History Society, An Historical Atlas of County Durham (Durham, 1992), p. 60. TNA, HO 129/540, Census of Religious Attendance and Worship, 1851.The percentage is based on the total maximum attendance figure recorded.

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coalmining townships where the writ of the Church of England simply did not run. Had he been resurrected in such times, the shock experienced by Bishop Pudsey would have been cultural as well as visual. It was a nightmarish vision that was to haunt successive bishops from Shute Barrington in the 1820s to Hensley Henson in the 1920s. All those drifting migrant workers, with their Ranting Methodism, their Catholicism, their socialism or their atheism, meant that the view from the cathedral tower was not only one of smokestacks and winding gear but of an alien cultural environment, in which different and dangerous values of society, politics and religion were actively being forged. The peninsula above the River Wear – on which stood Durham’s cathedral, castle and university – seemed under siege. Bishop Maltby sensed it in the 1840s and wrote that: The whole county from Durham to Hartlepool on the one hand, and to West Auckland on the other is one of vast excavation; teeming with a numerous and ignorant population; under the influence of Chartists and other artful men and easily stimulated by liquor.5

In the 1830s Bishop Van Mildert sensed it too, describing a diocese embattled by ‘infidelity and atheism on one side, Fanaticism on another; Popery advancing in this direction, socinianism in that; Dissent, Lukewarmness, Apathy, each with multitudes in its train’.6 These were, of course, the gloomiest possible readings of demographic change. Migrants were bringing with them new technologies, new leisure activities, new kinship structures, as well as new forms of politics and worship.7 Whatever else they did, migrants exposed County Durham and its inflexible ecclesiastical structure to the constant challenge of diversity and change. It would be wrong to portray the early nineteenth-century diocese as inert in the face of these challenges, for much church building and parish creation went on, at the instigation of individual bishops. But it was not until 1860 that the Church fully committed itself to an organised programme of reform. Following a meeting of all the region’s influential Anglicans, held in Newcastle in January 1860, an urgent and determined campaign got under way to create new, manageable parishes, to recruit more clergymen, to build new churches and rectories and to broadcast the Church’s message more forcefully and dynamically than ever before among the region’s working-class poor. The results were striking. Between 1860 and 1920, 132 new parishes were created.A diocese of 86 parishes in 1800 had become a diocese of 262 parishes by 1920. 5 6 7

TNA, HO/45/644, Bishop Maltby to Sir James Graham, Home Office, 15 April 1844. W.Van Mildert, A Charge to the Clergy of the Diocese of Durham (London, 1832), p. 16. P. Norris, J.C. Dewdney and A.R. Townsend, Demographic and Social Change in the Durham Coalfield, (iii) Birthplace and Migration, 1851-1881 (Durham, 1984), p. 2.

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But could this reformed, re-organised diocese contribute in any way to a sense of ‘identity’ among north-easterners in the nineteenth century? Could a national church play a part in shaping local and regional perceptions of belonging, particularly in a diocese where migration was making the population so mobile, and where incomers were often decidedly non-Anglican in character? And what, in any case, might the Durham diocese have to do with region? The eagle-eyed reader will already have discerned that I am using the term ‘diocese’ rather loosely. Strictly speaking the ecclesiastical area south of the Tyne – roughly coterminous with County Durham – was, until 1882, merely the southern archdeaconry of a much larger diocese that embraced Newcastle-uponTyne and the county of Northumberland.8 All the portents suggested that the nineteenth-century diocese of Durham would struggle to contribute to any sense of identity: it did not map onto any geographically understood region, area or district; other denominations were stronger and had established a prior claim to notions of religious identity; even parochial identities were lacking, given that the Church of England’s huge, unwieldy parishes constituted ‘not one community but several, less one than a collection of neighbourhoods’.9 The diocese of Durham’s connection with identity hung by a thread, but it is a thread that this chapter nevertheless attempts to pick up and follow. One end of it lay amid signs that migrant communities (perhaps even subliminally) sought to throw down roots and establish a sense of identification with an area that ran counter to a lifetime experience of constant mobility. Here, perhaps, the Church could help. Identity and Identification Issues of identity were often at the front-line of the clergyman’s dealings with his parishioners. Demographic, social and political circumstances had given ‘identity’ on the Durham coalfield a peculiarly layered complexity, and the extent to which the clergyman demonstrated an awareness of this complexity – as well as an ability to negotiate it sensitively – was one of the determining aspects of the success or failure of his parochial mission. One of the greatest challenges faced by the parish clergyman was that posed by migration.The issue was not purely one of inward migration, but of a constantly shifting population within the coalfield. Driven by economic fluctuations and by the annual ‘binding’ system of employment contracts, miners’ movements were, on the whole, rapid, continuous, step-

8 9

In 1882 the northern archdeaconry of Northumberland became the diocese of Newcastle. D. Levine and K. Wrightson, The Making of an Industrial Society: Whickham, 1560-1765 (Oxford, 1991), pp. 348-9.


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by-step migrations into neighbouring communities.10 The miners’ leader Thomas Burt recalled that, by the age of fifteen, ‘my father [had] worked at some seven or eight collieries in Durham and Northumberland, and I can count no fewer than eighteen houses in which we lived.’11 The cumulative result was a landscape of communities so fractured and fissile that census returns revealed some of them, like Throckley in Northumberland, to have not a single head of household who was resident in his or her place of birth.12 In a study of eight townships on the East Durham coalfield, Michael Sill found that, in 1851, 87% of residents had been baptised in Northumberland or Durham, and 70% had been baptised in Durham, but only 7% had been baptised in the township in which they then lived.13 While the Church remained enthusiastic about the idea of labour mobility, individual clergymen found that the ever-shifting patterns of settlement around them made their pastoral work considerably more difficult.‘The great hindrance to ministerial usefulness here’, wrote one,‘is the continual migration of the Pitmen and their families from one colliery & parish to another.’14 The problem was exacerbated by the suspicion that migrant populations were of doubtful morality, and more than one clergyman complained about their cavalier attitude to the institution of marriage.15 There was also a sense that transitory populations were somehow inferior to those that were settled. As commissioner Leifchild observed in his report on the employment of children in the mines in 1842, the new pits ‘are naturally the receptacles of the refuse of the old’.16 Even so, as Sill’s figures imply, migrant communities still had a heavy preponderance of inhabitants who were native to the North East. In these circumstances, labour mobility could furnish rather than retard communal solidarity. Kinship ties, a strong associational culture and the shared experience of a hazardous workplace could combine to forge communities of migrants that, paradoxically, did not take easily to incomers. These were communities of the physically mobile, characterised by monolithic social structures that allowed for minimal social mobility.

10 M. Sill, ‘E.G. Ravenstein and Coal Miner Migration: East Durham in the Nineteenth Century’, DCLHSB 32 (May 1984), pp. 2-23. 11 T. Burt, Thomas Burt, Pitman and Privy Councillor:An Autobiography (New York, 1984 edn), p. 24. 12 B. Williamson, Class, Culture and Community: A Biographical Study of Change in Mining (London, 1982), p. 79. Data relates to 1871. 13 Cited in Norris, Dewdney and Townsend, Demographic and Social Change, p. 10. 14 DUL, Palace Green Archive, AUC 4/1 Visitation Returns, 1861. Response of the Rev. R. Webster, Kelloe. 15 See, for example, ibid., Response of the Rev.T. Dixon, South Shields St Hilda. 16 Cited in Norris, Dewdney and Townsend, Demographic and Social Change, p. 10.

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Table 1: Percentage of clerical ordinands from different social backgrounds in the Durham diocese 1810-1920. Father’s occupation

% of ordinands % of ordinands % of ordinands 1900-1920 1855-1875 1810-1830

Clergy

44.9

22.4

23.0

Aristocratic or gentry

21.8

12.7

5.9

Upper middle class and professional

10.3

26.5

18.3

Lower middle class and ‘white collar’

14.1

13.3

23.0

Skilled working class

7.7

22.7

26.4

Unskilled working class

1.2

2.6

3.4

SOURCE: DUL, Palace Green Archive, Durham Diocesan Records, Ordination papers 1810-1920.

Into this complicated picture stepped the parish clergyman. Evidence from the early nineteenth century suggests that Oxbridge-educated, rather patrician and often absentee clergymen tended to remain aloof from the melting-pot of parish life. The signs from later in the nineteenth century were, however, that the Durham diocese made a clear attempt to forge new links of empathy and identification between its clergy and its population. Clerical recruitment was a key area in this respect. Table 1, based on a survey of clerical ordination papers, indicates how this was achieved. After 1860 the reforming diocese recruited an unprecedentedly high number of young clergymen from the lower-middle and working classes. By the early twentieth century more than half the clergy ordained in Durham originated from these relatively modest social backgrounds. Many of them came from County Durham or from other parts of northern England that were undergoing similar processes of industrialisation. Most received their clerical training in Durham’s own university. Here, it seemed, was a clerical labour force recruited and deployed specifically to connect more closely with the needs and experiences of a working-class population. Fertility and Marriage As well as migration, another key demographic characteristic of coalfield communities lay in their high rate of fertility. In due course this tended to reduce the level of long-distance migration as mining populations acquired the ability to replenish themselves and meet local labour


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requirements through natural increase.17 The 1843 Parliamentary Commission on the Mines reported that a community of 125 families could expect to produce twenty to twenty-five coal hewers every year, thereby satisfying its own immediate labour needs. A study of Durham and Easington registration districts between 1851 and 1871 revealed reproduction rates that were 25% above the national average. Almost all women married and most married young, optimising the number of child-bearing years that were available to the marriage.18 Illegitimacy also tended to be high, but fundamentally fertility had its roots in patterns of nuptiality. Marriage in the nineteenth century was one of the essential building-blocks of communal identity, and the patterns of marital endogamy within a community made a profound difference to both the internal structure and the external relationships of that community. In this context, marital endogamy describes the extent to which marriage was contained within the boundaries of the Anglican parish. Marriages where both partners were residents of the same parish were ‘endogamous’; those where one partner came from another parish were ‘exogamous’; and those where neither partner resided in the parish in which the marriage was solemnised were ‘foreign’. There were places in England where parochial endogamy acted in tandem with secular measures like the laws of settlement to forge a strong, highly-localised sense of identity that had the parish church at its symbolic heart.19 This identity was challenged by less parish-bound organisations like the Nonconformist churches, but was not generally exposed to mass migration on the scale experienced in County Durham. Consequently, in rural southern England identification with the Anglican parish was strong, even among non-Anglicans. Could a similar sense of ‘parochial identity’ be established in the very different circumstances of the Durham coalfield? Tables 2 and 3 represent an attempt to find out. Table 2 indicates that the number of marriages in Anglican churches declined across the board in County Durham during the nineteenth century, despite a rapidly expanding population. The proliferation of dissenting alternatives and the appeal of the registry office were undoubtedly factors here, but so, too, was the creation and intercession of new parishes: each of the parishes surveyed will have been geographically much smaller in 1919 than in 1819. Parochial endogamy was also declining, but much more sharply in non-coalfield parishes. By 1910-19 the majority of marriages taking place away from the coalfield were exogamous, a 17 B.R. Mitchell, Economic Development of the British Coal Industry, 1800-1914 (Cambridge, 1984), pp. 109-21. 18 Harries (1979), cited in Norris, Dewdney and Townsend, Demographic and Social Change, p. 8. 19 See R.J. Lee, Rural Society and the Anglican Clergy, 1815-1914: Encountering and Managing the Poor (Woodbridge, 2006), p. 216.

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product of the parishes’ reduced size, reduced marriage options and restricted employment opportunities.20 In coalfield parishes the decline of endogamous marriage was less marked. These parishes were also often physically smaller than they had once been, but a vibrant turnover of population ensured an ever-changing pool of potential marriage partners and, significantly, employment opportunities that were always available. Here, then, is the first evidence that coalfield parishes could overcome the effects of mass migration to produce communities that were close-knit in marital terms, and that the Anglican rite of marriage remained a significant building-block of identity, even among the most mobile populations. Table 2: Anglican parochial marital endogamy rates in County Durham, 1810-19 and 1910-19. Exogamous

Foreign

1910-19

1810-19

1910-19

1810-19

1910-19

1325

891

326

474

0

3

Non-coalfield

457

168

184

222

0

6

Coalfield

80.3

65.1

19.7

34.6

0

0.3

Non-coalfield

71.3

42.4

28.7

56.1

0

1.5

Coalfield

%

Total Marriages

Endogamous 1810-19

SOURCE: DRO, Marriage Registers for the parishes of Auckland St Andrew, Chester-le-Street, Cockfield, Lamesley, Lanchester, Ryton, Barnard Castle, Coniscliffe, Dinsdale, Haughton-le-Skerne, Middleton in Teesdale and Redmarshall.

Table 3: Parochial marital endogamy rates compared between Church of England, Methodist and Roman Catholic churches in four coalfield communities, 1910-19. Church of England

Methodist

Roman Catholic

No.

%

No.

%

No.

%

Endogamous

752

67.9

97

39.1

76

46.1

Exogamous

355

32.1

98

39.5

60

36.4

0

53

21.4

29

17.5

Foreign

0

SOURCE: DRO, Marriage Registers of Anglican, Wesleyan Methodist, Primitive Methodist and Roman Catholic churches in Crook, Seaham Harbour,Willington and Tow Law, 1910-19.

20 The declining ability of individual parishes to provide work for all meant that people


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The benefit of this, from the point of view of the Church of England, is underscored when endogamy rates are compared between the principal denominations (Table 3). As is to be expected, parochial endogamy was much lower among Methodists and Catholics who did not look to the Anglican parish for their principal source of religious identity. The organisation of the Methodist church into ‘circuits’, each of several parishes or townships, had many benefits in terms of broadened social, cultural and political contact, but in the relatively narrow field of marital endogamy the Church of England can be said to have had a more significant input into secular senses of identity than the other principal churches. It might tentatively be observed that Nonconformist and Roman Catholic marital identities were primarily sectarian, but that Anglican marital identities connected more broadly with a sense of ‘place’. Belonging Continuous mass migration nevertheless ensured that ‘a sense of place’ was a concept of the utmost fragility. ‘I remember, I remember the house where I was born,’ wrote the poet Thomas Hood in 1826, and his words exercised a tremendous appeal for generations of sentimental Victorians. The trouble was, as the nineteenth century progressed and Durham’s migrant population grew, relatively few people in the diocese remembered the house where they were born in any meaningful way: from the vantage point of their overcrowded, industrial tenements and terraces it became a fading memory of a world they had lost. Among the many emotional wounds inflicted by industrialisation and urbanisation, a lost sense of belonging was perhaps the most keenly felt.The feeling of alienation could be acute, as Jack Lawson describes in his autobiography: The day my mother and our family travelled from Flimby to Boldon Colliery, in Durham, I felt instinctively the great difference between an agricultural county and one which is purely industrial ...When one who has spent his years in the country and by the sea finds himself amongst great aggregations of steel erections and chimnies, something closes up within ...When we came to Boldon Colliery that sense of closed-in-ness increased, for I had lived my life up to this time in little more than singlestreet communities where there was always not far off the sea and widestretching country, woods, and distant mountains.We now found ourselves in streets which seemed to my childish eyes miles long, an endless number of streets, every house and every street alike ... Barracks, barracks everywhere, and noisy, bustling life.21

travelled further afield to find jobs and were thus brought into contact with potential marriage partners from a much wider geographical range. 21 J. Lawson, A Man’s Life (London, 1944), pp. 27-8.

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Sill makes the point that many colliery settlements of this type – so depressing to the eyes of the young Jack Lawson – were ‘super-imposed ruthlessly upon the antecedent pattern of rural settlements’.22 They made a physical intrusion into the landscape.All of their features were alien: their colliery buildings, their roads and railways and their housing developments. This was the experience in places like West Rainton, Burnmoor, Houghton and Newbottle, where farms and village greens were infilled by colliery housing.23 Mining settlements could also represent a cultural and social intrusion into the landscape. Strikingly apparent from analyses of mid-nineteenth-century census returns is the fact that mining and agricultural kinship groups co-existed in certain parishes, but maintained their own distinctive social structures. This can be demonstrated by an examination of the phenomenon of dependent populations.24 Table 4: Average dependent populations in 24 coalfield and non-coalfield parishes in County Durham, 1851. Coalfield parishes

Non-coalfield parishes

Overall dependent population, per 1000 non-dependants

562

562

Dependent children, per 1000 non-dependants

501

478

Dependent elderly, per 1000 non-dependants

61

84

SOURCE: 1851 Census Returns

Table 4 indicates that coalfield and non-coalfield parishes in the county each had average dependent populations of 562 per 1000 non-dependants in 1851. The difference between them becomes much more apparent, however, when the dependent population is divided between those under 12 and those over 65 years of age. Now the table reveals coalfield parishes 22 M. Sill,‘Landownership and Landscape:A Study of the Evolution of the Colliery Landscape of Hetton-le-Hole, County Durham’, DCLHSB 23 (August 1979), p. 2. 23 J.C. Creigh, ‘Landscape and People in East Durham’, Northern Geographical Essays in Honour of G.H.J. Daysh, ed. J.W. House (Newcastle, 1966), pp. 217-66. 24 See E.A. Wrigley and R.S. Schofield, The Population History of England, 1541-1871: A Reconstruction (Cambridge, 1981), pp. 443-4. Dependent populations have, for the purposes of my own exercise, been defined as: (no. children aged 0-12) + (no. elderly aged 65 and over) ÷ (1000 adults aged 13-64).The higher the figure arrived at from this calculation, the higher the number of dependants in the parish (i.e. those incapable of earning their own living through extremes of youth or age) in relation to the size of the putative working population.


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to have had more dependent children and fewer dependent elderly than non-coalfield parishes. This was a structural difference that also existed within parishes, wherever miners and substantial groups of non-miners lived side by side, and it was clearly a product of the nature and circumstances of the immigrant group. As predominantly young, male migrants, coalminers arrived in host communities unencumbered with elderly relatives. They married early, and their marriages soon produced children.Their youthful, child-filled households began to strike a contrast with those of their agricultural neighbours, where elderly relatives stayed on as part of extended families. At Shadforth there were 483 dependents under the age of 12 and 147 dependents over 65 (per 1000) in one part of the parish, but 682 under-12s and only 38 over-65s (per 1000) in another. Analysis of heads’ of households occupations confirms where the split occurred: families headed by colliery workers had 17.5 children to every 1 elderly person, while in families headed by agricultural labourers the ratio was 4.1:1.The two parts of Shadforth parish must have appeared and felt very different, and, for a time, the place was clearly two communities rather than one: an additional difficulty for the clergyman as he tried to raise his profile among the working population. As the tide of coalfield development swept eastward, colliery settlements continued to be unwelcome intrusions into the agricultural and seafaring landscapes of the Durham coast. The Newcastle Weekly Chronicle described the tension as the village of Ryhope was transformed: It is not to be wondered at ... that when, a dozen years ago, a colliery settlement sprang up at the very back-door of the smug and smiling seaside village, there should have been great contempt on the part of the aristocratic lodging-house keepers for the new people out by in the vulgar coal colony ... The swells, whose quaint houses still border the spacious village green and proudly face the village pump, regarded the colliery folks as outsiders.25

In other places communities of long-distance migrants clustered together in groups that reflected their places of origin, the intention and effect being, presumably, to ameliorate the impact of change.26 The tripartite division of Trimdon parish offers one example of this: Irish quarrymen settled in Trimdon village, Welsh miners in Trimdon Grange, and Lancashire miners in Trimdon Colliery.27 Wingate Colliery seemed to be 25 Newcastle Weekly Chronicle, 25 January 1873. I am grateful to Adrian Green for pointing out that this repeats a pattern in play since at least the seventeenth century, the processes described in Levine & Wrightson, Making of an Industrial Society, passim. 26 See Norris, Dewdney and Townsend, Demographic and Social Change, p. 6 for a general discussion of this. 27 Sill, ‘E.G. Ravenstein’, p. 3. See also below, Chapters 6 and 7.

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exercising a deliberate policy of recruiting workers from Cornwall during the 1860s and 1870s.28 More than eighty Cornish families made the journey to the North East where, for a time, they created a tight-knit Cornish kinship network, still visible to the 1881 census where six families of Knights, Currocks and Muttons lived next door to each other in Wingate village.Very occasionally the Church of England made an openhanded gesture of welcome to communities such as these: it is said that the church at Leadgate was dedicated to St Ives in order to help a similar influx of Cornish families feel at home.29 The physical and social disruption of pre-existing communities and the apparent ghettoisation of some migrant groups nevertheless tended to be temporary, transient crises.This could explain why the Church of England did not feel the necessity to repeat its Leadgate experiment elsewhere. If the experience of the Bible Christians is any guide, later nineteenthcentury migration culminated in a desire to integrate and to become part of the community of the North East. Short has described how the Bible Christian sect, originating in Devon and Cornwall, established a significant presence in the East Durham coalfield in the 1870s, but underwent a steep decline when it failed to adapt its obstinately ‘West Country’ identity. It remained ‘an expatriate Mission’, unwilling to reach out to people who were not from the South West. By the early twentieth century second- and third-generation Bible Christians ‘were increasingly north-easterners. They were adopting north-eastern traditions and interests, and, most particularly, north-eastern ways of speech, and the appeal of Methodism rooted solely in the South West was diminishing.’30 Negotiating the Past In her study of the Durham diocese in the eighteenth century, Françoise Deconinck-Brossard argues that clergymen were often trying to iron out local irregularities in order to get across a national message.‘The minister’s voice played a part arguably similar to that of today’s mass media,’ she writes.‘There is much evidence to suggest a convergence of ideas between the sermons of northern preachers and those of their more southern counterparts in the eighteenth century ...The pulpit ... provided an ideal platform for shaping a sense of trans-regional identity.’31 But if the Church 28 DRO, D/X 411/11, Wingate Colliery, agreements with Cornish miners, 1866-75. The following discussion is based on this document and Wingate Colliery census returns, 1871 and 1881. 29 J.E. Ruscoe, ed., The Churches of the Diocese of Durham, (Durham, 1994), p. 108. 30 C.C. Short, ‘Bible Christians in Durham:The Establishment of the Bible Christian Mission in County Durham, 1874-1878’, DCLHSB 47 (December 1991), pp. 83-100. 31 F. Deconinck-Brossard,‘“We live so far North!”:The Church of England in the North-East of England’, The National Church in Local Perspective:The Church of England and the Regions, 1660-1800, ed. J. Gregory and J.S. Chamberlain (Woodbridge, 2003), p. 237.

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sometimes played a specifically anti-regional role, there were special circumstances in Durham which dictated that the diocese would always answer to a distinctively north-eastern call. Writing in the 1830s, Sir Cuthbert Sharp saw the county of Durham as coterminous with the see or the bishopric, and discerned a definable culture of legends, songs and ballads within its borders. Some of this culture had been generated by the ancient panoply of the Prince Bishops, and Sharp described the last of their number, Bishop Van Mildert, being met in the middle of Croft bridge over the River Tees as he made his first journey towards Auckland Castle. Ostensibly the ceremony confirmed the legitimacy of the lordship of Sockburn, but symbolically it marked the passage of the Prince Bishop into his new northern territory.32 This particular tradition passed with Van Mildert, but there were a number of other ways in which the Church provided a touchstone of continuity with the region’s past, real and imagined. Not the least of these was a spiritual yearning for a lost Eden that was rapidly vanishing before the relentless march of industrialisation. This yearning at least partly informed an antiquarian sense of awareness among certain clergymen that reached something of a peak in the 1880s.The interests of antiquarian clergymen in the North East can be tracked by analysing their contributions to Archaeologia Aeliana, a journal of local history and archaeology published by the Newcastle Society of Antiquaries (Fig. 1). Figure 1 Clerical involvement in Archaeologia Aeliana expressed as a percentage of all officers, members and contributors, 18651922 50

percentage

45 40 35 30 25 20 15 10 5 0 1865

1886

1902

1922

year Officers

Members

Contributors

The phenomenon of the antiquarian clergyman was not new, of course, and it should be pointed out that clergymen represented a far higher 32 Sir Cuthbert Sharp, The Bishoprick Garland, or a Collection of Legends, Songs, Ballads &c., Belonging to the County of Durham (London, 1834), p. 2. For the medieval history of this tradition see C.D. Liddy, ‘Land, Legend and Gentility in the Palatinate of Durham: The Pollards of Pollard Hall’, North-East England in the Later Middle Ages, ed. C.D. Liddy and R.H. Britnell (Woodbridge, 2005), pp. 75-96.

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percentage of contributors to Archaeologia Aeliana in the 1820s than in later decades, but Fig. 1 nevertheless shows their antiquarian involvement holding up strongly during the peak years of industrialisation before declining rapidly in the early twentieth century. For some of them, contributions to the journal were motivated by regret at the depredations wrought by the coal industry on the local landscape. In 1916 a clergyman called Henry Gee contributed an article that recounted the journey from Oxford to Durham of the Rev. Dr. Eedes, who accompanied the new Dean of Durham north in August 1583: Eedes describes [Bearpark] as a particularly charming place, with its green meadowland, its pretty peaceful river ... its general fruitfulness, and above all its thick grove of oak trees ... He tells us that there was a noble house. Both site and use were delightful. The visitor can please himself whether he prefers the music of the springhead, or to survey the rich grassy meads, or to smell the sweetly-scented air, or to ramble through the woods, or to climb the hills.

Gee went on to contrast Eedes’ experience of Bearpark with his own. Alas, the glories of Bearpark have departed! Its trees are attenuated, its green meadows are smirched with coal-dust, its river is polluted. Eighty years ago it was the chief asset in the gift made by the dean and chapter for the endowment of the University of Durham, and is today the scene of the activities of the Bearpark Colliery Company.33

Concern at the industrial destruction of the countryside’s aesthetic qualities was expressed by a number of nineteenth-century clergymen. Many felt that spirituality could not thrive in these circumstances, still less when economic decline struck in the vulnerable, single-industry communities that coalmining had helped to create. The past could also be a powerful political force.This was demonstrated by the exhumation of St Cuthbert in 1827, for what was at stake when Cuthbert’s tomb was opened went far deeper than the mere satisfaction of antiquarian curiosity. The exhumation, supervised by the cathedral librarian, James Raine, has to be seen in the contemporary context of Catholic Emancipation and, more locally, the building of St Cuthbert’s Roman Catholic church in Durham city.34 Raine was keen to prove that the body in the grave was that of Cuthbert, and that it had decomposed like any other human corpse. This would discredit, at a stroke, two Catholic beliefs: that the saint’s body was incorruptible, and that it had been spirited away to a secret hiding place at the time of the Reformation. A scientific debunking of these legends would, Raine hoped, contribute 33 Rev. Henry Gee, ‘A Sixteenth-century Journey to Durham’, AA 13, 3rd ser. (1916), pp. 109-10. 34 Rev. J. Raine, St Cuthbert, with an Account of the State in which his Remains were Found (Durham, 1828).


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to the view that Catholics were superstitious deceivers who could not be trusted with any form of political office. Durham’s past, in the highly symbolic form of St Cuthbert’s corpse, retained a significance in Protestant–Catholic tensions throughout the nineteenth century, for Raine’s questions about the dead saint were never satisfactorily resolved, even when Cuthbert was dug up again in 1899.And the past was brought to bear on other contemporary crises, too. Almost exactly one hundred years after James Raine’s exhumation of Cuthbert, Bishop Henson was in the Galilee Chapel of Durham cathedral, using the annual celebration of the life of Bede to warn against the threat posed by Soviet Russia.35 Like Raine before him, Henson invoked aspects of the Church’s ancient regional heritage as a means of highlighting the existence of an external political menace. The past, it seemed, was where the most solid virtues lay, and the fact that the Church of England’s past had a strong north-eastern dimension was something that it appeared to make use of as it positioned itself upon Durham’s confused, shifting spectrum of identities. It may be that church dedications in the post-1880 period represented an attempt to tap into this nascent regional consciousness, for these decades saw a sudden flourish of dedications to figures such as Columba, Aidan and Oswald: figures from the very early, evangelising history of the northern church that had scarcely ever been claimed as patron saints before the late nineteenth century. Of sixteen dedications to these saints in the diocese, only one pre-dates 1880. The Church of England also offered another uniquely powerful connection into a community’s past. As the places where the dead were buried and commemorated, churchyards often lay at the spiritual heart of settlements that were united in work and suffering but otherwise devoid of tangible signs of identity and belonging. The communal witness that attended the mass burial of the victims of pit disasters placed the Church at centre stage. The church building and churchyard each had an iconic status on these occasions, and there was frequently a strong local insistence that dead miners should be brought to the surface in order to rejoin their communities for the last time. The recovery and burial of victims of the 1880 Seaham explosion became such an issue that when Lord Londonderry attempted to restart the colliery while some bodies remained unaccounted for, his actions provoked a bitter industrial dispute.36 After the Trimdon Grange colliery disaster, victims were allocated to Trimdon cemetery or to Kelloe churchyard, depending upon which of them had relatives already buried in either place. At the funeral, one distraught woman even begged the vicar to marry her to the dead 35 Durham Chronicle, 3 June 1927. 36 J.E. McCutcheon, Troubled Seams:The Story of a Pit and its People, (Durham, 1955) pp. 111-12.

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body of her fiancé.37 Mining communities of the living might be shifting, impermanent places, but the miners also belonged to a much larger community than this: one that encompassed all of their number, living and dead. Despite all its problems with the coalfield community, the Durham diocese of the early twentieth century had begun to position itself in such a way that it could make connection on two fronts. Firstly, it had established a mobile clergy of men whose experience of itinerancy between coalfield parishes sounded an echo of the itinerancy of the colliers themselves. Secondly, some of its buildings managed to exude an air of static calm amid the turmoil and busy-ness, and spoke to even deeper senses of communal belonging.The continuing desire to be buried in the parish churchyard contributed towards the Church’s status as (to quote Wordsworth) ‘the visible centre of a community of the living and the dead’. A regional diocese? This chapter has, among other things, attempted to determine the Church of England’s input into a sense of north-eastern regional identity in the nineteenth century. The population of the diocese came from such a diverse range of geographical backgrounds that geography alone cannot be said to have been the determinant of senses of belonging and identity. More significant seems to have been a notion of shared experience among working people for whom the travails of industrialisation and urbanisation were all too familiar. In this respect, the diocesan drive to recruit clergymen from a similar background, to train them at the diocesan university, and to guide their careers – using episcopal patronage – around the livings where they might have the most impact, speaks clearly of an intent to form some kind of ‘regional community’. The problem with this strategy lay in its failure to acknowledge the profound differences between and within the colliery settlements. Despite their common characteristics there was no such thing as a ‘typical’ mining community in Durham. Some were tiny urban blots on an otherwise rural scene, concentrated in the unwholesomeness of their immediate conditions but ameliorated, at least, by their proximity to open countryside.38 Others had been shoe-horned into pre-existing agricultural villages and lived cheek-by-jowl with agricultural labourers with whom they shared little in common save mutual dislike and suspicion. Others still were lost in the sprawl of south Tyneside, subsumed into a landscape 37 Durham County Advertiser, 24 February 1882 38 See J.Y.E. Seeley, ‘Coal Mining Villages of Northumberland and Durham: A Study of Sanitary Conditions and Social Facilities, 1870-1880’ (unpublished MA thesis, University of Newcastle, 1973).


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occupied by other heavy industries and their own – often problematic – populations. Between the urban coalfield of the east and the western colliery villages of the Gaunless Valley there was a world of difference, and the diocese’s one-size-fits-all attempt to allocate working-class clergymen to working-class parishes took insufficient notice of this diversity:‘For the Cockfield man, Ferryhill or Fishburn are foreign parts, and the Greensider who moves to the Hettons soon finds out that in a space of less than thirty miles he has become almost a stranger.’39 The climate of rapid, continuous change in the mining districts clearly did not make the clergyman’s job any easier. Established, long-term incumbents who had been inducted in a much less-heavily industrialised era found that the ground had shifted beneath their feet and presented them with a teeming new population, with whom they felt little or no affinity. The forces of migration and constant parish boundary changes combined to wreck fragile ‘mental maps’ and nascent senses of belonging among potential congregations, almost as soon as they had formed. Even so, from 1860 the diocesan strategy of deploying north-eastern working-class clergymen into north-eastern working-class communities probably contributed towards the building of a common identity, based upon shared experiences of industrialisation. In a way, this tapped into a sense of what the region was now. It achieved some currency.Although by the 1920s there were considerable political differences between the Church of England and the miners – and it is worth remembering that one of the diocese’s most senior figures, Dean Welldon, was attacked at the 1925 Miners’ Gala40 – the Church seems to have been held in some affection. It even achieved a certain regional iconic significance with the depiction of Durham cathedral on a number of Union Lodge banners.41 Largely emanating from a rather different class of clergymen, there came an antiquarian sense of the beauty of the North East that was being lost to industrialisation. This tapped into a sense of what the region had been. It was expressed partly in a renewed interest in the culture, folklore and traditions of the bishopric, an area which – just as Matthew Holford, Andy King and Christian Liddy have described (Chapter 1) in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries – was coterminous with the southern archdeaconry of Durham, rather than the diocese itself. There was also a renewed interest in the early northern church: partly posited on reclaiming Cuthbert from the Catholics; partly seen in the dedication of new churches to Oswald, Columba and Aidan.

39 S. Chaplin, A Tree with Rosy Apples (Newcastle, 1972), p. 124. 40 N. Emery, Banners of the Durham Coalfield (Stroud, 1998), p. 48. 41 Ibid., passim.

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Even the single most problematic incident for north-east identity and the Church of England – the division of the diocese in 1882 – need not necessarily be fatal for the argument that the diocese contributed to a sense of ‘region’.42 The process pulled the Durham diocese back within the borders of the bishopric; it made the diocese a closer fit to the ‘industrial north-east’ described by Graeme Milne below; it respected the cultural and psychological boundary which others have argued the Tyne represented. But the diocesan division clearly represents a substantial hurdle for those who favour the ‘greater north-east’ of Northumberland and Durham as their region. Some opposition to the division of the diocese certainly stemmed from a regionalist mentality. Lord Houghton spoke in the House of Lords about the ‘pride and affection’ that people felt for their diocese, and described, too, how the inhabitants of Teesside still referred to the district as the bishopric. But the argument to split the diocese had always centred on practical, rather secular issues.There had been previous attempts: in 1552, because it was thought that the diocese was too large for practical purposes; and in 1854, seemingly because of the municipal ambitions of a group of Newcastle town councillors. In 1882 the argument was that the population was too large, too diverse and too unmanageable: the diocese was split for exactly the same pragmatic reasons as its parishes were being subdivided. The historic claims of Hexham, Bamburgh, Lindisfarne and Alnwick to become the northern see were all rejected in favour of the modern demographic and economic claims of Newcastle. The Durham bishops who oversaw the change – Baring and Lightfoot – were entirely supportive of its aims: they regretted the severance of some historic ties into Northumberland, but recognised that other, larger forces were at work. A sustainable argument might therefore be made that the diocese did have some impact on regional awareness. This impact tended to be symbolic, and owed a lot to the iconic visual presence of Durham cathedral, the lost world of Cuthbert and Bede and the lingering notion of a bishopric. In a country becoming, governmentally, more centralised from the 1830s, the Church of England generally helped sustain a localist mentality, especially through its involvement in the rites of passage. This exercised some appeal among mobile, migrant populations, and may have acted as a kind of emotional glue that helped establish a broader, more settled identity. If ‘the North East’ conjures in people’s minds the industrial Tyne-Wear-Tees district, the post-1882 diocese fits onto regional templates that had been established in the past and would be added to in 42 P.J. Jagger, ‘The Formation of the Diocese of Newcastle’, A Social History of the Diocese of Newcastle, 1882-1982, ed.Alexandra Shepard and Phil Withington (London, 1981), pp. 24-52.


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the future. The diocese might be conceived of as a single tessera in the mosaic of regional awareness. Ultimately, however, it seems more probable that Durham’s parochial structure was too weak, and the profile of the Church too low in ordinary people’s minds for the notion of a regional church to take a hold. The diocese was a landscape of townships rather than parishes, and those new parishes which filled the gaps between them arrived too late to play any more prominent and practical role in the development of a wider consciousness.At most the Church was a follower, rather than an instigator of regional trends. Conclusion ‘Parish’ had seldom been synonymous with ‘identity’ in the Durham diocese. This was a relationship that had tended to be stronger in the agricultural south of England, where parochial boundaries had historically been more closely associated with Poor Law administration.The Durham clergyman in his newly created parish consequently faced an immediate crisis of relevance.As a geographical, spiritual and economic unit his parish had little meaning. Its people either looked well beyond its boundaries for their senses of allegiance – to Methodist circuits, perhaps, or to Catholic ecclesiastical districts – or they concentrated their focus upon a tiny area within it, often a street or colliery row dominated by residents from a shared geographical and cultural background. The potential volatility of this is seen in people’s reactions to migration and displacement. The evidence is that second- and third-generation immigrants were proud to proclaim their County Durham identities, but this was only achieved after a period of considerable local xenophobia, during which the different communities demonstrated a good deal of reluctance to integrate with each other.43 The special circumstances of the coalfield also divided parishes internally. For a time, at least, immigrant miners into hitherto agricultural communities lived in a separate, alien-built environment, and had different, separate kinship and familial structures, apparent in differing patterns of marital endogamy and the continued living-in of dependants. Despite its marginalisation and minority appeal as a religious institution, the parish church nevertheless enjoyed something of an iconic status. On the coalfield, as elsewhere, it was revered as the setting for life’s great rites of passage, and although individuals and faces were constantly changing, there is evidence – particularly in the field of marital endogamy – that the parish church offered a place where an anchor of belonging might temporarily by dropped. Latecomers to the landscape as many Anglican church buildings were, the diocese made efforts to connect them 43 See also below, Chapter 6.

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to Christianity’s great and glorious past in the North East, and the awkward fact that the ‘great and glorious past’ had pre-dated the Protestant Church of England by many centuries seems not to have caused a problem. Against this must be weighed the powerful counter-argument that the Church of England re-organised itself too late in the North East to have any significant effect on the region’s self-perception. History had determined that Durham should not have the powerful sense of parochial connection that was, elsewhere, such a formidable element of ‘belonging’. Consequently, the Church in Durham did not touch people’s lives in quite the all-pervading way that was the case in some other parts of the country. Other bonds of identity – social, cultural, political and, above all, other non-Anglican religious identities – had been forged in the meantime, and they were not easily broken by a Church that was such a late-comer to local community life. One other significant factor should also be borne in mind.The diocese of the Prince Bishops had always held, at its iconic core, the architectural and spiritual edifice of Durham cathedral. The existence of the building had a resonance across the region that would have reverberated – however slightly – even in those remote communities where, perhaps, only the curate had ever set eyes on the place. In 1882 this link was broken and the lingering ecclesiastical connection with Northumbria came to an end.The lands south of the Tyne continued as the diocese of Durham, those to the north were redesignated as the diocese of Newcastle. Here, perhaps, would have been the final shock for a Prince Bishop like Pudsey, and here, too, lies the most compelling evidence that the Church of England’s desire was to concentrate its authority at the local rather than the regional level.

5 Business Regionalism Defining and Owning the Industrial North East 1850-1914 GRAEME J. MILNE The North East has long been defined by its industrial profile. In the late nineteenth century it was the great stereotype of a coal, shipping and heavy-engineering industrial district, standing in contrast not only to England’s agrarian shires, but also to other industrial clusters, such as the textile-manufacturing North West or the light-engineering and potterymaking Midlands. The staple industries dominate contemporary and historiographical perceptions of the North East, and of its place within wider processes of trade and industrialisation, whether in the sudden growth of the economy from the mid nineteenth to the early twentieth century, or in its equally dramatic collapse into ‘special area’ rustbelt subsequently. In addition, the export focus of the North East’s major industries made it an important player in the broader industrialisation of Europe, while also increasing its vulnerability to events elsewhere.1 If industry has been central to much historical writing on the North East, there has been less explicit engagement between that historiography and the regional question.Work on shipbuilding, to give just one example, is naturally focused on the industry itself, its workers, its wider significance to the economy and in many cases its local impact on particular waterfront communities. Such research is not intended to cast light on whether the shipyards helped make the North East a regional space, contributing to any sense of regional definition or belonging. Similar patterns are evident in the sizeable bodies of literature dealing with mining, shipping, chemicals and iron; while central to the popular image of the North East, the relationship between these industries and the North East’s regional definition remains unclear. Two threads in the economic historiography of British regions do have particular relevance to this essay. The first arose from discontent with the study of industrialisation at the level of the nation-state. Industry 1

Norman McCord and Richard Thompson, The Northern Counties from AD 1000 (London, 1998); A.E. Smailes, North England (London, 1960); A.G. Kenwood, Capital Formation in North East England 1800-1913 (New York, 1985).

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developed in isolated clusters of activity in most countries, but the major collections of statistics available to the historian usually come from national treasuries and other central institutions of state. These figures average out regional patterns of growth, making it difficult to relate macro-economic trends to human experience, and underplaying the radical changes that occurred in some of the pioneering industrial districts. Work on the complementary and competitive interactions of different regions as they managed commodity, labour and capital flows, and on the industrialisation of marginal places more generally, has offered an important corrective.2 The second approach has its roots in the economic geography of industrial districts, and is often inspired by the early-twentieth-century writings of the economist Alfred Marshall. This literature considers the complicated relationships between firms and sectors at work in particular industrial clusters over time, seeking explanations in econometric factors such as labour and transport costs, as well as in more qualitative questions such as the information culture of a district and the reputations of its businesses; in short, what Marshall called industrial ‘atmosphere’.3 Economic and business history therefore offers some valuable perspectives on the regional question, and not just in the most obvious empirical research into industrial and economic development. Indeed, the central issue confronted in this essay is the balance between the day-byday economic reality of business and industrial development on the one hand, and the broader articulation and rhetoric of regional definition and promotion on the other. As will be discussed in the next section, it is easy to find nineteenth-century references to such spaces as the ‘North East Coast’, which usually referred to the shipbuilding and iron-making districts between Blyth and the Tees, and to the ‘Great Northern Coalfield’, which encompassed the Northumberland and Durham mining districts. It is far harder to assess whether Victorian business perceived these as cohesive spaces that amounted to anything more solid than just a number of separate, local systems that happened to have common characteristics and could be given a convenient label. Assessing the subtleties of those distinctions helps to identify the working horizons of the business classes, and illuminates their sense of ownership in the heartland of carboniferous capitalism. 2

3

Sidney Pollard, Peaceful Conquest:The Industrialisation of Europe, 1760-1970 (Oxford, 1981); Regions and Industries: A Perspective on the Industrial Revolution in Britain, ed. P. Hudson (Cambridge, 1989); C.H. Lee, Regional Economic Growth in the United Kingdom since the 1880s (London, 1971). Alfred Marshall, Industry and Trade (Basingstoke, 1919); John F.Wilson and Andrew Popp, eds, Industrial Clusters and Regional Business Networks in England, 1750-1970 (Aldershot, 2003); Andrew Popp, Business Structure, Business Culture and the Industrial District: The Potteries, c.1850-1914 (Aldershot, 2001).

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The Forging of an Industrial District On one level, regions are to geographers what time-periods are to historians – necessary constructs that break up space and time into manageable units. In practice, no project like the one being discussed here can be undertaken without an active awareness of both space and time, and a sense of the ways in which human perceptions of both are fundamentally interwoven. Even within the half century or so covered in this chapter, the North East and its constituent districts changed considerably.4 This chapter uses ‘North East’ to mean the simple territorial space encompassing Northumberland, Durham and Teesside, and does not assume any regional cohesion or unity. Indeed, it is clear that internal and external forces work to alter the boundaries, composition and character of any region over time.As with any other human system, loyalties and other attitudes toward the region in their turn inform future developments. Earlier scholars of industrial regions recognised the anachronisms inherent in most attempts at definition. One historian working on the first industrial wave in the Lancashire textile district, for example, noted that ‘what was recognisable as a distinctive economic region by 1840 had been a jigsaw of contrasting experiences less than a century earlier.5 And it was still a distinctive but very different entity again, a century later. The industrial North East is best visualised as a polycentric space with shifting economic focal points and centres of gravity. In other words, different localities have been prominent at different times, and there have often been several competing centres of development within a relatively small area. The towns of Newcastle, South Shields, Sunderland and Middlesbrough have all at some point in the last two centuries dominated one or other element of the economy, only to see that role challenged a generation or two on, and the same is true of different parts of the coalfield and the various riverside zones. A brief account of some of these patterns, and of contemporary attempts to classify and delineate them, will provide some context for the evidence presented in the remainder of the chapter.6 The shifting boundaries of the Great Northern Coalfield are probably the fundamental factor in explaining the development of the North East in the nineteenth century.This is because the coalfield was at the heart of an integrated industrial complex, involving railways, ports, ships, ironworks and much else as well as mines. Coal is the classic high-volume, low-value commodity, requiring the cheapest possible transport between its points of 4 5 6

Norman McCord, ‘Some Aspects of Change in the Nineteenth Century North East’, NH, 31 (1995), pp. 241-66. J.K. Walton, ‘Proto-industrialisation and the First Industrial Revolution: The Case of Lancashire’, Regions and Industries, ed. Hudson, p. 43. For a more detailed analysis, see Graeme J. Milne, North East England, 1850-1914: The Dynamics of a Maritime Industrial Region (Woodbridge, 2006), pp. 53-62.

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production and use, and a large part of the North East economy and landscape was adapted to handling it. Crucially, though, this was far from being a closed regional system, and external markets for North East coal grew in relative importance as the century went on. The shipping and financial communities of port towns were therefore as vital to the success of this economy as the coal owners in their hinterlands, and the fortunes of individual ports fluctuated according to the evolving shape of the coalfield.7 Early in the nineteenth century, the coal trade was essentially a matter of rivalry between the Tyne and the Wear, with shallow seams being worked close to navigable water, and the product being carried downriver to collier ships at Shields and Sunderland.8 Waggonways using horsepower or stationary steam engines, and then railways proper, reduced the need for the coal industry to hug the riverbanks, and the period from the 1820s to the 1850s saw a substantial ‘colonisation’ southward into County Durham. This in turn encouraged the building of new ports by entrepreneurs seeking to bypass the existing Tyne and Wear coal networks. The Pease family and Ralph Ward Jackson envisaged a new world dominated by railway companies, with coal being carried from central and southern Durham to coal staiths, docks and even entire ports purposebuilt and owned by the railways. They founded Middlesbrough and West Hartlepool respectively, with the explicit intention of taking traffic away from the older ports to the north.9 Faced with this threat, the Tyneside business classes improved their port facilities and exploited their long-established markets and mercantile connections to recover lost market share and once again dominate the coal trade.10 Teesside and Hartlepool turned to heavy industry and more diverse trade and shipping instead, and the railway complex that had been built to pull coal from a scattered hinterland was readily adapted, with a few sidings and branch lines, to supply that coal to major industrial works close to the shipping ports.11 In the middle decades of the nineteenth century, therefore, the south Durham–Teesside zone emerged as a second growth pole, challenging the long-established Tyneside–Wearside grouping. The 7

N.R. Elliott,‘A Geographical Analysis of the Tyne Coal Trade’, Tijdschrift voor Economische en Sociale Geografie 59 (1968), pp. 71-93. 8 Smailes, North England; Roy Church et al., The History of the British Coal Industry, Vol. III: 1830-1913 (Oxford, 1986). 9 M.W. Kirby, Men of Business and Politics:The Rise and Fall of the Quaker Pease Dynasty of North East England, 1700-1943 (London, 1984); Robert Wood, West Hartlepool: The Rise and Development of a Victorian New Town (Hartlepool, 1969). 10 R.W. Rennison, ‘The Development of the North-East Coal Ports 1815-1914: The Contribution of Engineering’ (unpublished Ph.D. thesis, University of Newcastle, 1987). 11 Maurice W. Kirby, The Origins of Railway Enterprise: The Stockton and Darlington Railway, 1821-1863 (Cambridge, 1993), p. 151.


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reinvention of Teesside as a manufacturing district – having initially been planned as a coal-shipping river – is just one example of a business cluster having to respond quickly to changing opportunities in this era.12 A good deal of evidence survives for contemporary perceptions of the boundaries and divisions of the North East as an industrial space. Probably the most common label in the nineteenth century was ‘the North East Coast’. Early examples suggest a very literal use for the term, with most citations relating to fishing activity, storms at sea, and shipping disasters in the area from the Scottish border to the north Yorkshire coast.13 By the 1880s, however, the expression was more often used to define the emerging zone of heavy industry and port development. This example from 1911 is typical of many to be found in that era, with the industrial North East Coast stretching from Morpeth and Blyth in the north, where the collieries begin, to Guisborough and Skinningrove in the south, where the Cleveland iron mines end. It extends westward as far as Consett and Bankfoot.14

‘North East Coast’ was, and remained into the 1960s, a common label for this broad industrial district, encompassing the Tyne,Wear, Hartlepools and Tees, which ‘with its special industries, is quite sharply separated in character’ from the territory around it.15 A few went further, arguing that the North East Coast stretched south as far as Hull, thereby including the Humber in the same shipping, coal and industry zone. When John Price, general manager of Palmers, the Jarrow shipbuilders, was asked for a definition in the 1880s, he used shipbuilding as his main criterion, starting with Blyth and working southward to the Tyne, the Wear, the Hartlepools, the Tees, Whitby and Hull.16 Price’s southern boundary was unusual, though, and most people who were asked that question stopped at the Tees. West Hartlepool shipbuilder Sir William Gray, for example, chose a half-century of progress in ‘the North of England’ as the topic of his presidential address to the UK Chamber of Shipping; by this, he meant the harbour improvements and great expansion of shipping in the industrial districts between Blyth, which served the northern districts of the coalfield, and the Tees.17 Other definitions depended less on the thinking of industrialists and more on external perceptions. The Engineer, a trade journal, published a regional round-up of news and events in the 1890s; its ‘North of England’ 12 13 14 15 16

Huw Beynon, A Place Called Teesside: A Locality in a Global Economy (Edinburgh, 1994). For example, The Times, 26 March 1855, p. 8; 25 July 1863, p. 5; 25 August 1866, p. 5. Electric Power on the North-East Coast (London, 1911), p. 9;TWAS, 1385/6. North of England Yearbook (Newcastle, 1895); Smailes, North England, Chapters 11 and 12. BPP, Royal Commission to Inquire into Depression of Trade and Industry, 1886,Vol. XXI, C.4715, evidence of John Price, q. 10,941. 17 Chamber of Shipping, Report of Proceedings, 1891 meeting.

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stretched from the Tyne to the Tees, but also included the Cumbrian iron industry on the west coast. The shipowners’ trade paper The Syren & Shipping published a special number in 1901 entitled ‘The North-East Coast commercially considered: Tyne, Wear, the Hartlepools and Tees’.18 The Labour Department of the Board of Trade had a sophisticated breakdown of Britain’s industrial districts, reporting information in its monthly journal from a number of correspondents. Its ‘Northern Counties’ was divided in two: the ‘Tyne and Wear District’, and ‘Middlesbrough, Stockton and District’ (which included the Hartlepools).19 By the 1930s a team from Newcastle’s Armstrong College was dividing what they called the ‘North East Coast Area’ into three ‘regions’: Teesside (which included the Hartlepools), Wearmouth and Tyneside.20 Despite all the difference in detail, then, there was a gathering consensus by the late nineteenth century that the North East was a recognisable industrial entity, but with at least two and possibly three subdivisions.Those divisions focused on the riparian and coastal districts that had developed as coal shipping points, and as the main clustering areas for transport systems and heavy manufacturing development. Some, like Tyneside and Wearside, were built on older industrial foundations, while others were new creations serving the rapid expansion of the coal, iron and shipping complex. They were also, of course, the principal sites for new riparian conurbations: ribbon developments along the banks of the major rivers connected older towns with new settlements built to house workers for shipyards and ironworks.21 These ports and riparian districts worked in a competitive environment, and some, like Middlesbrough and West Hartlepool, even had founding missions that were predicated on taking market share away from the others. A closer level of magnification, looking at the practices of individual firms working in these markets, reveals some of the tensions at the heart of these interactions. Business Connections: Investment, Ordering and Tendering It is already clear that the industrial North East was not a closed system, and nor was the relative importance of individual places within it constant or predictable over time. Both of these features necessarily influenced the sense of regional cohesion evident in the activities of the business classes. The North East’s place in the world, and the image of it held by people elsewhere, were both coloured by its production of coal, iron and ships for 18 TWAS, 202/4112. 19 Newcastle University Library, The Labour Gazette (1895). 20 Board of Trade/Armstrong College, An Industrial Survey of the North East Coast Area (London, 1932), pp. 62-5. 21 Michael Barke,‘Newcastle/Tyneside, 1890-1980’, Regional Cities in the UK, 1890-1980, ed. George Gordon (London, 1986), pp. 117-47.


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export. Equally, varying patterns of competition and collaboration within the industrial complex served to define internal subdivisions, which did not necessarily coincide with the clustering patterns observed by the commentators encountered in the last section. Finding the evidence to measure any of these patterns at the level of individual firms and businesses is problematic, but also potentially very revealing.22 Firms live or die in a practical world of buying and selling, but their owners and employees also have aspirations and attitudes that will help or hinder those daily processes. The boundaries and horizons of entrepreneurs define the areas in which their firms are able to operate, and may be too wide or too narrow.The geography of supply and demand is an important indicator of the existence of regional markets, and the extent to which such markets were more or less important than those above and below them at international, national and local level. This section takes some examples from one of the North East’s signature sectors, the grouping of activities related to the shipping industry that Kubicek in a different context calls the ‘ship nexus’, and which is referred to here as the maritime-industrial complex.23 The transition from sail to steam transformed the shipping industry in the second half of the nineteenth century, driving a revolutionary shift in scale and capability. The North East’s shipowners developed a global reputation in the bulk cargo tramp sector, often starting in the coal trade before acquiring larger ships and moving into more lucrative markets. They did so as part of a web of finance and information in a highly fragmented and competitive industry. Shipowning was a heavily capitalised activity that needed to cultivate both investors and shipbuilders, while shipbuilding itself was a complicated assembly process, with yards dependent on large numbers of component suppliers.24 This environment of relatively small firms seeking capital and maintaining close connections with one another offers useful evidence for the existence of regional business horizons. First, shipping investment. Historians have identified strong patterns of localism in shipping finance, as shipowners worked closely with their homeport business communities to raise the necessary capital for their fleets.This continued to be a characteristic of the industry well into the nineteenth century, and even into the era of increasing capital requirements and the 22 Michael Taylor and Bjørn Asheim, ‘The Concept of the Firm in Economic Geography’, Economic Geography 77 (2001), pp. 315-28. 23 Robert Kubicek, ‘The Proliferation and Diffusion of Steamship Technology and the Beginnings of the “New Imperialism”’, Maritime Empires: British Imperial Maritime Trade in the Nineteenth Century, ed. David Killingray (Woodbridge, 2004), pp. 100-10. 24 Gordon H. Boyce, Information, Mediation and Institutional Development:The Rise of Large-Scale Enterprise in British Shipping, 1870-1919 (Manchester, 1995).

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conversion to steamships.25 Shipping was probably an extreme example, but localist patterns of shareholding were readily visible throughout the wider economy. In 1860 76% of industrial shares were owned by people whose addresses were within ten miles of the company’s registered office; by 1885 the figure was slightly lower, at around 70%, but local horizons clearly persisted.26 Overall, shipowners maintained their reliance on local shareholding networks, but some entrepreneurs had started working in wider markets by the 1880s and 1890s. The largest single blocks of capital invested in a port’s shipping usually came from the immediate vicinity of the port, such as the 65% of Sunderland tonnage that was owned on Wearside, or the 53% of West Hartlepool tonnage owned in that town in 1895.There was also a smaller, but important, element of shareholding from a distance, with London, Lancashire and West Yorkshire investors together owning almost 16% of Tyneside tonnage and 21% of that registered in the Hartlepools. These figures relate to the traditional 64ths form of shipowning, but the increasing tonnage of shipping owned by joint-stock companies shows similar broad patterns.27 In both forms of shipping investment cross-ownership from one part of the North East to another remained very low: it was rare to find Sunderland investors in Newcastle shipping, or Newcastle investors involved in the Middlesbrough fleet. Indeed, shipowners seem to have worked at two levels in recruiting their shareholders – the local and the national – while largely ignoring the regional level represented by the other towns and districts of the North East. Connections between shipowners and shipbuilders reveal another set of patterns. Most of the merchant fleet was bought on a riparian basis. Sunderland’s shipowners were particularly self-sufficient, with 86% of their registered tonnage in 1895 built at home on the Wear, and the Teesside ports also had a high level of localism in connections between owners and builders. Owners based on the Tyne and at the Hartlepools, on the other hand, both had around 65% of their tonnage built at ‘home’, and around 20% built by yards on the next nearest river, the Wear and the Tees respectively.There was, therefore, some delineation between the northern and southern shipping districts of the North East, as Tees and Hartlepool shipowners bought few vessels from yards on the Tyne and the Wear, and vice versa.28 25 Graeme J. Milne, Trade and Traders in mid-Victorian Liverpool: Mercantile Business and the Making of a World Port (Liverpool, 2000), pp. 134-45; Boyce, Information, Mediation, pp. 50-4. 26 P.L. Cottrell, Industrial Finance, 1830-1914 (London, 1980), pp. 92-4. 27 Derived from analysis of Turnbull’s Shipping Register (1895), in Milne, North East England, pp. 151-6. 28 Milne, North East England, pp. 170-6.


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These patterns have their roots in the tendency of the North East’s riparian districts to become rather more specialised as the nineteenth century went on. The Wear yards focused on cargo ships, and developed economies of scale and technique that made them attractive partners for tramp and cargo liner operators, who worked in a highly competitive market requiring efficient and cost-effective vessels. Many such ships were built on the Tyne as well, but the larger Tyne yards were expanding into high-value-added shipping sectors by the end of the century, focusing on warships and the largest passenger steamers, and selling them to governments and to shipping companies working from Atlantic liner ports like Liverpool.29 Some of the Tyne’s own shipowners therefore established a complementary relationship with Wear builders. Major shipowners had a ‘stable’ of builders from whom they bought several ships over time, gaining economies from repeated orders, increasing trust and better information about the strengths and specialist capabilities of particular yards.30 Newcastle’s James Knott, for example, bought seventy-four new ships between 1882 and 1914: Short Bros of Sunderland built just over 40% of that tonnage, another 20% came from other yards on the Wear and another 30% from yards on the Tyne.31 Equally, West Hartlepool shipowners developed a complementary relationship with yards on the Tees.Teesside, with navigable water as far upriver as Stockton, offered better shipbuilding spaces than the cargo-oriented dock system at West Hartlepool. Robert Ropner, West Hartlepool’s largest shipowner, personified the connection by buying a Stockton shipyard and building his own ships.32 Some of the North East’s shipowners, then, moved beyond their immediate riparian shipbuilders, but not by far. The shipowner–builder relationship offers evidence of business connections that linked the Tyne with the Wear and the Tees with the Hartlepools, and suggests a binary division that was more inclusive than the close riparian pattern of shipping investment, but still less inclusive than the ‘North East Coast’ of the promotional and engineering literature considered earlier. The shipowner–builder relationship was not a balanced one, in large part because British shipbuilding became much more concentrated geographically in the steamship era than it had been in the age of the sailing ship. By the end of the nineteenth century the Tyne, the Wear, the 29 Sidney Pollard and Paul Robertson, The British Shipbuilding Industry, 1870-1914 (Cambridge Mass, 1979); Simon Ville, ‘Shipbuilding in the Northeast of England in the Nineteenth Century’, Shipbuilding in the United Kingdom in the Nineteenth Century: A Regional Approach, ed. Simon Ville (St John’s Newfoundland, 1993). 30 Boyce, Information, Mediation, pp. 178-85. 31 Calculated from fleet list in N.L. Middlemiss, Pride of the Princes (Newcastle, 1988). 32 See Ropner’s entry in David Jeremy, ed., Dictionary of Business Biography (5 vols, London, 1984-6).

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Tees, the Clyde and Belfast dominated British and world output, and would not have been capable of such expansion had builders only been able to sell to local owners. In particular, London and Liverpool grew as shipowning centres while seeing a sharp decline in their local shipbuilding capacities; many of these owners turned to the North East for their vessels. A snapshot can illustrate the broad patterns. Between July and December 1891 yards in the North East launched 110 merchant ships. Shipowners in one or another of the North East’s ports bought just over a quarter of these vessels, with London firms accounting for another quarter. North West England (Liverpool and Manchester) and Northern Europe (mainly Germany and Scandinavia) were the other two markets of any scale, accounting for about an eighth of the vessels each; these four markets, in other words, took three in every four ships built in the North East.The remainder comprised ships bought in South Wales and in Hull, and a few further afield in Greece, Italy and the United States.33 As with shipowners and their investors, patterns varied widely from one firm to the next; while some yards developed national and international customer bases in this period, others remained rooted in supplying their home-port fleets. Overall,Tyne and Wear yards worked in a wider market than those on the Tees, in large part because of their capacity for building larger vessels suited to the liner and passenger trades working from ports such as Liverpool. Shipbuilders also looked inwards to a hinterland of suppliers and collaborators, the continuing legacy of long-standing characteristics in an industry that was essentially an assembly process, and which relied on clusters of specialised firms to sell it a broad range of necessary items.34 Like the shipowner–shipbuilder connection, the shipbuilder–componentmaker link can be examined from both sides. Marine engines were the most important single components bought in by shipbuilders, and the evidence from the North East suggests that this was, once again, a local rather than a regional market. Swan Hunter, the Tyneside shipbuilders, fitted two in every three of their ships with engines made by Tyneside firms.35 From the other perspective, the Wallsend Slipway Co. supplied twenty-four different yards with at least one set of engines from the 1870s to the Great War, but three in every four went either to Swan Hunter or to Armstrongs, both on the Tyne.36 33 Calculated from reports of ship launches in the shipping industry’s weekly trade paper Fairplay (July-December 1891). 34 Tom McLean, ‘Contract Accounting and Costing in the Sunderland Shipbuilding Industry, 1818-1917’, University of Newcastle School of Business Management, Discussion paper 93-7, (1993), p. 7. 35 TWAS, 964/2. 36 J.F. Clarke, Building Ships on the North East Coast (2 vols,Whitley Bay, 1997),Vol. II, pp. 28, 39, 47.


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Other component makers worked in a much wider market, especially when their products could be used in more than one industry. For example, the Sunderland rope-making firm of Webster & Co. supplied ropes mainly to collieries and increasingly to shipbuilders; it was an early innovator in the new wire rope technology from the 1840s.37 The firm’s rate of expansion in the nineteenth century outstripped its immediate locality, and the geographical range of its contracts widened considerably over the second half of the century. It supplied mines in Wales and Staffordshire as well as in Durham, and its greatest area of growth was in making wire rope for shipbuilders. Despite close relationships with Wearside yards, the firm increasingly supplied builders on the Tees and the Clyde.38 Webster & Co. clearly found that growth required reaching markets beyond Sunderland’s shipyards, and beyond the Durham coalfield. Occasionally, evidence survives that allows assessment of a firm’s tendering record as well as the orders it actually delivered; this indicates whether it was able to reach the horizons to which it aspired. Westmoor Engineering Ltd on Wearside made waterproof doors for ships, and its records suggest that it hoped to work in a wider market than it did.39 Neighbouring firms on Wearside were by far the most likely to give Westmoor any business, and accounted for about half of the firm’s orders in 1911, although they only made up a fifth of its tenders.The firm chased a considerable amount of work further afield, with around one-third of its tenders going to yards on the Clyde, at Hull, on the Mersey and across the North Sea in Denmark, Germany and the Netherlands; many of these bids were successful. Westmoor’s least fruitful market was Tyneside – despite sending more tenders there than anywhere else,Tyneside yards represented Westmoor’s poorest success rate. While the idea of an integrated regional economy gives the impression of being a rather cosy environment for business, at the level of individual firms matters were much less certain. Being a wire rope producer in a district of collieries, or a steam winch maker in a district of shipbuilders, offered great opportunities but few guarantees on either side. In addition, over the longer run, comfortable networks can readily lead to inertia and complacency. Component suppliers who limit their horizons to large local customers risk being dragged down when a major player fails, however stable and lucrative such relationships might be in the shorter term. Product innovation, a willingness to tender for work in other industrial districts and the ability to serve customers in more than one industry can all lessen that vulnerability, and there is good evidence from the North East of at least some firms adopting these strategies even in prosperous times. 37 TWAS, 569/2 (Daybook, 1848-54) and 569/35 (Order book, 1893). 38 Calculated from Laing Order books,TWAS, 1811/29/2. 39 TWAS, DS/WM/2/1 (Quotations book, 1910-11), DS/WM/3 (Order book, 1904-16).

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By the end of the nineteenth century some of this small-firm environment was being taken over by large, integrated corporations, in a merger and agglomeration movement that had a far-reaching impact on business in America and Europe alike. A few firms in the North East adopted this strategy, and indeed entrepreneurs in the iron, steel and shipbuilding sectors were at the forefront of it. W.G. Armstrong and Charles Mark Palmer both created integrated works on Tyneside for the building of iron ships, and controlled virtually the whole chain from coal and iron mining through to the finished product. Christopher Furness had an even more diverse empire focused on the shipping and engineering sectors in West Hartlepool, while some Teesside steel firms developed giant riverside works with their own coal and iron mines in the hinterland.40 These firms are important to business historians on a number of levels, but their significance for this chapter is in what they did not do, rather than what they did. None of the giant firms expanded to the point where its local core of activity became lost in a broader regional profile. Their principal identification remained at the town and river level, and indeed contributed further to the binary clustering and specialisation of the Tyne and Wear on the one hand, and greater Teesside on the other. One major company did truly come to symbolise the North East as a whole in this era, but its exceptionalism tends to reinforce the points made above. By the early twentieth century the North Eastern Railway Company dominated rail services throughout the North East. Created in 1854 by a large amalgamation of existing companies, the NER further consolidated its position by absorbing smaller local lines over several decades. Its regional focus was unusual for a major British railway company, and it did not have a London terminal. Over time the NER developed a reputation as one of the most progressive rail operators, keeping accurate records and adopting larger coal wagons to improve its productivity.41 Its control of the North East’s coal-carrying and industrial transport network, combined with its role as the only fast means of moving passengers, made it, in the words of one commentator from the 1880s,‘no unfit indication of the industrial development of this district’.42 40 Kenneth Warren, Armstrongs of Elswick (Basingstoke, 1989); Gordon Boyce, ‘Corporate Strategy and Accounting Systems: A Comparison of Developments at Two British Steel Firms, 1898-1914’, Business History 34 (1992), pp. 42-65; Robert C.Allen,‘Entrepreneurship and Technical Progress in the Northeast Coast Pig Iron Industry, 1850-1913’, Research in Economic History 6 (1981), pp. 35-71; relevant entries in Jeremy, ed., Dictionary of Business Biography. 41 R.J. Irving, The North Eastern Railway Company, 1870-1914: An Economic History (Leicester, 1976); J.S. Dodgson,‘British Railway Cost Functions and Productivity Growth, 1900-1912’, Explorations in Economic History 30 (1993), pp. 158-81; Peter Scott, ‘Path Dependence and Britain’s “Coal Wagon Problem”’, Explorations in Economic History 38 (2001), pp. 366-85. 42 The Monthly Chronicle of North Country Lore and Legend 1 (1887), p. 12.


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Others were less impressed, and some parts of the North East felt excluded from the NER’s decision-making processes. It is indicative of the localist agendas that were always close to the surface in the North East that the company with the clearest regional role and profile was also the one that attracted the most criticism from individuals, firms and towns. Town councils and Chambers of Commerce – Sunderland’s especially – consistently complained of being neglected by the NER.43 More generally, the NER was seen as a kind of holding company for the North East’s industrial elite, rather than as the custodian of the broader public interest.44 This was undoubtedly true, but members of that same industrial elite were quick to criticise the NER when it interfered with their own firms and districts, and there was in reality no contradiction. Loyalty to a regional institution when it was promoting industrial growth could coexist quite happily in business minds with criticism of that body when it failed to respect more local priorities. Most of the indicators raised in this section point to a business environment that had wider horizons than the conventional boundaries of the North East, but which equally drew much of its strength from close local ties, and these are far from being exclusive tendencies.The diversity evident in the practices and outlooks of the firms sampled here is a reminder of the multiple layers of experience that influence the cohesion or otherwise of any community, including an industrial district. However, it remains striking that for all the commonality to be found in the North East, many firm- and sector-level patterns show a binary divide between the Tyne and Wear and Teesside, with far less interaction over ordering and investment than there was within either of those districts. Belonging: Business Associationalism Alongside their commercial relationships, North East businesses had more formal institutional structures, which also varied in their geography. Business associations provided forums for maintaining contacts, connections and friendly relations with suppliers and customers, and their regular meetings offered the opportunity to keep wheels oiled: as well as their formal agendas, associations helped generate the more random and opportunistic talk that cemented much of the human capital in trading environments.45 Associations also offered a form of collective security lacking in many business careers – their constitutions, rules, minutes and 43 TWAS, 741/2, Sunderland Chamber of Commerce, Minute Book, 1898-1913, 31 January 1898. 44 Michael Freeman, Railways and the Victorian Imagination (New Haven, 1999), p. 157. 45 Curtis J. Simon and Clark Nardinelli, ‘The Talk of the Town: Human Capital, Information, and the Growth of English Cities, 1861 to 1961’, Explorations in Economic History 33 (1996), pp. 384-413.

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annual accounts were a great deal more orderly than the risky and fragile environment of industry and commerce.46 In addition, maritime-oriented business tried to make coordinated responses to the increasing volume of government regulation applied to the sector in this period, and this required meetings and delegations. Finally, business was confronted with an organised labour movement in the later nineteenth century that seemed to call for a more collective voice in return. Business associations and other networks need to be viewed with some caution. One of the leading scholars in this area has warned against wishful thinking, and the unquestioning assumption that business networking is a positive force working toward a gentler, more humane capitalism.47 Nonetheless, for the purposes of this chapter, the membership patterns and meeting records of some of these organisations point to the working boundaries of business associationalism. This is similar to one of the indicators suggested by C.B. Fawcett early in the twentieth century when he sought to define the English regions: Fawcett believed that regional boundaries were often measurable by establishing which towns played in which sports leagues, or which locations were chosen for meetings of local charities, and he was able to point to a range of social and voluntary organisations that had long ignored county boundaries in favour of more ‘natural’ spaces.48 As a general rule, employers’ organisations dealing with the detail of labour relations tended to work within narrower limits than business associations dealing with more strategic industrial questions. In the coal industry, for example, Northumberland and Durham each had a separate Coal Owners’ Association to negotiate with the miners’ unions, and separate Mutual Protection Associations to handle insurance and liability questions. Only when lobbying Parliament and government, and developing broader policies for the industry, did the coal owners of the two counties feel able to join in a single organisation, the North of England United Coal Trade Association.49 In fact, some of the realities of the coal industry called these boundaries into question. The increasing tendency of iron-making firms and the larger coal-owning companies to own pits across the coalfield meant that individual coal-owners were members of more than one association, and all five societies cooperated sufficiently to employ the same man as secretary in the early twentieth century. The continuing divisions reflected tradition, and a desire not to 46 Howard L. Malchow, Gentleman Capitalists: The Social and Political World of the Victorian Businessman (Stanford, 1992), p. 354. 47 Mark Casson, Enterprise and Leadership: Studies on Firms, Markets and Networks (Cheltenham, 2000), pp. 161-9. 48 C.B. Fawcett, Provinces of England (London, 1919), Chapter 4. 49 BPP, Royal Commission on Trade Disputes, 1906,Vol. 56, Cd. 2825-6, Reginald Guthrie, q. 1,406.


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disturb localist variations unnecessarily, but practicalities were beginning to encourage a move to a larger scope of operation. In shipbuilding, too, the specialist profiles of the three major rivers made it difficult for employers to agree a single platform for the North East.Three separate North East shipbuilders’ associations – Tyne,Wear and Tees–Hartlepool – met periodically from the 1880s, and sometimes met together with Clydeside employers to discuss working practices, but did not amalgamate.50 Builders on a single river often failed to agree a common policy. In December 1901, for example, after months of negotiation, the Tyne association decided to drop the idea of having uniform holiday provision for workers, and to go back to letting every firm set its own policy.51 Some firms in the engineering industry were not allowed to join employers’ associations in the first place, because they had particularly unusual working arrangements that would have complicated negotiations still further.52 Employers were also worried about being sucked into disputes in other districts. The Tyneside branch of the Iron Trades Employers’ Association, for example, worked with its counterpart on the Wear in 1889, but the following year refused to get involved in a new initiative by a Sunderland employer aimed at uniting the industry on the whole north-east coast. Officials complained that ‘considerable difficulty’ had been experienced in the past through employers discussing ‘localities they do not represent or over which they have no control’.53 Matters were also complicated on the workers’ side of the table. Attitudes toward technological innovations, or proposed changes in working practices, varied from yard to yard. Men in the mid-Tyne and Shields shipyards took a harder line on suggested changes to overtime rules in 1891 than their counterparts in Newcastle and Gateshead, for example.54 Workers also highlighted differences in their negotiations with employers, although it is hard to tell genuine localist views from subtle tactics.The Machine Workers Association in the Hartlepools, for example, urged their bosses in 1894 to remember that they ‘were not of the headstrong excitable nature of the men on the Tyne’.55 50 John Lovell, ‘Employers and Craft Unionism: A Programme of Action for British Shipbuilding, 1902-5’, Business History 34, no. 2 (1992), pp. 38-58;TWAS, 895/32-35, Joint Meetings minute books, 1885-1922. 51 TWAS, 895/3,Tyne Shipbuilders Association, General (and wages) committee, minute book, December 1901. 52 TWAS, EM/EN1/3/1, Tees & Hartlepool Engineering Trades Employers’ Association, minute books, 7 January 1898. 53 TWAS, EM/EN1/2/1,Circular letter, 13/12/1890 fol. 1. 54 TWAS, EM/EN1/2/1,Letter, 6 October 1891. 55 TWAS, EM/EN1/3/1,Tees & Hartlepool Engineering Trades Employers’ Association, 4 April 1894.

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Some associations explicitly sought a regional profile. In general, professional, rather than employer and labour, associations were more successful in this, perhaps because they were not confronted with having to rationalise byzantine wage and working agreements. The North East Coast Institution of Engineers & Shipbuilders is a useful example of the ambivalence of individuals, and of organisations, in deciding where they should draw their boundaries, and of their limited ability to turn inclusive rhetoric into a genuinely wide-ranging organisation.The Institution was a Tyneside initiative at the very beginning in 1884, but Sunderland shipbuilders were invited to join in the planning. Sunderland was enthusiastic, and the resulting organisation settled on ‘North East Coast’ rather than ‘Tyneside’ as its geographical label.56 In the first year of the Institution there was a genuine partnership between Tyne and Wear. The two districts dominated the membership, with just under 60% based on the Tyne and just over 30% on the Wear.57 Meetings were held alternately in Newcastle and Sunderland. Extending the organisation’s sphere of influence beyond the Tyne and the Wear was much more problematic, however. Its vice-president claimed that it was ‘not a Tyneside Institution, nor a Wear Institution, but a North-East Coast Institution’, and that it was his ‘earnest desire that their friends on the Tees and, if possible, those at Hull also might join’.58 But in its first year there were only six members from the Hartlepools and Teesside, compared to 348 from the Tyne and the Wear, and little interest from any further south. Indeed, there is a clear sense that the organisation was perceived as an external body by the Tees and Hartlepool industrialists, perhaps because they had not been invited to participate in the initial planning. Hartlepool business and civil leaders invited the Institution to visit in 1888, and the formal language and protocol gave little sense of a meeting of one, inclusive, organisation.59 The Institution made continuing efforts to include Hartlepool in its orbit, recognising the growing significance of the port as a shipowning centre, and of south Durham more generally in shipbuilding and engineering. By the early 1890s meetings were being held there regularly, as well as in Newcastle and Sunderland, and there were also meetings in South Shields later in the decade. This became less common in the 1900s, with an increasing tendency to hold meetings in Newcastle.60 Bringing Teesside and Hartlepool into active membership was a common problem for bodies based on Tyneside, and suggests that even the mobile 56 57 58 59 60

J.F. Clarke, A Century of Service to Engineering and Shipbuilding (Newcastle, 1984), pp. 5-7. Calculated from membership lists NECIEST 1 (1884-5). NECIEST 1 (1884-5), p. 18. NECIEST 5 (1888-9), pp. 39, 61-70. Lists of meetings, NECIEST 10 (1893-4); 15 (1898-9); 20 (1903-4); 25 (1908-9).


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business classes struggled to justify much travelling for associational purposes. The North East Coast Association of Secretaries, for example, represented company secretaries, an increasingly important professional group in an era of rising bureaucratic and legal demands on firms. Of eighty members in 1905, forty-six came from Tyneside, fifteen from the Tees and nine from Darlington.61 This was a respectable proportion for the southern districts, but many were happy just to read the printed proceedings and not travel to Newcastle for meetings.The Association frequently revisited the question of when and where to hold meetings in the interests of including more of its members, but could not overcome the difficulty of reaching places that were off the main express rail services. Hartlepool was particularly hard to reach from Tyneside before the coastal line was completed in 1905, cutting the journey time in half to fifty minutes.62 The Tyneside Geographical Society – formed to promote the study of commercial geography for the benefit of the trading classes – widened its audience by offering a lower subscription rate for those not resident or working in Newcastle.63 Some associations became less interested in attracting people to meetings, and aspired to become national and international societies of record, conducting research and publishing technical materials. Membership of the Institution of Engineers & Shipbuilders almost doubled between 1884 and 1911, and the geographical spread of the members diversified. The greatest growth, though, was on Tyneside itself and in districts beyond the North East: Sunderland, ironically, contributed fewer members in 1911 than in earlier years. This national and international dimension to the Institution’s membership profile on the eve of the Great War was similar to that of other specialist societies, most notably the North of England Institute of Mining and Mechanical Engineers. Usually known as the Mining Institute, this body had almost as many members overseas as it had in the northern coalfield itself, with a particularly large constituency of members in southern Africa, South and Central America and Australia.64 Like the Engineers & Shipbuilders, the Mining Institute had a mobile membership, and junior engineers were especially likely to work further afield after training in the North East. Such people maintained their memberships because the two bodies were disseminators of high-quality technical research, working in an acknowledged centre of industrial innovation and excellence, and were important sources of professional connections.

61 Membership list, Journal of the North East Coast Association of Secretaries 1 (December 1905). 62 Reid’s Railway Guide and ABC Tables (1886, 1913 eds). 63 John M. MacKenzie, ‘The Provincial Geographical Societies in Britain, 1884-1914’, Geography and Imperialism, ed. Morag Bell (Manchester, 1995), pp. 93-124. 64 North of England Institute of Mining and Mechanical Engineers, Annual Report, 1912.

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The associational geography of the North East’s business and industryrelated institutions evolved in the later nineteenth century, but coordinating any of them beyond the local level proved difficult. Employers’ associations on the Tyne, Wear, and Tees–Hartlepool were reasonably stable, provided they did not attempt to standardise too closely the practices of their member firms. Federal agreements, in which those associations worked more closely together, could usually only be sustained in very particular disputes, and over short periods; otherwise, a broadly regional stance was only possible at the most general level, when relatively uncontroversial positions could be taken. Business associationism had to develop a pragmatic approach to the varying levels of localism demanded of it, depending on the issues at stake, and no single regional boundary came close to serving as a model in this era. In addition, the associational evidence reinforces the earlier impression of a North East with two major industrial districts, both of which were in turn subdivided for many purposes. While there were clearly tensions between the Tyne and the Wear, there was a sharper division between those districts on the one hand, and the Tees–Hartlepool zone on the other. Middlesbrough’s iron exchange served the iron and steel sectors in the same way that Newcastle’s Quayside exchange was a networking nervecentre for the coal trade. Although the Teesside economy was more narrowly focused than that of the Tyne and Wear, it was to some extent a complementary focal point, just far enough away and just different enough to avoid the powerful gravitational forces that tended to draw higher-level economic and associational activity to Tyneside. As Fawcett recognised, regional definitions and boundaries are indeed evident in the activities of social and economic institutions, and the associational evidence in this case suggests a favouring of spaces rather smaller than that of the North East as a whole. Conclusion: The Horizons of North East Business A picture emerges, then, of a business world that had to be pragmatic about boundaries, and which often had gaps between its broad aspirations and day-by-day achievements. Trying to secure orders for steam winches from shipbuilders could be undertaken on a far wider stage than trying to negotiate standardised wage rates for boilermakers, say, and many such contrasts are evident in every branch of the industrial North East; ultimately, though, most of the deals that actually came to fruition seem to have been done at that narrower level. In particular, the binary north–south division is a recurrent theme, with Middlesbrough and Newcastle serving as centres of gravity for their respective districts.While they shared many economic characteristics, they rarely collaborated in them, and this developed into an important distinction.


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Nonetheless, there was a powerful rhetorical thread to the business worldview by the later decades of the century, in which the North East Coast served as a recognisable brand for quality and achievement in the maritime-industrial complex, and leading business figures and institutions offered a more explicit articulation of their vision of the North East and its capabilities, especially in the context of major set-piece events that included a celebratory or promotional element. Businessmen became adept at taking advantage of public fascination with the products of hightechnology manufacturing, and especially the powerful visual manifestations of industrial production. The most graphic and symbolic events of the industrial North East were played out on its rivers in this era, in the launching of prestige steamships, and this phenomenon reached a high point with the launch of the Cunard liner Mauretania in 1906. The full social spectrum was represented, albeit with carefully segregated space for the elite and a more democratic open space for the crowd.A ‘select and distinguished company’ toured Swan Hunter’s yard, and had lunch before the launch; they watched the event from specially-built stands beside the vessel itself, and then went for tea in the large moulding loft of the shipyard. The public found their vantage points where they could: the deck of every available vessel was crowded, and the Shields ferry was ‘laden like a Norwegian timber boat with a good paying deck cargo ... passengers seemed to be hanging onto her funnel and to the sides of the wheelhouse’. On shore, Wallsend was packed to the water’s edge, and the ballast hills on the opposite side of the river ‘seemed to be built of humanity’. Swan Hunter & Wigham Richardson, builders of Mauretania, played to an audience far beyond Tyneside when they launched their vessel. The guest list included, naturally, the Liverpool and Glasgow-based members of Cunard’s board, but also dignitaries from all the North East’s ports, and especially the shipbuilding community of Sunderland. G.B. Hunter was explicit in recognising their presence: the workmanship and quality of the work done in the ‘district which comprised the Tyne,Wear,Tees, the Hartlepools and Blyth … was equal to if not greater than those of vessels built in any other districts of the world’.65 By the start of the twentieth century the various stakeholders in the North East’s rivers were aware of the need to sell their districts to a wider world, and in particular to attract inward investment. It is revealing, though, that most of the promotional literature emerged from the riparian and town level, and not from an inclusive regional space of the kind outlined in Hunter’s Mauretania speech. In 1908, in an example typical of the genre, the North Eastern Railway, the Tyneside town councils, local 65 Newcastle Daily Chronicle, 21 September 1906, p. 9.

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utility companies and the Newcastle & Gateshead Chamber of Commerce all agreed to produce a promotional booklet entitled The River Tyne: Its Advantages and Possibilities.66 This listed in some detail Tyneside’s advantages for industry, covering questions like access to shipping, railways and roads, and the availability of building land, power and labour. The part given to the individual rivers in such documents is revealing of the extent to which they were fundamental to the industrial districts, serving as focal points around which diverse interests could coalesce. Business and institutions coordinated their promotional efforts well enough at the level of individual rivers and ports, managing to build the sort of district alliances that made such publicity affordable and attractive. Only occasionally, and often at the behest of the North Eastern Railway, did a wider regional level emerge: on the eve of World War One, the NER was advertising business services in ‘North East England’, but this remained an unusual label, and the context – industrial development – suggests that it was initially synonymous with the older ‘North East Coast’.67 In 1899 the bishop of Newcastle told the North East Coast Institution of Engineers and Shipbuilders that he ‘yielded to none of them in his patriotism for the North-East Coast’, despite his southern origins. The root of that local pride, he argued, was the trade and shipbuilding that had created a district unique in the world, and it compared favourably even with the famous local patriotism of parts of the United States.68 That in itself was a revealing choice, placing a distinctive, maritime-industrial North East on a par with what was beginning to be recognised as the most progressive and dynamic nation of the age. It was also, however, a layer of belonging and identification that operated at a rather different level from the practical working boundaries of the industrial complex as it evolved in the course of the nineteenth century. Belief in a coherent regional North East could, in certain circumstances, coexist with the adoption of narrower boundaries in others.This chapter demonstrates that such concepts can be profitably explored through economic and business history, as well as from the political and cultural perspectives more frequently encountered in studies of the regional question.

66 Herbert Shaw, ed., The River Tyne: Its Advantages and Possibilities (Newcastle, 1908). 67 For example, The Times, 16 April 1913, p. 26. 68 NECIEST 15 (1898-99), pp. 50-1.

6 Competing Identities: Irish and Welsh Migration and the North East of England, 1851-1980 JOAN ALLEN and RICHARD C. ALLEN Contemporary anxieties with a perceived refugee problem in the West, and a revitalised nationalism in Europe, have led to a plethora of sociological studies all eager to establish a definitive understanding of the production of identities.This may well be a fool’s errand, especially if we accept the view that ‘identity is never an a priori, nor a finished product’1 but, rather, a more fluid and ambiguous process which is constantly challenged and altered over time. Religion, according to some commentators, should be placed at the heart of any understanding of the production of identities, and even those who choose to prioritise other factors agree that it is a significant element.2 As Mary Hickman argues, ‘Protestantism was the basis of the Union of England and Wales with Scotland, and Catholicism from the sixteenth century onwards was synonymous with “the enemy”.’3 According to her analysis, religious identities were also politically constituted and this thesis must therefore have important implications for any appraisal of Irish and Welsh migrations.4 At the end of the 1990s, as the regional agenda assumed centre stage, some scholars sought to arrive at a better understanding of what it meant to be English5 while others addressed the projected demise of the British state.6 Inevitably, such deconstructions can 1 2

3 4 5 6

Homi K. Bhabha quoted in Thinking Identities, Ethnicity, Racism and Culture, ed. Avtar Brah, Mary J. Hickman and Máirtín Mac an Ghaill (Basingstoke, 1999), p. 2. There is a vast and still growing literature in this highly-contested field. For example, see A.D. Smith, National Identity (Harmondsworth, 1991) and Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger, eds, The Invention of Tradition (Cambridge, 1983). More specifically for the production of Irish and Welsh identities see Mary J. Hickman, Religion, Class and Identity:The State, the Catholic Church and the Education of the Irish in Britain (Aldershot, 1995), and Andrew Thompson, Graham Day and David Adamson,‘Bringing the “Local” Back into the Production of Welsh Identities’, Thinking Identities, ed. Brah, Hickman and Mac an Ghaill, pp. 49-70. Hickman, Religion, Class and Identity, p. 54. See also Linda Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation 1707-1837 (New Haven and London, 1992), pp. 46, 324-34. Hickman, Religion, Class and Identity, p. 53. Most notably Robert Colls, Identity of England (Oxford, 2003). For an overview of these arguments see Paul Ward, Britishness since 1870 (London, 2004), pp. 1-4. Ward’s study advances a counter-argument which suggests that Britishness ‘is still in formation’, p. 7.

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only be undertaken with reference to the relationship between region and nation. If national identity is the ‘product of constant recomposition and renegotiation’ then the same might be held true for regional identity.7 Not everyone, of course, agrees and some theorists continue to cling to the ‘top down’ model of identity construction.8 The contention that the North East of England has, or ever had, a fixed regional identity which could be writ large over the two counties of Northumberland and Durham can be readily questioned. However, deconstructing the inherent mutability of any regional identity is altogether more problematic. What this study of Irish and Welsh migration can do is to illuminate the way that the cultures of incomers have leavened and shaped the communities in which they settled and, by extension, contribute to a better understanding of the complexity of north-east identities in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. From the national and the regional perspective, these two migrant groups represent markedly different models: Irish migration was large scale, high profile and widely regarded as troublesome; Welsh migration, on the other hand, involved much smaller numbers, was less visible and posed relatively fewer problems. Clearly, each made their own distinct accommodation with the indigenous culture. The argument which will be advanced here is that the espousal of a strong ethnic identity may not necessarily have precluded either group from professing other identities, including a north-east identity, at certain key moments and in response to particular stimuli. The experiences of Irish migrants in Britain have been well documented in the last twenty years or so, not least through the extensive treatment afforded in Patrick O’Sullivan’s magisterial six-volume study, The Irish World Wide, and the seminal work of Roger Swift and Sheridan Gilley.9 Historians have been preoccupied by the need to assess the impact such large-scale migration had upon British communities for, as Bernard Aspinwall concludes in his study of the Irish in Scotland, they were ‘essential to the nineteenth century Scottish experience’.10 It is somewhat anomalous, therefore, that the history of the sizeable Irish community who settled in the North East of England should have been comparatively neglected. Indeed, the gap in the literature is so pronounced that Roger Cooter’s 1972 pioneering MA thesis has recently been published in its original form.11 7 8

Ibid., p. 13. For a critique of the ‘top down’ approach see Thompson, Day and Adamson,‘Production of Welsh Identities’, pp. 49-52. 9 P. O’Sullivan, ed., The Irish World Wide: History, Heritage, Identity (6 vols. London, 1992-2000); Roger Swift and Sheridan Gilley, eds, The Irish in the Victorian City (London, 1985); Roger Swift and Sheridan Gilley, The Irish in Britain 1815-1914 (London, 1989). 10 Bernard Aspinwall, ‘The Irish in Scotland’, The Irish World Wide,Vol.V: Religion and Identity, ed. O’Sullivan (London, 1996), p. 149. 11 R.J. Cooter, ‘The Irish in County Durham and Newcastle, c. 1840-1880’, (unpublished MA thesis, University of Durham, 1972), published as Roger Cooter, When Paddy Met Geordie:The Irish in County Durham and Newcastle, 1840-1880 (Sunderland, 2005). In 1993 a conference at

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It may be that the wider dissemination of his work will prompt a muchneeded re-evaluation of the region’s reputation as a tolerant host community, not least by highlighting the key differences in interpretation expressed by Frank Neal and others.12 In the late 1990s Roger Swift and Sheridan Gilley published a third edited collection in their series which focused specifically upon the ‘local dimension’. Frank Neal’s study in that volume offers some pertinent comparisons of the settlement patterns in the North West and the North East, though its remit is mainly demographic and as such does not directly advance the question of identities.13 Something more useful, perhaps, can be gleaned from other work in the volume, most notably Gerard Moran’s study of the National Brotherhood of St Patrick in Lancashire, in which he argues that the movement fostered unity and the preservation of Irish cultural traditions.14 In a field previously dominated by tracing the residential patterns and employment profile of the Irish, Moran’s work offers a much-needed focus on cultural activity. His work underlines the importance of associational life to any analysis of the migrant community, and provides a useful methodology for comparing the diverse experiences of the north-east region’s Irish and Welsh communities. The history of Welsh migration has received some attention in recent years but clearly much more work is needed.There is a corpus of material relating to Welsh settlement patterns in America,15 Canada,16 Patagonia,17

12

13

14 15

16 17

the University of Liverpool led to the publication of an important edited collection: P. Buckland and J. Belchem, eds, The Irish in British Labour History (Liverpool, 1993) in which M. Chase,‘The Teesside Irish in the Nineteenth Century’ is of particular interest. See also Caroline L. Scott,‘A Comparative Re-Examination of Anglo-Irish Relations in Nineteenth Century Manchester, Liverpool and Newcastle upon Tyne’ (unpublished Ph.D. thesis, University of Durham, 1998). F. Neal,‘English-Irish Conflict in the North-East of England’, Irish in British Labour History, ed. Belchem and Buckland, pp. 59-85; Donald M. MacRaild, Faith, Fraternity and Fighting: The Orange Order and Irish Migrants in Northern England, c.1850-1920 (Liverpool, 2005). Frank Neal,‘Irish Settlement in the North-West and the North-East of England in the MidNineteenth Century’, The Irish in Victorian Britain:The Local Dimension, ed. Roger Swift and Sheridan Gilley (Dublin, 1999). Gerard Moran, ‘The National Brotherhood of St Patrick’, The Irish in Victorian Britain, ed. Swift and Gilley, pp. 234-5. For example, Aled Jones and William D. Jones, ‘The Welsh World and the British Empire, c.1851-1939: An Exploration’, Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 31.2 (2003), pp. 57-81; W. Ross Johnston, ‘The Welsh Diaspora: Emigrating around the World in the Late Nineteenth Century’, Llafur 6.2 (1993), pp. 50-74. For details of Welsh emigrants to America from the seventeenth century onwards see Richard C.Allen,‘In Search of a New Jerusalem: A Preliminary Investigation into Welsh Quaker Emigration to North America c. 16601750’, Quaker Studies 9.1 (2004), pp. 31-53;William D. Jones, Wales in America: Scranton and the Welsh 1860-1920 (Cardiff and Scranton, 1993). Muriel Chamberlain,‘The Welsh in Canada: Historical Sources’, WHR 19.2 (1998), pp. 265-88. Robert Owen Jones,‘Yr Iaith Gymraeg yn y Wladfa’ (‘The Welsh Language in Patagonia’), Iaith carreg fy aelwyd: iaith a chymuned yn y bedwaredd ganrif ar bymtheg (Language and Community in the Nineteenth Century), ed. G.H. Jenkins (Caerdydd, 1998); Glyn Williams, The Welsh in Patagonia: The State and the Ethnic Community (Cardiff, 1991); R. Bryn Williams, Gwladfa Patagonia:The Welsh Colony in Patagonia, 1865-1965 (Cardiff, 1965).

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Australia18 and elsewhere,19 and this literature has mapped the impact of religious exiles, economic migrants, politicians, women and intellectuals.20 For England, there are also some studies of the Welsh in the North West,21 the Midlands,22 Oxford23 and, of course, London,24 but arguably the Welsh are ‘like the Cheshire cat in Alice in Wonderland, continually disappearing except for the smile left behind’.25 While this is perhaps a reflection of regional demographics it also indicates their greater levels of assimilation. Yet the continuous presence of the Cymmrodorion26 and St David’s Societies throughout the region, and of the industrial and cultural activities of the Welsh, notably in Teesside, suggests that, despite their relatively small numbers and supposed ‘invisibility’, the Welsh had a discernible impact. This study will draw upon the extant records of the associational life of both migrant groups and consider the extent to which such separatist organisations underpinned their ethnic identity. Beyond the essential sociability such gatherings provided to those far removed from kith and kin, attention will be paid to their role in the construction of community life. Finally, an assessment will be made of the way that these earlier social 18 William D. Jones,‘Welsh Identities in Colonial Ballarat’, Scatterlings of Empire, ed.W. Prest and G. Tulloch (St Lucia, Queensland, 2001); Bill Jones, ‘Welsh Identities in Ballarat, Australia, During the Late Nineteenth Century’, WHR 20.2 (December 2000), pp. 283-307; Lesley Walker, ‘‘‘Two Jobs for Every Man”: The Emigration Decision from Wales to New South Wales, 1850-1900’, Australian Studies 13.2 (Winter 1998), pp. 99-118. 19 Heather Hughes,‘How the Welsh Became White in South Africa: Immigration, Identity and Economic Transformation from the 1860s to the 1930s’, THSC 2000, new ser. 7 (2001), pp. 112-27. 20 W.T.R. Pryce and I. Donnachie, ‘Aspects of English, Welsh, Scottish and Irish Migrations’, From Family History to Community History, ed.W.T.R. Pryce (Cambridge, 1994), Chapter 2; Kate Bartholomew, ‘Women Migrants in Mind: Leaving Wales in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries’, Migrants, Emigrants and Immigrants: A Social History of Migration, ed. Colin G. Pooley and Ian D.Whyte (London, 1991), pp. 174-87. 21 R. Merfyn Jones,‘Welsh Immigrants in the Cities of North-West England’, Oral History 9.2 (1981), pp. 33-41; R. Merfyn Jones and D. Ben Rees, The Liverpool Welsh and their Religion: Two Centuries of Welsh Calvinistic Methodism (Liverpool, 1984). 22 Andrew J. Chandler, ‘The Re-making of a Working Class: Migration from the South Wales Coalfield to the New Industry Areas of the Midlands’ (unpublished Ph.D. thesis, University of Wales, 1988). 23 Peter D. John, ‘Oxford Welsh in the 1930’s: A Study in Class, Community and Political Influence’, Llafur 5.4 (1991), pp. 99-106; David Lyddon, ‘“Trade Union Traditions”, the Oxford Welsh and the 1934 Pressed Steel Strike’, Llafur 6.2 (1993), pp. 106-14. 24 R.T. Jenkins and Helen M. Ramage, A History of the Honourable Society of Cymmrodorion and of the Gwyneddigion and Cymreigyddion Societies (1751-1951) (London, 1951); The Welsh In London, 1500-2000, ed. Emrys Jones (Cardiff, 2001); Emrys Jones, ‘Yr Iaith Gymraeg yn Lloegr c. 1800-1914’ (‘The Welsh Language in England c. 1800-1914’), Iaith carreg fy Aelwyd, ed. Jenkins, Chapter 8. 25 Chamberlain, ‘The Welsh in Canada’, p. 265. 26 The Honourable Society of Cymmrodorion (Anrhydeddus Gymdeithas y Cymmrodorion) was established in London in 1751. The Newcastle and Tyneside society used the slightly different title ‘Cymrodorion’. For the purposes of this study the former title is being used.


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networks began to fall away in favour of other cultural activities whose constituencies were increasingly determined by class rather than by ethnicity.The creation of a more homogeneous north-east identity, albeit imperfect and punctuated at key moments in the calendar by public expressions of ethnic loyalty, can be located in the generational transitions in associational life. The Irish The number of Irish-born migrants in the North East of England in the nineteenth century has been judged small in comparison to those who settled elsewhere, such as in Lancashire, London or West Yorkshire. Nonetheless, recent assessments have confirmed that in 1851 Northumberland and Durham had the ‘fourth largest concentration of Irish-born’ in England and Wales.27 R.J. Cooter’s study of Northumberland and Durham traced a large majority of Tyneside’s Irish population back to the same few counties: Mayo and Sligo,28 while Felix Lavery commented upon the ‘strong County Down leavening’ of the Newcastle Irish community.29 Thus the strong solidarities which were bound to be felt by those who shared older community ties and the concentration of those same settlers in certain parts of the North East are both key factors in the rootedness and retention of their own ethnic identity. Residential clustering was as much a feature of north-east settlements as it was of Manchester with its notorious ‘Little Ireland’ ghetto. Neal’s statistical survey concludes that the Irish in Durham were ‘more widely dispersed’ than those in Northumberland and identifies major settlements in Sunderland, Gateshead and Durham.31 This gave the town of Gateshead, for example, a ratio of 1:4 in 1871, while the Newcastle Daily Chronicle observed in 1873 that the Irish so overwhelmed the population of Ryhope that ‘you cannot help the result reminding you of Connemara or Tipperary’.32 In the south of the region more than 9% of Middlesbrough’s population was Irish-born and there were sizeable Irish communities in 27 The Irish-born population has been estimated at 31,167 in 1851, some 4.4% of the total population. See Neal, ‘Irish settlement in the North-West and the North-East’, p. 76. See also Roger Swift, ‘The Irish in Britain’, The Irish World Wide, Vol. II: The Irish in the New Communities, ed. O’Sullivan (Leicester, 1992), p. 57 who notes that 5.4% of the population of Durham were Irish. 28 Cooter, When Paddy Met Geordie, p. 22. 29 Felix Lavery,‘Who’s Who of the Tyneside Irish Movement and Associates (Past and Present)’, Irish Heroes in the War, ed. Felix Lavery (London, 1917), p. 328. 30 Graham Davies,‘Little Irelands’, The Irish In Britain, ed. Swift and Gilley, pp. 103-33; M.A.G. O’Tuathaigh, ‘The Irish in Nineteenth Century Britain: Problems of Integration’, The Irish in the Victorian City, ed. Swift and Gilley, pp. 13-36. See also Steven Fielding, Class and Ethnicity: Irish Catholics in England, 1880-1939 (Buckingham, 1993). 31 Neal, ‘Irish settlement in the North-West and the North-East’, p. 78. 32 ‘Our Colliery Villages’, Newcastle Daily Chronicle, 25 January 1873.

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Stockton and Darlington.33 It is not surprising that the regional capital, Newcastle, should attract the lion’s share with over 7,000 Irish migrants, many of whom settled along the banks of the Tyne where work was plentiful.34 Roger Swift and others have argued that poverty, not ethnicity, largely dictated where people lived, and even in those urban areas where the application of the term ‘ghetto’ can be justified the Irish were rarely the only residents.35 In 1851 the numbers of Irish who flocked to Tow Law to secure highly paid jobs in the flourishing iron industry was twice that of any other settlement in County Durham.36 Residential clustering was certainly in evidence at that time but by 1871, as the town grew and coal mining overtook iron as the largest employer of Irish labour, segregation became much less pronounced.As P. Norris has shown, such close working relationships in a dangerous occupation were bound to foster a level of mutuality and cooperation; such ties could act as an effective counterbalance to other cultural differences.37 On balance, it would be wrong to assume that segregated settlement patterns necessarily precluded contact with the host community. Recent research has effectively refuted this idea and demonstrated that there were just as many Irish living outside of these notional ‘Little Irelands’.38 In any case, place of residence was not the only forum in which emigrants and the indigenous population might interact. Once the unhelpful emphasis on ghettos is despatched as a crude and misleading representation of Irish community life in Britain it becomes easier to appreciate the other means by which ethnic solidarities were sustained. The spatial distribution of Irish communities inevitably served to buttress ethnic loyalties and this is best illustrated by the abundant and diverse associational activities which were established. Irish associational activities were more often than not distinguished by religious confession and it is hardly surprising that the Protestant Irish looked to the lodges of the Orange Order for conviviality and recreation.39 In this connection it is noteworthy that the Irish population in Northumberland and Durham was overwhelmingly Roman Catholic.The 1851 Religious Census records that the Roman Catholic population of Northumberland and Durham was 33 Chase, ‘Teesside Irish’, p. 47. 34 In 1851 the population of Newcastle was 89,156. See table 2 for detailed statistics drawn from the 1851 Census in Neal,‘Irish settlement in the North-West and the North-East’, pp. 78, 79. 35 Swift, ‘Irish in Britain’, pp. 57-8. 36 P. Norris, ‘The Irish in Tow Law, County Durham, 1851 and 1871’, DCLHSB 33 (December 1984), p. 62. 37 Ibid., p. 65. 38 G. Davies, The Irish in Britain 1815-1914 (Dublin, 1991), p. 82. 39 Ibid., pp. 150-1. See also MacRaild, Faith, Fraternity and Fighting.


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26,000 and this is widely regarded as a conservative estimate.40 By 1914 parish records indicate that the numbers of registered Catholics had multiplied ‘sevenfold’ to approximately 190,000 and this can be directly linked to post-famine Irish migration to the two counties.41 There was, therefore, rather less of the ‘Orange and Green’ internecine warfare that characterised other major areas of Irish settlement.42 There were flashpoints, of course, prompted by particular emotive events such as the Garibaldi riots in Newcastle in 186643 and the inflammatory anti-Catholic lectures of William Murphy in 1867 which created mayhem in North Shields.44 Overall, the size of the Protestant Irish community meant that conflict was isolated and relatively small scale.The vibrancy of Catholic associational life which could draw upon such a large constituency of exiles, and which frequently has been cited as an important bulwark not just against lapsation but assimilation, adds force to the argument that in the nineteenth century the Irish in the North East constituted a cohesive and tight-knit group whose first loyalties were to their homeland.45 And if Hickman’s thesis is invoked, the response of the wider community to a revitalised Catholicism would simply have accentuated any siege mentality.46 While Catholic associational life inevitably served as a powerful recruitment mechanism, many groups and organisations which were aggressively sponsored by the Church had a practical function too. Groups, such as the Catholic Benefit Societies or the Jarrow Relief Fund set up by St Bede’s Catholic Church in 1885, at the time of the strike at Palmer’s shipbuilding yard, reflected the abject poverty of some Irish settlers and were part of a church-driven initiative to create support networks at times of sickness or unemployment.47 St Andrew’s, Newcastle, was one of the strongest and most flourishing branches of the Catholic Benefit Society. 40 Michael Morris and Leo Gooch, Down Your Aisles.The Diocese of Hexham and Newcastle 18502000 (Hartlepool, 2000), p. 12. There was already a small indigenous Catholic community in the two counties before the Great Famine. 41 Ibid. See also, R.J. Cooter, ‘Hibernians and Geordies in the Nineteenth Century’, Northern Catholic History 4 (1976), pp. 20-9. 42 P.J. Waller, Democracy and Sectarianism: A Political and Social History of Liverpool 1868-1939 (Liverpool, 1981); Tom Gallagher, Glasgow: The Uneasy Peace (Manchester, 1987); Donald MacRaild, Culture, Conflict and Migration:The Irish in Victorian Cumberland (Liverpool, 1998). 43 Dan Jackson, ‘‘‘Garibadi or the Pope!”: Newcastle’s Irish Riot of 1866’, North East History 34, (2004), pp. 49-82. 44 Newcastle Daily Chronicle, 26 August 1867; MacRaild, Culture, Conflict and Migration, pp. 178-83. 45 See, for example, Raphael Samuel, ‘The Roman Catholic Church and the Irish Poor’, The Irish in the Victorian City, ed. Swift and Gilley, pp. 267-99. 46 Hickman, Religion, Class and Identity. 47 Irish Tribune, various dates including 7 February 1885 and 1 January 1887. See also Catholic Herald, 15 March 1895 which carried a history of the Catholic Benefit Society in Nottingham which had been launched under the auspices of the bishop in February 1871 with only 16 members and a balance of £5 16s. 8d. By 1895 it had 52 branches and assets of over £7,000.

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With contributions fixed at just 51/2 d per week it is hardly surprising that they were so well supported.48 The Society of St Vincent de Paul gained a strong foothold in the region and was able to muster 4,000 members at its annual general meeting in 1859. Its remit was not merely to distribute money and clothing to the needy, often its officers paid school fees and gave legal advice too.49 As Raphael Samuel noted, ‘Catholicity ... served as a national church of the Irish poor ... seeking out the Irish in the workhouse, the Children’s orphanage and the reformatory.’50 The religious bonds that were strengthened as a result of these strategic welfare initiatives were a significant factor in reinforcing migrant identities. Nonetheless, a small but significant percentage of the Irish migrant community were neither penniless nor destitute; some enjoyed the benefits of stable employment and others were members of the region’s burgeoning business class.51 After the mid century, Samuel Smiles’ self-help credo was enthusiastically embraced by the region’s working-class population who flocked to join co-operative societies, mechanic’s institutes and friendly societies.52 For many low earners the attraction of these organisations was that they enabled workers with limited access to savings the opportunity to provide for themselves and their families in times of need. This was a particularly pressing matter for the Irish at a time when poor relief was often restricted or denied, ostensibly on account of their residential status.53 In Crook, anti-Catholic hostilities on the part of the Auckland Board of Guardians determined that many Irish paupers were served with removal orders.54 Large numbers of Irish immigrants became active members of the Co-operative movement in the North East, especially in ‘Irish’ districts such as Wallsend, Willington Quay and Jarrow.55 48 49 50 51

52

53

54 55

Morris and Gooch, Down Your Aisles, p. 15. Ibid., pp. 16-17. Samuels, ‘The Roman Catholic Church’, p. 271. Frank McCombie and Michael Cullen pay tribute to a number of wealthy Irish parishioners who were key benefactors including John Farnon (1851-1923) who was the founder of Farnon’s department store in Newcastle. See Frank McCombie and Michael Cullen, A Parish in Its Time: A History of St Charles Parish, Gosforth (Newcastle, n.d.), pp. 153-4. Joan Hugman, ‘Print and Preach: The Entrepreneurial Spirit of Nineteenth-Century Newcastle’, Newcastle upon Tyne: A Modern History, ed. Robert Colls and Bill Lancaster (Newcastle, 2001), pp. 124-5. See also Harold Perkin, Origins of Modern English Society (London, 1972), passim. It has been argued that it was the exercise of power by officials such as the police and Poor Law Guardians at the local level who ‘constructed a segregationalist rationale focusing upon the Irish’. See Hickman, Religion, Class and Identity, p. 76. Michael McManus, ‘From Townland to Township:The Complex evolution of a Dissipative Famine Irish Community in Country Durham’, North East History 34 (2004), pp. 34-5. For more information about the Co-operative movement in the North East of England see Joan Hugman,‘Joseph Cowen and the Blaydon Co-operative Society:A North East Model’, Towards the Co-operative Commonwealth, ed. Bill Lancaster and Paddy Maguire (Loughborough, 1996). See also G.D.H. Cole, A Century of Cooperation (Manchester, 1944).


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The Co-operative movement undoubtedly acted as a bridge between Irish workers and the indigenous working class, and spin-off social activities would have further strengthened such bonds. The essential independence of individual societies, who managed their own affairs with reference to the interests of their members, fostered vital social and political solidarities. Working alongside other, non-Irish, members of Co-operative Society committees was a vital part of this process. In this instance, class, not ethnicity, was the basis for collective activity and the key factor in the forging of an over arching working class identity that co-existed rather than replaced that based on origins and religion. Co-operative Societies were not the only organisations which helped to bridge the ethnic divide.As well as restricting entry into their particular trade and protecting wages, friendly societies offered important financial benefits too, albeit in a different way.The payment of membership fees and weekly subscriptions enabled workers to insure themselves against loss of earnings through sickness or unemployment and provided funds to cover the cost of funerals.56 In the nineteenth century the Catholic hierarchy pronounced against trade unionism, and local priests used their considerable influence to prevent members of their congregations from getting involved in what they claimed were secret societies.57 The ambiguous status of friendly societies in this regard made it more difficult for the Irish to join trade associations, and so many chose to secure welfare insurance via one of the branches of Irish National Foresters (INF) or the Ancient Order of Hibernians which flourished across the North East of England. Such associations looked to the national headquarters for executive decisions and this was one of the ways in which links between Irish migrant communities in the North East and their homeland were sustained. For instance, members of the Cleator Moor branch were in close communication with the executive in Dublin and Cork.58 Occasionally, the charitable endeavours of INF branches extended beyond the immediate community to distressed Irishmen in other parts of Britain. The enthusiastic commitment of local Irish groups to raise money for the Fund for Discharged Irishmen in London reveals much about the resilience of ethnic solidarities and their willingness to make common cause with their compatriots elsewhere.59 The welfare benefits that flowed from membership undoubtedly performed an important local service as the records of the T.M. Healy 56 57 58 59

See P.H.J. Gosden, The Friendly Societies in England 1815-1875 (Manchester, 1961). Swift, ‘The Irish in Britain’, pp. 62-3. Irish Tribune, 7 February 1885. Large amounts of money were raised in North Shields, Seaham Harbour, Easington Lane and Newcastle in February and March 1885. For details of meetings connected with this benevolent fund see Irish Tribune throughout this period, notably 14 February 1885.

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(Cleator Moor) branch reveal. Some 438 sick claims were dealt with at the fortnightly meeting in February 1885 and forty-four new members enrolled.60 It is notable too that this branch, and others, deliberately adopted the names of Irish political leaders. While such devices were a useful distinguishing mechanism, they also signalled their nationalist loyalties, which assumed increasing importance in the late 1880s as Irish Home Rule assumed centre stage on the political agenda. Few would discount the role that associations such as the INF, with its specifically Irish remit, played in buttressing a separatist identity, and yet evidence highlights the way that this might be leavened by the interplay of other associational loyalties. The ability of the T.M. Healy branch to hold their meetings in the Co-operative Hall, for example, would seem to suggest that they enjoyed an amicable relationship with their neighbours.61 The self-help principles espoused by leading co-operators and other advocates of self-improvement invariably promoted the idea of moderation in all things, especially drink. Contrary to the age-old stereotype, temperance campaigns did recruit well among the Irish in the 1840s, especially to those societies led by the enterprising ‘teetotal apostle’, Fr Mathews.62 After the mid century, when support had somewhat declined, the Church hierarchy took the lead in encouraging sobriety and self-discipline by setting up support groups such as the League of the Cross, St Patrick’s Total Abstinence Society and the Catholic Young Men’s Society (CYMS). Naturally, such groups were an intrinsic part of parish life, with meetings on church premises presided over by the parish priest, all too eager to offer a counterculture to drink and thereby create an ideal forum in which young Catholics might socialise.63 The diocesan headquarters established in Newcastle in 1886 had lavish facilities including a games room, library and a reading room for its 350 members.64 Cardinal Manning’s influential endorsement helped enormously to boost recruitment, and it was at his directive that Temperance Resolutions were declared from the pulpit on the first Sunday of every month.65 In Newcastle a branch of St Mary’s League of the Cross was set up in 1885 by Canon Franklin in connection with St Mary’s Cathedral.66 Competing for the minds and hearts of the faithful was not just a matter of directing Irish Catholics towards self-improvement. The political activities of the National Brotherhood of St Patrick were censured by the Catholic 60 Ibid. 61 Irish Tribune, various dates including 31 January 1885. 62 Jacqueline Turton, ‘The Irish Poor in Nineteenth-Century London’, Local Dimension, ed. Swift and Gilley, p. 146; Aspinwall, ‘Irish in Scotland’, p. 167. 63 Aspinwall,‘Irish in Scotland’, p. 167. See also McManus,‘From Townland to Township, p. 30. 64 Morris and Gooch, Down Your Aisles, p. 16. 65 Ibid., p. 17. 66 Irish Tribune, 14 February 1885.


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Church, and in Lancashire considerable friction arose between the Brotherhood and the CYMS.67 The cultural needs of the Irish communities were fully catered for by the Irish literary societies which sprang up in the major north-east towns.The Newcastle Irish Literary Institute in Clayton Street was housed in a ramshackle three-story building which had been the home of a Newcastle merchant.68 First launched following a meeting in the Portland Arms Inn in April 1871, its founding members included the famous Fenian Michael Kelly, John Walsh, who was to become one of four members of the IRB Supreme Council, Edward Savage and Tim Healey, who were both then employed by the North East Railway Company.69 The Institute provided a range of social activities, including the meetings of the Reading and Debating Society,70 supper dances and balls71 and annual excursions during Race Week.72 Irish sociability was not, of course, the only function of such gatherings for they invariably acted as a focal point for both confessional and political activities too.The Irish Institute in South Shields was built by Dean Ramsay as a community centre and attached to the presbytery.73 Under the watchful eye of the parish priest, revellers were more likely to observe the required moral boundaries and to find suitable Catholic marriage partners. Most of all the institutes provided safe meeting space where political opinions could be frankly expressed and campaigns organised and financed. As the Irish Tribune reported in February 1885, the North Shields Literary Institute was active ‘not only in diffusing literature, but by providing a regular meeting place’74 for the National League and other political organisations. From the relative safety of 1917, Joseph Keating recalled how Political felons, John Daly, O’Donovan Rossa, Davitt and more had been visitors to the Institute ... for thirty seven years the Institute had been the Irish storm centre. Newcastle nationalism had been nursed and reared there – from Fenianism through all its daring and exciting phases, to the less dramatic policy of Constitutionalism.75

By the mid-1880s such thriving centres of cultural recreation could be found in Sunderland, Newcastle, South Shields, North Shields and Middlesbrough.76 The latter Institute’s political reputation was such that 67 Moran, ‘National Brotherhood of St Patrick’, pp. 228-9. 68 Joseph Keating,‘The History of the Tyneside Irish Brigade’, Irish Heroes in the War, ed. Lavery (London, 1917), p. 57. 69 Michael Kelly was the Principal of the Newcastle Catholic High School. Ibid., p. 58. 70 Irish Tribune, 29 January 1887. 71 Irish Tribune, 14 February 1885, 20 April 1887. 72 Irish Tribune, 7 May 1887. 73 Irish Tribune, 14 February 1885. 74 Ibid. 75 Keating, ‘Tyneside Irish Brigade’, p. 77. 76 Irish Tribune, various dates including 14 February 1885, 19 February 1887, 2 July 1887, 16 July 1887.

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the clergy ‘replaced’ it with a Catholic society.77 It would be all too easy to dismiss Keating’s tale of excitable and heroic nationalism as an exaggeration, prompted by the events of 1916 and the need to ensure that the Irish who had volunteered to fight in the Great War were not overlooked. Yet the evidence to support this account is strong. The Newcastle Institute and others like it became the preferred meeting places for the Irish National League (INL) from which sprang other political activities, constitutional and covert. It was the INL branch committees who took the lead in organising the St Patrick’s Day events in the region. Naturally, this gave the regional festival its strong political focus. The records of celebrations early in the nineteenth century are scarce, but the eclectic diary of Richard Lowry states that the Newcastle Irish celebrated St Patrick’s Day in 1842 with a procession.78 Later in the century processions were increasingly rare and the occasion was typically observed by indoor activities: large meetings, celebratory dinners and balls.79 The rising tide of nationalist sentiment loomed large as the 1870s dawned, and Isaac Butt launched his constitutional Home Rule movement in the shadow of the Fenian rising of 1867. The Manchester Martyrs assumed iconic status and images of William Allen, Michael Larkin and William O’Brien became an ever-present feature of St Patrick’s Day banners.80 In the heated atmosphere that ensued, a monster procession in memory of the Manchester Martyrs was planned. Only the intervention of the bishop of Hexham and Newcastle calmed the situation and persuaded the outraged Irish population to avoid such public displays of hostility.81 With so much of the St Patrick’s Day events given over to celebrating and memorialising Irish heroes, such as Robert Emmett and Theobald Wolfe Tone, it is hardly surprising that the deaths of the Manchester men should resonate with the insurgent nationalism of Irishmen and women in the region.Thus it was that in March 1875 John Martin MP presided over a national concert in Newcastle Town Hall at which all proceeds and profits were to be dedicated to the relief of Irish political prisoners and their families. In addition, a concert held that same day in the Newcastle Mechanics’ Institute donated all profits to the Home Rule Confederation of Great Britain.82 Even after the Party Processions Act was repealed in 1872 street parades were very rare in North-East England.The procession of 400 who 77 Chase, ‘Teesside Irish’, p. 55. 78 Norman McCord, ‘Victorian Newcastle Observed: The Diary of Richard Lowry’, NH 37 (2000), p. 252. 79 Mike Cronin and Daryl Adair, The Wearing of the Green:A History of St Patrick’s Day (London, 2002). 80 Alvin Jackson, Ireland 1798-1998 (Oxford, 1999), pp. 103-5. 81 Newcastle Journal, 16 December 1867. 82 Newcastle Daily Chronicle, 18 March 1875.


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marched through the streets of Wallsend and Willington Quay in 1875, carrying green banners and accompanied by the local brass band, scarcely compares with the 60,680 Irishmen who paraded through Ulster in 1874.83 The 1877 celebration was marked by the usual large gathering in the Newcastle Town Hall presided over by Councillor Bernard McAnulty. Richard Power MP was there to raise the fighting spirits of the crowd: Her institutions are not ours institutions, her language is not ours, her religion is not ours, our customs are different, our traditions are not the same, we live differently, and they might just as well try to wash a black man white as make an Irishmen the same as an Englishman … my friends it is this difference of habits, characters, and tastes that makes it impossible for them to reconcile their laws to our inclinations or approach.84

Not one but two members of the Irish Parliamentary party attended the 1885 demonstration in Newcastle Town Hall; both John O’Connor MP (Tipperary) and Mr Deasy MP (Cork) added their weight to the proceedings organised under the auspices of the No. 1 branch of the INL. Admission prices, of a gallery view at 3d, back seats at 6d, front seats at 1s and platform seats at 2s for the wealthy and influential, were carefully calculated to enable the widest possible cross-section of Irish society to attend.85 On this occasion the surplus finds raised at the event were committed to the Irish National League.The following year, planning for St Patrick’s Day began in earnest on 2 January in Annitsford, Cowpen and other places. As elsewhere a special parliamentary fund was set up in connection with the forthcoming celebrations.86 At a meeting in the Newcastle Irish Literary Institute an organising committee put in place plans for a major demonstration to raise ‘a couple of thousand pounds’.87 Across the region, branches of the INL in Bedlington, Cowpen, Blyth, Willington, Sunderland and Bishop Auckland invited keynote speakers. David Crilly MP was the chosen speaker for the Newcastle meeting, while Spennymoor were intent upon securing J.F.X. O’Brien, ‘one of the men of ’67’.88 Despite the extensive investment of time and effort, the results were disappointing. As the Irish Tribune reported on 20 March 1886 the Manchester and Leeds ‘demonstrations’ had fallen through. David Crilly failed to turn up, protesting in a letter to the Newcastle INL that the Irish members had been ‘absolutely commanded to remain here [London]’.89 83 84 85 86 87 88 89

Ibid. See also Cronin and Adair, Wearing of the Green, pp. 54, 56. Newcastle Weekly Chronicle, 24 March 1877. Irish Tribune, 26 February 1885. Ibid., 2 January 1886. Ibid., 16 January 1886. Ibid., 13 March 1886. Ibid., 20 March 1886.

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Nonetheless, even if the dominant mode of celebration was highly politicised there were some parts of the region where the festival was primarily devotional. Middlesbrough is a case in point: in 1887 the highlight of the proceedings in the Oddfellows Hall was a eulogy by the bishop, Dr Lacy, on the life, character and works of St Patrick.90 At the close of the 1880s the region’s Irish community were galvanised by the coercive policies of the government, as this St Patrick’s Day poem printed in the Irish Tribune on the eve of the feast day in 1889 indicates: And bid them at their country’s call be up to work like men, That Faith and Freedom, hand in hand, may bless our land again. And, honest men of every creed will aid that holy cause, Till foul Coercion Acts give place to honest Irish laws.91

Yet in its third line the poem also gestures to the existence of other solidarities and a cause to which all ‘honest men’ could subscribe. The commitment to Irish Home Rule was a key element in the powerful alliance which was brokered between local radicals and Irish nationalists. The ‘community of occupation, interest and struggle’ located in the region’s mining settlements inevitably drew large numbers of Irish migrants into working-class reform campaigns.92 The official banner of the Northern Reform League symbolically proclaimed solidarity with the Irish at a major rally in January 1867 and keynote speeches at successive demonstrations promised that electoral reform would ‘remedy the wrongs of Ireland’.93 For all its efforts, the Church ultimately failed to place an embargo on Catholic involvement in trade union activities, especially in mining, engineering and shipbuilding, and by 1873 membership of the Durham Miners Union and the Northumberland Miners Association was virtually comprehensive. In time, Irish trade union activists exerted considerable influence upon the north-east movement.94 After 1867, too, the voting power of the ‘Celtic fringe’ was a force to be reckoned with, and Bernard McAnulty’s election as Town Councillor for the All Saints ward in Newcastle in 1874 constituted a national as well as a local milestone.95 In all of this, the role of the radical MP Joseph Cowen was crucial, not just because he used his Chronicle newspapers to support the Irish cause but because of his executive involvement in the National Land 90 Northern Weekly Leader, 19 March 1887. 91 Ibid., 16 March 1889. Poem penned by James Lynch,Teacher, Coatbridge. 92 Joseph Keating, ‘Tyneside Irish Brigade’, and cited by David Byrne, ‘Immigrants and the Formation of the North Eastern Industrial Working Class:Another Venue for the “Wild West Show”, Bulletin of the North East Labour History Society 30 (1996), p. 31. 93 Newcastle Daily Chronicle, 29 January 1867, 11 March 1867. 94 For a detailed appraisal see Joan Allen, Joseph Cowen and Popular Radicalism on Tyneside, 18291900 (London, 2007), Chapter 4. 95 McAnulty was the first Irishman to sit on an English Town Council. See T.P. McDermott, ‘Charles Larkin, Radical Reformer 1800-1879’, Catholic History 28 (1988), p. 167.


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League of Great Britain.96 His stress on collective goals was a unifying force and local radicalism became a rallying point around which all working people in the region could and did converge. Cowen’s retirement from political life in 1886 created a hiatus which threw the politically-minded Irish back on their own resources. The publication in Newcastle of a new nationalist newspaper for England and Scotland, the Irish Tribune, marked the coming of age of Irish politics, and its proprietor, Charles Diamond, urged his compatriots to prioritise an Irish nationalist agenda.97 The Tribune survived until 1897 when different parts of the region became served by their own Catholic News title.98 In the closing decades of the nineteenth century and beyond, the political agenda dominated the north-eastern St Patrick’s Day celebrations to an unusual degree and such heightened nationalist activity was a key factor in the resilience of Irish identity. In 1911, when Joseph Devlin was presented with a donation of £70 for the Irish Parliamentary Fund at a St Patrick’s Day reception in the County Hotel, Newcastle, the strength of nationalism among the region’s Irish population seemed scarcely diminished.99 The onset of war posed new challenges, however, as the local Irish were called upon to make common cause with their friends and neighbours. The raising of an Irish Brigade on Tyneside signalled the existence of competing loyalties. As the numbers of Irish migrants steadily decreased, the older generation gave way to children and grandchildren who identified more and more with the place of their birth.As David Byrne notes, exogamous marriages were fairly commonplace and this inevitably contributed to the gradual incorporation of the Irish into north-east society.100 At the end of the First World War, the organisers of the St Patrick’s Day annual demonstration once again seized the opportunity to press the claims of self-determination, but this time they did so with the support of the Irish Labour Party.101 Thereafter, and in the light of the 1921 Anglo-Irish Treaty, Irish nationalism in the region became more muted, and St Patrick’s Day was mostly marked by attendance at Mass and diocesan parties. The social welfare functions of the Catholic Church were less in evidence, too, as the State finally assumed more responsibility for its citizens.What remained were the Irish social clubs whose brief was more prosaic: food, drink and entertainment rather than a political resolution to 96 Hugman, ‘Print and Preach’, p. 130. 97 The Irish Tribune was first published on 13 December 1884. See Joan Allen, ‘Keeping the Faith: The Catholic Press and the Preservation of Celtic Identity in Britain in the Late Nineteenth Century’, Exile and Homecoming, ed. Pamela O’ Neill (Sydney, 2005), p. 85. 98 Teesside Catholic News, 1907-34; Tyneside Catholic News, 1897-1934; Wearside Catholic News, 1907-34. 99 The Illustrated Chronicle, 18 March 1911. 100 Byrne, ‘Immigrants and the Formation of the North Eastern Industrial Working Class’, pp. 34-5. 101 In attendance at the Hippodrome Theatre was William O’Brien, Secretary of the Irish Labour Party and Trade Union Council. Newcastle Evening Chronicle, 17 March 1919.

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an age-old grievance. In 1932 the Newcastle Evening Chronicle was able to report that the wearing of shamrock on Tyneside ‘did not necessarily indicate Irish nationality’ but was ‘worn by the English as a gesture of friendship with Irish folks’. There were no politicians to grace the annual festivities either; instead the importance of the occasion was formally acknowledged by the laying of a wreath by the lord mayor in memory of the Tyneside Irish Brigade.102 It is this depoliticised and commercially driven version of the festival that has survived since; the present-day jamboree with its costumes, green ribbons and endless supply of Guinness is everyone’s festival now: local, not Irish. The Welsh The Welsh appear to have settled more easily, although there were instances in the 1840s when Welsh immigrant coalminers encountered significant hostility.103 To some extent this reflects the much smaller numbers involved. The Welsh population of the northern counties was a mere 1,780 in 1851, with the vast majority located in Durham.104 By 1871 numbers had increased fourfold, and Durham retained its dominant position with almost 6,500 Welsh migrants.105 Thereafter the Welsh migrant community remained remarkably stable and seemed less affected by the economic factors which heralded the notable decline of Irish settlers to the region.106 Even in 1951 Tyneside was host to 2,965 Welsh migrants, and this figure is all the more notable when viewed alongside the vastly reduced numbers of Irish (4,858) at that time.107 In the nineteenth century their predominantly nonconformist identity shielded them from the kind of prejudice that sometimes handicapped the Irish, and they were not caught up in any ongoing struggles for Home Rule for Wales. In response to a letter from a former Welsh colleague, Rev.Thomas E. George,William Jenkins (1825-95), the General Manger of the Consett Ironworks, wrote in June 1879 that he still missed some aspects of his former life in Wales. Indeed, his move from Dowlais ten years earlier had been a ‘great trial’, especially as he initially had to leave his wife and five children behind.The intervening years had nevertheless been good to Jenkins and he stated that he had ‘no desire to return Excepting for the old associations’.108 Consett, 102 ‘English Wear the Green’, Newcastle Evening Chronicle, 17 March 1932. 103 Richard Fynes, The Miners of Northumberland and Durham:A History of their Social and Political Progress (Blyth, 1873), pp. 106-12. 104 Census Reports of the Northern Counties, 1851. 105 Census Reports of the Northern Counties, 1871. 106 David Feldman, ‘Migration’, The Cambridge Urban History of Britain, ed. P. Clark, Martin Daunton and D.M. Palliser (3 vols. Cambridge, 2000),Vol. III: 1840-1950, p. 198. 107 Census Reports of Tyneside, 1951. 108 GCRO, D/D/X 204/6/2.William Jenkins to Thomas E. George, Consett Hall, Durham, 4 June 1879.


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like many other industrial centres in the region, attracted skilled Welsh miners and ironworkers from the 1840s onwards.109 Indeed, by 1861 over 40% of Middlesbrough’s skilled ironworkers had been born in Wales and many of them had migrated in family groups.110 The migratory process was clearly not at an end by the late 1870s as Jenkins’ letter was in response to a plea to find work for a young Welshman, Edward Thomas.111 Jenkins agreed to help Edward to secure a job as a mechanic at the Consett collieries but warned that he would have to ‘rough it for a time, as he ought to do; & he can soon, in a few months, judge for himself whether he is suited’.112 The Newcastle Daily Chronicle, when recalling the life of Alderman Jenkins, observed that, ‘No one who has not passed through the ordeal [of exile] could imagine or experience the trial of having to leave his home, family connections, and intimate friends.’113 It did, however, note that his life had been made easier by ‘staunch friends, such hospitality, such sterling honesty, and a great desire to co-operate with him’. Indeed, the prosperity of the ironworks had, according to the Chronicle, made Consett ‘the Hub of the Universe’.114 Along with small numbers of Welsh settlers elsewhere in the region,115 there was a conscious desire to retain their Welsh heritage and a genuine affection for their former homeland.As Malcolm Chase has observed: As skilled workers, they had been assimilated into Teesside’s labour politics without difficulty, bringing with them extensive experience of workplace organisation, and of life in industrial communities where class division was arguably more acute than anywhere else in Britain.Yet at the same time a distinctive Welsh sub-culture, in the form of Welsh-language religious worship, choirs and eisteddfodau, was also created.116 109 For details see William Jenkins, Consett Iron Company Limited: Description of the Works (Newcastle, 1893). For a wider examination of Welsh economic migrants see T. Gwynne and M. Sill, ‘Welsh Immigration into Middlesbrough in the Mid-Nineteenth Century’, Bulletin of the Cleveland and Teesside Local History Society 31 (1976), pp. 19-22; Jones, ‘Welsh Immigrants in the Cities of North-West England’, pp. 33-41; John, ‘Oxford Welsh in the 1930s’, pp. 99-106; C.G. Pooley and J. Doherty,‘The Longitudinal Study of Migration:Welsh Migration to English Towns in the Nineteenth Century’, Migrants, Emigrants and Immigrants, ed. Pooley and Whyte, pp. 152-68. 110 See Malcolm Chase, ‘The Implantation of Working Class Organisation on Teesside, 18301974’, Tijdschrift voor Sociale Geschiedenis, achttiende jaargang 18 (1992), pp. 191-211 (p. 195); Malcolm Chase,‘‘‘Dangerous People”? The Teesside Irish in the Nineteenth Century’, North East Labour History 28 (1994), p. 28, and citing ‘Notes and Queries: The Teesside Welsh’, Cleveland History 62 (Spring 1992), p. 65. 111 Presumably this was Thomas George’s son. 112 GCRO, D/D/X 204/6/2. 113 GCRO, D/DX 204/7. News cuttings from Newcastle Daily Chronicle and Consett Guardian c. 1890-5. 114 Ibid. 115 According to Richard Lewis and David Ward, Middlesbrough was ‘the centre for Welsh settlement for the North East of England’. See Richard Lewis and David Ward,‘Culture, Politics and Assimilation:The Welsh on Teesside, c. 1750-1940’, WHR 17 (1994-5), pp. 550-70 (p. 552). 116 Chase, ‘Dangerous People’, p. 28.

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In the mid 1990s Richard Lewis and David Ward explored the cultural and political identity of Welsh migrants and considered whether they had been fully assimilated by 1940.They concluded that for a man such as B.O. Davies, the mayor of Redcar and chairman of the Cleveland and Durham Eisteddfod,Welshness was ‘an important part of his personal cultural makeup, but politically and socially it was peripheral’. This, they believed, was common to the majority of Welsh exiles. According to their analysis the Welsh were economic migrants who sought a new life in the North East.117 It has been estimated that the Welsh-born population of Middlesbrough increased from 1% to 5% between the 1851 and 1861 censuses, while in c. 1871 at least 956 people in the town were Welshborn.118 They were ‘more self-contained, disposed to live closely together and mix less with the host community’.119 They established sizeable cultural gatherings, most notably the annual Eisteddfod at Witton Park, near Bishop Auckland, Darlington, Stockton and Middlesbrough.There is also evidence of Welsh religious observance. For example, in 1847 the Welsh Independents erected a meeting house and in 1861 the Welsh Wesleyan Methodists occupied the old chapel at Witton Park;120 there were Welsh-speaking Anglican services at St Hilda’s in Middlesbrough121 and a plethora of Welsh nonconformists who ministered to their congregations in both English and Welsh. The plurality of the region as it became the home of other ethnic groups in the nineteenth century inevitably served to privilege English as the dominant language, and those migrants who may have used Welsh as their main language quickly acquired new linguistic skills. As with other migrants, the Welsh had close contact with their fellow workers and were as vulnerable to cultural and religious influences in their new surroundings as they had been in the old. Clearly there was coexistence and intermarriage with other ethnic groups and in time they gradually assimilated into the wider English-dominated cultural framework. Even though leading members of the Welsh community, such as chapel ministers and businessmen, were keen to retain the ‘old language’ they did not energetically support its continuation. They were inclined to see their countrymen move towards bilingualism, and Welsh settlers increasingly 117 Lewis and Ward, ‘Culture, Politics and Assimilation’, p. 569. 118 See Gwynne and Sill, ‘Welsh Immigration into Middlesbrough’, p. 19, and Pooley and Doherty, ‘The Longitudinal Study of Migration’, p. 551. For further statistical details see Lewis and Ward, ‘Culture, Politics and Assimilation’, pp. 551-2. 119 Lewis and Ward, ‘Culture, Politics and Assimilation’, p. 551. 120 George T. Gray, ‘Witton Park: Its Past and Present’ (1903), and provided in http://www.daledaniel .fsnet.co.uk/08a_Its_Past_&_Present.htm. I am also grateful to Dale Daniel and the Witton Park History Group for additional information. 121 Middlesbrough Directory and Guide for 1863 (Middlesbrough, 1863), p. 49, and cited in Lewis and Ward, ‘Culture, Politics and Assimilation’, p. 553.


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became English-speakers only. For their part,Welsh migrants accepted that they would have to relinquish, or at best play down, their national allegiance.Yet Welsh migrants did not completely abandon their heritage, and their use of the Welsh language, particularly when engaged in cultural activities, sharpened their ethnic identity. Language was not an issue which figured largely in Irish associational life. The Gaelic League which emerged in Ireland in 1893 to regenerate interest in Irish culture and language appealed mostly to ‘a frustrated intelligentsia’ and had little impact outside of London.122 At the same time, as Merfyn Jones has pointed out in his study of the Welsh in the North West of England between 1880 and 1930, there was similar ambivalence towards the Welsh language. According to one Welsh migrant from Manchester: There were degrees of Welsh people in Manchester. There were what I could call the wholly Welsh ... who spoke Welsh at home and everything ... we were in Wales but not in Wales somehow.Then there were the people who would call themselves Welsh and were very sympathetic to everything but they wouldn’t speak Welsh to you, they could obviously understand it, but they never spoke it.And then there were the ones who ... didn’t follow it through, they didn’t speak Welsh at home and the children really couldn’t get away quickly enough.They became English and they were Welsh only with a Welsh name.123

The Welsh language was not reinvigorated among the region’s Welsh population until the establishment of Welsh societies in the North East of England in the twentieth century. The origins and various manifestations of The Honourable Society of Cymmrodorion can be traced back to the enterprise of eighteenth-century London-Welshmen,124 but these cultural activities did not take root in North-East England until the mid nineteenth century. Moreover, it took until 1896 for the first Welsh societies to be established at Middlesbrough, followed by Newcastle in 1905 and Durham in 1930.125 The primary aim of the early London Society was to promote ‘friendship and good understanding among the people of Wales’, and their motto was ‘Unity and 122 John Hutchinson and Alan O’Day, ‘The Gaelic Revival in London, 1900-22: Limits of Ethnic Identity’, Local Dimension, ed. Swift and Gilley, p. 255. See also John P. Cullinane,‘Irish Dance World-wide: Irish Migrants and the Shaping of Traditional Irish Dance’, The Creative Migrant (The Irish World Wide,Vol. 3), ed. P. O’Sullivan (Leicester, 1994), p. 196. 123 Jones, ‘Welsh Immigrants in the cities of North-West England’, p. 39. 124 See Jenkins and Ramage, A History of the Honourable Society of Cymmrodorion; Emrys Jones, ‘A Concise History of the Society 1751-1951’,THSC 2002, new ser. 9 (2003), pp. 5-16. For a wider discussion of eighteenth-century London-Welsh societies see Emrys Jones,‘The Age of Societies’, The Welsh in London, ed. Jones, pp. 54-87. 125 Details of the various Welsh societies in existence worldwide and their various appellations are provided in http://www.homecomingwales.com/societies.bhp (accessed November 2006).

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Brotherhood’.The first Cymmrodorion Society (1751-87) was a convivial gathering of like-minded individuals and tended to attract those who were wealthy and educated.126 Various changes in composition127 eventually gave way to mid-nineteenth-century respectability, a desire to protect Welsh culture and ‘the well-being of the people of Wales’.128 On 10 November 1873 the present-day Cymmrodorion Society was founded to support the cultural and literary activities which are familiar today: the eisteddfod and the promotion of the Welsh language, better educational provision, the establishment of national institutions and the publication of a corpus of literary and historical studies.129 Regional Cymmrodorion were established first of all in Wales and then throughout England.130 In a recent article ‘On being Welsh’, the late Sir Rees Davies wrote that Welshness should be lived, not protested; experienced, not raucously proclaimed. Our distrust is immediately triggered by those who protest their Welshness, not least because it is usually a preface to a bout of sentimentality, a poor argument, or a shifty political or moral decision ... Tread gently on my Welshness, might be our motto, because you tread on my identity.131

It could be argued that Welsh migrants in the North East faced a similar choice: either embrace a new culture which would deliver economic benefits, or cling to their ethnic roots and preserve their attachment to Wales. There are problems with any assessment of identity for, as Davies rightly points out, ‘it is this essential personal, multifaceted, variable and chameleon character of … Welshness – as of any identity – which makes it such a protean, elusive concept’; in the post-modern world nations and people simply become ‘social and intellectual constructions, “imagined communities” in a process of endless invention, reinvention and redefinition’.132 So how did the Welsh in the North East define, reinvent and redefine themselves? Did they constitute a society that reflected the Wales of their memory and its culture? Were they more aware of their Welshness because they lived in exile, away from their homeland and its national culture?133 126 Admission was based upon a proposal and ballot. See Jones, ‘A Concise History’, p. 7. This study also provides details of the pre-Cymmrodorion organisation, the Honourable and Loyal Society of Antient Britons, established in 1715, see ibid., pp. 5-6. 127 See Marion Loeffler, ‘Eu Hiaith a Gadwant’: The Work of the National Union of Welsh Societies, 1913-1941’, THSC 1997, new ser. 4 (1998), p. 125 128 Jones, ‘A Concise History’, p. 11. 129 Ibid., pp. 12-13. 130 See Williams, Religion, Language and Nationality, pp. 140-1. 131 R.R. Davies, ‘On Being Welsh: A Historian’s Viewpoint’, THSC 2002¸ new ser. 9 (2003), pp. 29-30. 132 Ibid., p. 30. 133 Ibid., p. 31. See also Jeremy Segrott,‘Today and Tomorrow:Welsh Identities in London’, The Welsh in London 1500-2000, ed. Jones, pp. 184-92.


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For the purposes here a case study is offered of the Welsh members of the Newcastle (and later Tyneside) Cymmrodorion Society which will reflect, where possible, upon the inter-regional links with other Welsh communities and societies.134 The Society began in 1905 and its first president was Sir Isambard Owen (1850-1927), a well-known physician in London who was instrumental in the establishment of the third London Cymmrodorion Society in 1873. In 1904 he became the principal of Armstrong College, Newcastle.135 There are no extant minutes of the Cymmrodorion until 1917, but a St David’s Day Dinner programme from 1908 and other ephemera provide some insight into their early activities. At the annual dinner in February 1908, held at Tilley’s Restaurant in Newcastle, the president professed the loyalty of the Cymmrodorion to the royal family before a toast was given to ‘Our City by Adoption’.The President also proposed a toast to ‘The Immortal memory of St David’, and delivered a speech on ‘Cymry, Cymro and Chymareg’ (‘Wales, the Welsh and the Welsh language’).136 The cover of the programme bore the motto of the Cymmrodorion, ‘Y Ddraig Goch a Ddyrru Gychwyn’ (‘The Red Dragon will show you the way’), as an inspiration to the exiled Welsh.The menu for this annual event perfectly reflected received ideas about Welsh customs.Thus, in 1908 members were offered traditional dishes including ‘Cawl Cennin’, ‘Saddle of Welsh Mutton’,‘Boiled Leeks’,‘Sir Watkin Wynn Pudding’137 and ‘Welsh Rarebit’.138 The evening’s entertainment also consisted of a selection of Welsh music, songs and recitals culminating in the singing of ‘Hen Wlad fy Nhadau’, the Welsh National Anthem.The loyalty of the Welsh to the British monarchy was commented upon in the Illustrated Weekly Chronicle on 1 March 1911 when it a carried a picture of Caernarfon Castle, the site for the impending investiture of Prince Edward as Prince of Wales.This event, the newspaper suggested, ‘will be the pride of all loyal Welshmen’,139 showing the attachment of the Welsh, at the time, to the British monarchy. Every year the Newcastle Cymmrodorion, like many other Cymmrodorion societies, held a church service to celebrate St David’s Day. In March 1911 a special service was held in St Nicholas’ Cathedral ‘for the Welsh residents of the city’.This was attended by a large gathering of Welsh men and women, and interestingly the entire service was 134 The records of the Newcastle and Tyneside Cymmrodorion Society (hereafter NTCS) are undeposited and are currently held by the secretary of the Society. 135 He was also the executor of the will of Prince Louis Lucien Bonarparte. For details of his life and work see University of Wales, Bangor, MS GB 0222 BMSS ISAM, Sir Isambard Owen Papers. See also Heulwen Isambard Owen and Hedydd Isambard Owen, Sir Isambard Owen:A Biography, (Caernarfon, 1963). 136 NTCS, Dinner Programme, 29 February 1908. 137 A former vice-president of the Honourable Society of Cymmrodorion. 138 NTCS, Dinner Programme, 29 February 1908. 139 Illustrated Weekly Chronicle, 1 March 1911.

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conducted through the medium of Welsh. Rev. E.L. Owen preached about the life and character of St David, while special hymns were sung.140 It could be suggested that the emphasis upon the Welsh language may have acted as a barrier to others, yet the programme offered by the Society reflected both Welsh and English language entertainment.141 More detailed information about the Society is available between 1917 and 1921, and then from 1934 onwards. During the First World War an attempt was made to convert St David’s Day into a National Flag day. In February 1917 the secretary recorded that Mrs Lloyd George had written to the Newcastle branch about the proposed conversion, which demonstrates that Welsh festivities were taking on an entirely new character during wartime. The Newcastle members were, however, not challenged by this request as the lord mayor and the watch committee had abolished all flag days from October to the end of March. In the event the Saint’s day was used to ‘entertain our brave wounded countrymen now lying in Hospitals at Newcastle and Gosforth’, while subscriptions were also raised to support them.142 They also agreed to provide entertainment at the Picture House and tea afterwards, as well as a concert on St David’s Day ‘to draw all Welshmen together’.143 Moreover, close attention was paid by members to Welsh cultural activities held in Wales and to pan-Celtic organisations.This was possibly a response to a letter from Swansea in July 1917 whereby members were urged to support the National Union of Welsh Societies (NUWS) and to send representatives to the conference to be held at the Birkenhead Eisteddfod in September 1917.144 In July 1918 the Newcastle branch received a circular from the NUWS announcing a pan-Celtic conference which was to be held in Neath in August.145 The Newcastle Cymmrodorion was sufficiently enthusiastic to provide £5 to the Celtic Congress in January 1919, and in the following year they sent representatives to the same meeting held at Edinburgh.146 As members of a wider Celtic community, the Welsh in the North East were constantly reminded of their roots. In the aftermath of the war the Cymmrodorion was closely involved in community welfare. Between February and May 1919 committee members organised an Eisteddfod in Newcastle to raise money for the Royal Infirmary, and held a peace celebration for the Welsh on Tyneside 140 Ibid. 141 NTCS, Membership Card c. 1931. 142 NTCS, 8 February 1917.The wartime hospitals were at Armstrong College and Coxlodge. In February 1919 the secretary recorded that £39 18s 2d had been collected and £31 1s 6d had been expended on entertaining the wounded soldiers. NTCS, 10 February 1919. 143 NTCS, 22 January 1918. 144 NTCS, 10 July 1917; 15 November 1917. 145 NTCS, 12 July 1918. 146 NTCS, 28 January 1919; 26 October 1920.


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comprising traditional entertainment and a remembrance service for Welsh soldiers.147 In February 1920 the committee included additional toasts at the St David’s Day dinner to acknowledge ‘Our fallen boys’,‘Our distinguished countrymen’ and ‘Our forces’.148 This sentiment was repeated at the end of the Second World War when the proposed St David’s Day toasts included one to ‘Our Fighting Services’.149 The unifying effects of the war effort undoubtedly helped to break down some of the barriers between host communities and ethnic groups. In this climate of conciliation most people wanted to register their solidarity with their neighbours. At this time the Society changed its name to the Newcastle and Tyneside Cymmrodorion Society, but still retained its rather formal programme of events.Apart from the occasional Noson Lawen, an evening of light festivities, the programme consisted of lectures, religious services, whist drives, literary evenings, music and poetry recitals, and theatrical performances rather than embracing a more populist agenda.150 This may well reflect the composition and cultural tastes of the Society, especially the executive. The Society was financed by yearly subscriptions of 1s per member,151 and members were drawn heavily from the professional middle classes. The Cymmrodorion played an important role in fostering an interest in the Welsh language. A ‘very successful’ Welsh class was organised by Newcastle Education Committee in January 1950,152 and in March 1968 classes were also held at Ashington Technical College.153 In 1974 the Language Centre at the University of Newcastle provided classes for Welsh students on the grounds that they were likely to search for work in Wales after they had completed their studies,154 and in 1977 a similar course was offered at Sunderland Polytechnic, which notably was the ‘only class of its type between Liverpool and Edinburgh’.155 Interest in studying Welsh began to fall away during the early 1980s, and thereafter classes were discontinued.156 The fortunes of the Newcastle and Tyneside Cymmrodorion fluctuated and great efforts were made to expand the membership. In 1950 the committee redrew the constitution and emphasised ‘the preservation of the national culture, language and traditions and particularly the promoting of functions which will stimulate the appreciation of Welsh music, literature and 147 NTCS, 21 May 1919. 148 NTCS, 23 February 1920. 149 NTCS, 10 January 1946. 150 For example, a series of lantern lectures are referred to in the minutes for 1919 and a performance of a Shakespearean play. NTCS, 21 May 1919; Programme of Events 1930-1 and 1931-2. 151 NTCS, 8 January 1918; 22 January 1918. 152 NTCS, 13 January 1950. 153 NTCS, 21 March 1968. 154 NTCS, letter dated 3 October 1974. 155 NTCS, 20 June 1977. 156 NTCS, 22 June 1983.

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drama’.157 This had only a limited impact, for in the postwar period there was a notable apathy among the members and the Executive acknowledged that the Society was ‘too inward looking and not sufficiently friendly toward newcomers’.158 This was a common problem for provincial societies, and Merfyn Jones has suggested that Welsh emigrants in the North West ‘grappled with the strain of living in two cultures’ and this led to ‘rapid assimilation’.159 In the North East the Welsh may not have been ‘subjected to the isolating processes of discrimination that afflicted the Irish’, but their desire to prosper made them more likely to assimilate.160 In 1980 the secretary, H.M. Jones, complained that ‘I am continually reading of the depopulation of rural Wales and only wish that more of the emigrants would find their way to Newcastle and bolster up our diminishing numerical strength.’161 In the event, more interest surfaced in this decade as the Society made an effort to provide a more varied, family orientated programme. It also developed closer links with other Celtic groups in the region, especially the Caledonian Society, and overall this created ‘a greater sense of fellowship within the Society’.162 Although political luminaries were invited to functions there is little sign of overt politicisation. In 1918 the Newcastle members warmly welcomed David Lloyd George upon his being made a freeman of the city. In their address they proudly acknowledged his ‘strenuous efforts and ardent work’ as Chancellor of the Exchequer, Minister of Munitions, Secretary of War and, from 1916, as Prime Minister: In the darkest hours of the Empire’s history you have inspired confidence amongst us all, and we have the sure and certain hope that under your leadership and with the Blessing of Almighty God, we shall soon herald victory and an enduring peace.163

Other interesting speakers included Rev. Lake-Thomas and Rev. Mansel Davies who debated Welsh Home Rule in January 1952,164 while in February 1955 Gwilym Lloyd George, the son of David Lloyd George and Conservative MP for Newcastle, addressed the Society.165 More revealing were two debates, held in 1974, concerning the Welsh holiday home industry. This was one of those rare moments when the Tyneside Welsh registered their awareness of problems in Wales.166 With any migrant people 157 NTCS, 13 January 1950. 158 NTCS, 13 April 1957; 6 May 1978. 159 Jones, ‘Welsh Immigrants in the Cities of North-West England’, p. 33. 160 Lewis and Ward,‘Culture, Politics and Assimilation’, p. 570; Hickman, Religion, Class and Identity. 161 NTCS, Secretary’s Report 1980. 162 NTCS, 8 May 1981, Secretary’s Report 1981; 21 May 1982. Events included summer outings, a family picnic, a Christmas Fancy Dress Party and a ‘Welsh Night’. 163 NTCS, 12 September 1918; 26 September 1918. 164 NTCS, Programme of Events 1951-2. 165 NTCS, Programme of Events 1954-5. 166 NTCS, Programme of Events 1974-5; minute dated 13 June 1974.


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the desire to replicate ‘home’ can lead to over-sentimentalised views which promote an invention of tradition, or at least a self-conscious desire to preserve their national customs.167 Indeed at one event entitled ‘My Wales’ organised for February 1981 three speakers were invited to ‘describe what Wales meant to them’.168 In the North East the Cymmrodorion and affiliated Welsh societies have also enthusiastically supported Welsh chapel services, and inter-Welsh community gatherings, especially the Gymanfa Ganu (singing festivals), inter-Society Eisteddfodau, ‘Welsh nights/knick knack nights’, pethau cymraeg169 and the Urdd (Welsh youth movement). The nonconformist chapel was the crucial institution which brought the Welsh community together. Historians have observed that ‘to a significant extent chapel and community were synonymous … [it] was the organizer and the link with home.’170 For the Newcastle and Tyneside Cymmrodorion such links have been important.171 Increasingly, as attendance at church and chapel diminished, these festivals, which have included the Gymanfa Ganu Swydd Efrog a’r Gogledd Ddwyrain (Singing Festival of Yorkshire and the North East) held at Gosforth in 1981,172 took on an even greater significance for the preservation of Welsh identity.173 In May 1984 the secretary stressed the importance of keeping alive the Eisteddfod and the Gymanfa Ganu. But, despite having over 80 members and the efforts made to organise such events, it was ‘a great disappointment to see so few there’.174 Children were encouraged to join the Urdd y Delyn (Order of the Harp) from 1922 and later the Urdd Gobaith Cymru (Welsh League of Youth).175 The Cymmrodorion supported these initiatives and in June 1982 they proposed a junior (Urdd) group to ‘promote our Welsh heritage of song, dance and drama’.176 The April 1984 Eisteddfod was so successful that the Secretary noted that ‘even in Wales this would be difficult to 167 For example, see Prys Morgan,‘From a Death to a View:The Hunt for the Welsh Past in the Romantic Period’, The Invention of Tradition, ed. Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger (Cambridge, 1992), pp. 43-100. 168 NTCS, 26 June 1980. 169 In May 1982 members were invited to ‘bring some Welsh item which means something to them, or to give a Welsh item’. NTCS, 15 May 1982. 170 Jones, ‘Welsh Immigrants in the Cities of North-West England’, p. 36; Lewis and Ward, ‘Culture, Politics and Assimilation’, pp. 553-6; John, ‘Oxford Welsh in the 1930s’, p. 102. 171 It is worth noting that during the late 1940s a Welsh Church at Sunderland was being referred to in the minutes of the Society and in July 1947 thirty members of the Newcastle and Tyneside Society attended an annual service held there. NTCS, 21 May 1947; 9 April 1948. 172 NTCS, 10 May 1981. 173 Cf. Jones, ‘Welsh Immigrants in the Cities of North-West England’, pp. 36-8. 174 NTCS, 18 May 1984, Secretary’s Report 1983/4. 175 For details see R.E. Griffith, Urdd Gobaith Cymru (3 vols., Aberystwyth, 1971-3); Gwennant Davies, The Story of the Urdd (the Welsh League of Youth), 1922-1972 (Aberystwyth, 1973). 176 NTCS, 15 May 1982.

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beat’.177 The following year an Urdd group was established178 and Welsh children were encouraged to dress in traditional Welsh costumes for the lord mayor’s parade. In addition, children’s competitions were held at the Eisteddfod held at Brunton Park.179 Despite sporadic references to under16 Welsh competitions, the Urdd activities quickly ceased.180 This decline was reflected in the gradual cessation of Welsh Societies in the North East.181 The Newcastle and Tyneside Cymmrodorion Society was successful in recruiting the more affluent and influential Welsh migrants. To the outsider, this Society might seem a somewhat insular organisation, unduly preoccupied with the pomp and ceremony of its annual festivals. As Prys Morgan suggests for the eighteenth century, it may be that they created pseudo-Welsh cultural activities which reconfigured an idealised past.182 Evidence would, however, suggest that Welsh societies enriched the cultural heritage of the migrant by creating ‘a new Welshness which would instruct, entertain, amuse and educate the people’.183 Conclusion This study has revealed the importance of associational life in providing practical support and cultural sustenance to both Welsh and Irish exiles. The politicisation of the Irish has emerged as the crucial difference between the two groups, acting as a drag upon their assimilation. Nonconformity was not as culturally pervasive as Irish Catholicism. The vast majority of Irish migrants who settled in the North East could do little other than defend their Catholic identity and this, in turn, accentuated their Irish identity. Inevitably, ethnic identities were privileged during festivals and feast days, and at times of political conflict. But, by the end of the First World War, when loyalties had been uniquely tested and the population of the region had stabilised through declining migration levels and intermarriage, Welsh and Irish ‘outsider’ identities were less visible than before. Some, of course, would have it that the Irish became ‘less alien to English eyes after 1945’ but not everyone agrees. Others would argue that ethnicity proved remarkably resistant to the efforts of the State and the Catholic Church to assist the assimilation process.184 At work 177 NTCS, 18 May 1984, Secretary’s Report 1983/4. 178 NTCS, 17 May 1985, Secretary’s Report, 1984/5. 179 NTCS, 16 May 1986, Secretary’s Report 1985/6. 180 NTCS, 1982; 1985, Lord Mayor’s Parade; 1992, under-16 competition at Newcastle and Tyneside Cymmrodorion Eisteddfod. 181 Whereas in 1981 there were four Welsh societies (Darlington, Durham, Teesside and Newcastle), at the turn of the millennium there were only two. 182 Morgan, ‘From a Death to a View’, pp. 98-9. 183 Ibid., p. 99. 184 Fielding, Class and Ethnicity, p. 132; MacRaild, Culture, Conflict and Migration, pp. 208-9.


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and at play, migrants shared much in common with their neighbours but, as Steve Fielding argues, ‘comparative homogeneity’ should not be confused with ‘absolute homogeneity’.185 The class solidarities that brought together nationalists and radicals on Tyneside, or encouraged Irish and Welsh workers to find common cause on Teesside,186 did not necessarily represent the abandonment of their other, ethnic identity. Jose Harris has argued that in the postwar period religion became ‘increasingly internalised and private’.187 The same might be said of ethnicity: it may have faded from view but it did not fade away.

185 Fielding, Class and Ethnicity, p. 4. 186 Chase, ‘Teesside Irish’, p. 56. 187 Jose Harris, Private Lives, Public Spirit: Britain 1870-1914 (London, 1993), p. 179.

7 Immigrant Politics and North-East Identity, 1907-1973 D.A.J. MacPHERSON and DAVID RENTON Although many historians of the North East have analysed the interaction between migrant and host populations in the region, few have attempted to address the extent to which outsiders have engaged with notions of regional identity.1 This chapter considers two key migrant political campaigns, one from the period immediately preceding the First World War, the other from the late 1960s and early 1970s. Comparison of the two suggests how migrant identity could be shaped by the emergence of a selfconscious regional identity during the course of the twentieth century. Of all the movements of people, few transformed the region as dramatically as the arrival of Welsh, Scots and Irish workers in the 1850s, 1860s and 1870s. Taking note of English ‘emigration’ from the North East in the 1870s, David Byrne estimates that 37% of the 1911 population of the North East were born outside England or were children of migrants.2 Without the influx of labour, he suggests, the North East could not have found the workers needed for the region to achieve its industrial greatness. The Irish are particularly well known but many generations of migrants have shaped the region since, especially those who came to the North East from India, Pakistan and the West Indies after 1945. The protagonist of the first campaign, John O’Hanlon, was one of Tyneside’s most prominent Irishmen at the end of the nineteenth and 1

2

For the classic assessment of the Irish in the North East and how the region proved less hostile to these migrants than other areas of the United Kingdom, see Roger Cooter, When Paddy Met Geordie:The Irish in County Durham and Newcastle, 1840-1880 (Sunderland, 2005), a reworking of R.J. Cooter, ‘The Irish in County Durham and Newcastle, c. 1840-1880’ (unpublished M.A. thesis, University of Durham, 1972). More recent studies have rightly questioned Cooter’s approach. See, for example, F. Neal, ‘English-Irish Conflict in the North-East of England’, The Irish in British Labour History, ed. P. Buckland and John Belchem (Liverpool, 1993), pp. 59-85. The interplay of identities between migrant and host communities may be seen in John Belchem’s studies of the Liverpool Irish in, for example, his essay ‘Micks on the Make on the Mersey’, in John Belchem, Merseypride: Essays in Liverpool Exceptionalism (Liverpool, 2000), pp. 129-54. D. Byrne,‘Immigrants and the Formation of the North East Industrial Working Class’, North East Labour History Bulletin 30 (1996), pp. 29-36.

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beginning of the twentieth centuries. O’Hanlon rose rapidly through the ranks of Irish associational life in the region, from church groups to political organisations, representing the Irish party in the 1907 Jarrow by-election, and becoming mayor of Wallsend in 1913. He was a typical migrant Irishman in the North East of England, a second generation, skilled worker. A study of O’Hanlon’s leadership reasserts the importance of the individual to the study of collective identities and suggests leadership of the Irish in Britain was often localised and diffuse.3 It also helps us to see that the region (or, more precisely, a locality within the region) was itself created in part by migrant experience. O’Hanlon’s base was the mid-Tyne basin, a contiguous and identifiable part of Tyneside, comprising the towns of Jarrow and Hebburn on the south bank, and Wallsend,Walker and Willington Quay on the north. O’Hanlon’s career, spanning the towns of Jarrow and Wallsend, personifies this locality. His leadership of the Irish in the mid-Tyne area was notable for his self-identification as a Tyneside Irishman, a local working man with an Irish background.The first part of this chapter focuses on the culmination of O’Hanlon’s leadership of the mid-Tyne Irish, his standing as an Irish Nationalist candidate at Jarrow in 1907.The campaign revealed many features of Irish life in the region: the tension between Labour and Irish Nationalist politics and the particularities of a Tyneside Irish identity based on the region’s Irish industrial (and overwhelmingly male) workforce. The hybrid identity of ‘Tyneside Irishman’ embraced by O’Hanlon indicates a distinctive north-east and Irish regional identity. Chris Mullard’s life was shaped by a different experience: the great wave of black migration to Britain starting in the post-war years. Between 1948 and 1958 some 125,000 West Indians and 55,000 Indians and Pakistanis came to Britain.4 On arrival, many black and Asian people in Britain were treated harshly. Homes, hotels and pubs were often barred to them. Even some workers saw immigrants as potential competition. The first major piece of post-war immigration law was passed in 1962.5 Each government since has introduced further anti-immigration legislation. Born in Hampshire in 1946, the son of a black American serviceman, Chris Mullard was raised an orphan and adopted a black identity shaped by the Caribbean 3

4

5

See Louise Ryan,‘The Cult of Personality: Reassessing Leadership and Suffrage Movements in Britain and Ireland’, Leadership and Social Movements, ed. Colin Barker, Alan Johnson and Michael Lavalette (Manchester, 2001), pp. 196-212. For Black and Asian migration to Britain, see A. Sivanandan, From Resistance to Rebellion: Asian and Afro-Caribbean Struggles in Britain (London, 1986); Campaign Against Racism and Fascism, Southall: The Birth of a Black Community (London, 1981); J. Solomos, Race and Racism in Contemporary Britain (London, 1989); R. Ramdin, Arising from Bondage: A History of the Indo-Caribbean People (London, 2000); D. Widgery, Some Lives! A GP’s East End (London, 1991), pp. 191-201. P. Foot, Immigration and Race in British Politics (Harmondsworth, 1965), p. 255.

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migrants who were more numerous in Britain as he grew up. He arrived in Newcastle in the mid 1960s after a brief spell in London. He became in 1968 the first full-time worker for the Community Relations Commission (CRC) in Newcastle. In 1973 Mullard published an early memoir, Black Britain.6 His book was criticised by a number of groups within the region for its rejection of the Community Relations model. Mullard was seen as spurning the very agencies which had found him work and which also provided shelter to other, more moderate, black activists. Shortly after its publication he was forced to resign from the CRC. While O’Hanlon’s campaigning shows a migrant generation seeking approval from the community into which they had settled, Mullard’s politics suggest that in a different context, an unchallenged national or regional identity might be unattractive to first or second-generation migrants. Mullard was always opting out of the North East, and if his campaigns also contributed to the re-working of a north-east identity, they did so in a much more complex and equivocal fashion, as we shall show. John O’Hanlon and the Irish Community on Tyneside, 1880-1913 Early in the 1870s the journalist Hugh Heinrick surveyed the condition of the Irish in England for the Nation newspaper, and concluded that on Tyneside, excepting London, Liverpool and Manchester, ‘there is no such Irish force to be met with in England’.7 The enormous expansion of shipbuilding along the banks of the Tyne and of mining in the coal and iron districts of Northumberland and Durham had indeed attracted many thousands of migrant workers, including a large Irish contingent.8 At the time of the 1851 census, the two counties accounted for the fourth largest Irish-born population, in terms of proportion of the overall population, in the United Kingdom.9 This population, especially in Durham, grew dramatically during the 1860s and 1870s, the period in which the great industrial towns of Tyneside, such as Jarrow, Hebburn and Wallsend, began to develop from villages into extensive urban settlements. 6 7 8

9

C. Mullard, Black Britain (London, 1973). Hugh Heinrick, A Survey of the Irish in England (1872), ed. Alan O’Day (London, 1990), p. 122. For the Irish presence in the heavy industry of the North East, see the Victorian and Edwardian accounts of Hugh Heinrick, John Denvir and Joseph Keating in Survey of the Irish, pp. 115-22; John Denvir, The Irish in Britain from the Earliest Times to the Fall and Death of Parnell (London, 1892), pp. 442-4; Joseph Keating, ‘Tyneside Irish Brigade: History of its Origin and Development’, Irish Heroes in the War, ed. Felix Lavery (London, 1917), pp. 4152. See also Donald M. MacRaild, Irish Migrants in Modern Britain, 1750-1922 (Basingstoke, 1999), pp. 65-73. Frank Neal, ‘The Foundations of the Irish Settlement in Newcastle upon Tyne: The Evidence in the 1851 Census’, The Great Famine and Beyond: Irish Migrants in Britain in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, ed. Donald M. MacRaild (Dublin, 2000), p. 71.

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The Irish communities in Jarrow and Hebburn were quick to organise themselves into church, political and social groups. In Jarrow a Catholic church, St Bede’s, was opened in 1861 and quickly became dominated by the largely Catholic Irish migrants who had settled in the town.10 This process of hibernicisation, although resisted initially, gathered pace during the 1870s and 1880s.11 Recent research on the residential patterns of Jarrow suggests that Irish migrants settled predominantly in the streets surrounding the church, and St Bede’s rapidly became the focus for the social life of the Jarrow Irish, with the establishment of schools, societies and charitable organisations.12 During the 1880s Irish political organisations began to emerge, most notably the Land League, which later became the Irish National League. Rather than opposing the involvement of Catholics in nationalist politics, as had been the pattern in the 1850s and 1860s, the priests of Jarrow embraced these political networks, chairing meetings, providing rooms and helping to organise the town’s St Patrick’s Day celebrations.13 By the first decade of the twentieth century Jarrow could boast a number of Irish associations, including the United Irish League, the Ancient Order of Hibernians and the Irish National Foresters. In Wallsend the Irish community emerged at a later date, with a Catholic church not built until 1904, but the town’s Irish had an equally vibrant associational culture, with societies to match those of Jarrow.14 Who led the Irish communities in the mid-Tyne? Several leaders conformed to the pattern of middle-class leadership outlined by Fielding in his study of the Manchester Irish.15 Dr Michael McWilliams Bradley, local doctor, magistrate and Land League activist, played a leading role in the Irish community of Jarrow, being treasurer of the Irish National League for many years. Born in Tyrone around 1845, Bradley came to Jarrow in his early thirties to practice medicine and soon became involved 10 TWAS, C/JA7/14, Michael J.Young, Catholic Jarrow: St Bede’s 1860-1940: The Story of our Parish, Church and Schools (Sunderland, n.d.), p. 16. 11 For the Catholic Church’s opposition to hibernicisation during the initial phase of Irish migration to the North East see Donald M. MacRaild,‘“Abandon Hibernicisation”: Priests, Ribbonmen and an Irish Street Fight in the North-East of England in 1858’, Historical Research 76 (2003), pp. 557-73. 12 A.C. Hepburn, ‘Irish Settlements in North East England, 1851-1901: The Evidence from Jarrow, Hebburn and Wallsend with Comparative Reference to Belfast’, paper presented to ‘The Isonymic Analysis of Historical Data: Irish Migration to Britain, 1851-1901’ Colloquium, Centre for North East England History, Newcastle, 1 November 2005;TWAS, C/JA7/14; Catholic Jarrow, pp. 24-27. 13 ‘St Patrick’s Day’, Jarrow Express, 18 March 1887. 14 Richardson, History of the Parish of Wallsend (Wallsend, 1923, repr. 2004), p. 174. 15 Steven Fielding, Class and Ethnicity: Irish Catholic in England, 1880-1939 (Buckingham, 1993), pp. 183-4. Another example of the predominantly middle-class nature of the leadership of Irish associational networks is that of the Ladies’ Land League in Worcester, Massachusetts, discussed in Timothy J. Meagher, Inventing Irish America: Generation, Class, and Ethnic Identity in a New England City, 1880-1928 (Notre Dame, 2001), p. 185.


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in local Irish life, being a founding member of the town’s Land League branch in November 1880, and whose contribution to the Jarrow Irish is commemorated by a stained-glass window in St Bede’s.The large estate he left on his death, valued at £8,386, confirms Bradley’s elevated social status.16 The example of John O’Hanlon, however, suggests that, in Jarrow at least, the leadership of the Irish was more socially diverse. Born in Washington, County Durham in 1851, he was a second-generation Irish migrant who, in his skilled worker status, had much in common with the majority of the Tyneside Irish.17 His father was an Irish-born chemical works labourer and his mother was a dressmaker born in Newcastle.18 O’Hanlon served as an apprentice cooper at Black’s factory in Jarrow before entering the town’s burgeoning heavy industrial employment in 1871 as a worker in Palmer’s steel-rolling mills.19 In 1884 he began work as a driller in one of Wallsend’s shipyards, beginning his long association with the town.20 Despite being a second-generation migrant, O’Hanlon had a strong sense of Irish identity, describing himself, in his election address during the 1907 Jarrow by-election, as an ‘Irish nationalist since boyhood’.21 John O’Hanlon first appears in the public life of the Irish on Tyneside as early as 1870 when, as a teenager, he is reported as interjecting at a meeting in support of the Irish Land Bill, condemning the limited nature of the legislation.22 Ten years pass before we hear of him again. He became involved in the life of the Jarrow Irish during the early 1880s and, like many Irish men and women, his associational activity focused initially on the Catholic Church. O’Hanlon is next mentioned in the local press in his capacity as chair of the St Bede’s Catholic Church Library at the beginning of 1880.23 Later that year he strengthened his links with St Bede’s by becoming the auditor of the church’s Catholic Benefit Society and chairing the St Bede’s Catholic Mutual Improvement Society.24 But it 16 ‘The Late Dr M.M. Bradley, Jarrow’, Jarrow Guardian, 12 July 1907. For the opening of the Jarrow branch of the Land League, see ‘Formation of a Branch of the Irish Land League at Jarrow’, Jarrow Guardian, 12 October 1880, and James Hardiman Library, NUI Galway, POL6, Minute Book of the Jarrow Branch of the Irish National Land League (hereafter NUI Galway, POL6), 7 November 1880; ‘Local Gossip’, Jarrow Guardian, 11 January 1907. 17 Richardson, Wallsend, p. 457. 18 TNA, HO 107/2394, Census Enumerators’ Sheets,Washington, Co. Durham, 1851, p. 670; TNA, RG 11/5021, Census Enumerators’ Sheets, Jarrow, Co. Durham, 1881, p. 74. 19 ‘Election Reflections’, Jarrow Guardian, 21 June 1907; Richardson, Wallsend, p. 457. 20 Ibid. 21 ‘The Nationalist-Labour Candidate Adopted’, Jarrow Guardian, 14 June 1907. 22 ‘Public Meeting on the Irish Land Bill’, Newcastle Daily Chronicle, 27 April 1870. 23 ‘St Bede’s Catholic Church Library’, Jarrow Guardian, 27 February 1880. 24 ‘Catholic Benefit Society’, Jarrow Guardian, 28 May 1880; ‘St Bede’s Catholic Mutual Improvement Society’, Jarrow Guardian, 8 October 1880.

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was in the field of politics that O’Hanlon became most involved, being one of the founding members of the Jarrow branch of the Land League.25 At a meeting to form a branch in the town, he spoke passionately of the need for such an organisation as he ‘thought that the Irishmen of Jarrow were as patriotic as those in any other town in England’.26 He became an active committee member, raising money to be sent to the Irish prisoners’ defence fund, encouraging the Irish women of the town to form a branch of the Ladies’ Land League, lecturing on Irish topics and spearheading the branch’s efforts to register qualified Irish men for the vote in order that the Irish voice in Jarrow was heard electorally.27 He also encouraged the branch to affiliate with the British Land League, demonstrating a strong commitment to forging links between the Irish and English working classes that would later form the central theme of his election campaign in 1907.28 Following the Parnell split of 1890, during which he was in the antiParnell camp,29 O’Hanlon became concerned with the promotion of Irish political networks not just in Jarrow, but in the mid-Tyne and wider Tyneside areas, emerging as one of the key leaders of the Irish community. In 1890 he established the ‘T.M. Healy Branch’ of the Irish National League in Wallsend and in 1896 he became the regional organiser for the Northumberland and Durham branches of the Irish National League.30 The Jarrow Express, praising his appointment to this important position, described O’Hanlon as a vital ‘bridge’ between Irish and labour politics and between labour and capital: he was ‘held in high esteem by employers and workmen alike’ and helped ‘in the amicable settlement of industrial disputes’.31 O’Hanlon’s ability to appeal to different sectors of the workforce, ensuring co-operation between labour and capital, may be seen as an important part of the ‘Liberal hegemony’ in Jarrow politics at the end of the nineteenth century described by Purdue.32

25 NUI Galway, POL6, 7 November 1880. 26 ‘Formation of a Branch of the Irish Land League at Jarrow’, Jarrow Guardian, 12 October 1880. 27 NUI Galway, POL6, 14 November 1880; 18 December 1881; 19 February 1882. 28 Ibid., 10 April 1881; 7 August 1881. 29 ‘Wallsend National League Meeting’, Jarrow Express, 10 July 1891. 30 ‘Wallsend Irish National League’, Jarrow Express, 13 November 1896; Richardson,Wallsend, p. 457. T.M. Healy was a fellow second-generation Tyneside Irishman, see Frank Callanan, T.M. Healy (Cork, 1996) and, for a scepticism of the Irish Parliamentary Party’s alliance with the Liberals that O’Hanlon shared (and which acted as an important spur to his standing in the 1907 Jarrow by-election), see James McConnell,‘“Jobbing with Tory and Liberal”: Irish Nationalists and the Politics of Patronage’, Past & Present 108 (August 2005), pp. 105-31. 31 ‘Wallsend Irish National League’, Jarrow Express, 13 November 1896. 32 A.W. Purdue, ‘Jarrow Politics, 1885-1914: The Challenge to Liberal Hegemony’, NH 18 (1982), p. 183.


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During the 1890s O’Hanlon also played a greater role in local government. In 1894 Wallsend became an Urban District Council, and he was elected as the first ‘working man’ to hold council office in the midTyne area.33 He was also a frequent member of the Wallsend School Board during the 1890s and, when Wallsend became a municipal borough in 1899, his election victory was attributed by the Jarrow Express to the disciplined voting of the ‘Irish party’ in the town.34 The culmination of O’Hanlon’s career in local government came in 1913 when he was selected to be mayor of Wallsend.35 The position of mayor, traditionally a non-political and non-sectarian post, came at a difficult time for the Catholic and Nationalist Irish in Wallsend. In the same month that O’Hanlon was appointed mayor the town saw an extraordinary torch-lit procession through the streets of Wallsend in support of Sir Edward Carson’s anti-Home Rule campaign that culminated in a mass rally at Wallsend ice-rink attended by Carson, Bonar Law and 15,000 Unionist sympathisers.36 Days after Carson’s visit O’Hanlon spoke at a pro-Home Rule meeting addressed by Liverpool’s Irish Nationalist MP, T.P. O’Connor.37 His continuing support demonstrates how important the promotion of an Irish political identity on Tyneside was to O’Hanlon, a fact noted by his fellow Irishmen who, in November 1913, collected a testimonial fund to recognise his services to the Irish community and, reflecting the interconnection of Irish and labour politics during O’Hanlon’s career, rewarding also his contribution to the ‘betterment of the social conditions of the people’ of Wallsend.38 The high point of O’Hanlon’s political career, however, was his candidature for the Jarrow by-election in 1907. Jarrow had long been a particular stronghold for the Liberals, being held since the inception of the parliamentary division in 1885 by Sir Charles Mark Palmer, founder of the shipyard on which so much of the town’s prosperity was built.39 At the beginning of 1907, however, Palmer fell ill and announced that he would not 33 34 35 36

Richardson, Wallsend, pp. 383, 385. ‘Wallsend Election: Mr O’Hanlon and Mr Snaith’, Jarrow Express, 31 March 1899. ‘Mayoralty of Wallsend’, Jarrow Express, 10 October 1913. ‘The Ulster Meeting’, Newcastle Weekly Chronicle, 1 November 1913; Donald M. MacRaild, ‘Wherever Orange is Worn: Orangeism and Irish Migration in the 19th and early 20th centuries’, Canadian Journal of Irish Studies 28.2/29.1 (2003/04), p. 111. See also Ronald McNeill, Ulster’s Stand for Union (London: John Murray, 1922) at The Project Gutenberg eBook, http://www.gutenberg.org/files/14326/14326-h/14326-h.htm. 37 ‘Gossip and Criticism’, Jarrow Express, 31 October 1913; ‘Up and Down the River’, Jarrow Express, 7 November 1913. 38 ‘Proposed Testimonial to Ald. O’Hanlon’, Jarrow Express, 23 November 1913. 39 Jubilee Celebrations Committee, The Borough of Jarrow 1875-1925: Jubilee Celebrations, 29 July 1925. Programme of Entertainments and Historical Souvenir issued by the Jubilee Celebrations Committee (Jarrow, n.d.), p. 52. For the election results 1885-1906, see ‘Election Intelligence’, The Times, 4 July 1907.

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seek re-election, prompting the first jockeying for position from prospective candidates.40 Palmer’s subsequent sudden death in June 1907 occasioned a swift by-election, which became an unusual four-cornered contest between Labour, the Liberals, the Unionists and an Irish Nationalist, John O’Hanlon.41 The Labour candidate, Pete Curran, was, like O’Hanlon, a second-generation Irish migrant. Born in Glasgow, he became involved in Trade Union politics and had stood against Palmer at the 1906 general election.42 It was, however, the diversity of electoral forces pitted against Labour that stirred nationwide interest in the Jarrow by-election. Not only was a Unionist candidate standing, the first time a Conservative or Liberal Unionist had contested the seat, but the election witnessed one of the few occasions in which an Irish Nationalist fought in an English constituency.43 Why did O’Hanlon choose this opportunity to stand for election as an Irish Nationalist? As arguably the most prominent Irish man in the mid-Tyne region, the Jarrow by-election in 1907 presented a unique opportunity to apply the electoral strength of the local Irish to a national contest. The immediate context for O’Hanlon’s candidature was the widespread Irish Nationalist disappointment with the Irish Council Bill in May 1907.44 This bill was proposed by the Liberal government as a moderate measure of home rule for Ireland.Yet the bill’s equivocal nature in the end suited no one and was rejected by the Irish Parliamentary Party.45 It was in this mood of antigovernment defiance that O’Hanlon was put forward by the local United Irish League to stand for election in Jarrow as an Irish Nationalist. At the opening campaign meeting one of his election team outlined why O’Hanlon was standing: One of the reasons why those responsible for the candidature of Ald. O’Hanlon were taking that stand was as a protest against the Irish Bill brought forward by the Government. They had supported the 40 41 42 43

‘Local Gossip’, Jarrow Guardian, 3 May 1907. Purdue, ‘Jarrow Politics’, pp. 195, 197. ‘Election Intelligence’, The Times, 6 July 1907. Purdue,‘Jarrow Politics’, p. 196;T.P. O’Connor held the Scotland division of Liverpool as an Irish Nationalist MP for 44 years after his election in 1885, but his was the exception that proved the largely ineffectual nature of Irish electoral efforts in England and Scotland. See David Fitzpatrick, ‘A Curious Middle Place: The Irish in Britain, 1871-1921’, The Irish in Britain 1815-1939, ed. Roger Swift and Sheridan Gilley (London, 1989), p. 39. 44 The Times, 8 May 1907. For details of the bill, see Alan J. Ward, The Irish Constitutional Tradition: Responsible Government and Modern Ireland, 1782-1992 (Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University Press, 1994), pp. 89-90. 45 An unwitting consequence of the failed Irish Council bill was the first electoral outing for the Sinn Féin party in Ireland. The Irish parliamentary party MP for North Leitrim, C.J. Dolan, lost faith with the party as a convincing political force after their failure to influence the nature and content of the bill, which led him to stand as a Sinn Féin MP at the beginning of 1908. O’Hanlon’s campaign in Jarrow may be seen as the corollary of Dolan’s stand in North Leitrim. See Alvin Jackson, Home Rule:An Irish History 1800-2000 (London, 2004), p. 116.


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Government during the last twenty years in the country and in the House of Commons both with their voice and purse. After all their labour, all their loyalty, the Government had introduced the most deformed creature that could possibly be conceived, a constitutional cripple.46

The size of the potential vote that O’Hanlon aimed to mobilise is hard to measure. The Times’ ‘Election Intelligence’ column estimated that the Irish vote would come to approximately 3,000 people, of whom around 80% would vote for him.47 Commenting on the complexities that O’Hanlon’s candidature introduced to the contest, the Jarrow Guardian predicted that ‘the Catholic vote will go solidly for O’Hanlon there is no question’ and estimated that the size of the Irish or Catholic vote was somewhere between 2,000 and 4,000.48 Indeed, since the 1880s an identifiable Catholic party (a term elided with ‘Irish’ in the local press) emerged to contest local elections for the Jarrow council, school board and board of guardians, and it is certain that O’Hanlon would have had a solid bloc to call upon.49 O’Hanlon’s candidature may also be considered in the wider context of the politics of the Irish in Britain. The United Irish League of Great Britain was formed in 1900 by T.P. O’Connor to maximise the electoral potential of the Irish voters in British constituencies.50 What influence Irish voters actually had is hard to gauge, but certainly O’Connor would have claimed that Irish support assisted the Liberal party election victories at the beginning of the twentieth century.51 In a speech in support of O’Hanlon,T.P. O’Connor suggested that the Jarrow by-election ‘opened a new chapter in the Irish movement … to show there was an Irish race in England as well as in America’ and that there was the electoral potential, with an estimated two million Irish voters, for the Irish nationalists to hold up to twenty-six seats in parliament.52 The Jarrow campaign was, in other words, an attempt by the Irish Nationalists in Britain to remind the Liberal party of their potential influence in British electoral politics. Despite these initial discussions concerning the mobilisation of the local Irish vote in protest against the Irish Council Bill, O’Hanlon did not stand solely on a platform of Irish nationalism, but instead appealed to the 46 47 48 49

‘The Jarrow Bye-Election [sic]’, Jarrow Guardian, 21 June 1907. ‘Election Intelligence’, The Times, 15 June 1907. ‘The Local Political Outlook’, Jarrow Guardian, 14 June 1907. For press comment on the emergence of an Irish/Catholic party in local Jarrow politics see, ‘What would the Irish do?’, Jarrow Express, 20 November 1885 and ‘Gossip and Criticism’, Jarrow Express, 4 November 1898. See also D.A.J. MacPherson,‘Riots, Religion and Politics: The Irish in the Mid-Tyne Basin, 1851-1901’, paper presented at University of Sunderland and Tyneside Irish Conference, ‘The Word, the Icon, and the Ritual’, 14 November 2004. 50 Alan O’Day, ‘Irish Diaspora Politics in Perspective: The United Irish Leagues of Great Britain and America, 1900-14’, Great Famine and Beyond, ed. MacRaild, pp. 224-7. 51 Ibid., p. 226. 52 ‘The Nationalist-Labour Candidate Adopted’, Jarrow Guardian, 14 June 1907.

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working-class voters of the division to support him as the true champion of the labour interest. As soon as campaigning began in earnest he sought to convince the Jarrow voters of his working-class credentials.T.P. O’Connor, the Irish Nationalist MP for the Scotland division of Liverpool, visited Jarrow to offer his support, and stressed that the real labour candidate was in fact O’Hanlon:‘Talk of a labour candidate … here was a man who had his workman’s garb on that day, when he was approached by the Irish people of Jarrow with the honourable demand and request to take off his workman’s coat and lay down his tools.’53 O’Connor concluded with a gibe at the actual Labour Party candidate, Pete Curran, arguing that the Jarrow electors should ‘choose a labour man of their own [O’Hanlon] and not a labour man from somewhere else’.54 Curran was ‘a carpet-bagger’ who had relinquished hard manual labour for an easier life as a professional trade unionist.55 According to The Times, O’Hanlon had some success, at least in the campaign, in convincing working men ‘who are neither Catholics nor Irishmen’ that he was ‘sound on Labour questions’ and that he was ‘well received in the colliery villages, where he did not anticipate much support’.56 Indeed, O’Hanlon’s campaign attempted to claim that the emancipation of the working class was dependent upon the success of Home Rule. John Redmond, the leader of the Irish Parliamentary Party, spoke energetically at the final campaign rally, stressing the importance of O’Hanlon’s candidature to the well-being of working men: ‘Home Rule was as vital to England as to Ireland. The congestion of business in the House of Commons was a perpetual block to the passing of social reforms to the benefit of the people of England.’57 Redmond’s claim was that the introduction of a home rule bill in parliament would precipitate a final showdown with the House of Lords, and the Lords’ defeat would end their obstruction of wider social reforms.58 Yet Redmond’s argument failed to reflect the tensions between Labour and Irish voters. The Labour Leader commented on the ‘difficult’ relations between the two parties, and reminded T.P. O’Connor of his reliance on ‘the British trade unionist in the Scotland division of Liverpool’.59 The Dublin Trades Council, rather surprisingly, threw their support behind the Labour candidate, Pete 53 54 55 56

Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. ‘Election Intelligence’, The Times, 25 June 1907; ‘Election Intelligence’, The Times, 22 June 1907. 57 ‘Election Intelligence’, The Times, 1 July 1907. For Redmond’s involvement in Irish politics in the diaspora, see Malcolm Campbell, ‘John Redmond and the Irish National League in Australia and New Zealand, 1883’, History 86, No. 283 (2001), pp. 348-62. 58 Fielding has pointed out the importance of this argument that Irish and working men’s interests were congruent during the campaign for the third Home Rule bill from 1910 onwards, Fielding, Class and Ethnicity, pp. 98-100. 59 Quoted in ‘Election Intelligence’, 15 June 1907.


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Curran, describing O’Hanlon’s campaign as ‘a compromise between Redmond and Bannerman to spoil the Labour vote in Jarrow’ and as ‘an attempt by Mr. Redmond to divert attention from Ireland to the Tyneside’.60 The competing claims on Irish voters in Britain were reflected in the election results, with O’Hanlon polling a respectable 2,122 votes, but coming last behind the other candidates.61 He won 15% of the vote, but lagged far behind the winner, Pete Curran, who polled over a third.Yet the result must have disappointed O’Hanlon, as his votes fell several hundred short of The Times’ predicted result.62 The 1907 Jarrow by-election, then, illustrates most clearly the failure of a hybrid Tyneside Irish identity to appeal to both Irish and working-class electors. John O’Hanlon had failed to convince the working men of Jarrow that he was ‘one of them’ and a better representative of their interests than the Labour candidate. Equally, he had also fallen short of persuading all of the Jarrow Irish to support his Irish Nationalist platform, and several hundred of them had felt that their interests were more firmly aligned with those of the Labour Party. His illfated campaign also suggests, as we shall see below in the case of Chris Mullard during the 1960s and 1970s, that Tyneside proved to be a difficult arena in which to relate ethnic identity and politics to issues of locality and region. Black Britain While John O’Hanlon made his name by standing for parliament, Chris Mullard was a community campaigner and writer. Published in spring 1973, his Black Britain was described as the first book published by a Black writer who had been born and raised in the United Kingdom. Its actual and lasting innovation lay more in the consistency with which Mullard argued that the problems of his own generation were different from those faced by its parents, who had first arrived in Britain in the 1940s and 1950s.‘A Black man born in Britain is a shadow of a man’, Mullard wrote, a form but no identity … Even if you wished to you cannot pretend you are a Black immigrant, because embedded in your being is the knowledge that you are not. If you choose to ignore this then it is forced upon you by the way Black immigrants see you, treat you, and react towards you when in the presence of fellow Black immigrants or white people In the end you have no alternative but to remain alone, insecure, without an identity of your own making.63 60 ‘Election Intelligence’, 4 July 1907. 61 The result was P. Curran (Labour) 4,698; P. Rose-Innes (Unionist) 3,930; S.L. Huges (Lib) 3,474; J. O’Hanlon (Nationalist) 2,122. See ‘Result of the Poll’, Jarrow Guardian, 5 July 1907. 62 ‘Election Intelligence’, The Times, 15 June 1907. 63 Mullard, Black Britain, pp. 13-14.

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Chris Mullard was the first full-time race relations official employed in the region. As such, Mullard’s story belongs to a longer tradition of black self-organisation. Early black-run groups included the West Indian Standing Conference and the Campaign Against Racial Discrimination (CARD). Darcus Howe was an early supporter of CARD: ‘It had a huge but rather simple demand: racial prejudice had to be outlawed. The opposition ranged from sections of Harold Wilson’s Labour Party to almost the entire Conservative Party.’64 Up until the mid 1960s, however, the tone of the organisations remained moderate, with elderly businessmen still to the fore. By the late 1970s younger black and Asian people, the second generation, did not share their parents’ automatic sympathy with British democracy or justice.Tariq Mehmood’s novel, Hand on the Sun, describes a cycle of official racism from the early 1970s onwards, in which every authority worked together to keep young blacks and Asians down. One result was a conflict among generations of migrants. In Hand on the Sun, this struggle is represented by the arguments between Jalib and his father. Jalib is attacked by racist thugs at school and at home. He finds it almost impossible to hold down steady work. He had no understanding of the conditions back home which forced his father to leave Pakistan, such as debt or the poverty of rural life. Jalib’s father can no more understand why his son is so determined to pick fights or to get into trouble with the police. Incomprehension is mutual.65 Moving to Newcastle in 1967, Chris Mullard worked briefly as a bus conductor. Later surveys of the north-east bus companies showed that black bus workers were frequently concentrated in the very lowest grades.66 Mullard established an office at his home on Tyneside. He began to act as a one-man black advocate. He came to the notice of the regional press in spring 1968.The Conservative politician Enoch Powell had begun to tour the country, expressing a vehement opposition to migration and to black migrants. Mullard attempted to organise an anti-racist demonstration through central Newcastle. In London, at the start of May, fighting took place between Powellite dockers and anti-racist students.67 Students also heckled a pro-Powell MP in Warwick.68 The Newcastle march was called to highlight the danger of Powellism, and to resist it spreading northwards. The Newcastle papers took an attitude of sustained hostility to the march, warning of violence, and instructing their readers not to attend. The hints of rumours were reported as if they were facts, and little attempt was made to compare hostile comment against any favourable view. 64 65 66 67 68

D. Howe,‘On the race issue, all have made asses of themselves’, New Statesman, 30 April 2001. T. Mehmood, Hand on the Sun (Harmondsworth, 1983). ‘Race board hits at landlords’, Evening Chronicle, 25 September 1975. ‘Dockers versus students: the big punch-up’, Journal, 2 May 1968. ‘MP’s Wife is trampled in student riot’, The Times, 4 May 1968.


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On 7 May, for example, the Journal claimed that the event lacked any backing from the various local communities. Reference was made to the Council’s Working Group on Immigration,69 whose members were asked to disassociate themselves from the expected trouble. ‘The Sikh representative, Dr. Naru, said that his community did not support the march, for many of them felt it would cause prejudice among members of the white community. Similar sentiments were expressed by Mrs. Saeeda on behalf of the Pakistani community.’ Even one of Mullard’s allies, John Rafferty, opposed the May demonstration, as pressure from the police, the council and the press told.70 On 11 May, the day of the planned demonstration, the Journal reported the warnings of the police that the march should not be allowed to happen.‘Marchers, fans told to “cool it”’. The police had apparently checked in the calendars and learned that this Saturday march was due to take place on a match day. Twenty thousand Manchester City fans were expected in the city.‘A meeting of the two may lead to rowdyism.’ Attempts by the police to have the march banned or cancelled were reported as if the authorities had been sympathetic to the marchers’ goals,‘Last minute attempts by prominent Newcastle moderates to halt the demonstration failed.’71 The procession ran from Elswick Road to Town Moor. Around two hundred people joined in.72 Chris Mullard was identified in the press as the main organiser.There were no clashes with the police or with football fans from Manchester (we may understand why the press had assumed the hostility of the former, but why should the latter have challenged an antiracist protest?).The event was entirely peaceful.73 Jimmy Murray, the union convenor from Vickers Armstrong, spoke from the platform. He attacked Powell for encouraging a vile atmosphere of racism. He even joked at Powell’s expense,‘And he looks like a South Shields White Arab himself.’74 In the aftermath of the protest the post of Community Relations officer at the Newcastle CRC was advertised. Perhaps surprisingly, Mullard was appointed to the vacancy.At this point the most useful source becomes his own memories of the period. Various worthies had been offended by Mullard’s appointment. They responded by petitioning the national Community Relations Council in London, which then withdrew 69 The minutes of a ‘Special Committee as to Commonwealth Immigrants’ (the name went through various changes) are held at TWAS, MD/NC/149. 70 On the day of the march, and with the calls for a ban growing, Rafferty was quoted as saying ‘CARD now have a wonderful opportunity to lift themselves out of the realm of protest movements and act in an authoritative and statesmanlike manner.’ See ‘Marchers, fans told to “cool it”’, Journal, 11 May 1968. 71 Ibid. 72 Ibid., 13 May 1968. 73 J.H.Taylor, The Half-way Generation: A Study of Asian Youths in Newcastle upon Tyne (Windsor, 1976), p. 55. 74 Interview with David Byrne, 11 March 2003.

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funding from its north-east offshoot. Over the period of his appointment the local CRC’s debts continued to rise, reaching £3,000 by January 1973.75 According to Mullard, Councillor Gray disliked me. He was a Conservative and head of Newcastle Council at this time. I was a Black Marxist.76 My theoretical concepts tended to see everything in terms of the class struggle, with black issues as a large part of it.The world was divided into white and black, the haves and the have-nots. Councillor Bennie Abrahams disliked me. He was in the Labour Party. Abrahams was a local businessman and in control of race relations in the North East. I was twenty-four, far too young for the post. My appointment produced side issues, towards the idea of profession. In life, you have to climb up ladders, but here was some Young Turk, suddenly in charge of Community Relations. I was challenging relationships of age and authority, ties that go deep in the North East. Luckily, coming out of the streets, I didn’t have to learn any cynicism about liberalism.77

Mullard was subject to repeated challenge. In June 1969 Harash Naray of the Indian Forum walked out of meetings of the Newcastle CRC, in protest against his personal style.78 That September the Hindu Temple also resigned from the CRC, explaining their differences with Mullard in a letter to the city councillors.79 In March 1970 the Journal reported on clashes between the CRC in Newcastle and the London body. Mullard was invited to explain why he thought the authorities were hostile to him. He felt the explanation lay in his acknowledged militancy,‘I believe that in some cases the only way to achieve one’s aim is by revolution.’80 Again and again Mullard spoke out against the Northumbria police’s failure to investigate racial harassment. ‘It has reached the stage where immigrants go to police stations in groups of four or five or six,’ he said,‘out of fear that they will be pushed around. These fears are largely unfounded but they exist.’81 In February 1971 the press asked Mullard to comment on the government’s anti-immigration bill. Comparing the Conservatives to the far right, Mullard described Heath’s cabinet as ‘this Colin Jordan government’. He also suggested that ‘this Bill is the last step the Government can take before a Deportation Order Bill’.82 With such comments Mullard antagonised two groups in particular. The first were prominent Indian businessmen and local politicians of Indian or Pakistani descent.There were 75 ‘Race board in cash crisis’, Journal, 25 January 1973. 76 C.J. Robinson, Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition (Chapel Hill and London, 2000). 77 Interview with Chris Mullard, 9 June 2004. 78 E. Forster, ‘The Indian “Mutiny”’, Evening Chronicle, 11 June 1969. 79 ‘Hindus quit in donation dispute’, Journal, 30 September 1969. 80 ‘Man at the crossroads’, Journal, 21 March 1970. 81 ‘Immigrants in City fear police, says community relations chief ’, Evening Chronicle, 14 March 1970. 82 ‘This Colin Jordan government’, Journal, 26 February 1971.


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clashes of style, generation and politics.As the head of the Newcastle CRC, Mullard was charged with representing all minority ethnic groups in the city.Yet some issues and networks came more easily to him than others.The second group of consistent critics were town councillors, including Bennie Abrahams. Here the criticism was that, in adopting a militant politics of antiracism, Mullard threatened to bring the city into disrepute. His opponents claimed that Mullard was using the post as a platform for black militancy, rather than adopting the correct community relations approach. Mullard’s period of office was marked by constant controversy: he was quoted regularly in the local papers. His opponents were well publicised too. The financial difficulties were there for everyone to see. His final departure was in fact his third publicised resignation. Not surprisingly, the message of his book Black Britain is of determined opposition to incorporation: black radicalism should remain free of ties to the state. If they get involved, he warned, the most likely outcome would be frustration.Why then did Mullard agree to work for a government-funded Community Relations Council? ‘The CRC’, he argues today, was a massive effort on the part of the state to undermine the mass movement. The British reacted to that anger and organisation, to buy off the leadership.They offered status and salaries. But I was a bit smarter than most of my colleagues who worked in the Community Relations Councils. I believed we could use the structures to deliver radical objectives. Sometimes you have to use the discourses in order to effect the change. My activism required a different kind of knowledge.We could not deliver from on the street. We lacked knowledge of bureaucratic organisation. How do they deliver management and control? How do they place limits on the struggle? We needed to get closer to that.Also, I needed a job! I was writing a bit, but it hardly paid for the bedsit. I did need work. That’s why I knew the power of buying off a radical. It’s a powerful thing.83

Demography was simultaneously a barrier and an asset: depriving him of friends, but also making it harder for his opponents to rally around any alternative figure. My base was narrow. Caribbean people saw me as Caribbean, but I wasn’t. I had been born here. I was outside the immigrant communities. The number of African Caribbeans anyway was just in the low hundreds, in the whole North East. Asian people wanted an Asian person involved in leading the organisation. But the politics of ethnicity worked against that. There were large Muslim, Sikh and Hindu communities, if any one had been appointed from any of these groups, the other two would have complained. I had no allegiance to any of the groups. That helped to neutralise opposition. And who else would they appoint?84 83 Interview with Chris Mullard, 9 June 2004. 84 Ibid.

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Mullard remained in post, attempting to clear the CRC’s debts.The start of April saw the publication of his Black Britain, which contained strong criticism of the police, immigration law and the community relations model. Following further criticism, in September 1973 he quit the post for good. Community Leadership and Regional Identity The importance of the 1907 Jarrow by-election campaign goes beyond its demonstration of various aspects of Irish politics at the beginning of the twentieth century. As a leader of the Irish community in the mid-Tyne locality, O’Hanlon stands out in comparison to other leaders of the Irish in Britain and his self-identification as a working man suggests a distinctive mode of leadership in this particular part of the North East. Indeed, the mid-Tyne Irish for many years organised themselves separately from the rest of the north-eastern and northern England Irish because of an antipathy towards the northern England organiser of the United Irish League, Owen Kiernan.85 In turn, O’Hanlon’s leadership supports the idea that the mid-Tyne basin was a distinctive locality in itself within the north-east region. The associational activity of the Irish in the mid Tyne helped reinforce the notion of a contiguous locality distinct from the rest of Tyneside through their cross-Tyne organisations and, indeed, in O’Hanlon’s working and political life. Several features of his career suggest a possibility of an ethnically-shaped Tyneside identity. During his election campaign in 1907 he portrayed himself not just as a working man, but as a Tyneside Irishman, appealing to the voters on the basis of his identification with ‘the canny toon’ of Jarrow.86 Moving a vote of confidence in O’Hanlon’s campaign, Councillor Treanor, another prominent local Irish politician, argued that what Jarrow wanted was ‘a Tyneside man for Tyneside, and he [O’Hanlon] was an Irishman, that was not his misfortune, but his glory’.87 Here we see an explicit identification of an ethnically-shaped local identity. O’Hanlon was a Tyneside Irishman who, as a second-generation migrant, embodied the hybrid identity of being both a Tyneside worker and an Irish man. His election appeal to the labour interest illustrates the extent to which a Tyneside identity was based upon the conditions of its workforce, and suggests a gendered sense in which ‘hard men doing hard work’ shaped a distinctive Tyneside identity.88 The national profile of the Jarrow by-election meant that O’Hanlon projected this Tyneside Irish identity on a wider stage, just as the Tyneside Irish regiment formed during the Great War suggests a localised sense of 85 86 87 88

‘Local Gossip’, Jarrow Guardian, 1 February 1907. ‘Election Reflections’, Jarrow Guardian, 21 June 1907. Ibid. See Elaine Knox, ‘Keep Your Feet Still, Geordie Hinnie’, Geordies: Roots of Regionalism, ed. Robert Colls and Bill Lancaster (Edinburgh, 1992, repr. Newcastle 2005), pp. 92-112.


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ethnic identity.89 Yet O’Hanlon’s electoral failure indicates that a Tyneside Irish identity had limited attractions and that his efforts to appeal beyond his ethnic categorisation to a sense of Tyneside localism pleased neither the Irish nor the working men (nor, indeed, the Irish working men) of Jarrow. For O’Hanlon, his campaign occurred at a time when Irish politics was beginning to lose its hold on the Irish who had come to Britain. His rhetoric during the Jarrow by-election of 1907 reveals a complex negotiation between ethnic and local politics in which, at least in the eyes of the electorate, O’Hanlon’s Irishness undercut his commitment to the working men of Tyneside.90 His attempt to utilise Tyneside localism may be seen, then, as an early effort in the making of a self-conscious north-east identity that enjoyed greater success in the century to come. Writing in 1932 at a mid-point between O’Hanlon and Mullard’s campaigns, Jack Lawson, MP for Chester-le-Street, described County Durham as ‘a sort of social melting-pot ... its population consist[s] of people from every part of the British Isles ... all boasting they [a]re Durham men, though their parents ha[ve] the accent of the distant place of their birth.’91 Lawson’s intention was positive, but the negative mirror of such a history is the implied view that regional and migrant consciousness are incompatible. This second idea, the darker underside of Lawson’s, is that migration can undermine traditional communities, or that it can disrupt existing local or regional cultures and identities. A third approach is to hold that the modern sense of regional identity is related to a reduction in the intense population mobility associated with industrialisation and modernisation in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.When migrant populations settle and lose the identities brought with them, they find a new identity with the place in which they have settled. This latter is Jack Lawson’s ‘melting-pot’ revisited, but with the timescale considerably extended: a regional experience is created but in three rather than one or two generations. The contrast between any of these approaches and those adopted by O’Hanlon or Mullard is that our historical protagonists saw a much greater role for the host to adapt to the migrant. This indeed was the function of community leadership: not to change the Tyneside Irish in 1907 or the black population of the region sixty years later, but to alter the 89 For discussion of the hybrid nature of the identity of the Irish in Britain, albeit it in the context of late twentieth-century female migration, see Breda Gray, ‘Gendering the Irish Diaspora: Questions of Enrichment, Hybridisation, and Return’, Women’s Studies International Forum 23.2 (2000), pp. 167-85. For the Tyneside Irish regiment see ‘Irishmen for the Battle Line’, Newcastle Daily Chronicle, 30 October 1914; and Keating,‘Tyneside Irish Brigade’. 90 For the political ‘ethnic fade’ experienced by the Irish in Britain at the beginning of the twentieth century, see O’Day, ‘Irish Diaspora Politics in Perspective’. 91 J. Lawson, A Man’s Life (London, 1944 edn), p. 36.

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white majority. In O’Hanlon’s case the emphasis was on the capacity of the host to adopt an Irish perspective: it was on the basis that he asked for their votes. Mullard’s role was to criticise the majority when it proved intransigent. Chris Mullard’s story, like John O’Hanlon’s, shows the extent to which migrant leadership was built in relationship to established, ‘host’ populations. But his approach to the creation of hybridity was highly ambiguous. Interviewed in 2004, he described himself as having actively rejected the regional consciousness of the majority: ‘We were taking smugness off the body of the north east.’ Mullard criticised the idea that just because the region had, in South Shields, one of the oldest of Britain’s black communities, so it was necessarily protected from the virus of racism. He also criticised the idea that regional history must culminate in the creation of an elected assembly. This story he distrusted because it seemed to write conflict out of history; whereas conflict had to be acknowledged if it could be overcome. He portrayed his present-day analysis as consistent with his former views:‘We deconstructed notions of Geordyism and North Eastism, repackaging them in terms of antiracism.’92 Perhaps the most striking aspect of his work is the extent to which Mullard drew not just on black support, but also on white allies. Indeed Mullard’s supporters came from the ranks of those who have formed north-east opinion over the past three decades. Brian Roycroft was the head of Newcastle Social Services. He began to deliver support from within the council.93 Gordon Squires was the Head of Education, then Director of Housing.All the problems of housing in the West End, all came to us. I became friendly with Mike Neville, the anchorman for BBC News in the North East.94 Michael Partington played a similar role at Tyne Tees. I set up a supporters’ club, for people who wanted to contribute to the work of the CRC. Geoff Ridden was the deputy editor of the Chronicle. I invited him to edit the CRC newspaper, Gambit. Soon, we had a professional newspaper.The Chronicle even agreed to print it for us off their presses, for free.95

The list goes on: John Rafferty started as a traditional labour man, a Clause IV socialist. He became the party agent for Gordon Bagier MP.96 Then he was Secretary of the Newcastle Council of Social Services. The Chair of the Council of 92 Interview with Chris Mullard, 9 June 2004. 93 Brian Roycroft was the Director of Newcastle Social Services from 1971 to 1993. See T. Philpot, ‘Brian Roycroft: Charismatic social services director with a passion for justice’, The Guardian, 31 May 2002. 94 He now works for North East Tonight. 95 Interview with Chris Mullard, 9 June 2004. 96 Bagier became the MP for Sunderland South in February 1974.


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Social Services was Richard Harbottle. He was very different, more of a Liberal Tory in the Heath tradition. He became a Chartered Accountant, I don’t know why, after reading History at University. Richard was at Trinity Hall, where his best friend was a Trinidadian, Reggie Duma. He spent time with this sort of crowd. He had an extraordinary sense of injustice. Jeremy Beecham was my age then, he had just become a Labour councillor. Later he became leader of Newcastle council. His consciousness became infected by what we were doing.97

Mullard’s politics has had its influence, then, not just on black traditions, but also as a warning taken up by parts of the white majority, and has been effective in ensuring the growing commitment of the latter to a clear antiracist politics. In this process, the politics of previous activists such as O’Hanlon has also been vindicated. These two case studies show that in the face of a strong ethnic or racial identity or conflict, regional or local identity is a weak force. O’Hanlon failed to convince his electorate either as an Irishman or as a working man that he was best placed to represent it. Mullard, from a more radical standpoint, rejected ‘north-eastism’ as inimical to racial equality. O’Hanlon failed to square the circle; Mullard never sought to do so.When tested in the crucible of racial and ethnic heat, twentieth-century regional identity was revealed to be brittle.

97 Interview with Chris Mullard, 9 June 2004.

8 Regionalism and Cultural History: The Case of North-Eastern England, 1918-1976 NATASHA VALL Regional cultural historians operate in a climate of a ‘new’ territorial politics in which the dangers of history as advocacy are likely to be felt more keenly in regional studies than elsewhere.1 Present-day regionalists in the North East have long argued for the strength of the relationship between territory and a shared culture, and evidence of a cultural geography of belonging continues to be central to the characterisation of north-eastern England as distanced from the national heartland.2 Recently this claim has been anchored in discussions of European regionalism as mobilised by the alleged declining significance of nation-states and national cultures.3 Additionally, since the 1980s a process of place marketing, characterised by the sale of cultural particularity and associated with the new urban and regional regeneration strategies across Europe, has further informed the question of regions.4 This chapter contextualises the claims of contemporary regionalism through an assessment of contemporary cultural practices including radio, television and cultural policy. Its particular concern is with the relationship between the media infrastructure in north-eastern England and the kind of ‘North East’ that was represented during the twentieth century. In the modern period the contribution of broadcasting and cultural policy to making meaning in the cultural arena has been widely acknowledged. Despite Asa Briggs’s early claim that broadcasting regions 1

2 3 4

Keith Snell, for instance, has noted the critical neglect of the regional imaginations of writers such as Scott, the Brontës, Hardy and Lawrence, and attributed it to the fear that territorial political attachment may compromise objective scholarship. Keith Snell, ‘The Regional Novel: Themes for Interdisciplinary Research’, The Regional Novel in Britain and Ireland 1800-1900, ed. K. Snell (Cambridge, 1998), pp. 1-53. See above pp. 1-2 for a discussion of contemporary advocates for the region’s cultural particularity. M. Keating, ‘Rethinking the Region: Culture, Institutions and Economic Development in Catalonia and Galicia’, European Urban and Regional Studies 8 (2001), pp. 217-34. P. Sjohlt, ‘Culture as a Strategic Development Device: The Role of “European Cities of Culture” with Particular Reference to Bergen’, European Urban and Regional Studies 6 (1999), pp. 339-47; C. Philo and G. Kearns, Selling Places (Oxford 1993).

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would feature strongly in the future of regional culture in England, there remains little understanding of how new communicative processes were played out in the regional arena. Evaluating the new cultural institutions can be useful in pinpointing some of the conceptual difficulties of regional history. Although the regional radio and television stations, alongside the new regional arts associations, used the descriptor ‘North East’ to refer to the territory, broadcasts, activities and audiences under their remit, each institution’s boundary was subject to separate or conflicting considerations. For broadcasting, the technology of transmitters and wavelengths often dictated the territorial perimeter, whilst the North East Association for the Arts adopted administrative financial boundaries. Such discrepancies remind us of the difficulties that may arise if we assume that ‘regional identity’ is present in twentieth-century north-eastern England, awaiting discovery in cultural practice.As Paasi has written, this may result in accounts that either reinforce or essentialise aspects of regional identity, or that confuse the ‘identity of the region’, which he suggests is given expression by institutional practice, with ‘regional consciousness’.5 This insight recalls Colls’ observation that the modern North East is ‘someone else’s category error, which, nonetheless, has lived to find real meaning’.6 The ensuing discussion is concerned with the ‘North East’ that was represented through institutional practice, but this is not to say that such representations were equivalent to regional identity itself. The issue of overlapping or conflicting institutional boundaries is therefore of interest chiefly because it may help us understand the way in which the regional construct has found meaning in popular culture.7 Both Aronsson and Walton have suggested that influence over the ‘regional narrative’ may be achieved when cultural representations of territory spread from bureaucratic or official to popular practice.8 Whilst this would appear to bear out Paasi’s argument for the constitution of regions in institutional practice, it remains important to note reaction against the use of the regional descriptor by audiences and consumers of the media and cultural policy in the region. For although recent developments in cultural geography may guard against the dangers of regional history as advocacy, 5 6 7 8

A. Paasi, ‘Region and Place: Regional Identity in Question’, Progress in Human Geography 26.4 (2003), p. 480. R. Colls, ‘Cookson, Chaplin, Common: Three Northern Writers in 1951’, Regional Novel, ed. Snell, p. 198. This ambition cannot be realised fully in this chapter, but is dealt with at length in the forthcoming N.Vall, Polishing the Pitmen:A Cultural History of North-East England since 1918. P. Aronsson, ‘The Old Cultural Regionalism and the New’, Regions and Regionalism: An Agenda for Regional History, ed. B. Lancaster, D.R. Newman and N.Vall (Newcastle, 2007), forthcoming; J.Walton, ‘Imagining Regions in Comparative Perspective:The Strange Birth of North West England’, Regions and Regionalism, ed. Lancaster, Newton and Vall, forthcoming.

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they tell us less about how the concept of the region, as constituted in institutional practice such as broadcasting, has been acknowledged and reproduced in day-to-day existence.9 This account begins with the launch of the ‘Regional Scheme’ for BBC Radio during the interwar years, which highlights the part played by competing or overlapping cultural identities in the representation of regional culture. This is followed by reflections on the contribution of popular television to the predominance of mining and the legend of hardship in the visual representation of north-eastern culture.The chapter ends with an account of cultural politics during the 1960s and the work of Northern Arts, an organisation that tried and failed to dispel the ‘myth’ of north-eastern England as ‘consisting of slag heaps and … hearty barbarians’.10 Radio in the North East, 1929-1959 For much of the twentieth century radio broadcasting remained steeped in the language of public service. From its inception during the 1920s radio was defined by the state as a national service to operate in the public interest.11 This historical context does not readily invite regional perspectives, but the transition in 1929 from ‘local’ to ‘regional’ radio under the aegis of the BBC’s Regional Scheme permits consideration of the impact upon local and regional culture of an externally imposed framework. This scheme was prompted by an international hunt for new wavelengths following the Prague Treaty and resulted in the closure of the Newcastle radio station as an independent broadcaster, securing its operation as a subsidiary of Manchester from 1929. An initial report by the chief engineer had recorded that many listeners in north-eastern England were beyond the range of the Huddersfield transmitter, and proposed that ‘the ideal solution would be a north eastern region separate from the northern region’. But the ‘accession of Newcastle’ to Manchester took place swiftly with little opposition other than from ‘a small group of local enthusiasts’ clamouring for their right to make programmes in northeastern England.12 The relative indifference to the closure of independent broadcasting facilities is explained in part by the poor quality of reception from both local and regional transmitters.13 This is reflected in figures for 9 10 11 12 13

B. Deacon,‘Under Construction: Culture and Regional Formation in South West England’, European Urban and Regional Studies 11 (2004), p. 223. The Economist, 13 October 1962. P. Scannell and D. Cardiff, eds, A Social History of British Broadcasting.Vol. I: 1922-1939, Serving the Nation (Oxford, 1991), p. 6. BBC,WAC, R53/213/1, Report of the Proposed Regional Scheme by the Chief Engineer (1929). Asa Briggs, The History of Broadcasting in the United Kingdom, Vol. II: The Golden Age of the Wireless (Oxford, 1965), p. 319.

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licence holders: in 1936 70% of households in Northumberland, where transmission from the Newcastle station was good, held radio licences. In County Durham, by contrast, only 34% of households held radio licences, the lowest level in England.14 Whilst the closure of the Newcastle station did not meet with overt resistance, the launch of the Regional Scheme did prompt demand for more ‘national programmes’. In 1932 one local newspaper published a letter from a north-eastern listener expressing preference for national music programmes over the ‘tin can’ Manchester-based northern orchestra.15 Resentment at the imposition of Manchester programmes also suggests that there may have been limited opportunity for local output within the huge broadcasting ‘Northern Region’.16 During the 1930s discussions surrounding the opening of a new north-eastern transmitter near Corbridge in Northumberland and a subsidiary in Moorside Edge, County Durham, reveal the reluctance to permit local freedom within the North Region. Despite acknowledging that ‘Northumbria and the surrounding counties have strongly independent cultural characteristics’, North Region Director Edward Liveing dismissed the suggestion by north-eastern broadcasters that the two new transmitters adopt the names of the ancient kingdoms of Bernicia and Deira and that the programmes they radiated be known as the ‘North Regional Programme’.17 Instead the broadcasts from the new transmitters were to operate under the less auspicious title of ‘Stagshaw programme’.18 Significantly, during these discussions BBC officials based in either London or Manchester did not refer to ‘the North East’. But the creation of the BBC’s ‘Regional Scheme’ imposed a northern regional framework upon listeners in the North East and this had two distinct outcomes. On the one hand, it prompted listeners to look favourably upon the London-based National Programme and to define themselves against the broadcasts associated with the Manchester-led North. On the other, it provided a catalyst to the emergence of a new breed of broadcasters within the North East intent upon making programmes about north-eastern England, for listeners in north-eastern England (as defined by the areas that were able to access broadcasts from the transmitters at Stagshaw and Moorside Edge). In 1936 Cecil McGivern joined the BBC in Newcastle as a producer and in 1939 was promoted to the newly created post of Programmes Director for the North East.19 Born in Felling in 1907, McGivern had 14 15 16 17 18

Mark Pegg, Broadcasting and Society 1918-1939 (London, 1983), pp. 48, 59. BBC,WAC, Press Cuttings, 1926-32. A. Briggs, ‘Local and Regional in Northern Sound Broadcasting’, NH 10 (1975), p. 180. BBC,WAC, R/361 E. Living BBC Internal Memo September 3rd (1935). BBC, WAC, R45/87, Northern Programme, Provisional Programme Arrangements for Northern and Stagshaw transmitters, January-March (1938). 19 The Times, 6 February 1963.


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been a member of the People’s Theatre in Newcastle during the early 1930s. He went on to become the Television Director of the BBC in 1947, but prior to the outbreak of the Second World War and the cancellation of regional services, as Northern England’s Programmes Director, McGivern presided over the emergence of radio programmes distinguished from earlier features by the use of dialect and by the rootedness in popular culture.The following excerpt is taken from Blaydon Races.A Tale of Geordie Marley by the comic writer Captain Walter Diericx of Newcastle. The sketch was broadcast on the Northern Programme on 9 June 1937: Blaydon Races Announcer:This is the Northern Programme. Here’s a tale about the day the Marleys spent going to the place where the Blaydon Races were run. The famous races that the song was written about were held seventy-five years ago today … Jenny Marley: (after humming concluding bars) Hillo! (Laugh) ah’ll back ye knaa wat the tune is? Ay hinnies, ‘Blaydon Races’ Tyneside’s National Anthem. Did any owlder folk ivor gan te the Blaydon Races? Ah ownly went theor wance, an that was the day the ninth o’ June, an it wes some race an’ all mind ye. Ah’ll tell ye aboot it.20

The expressive idiom of this sketch is deeply rooted in Tyneside culture and assumes that listeners will be able to tap into this comic re-enactment of a nineteenth-century social ritual. This play was broadcast alongside a ‘factual’ feature on the Northumberland Plate, a horse race staged on the Town Moor in Newcastle and the main attraction of Tyneside’s unofficial holiday in the first week of June. Such features assumed that listeners would be familiar with and interested in north-eastern England’s geography of leisure. A testament to the growing command of the representation of north-east culture by broadcasters and publicists based in Newcastle, this genre of radio also adds weight to Lancaster’s suggestion that the changes brought to leisure by electronic developments sustained older cultural forms in the North East.21 On the other hand, the format for Diericx’s sketches, which was crystallised after the Second World War in the celebrated humorous programme Wot Cheor Geordie, was selfconsciously zany and characterised by an emphasis on the performance of social life, both aspects that were to become the hallmarks of national popular radio from the 1940s.22 20 BBC,WAC, Northern Region Scripts,Walter Diericx, Blaydon Races.A Tale of Geordie Marley (1937). 21 B. Lancaster, ‘Sociability in the City’, Newcastle: A Modern History, ed. R. Colls and B. Lancaster (Newcastle, 2001), p. 333. 22 P. Goddard, ‘“Hancock’s Half Hour” A Watershed in British Television Comedy’, Popular Television in Britain, ed. J. Corner (London, 1991), pp. 86-7.

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The interplay of local and national cultural influences which underpinned the emergence of radio broadcasting under the aegis of the BBC’s Regional Scheme was reinforced with the arrival of Richard Kelly as assistant producer at the BBC in Newcastle in 1948. A graduate of Newcastle University, Kelly is often regarded as the architect of a Geordie ‘golden age’ of radio that spanned the 1950s. Wot Cheor Geordie, which began in 1945, possibly earlier, but gathered momentum after 1948, was central to this era. The programme featured plays, songs and sketches broadcast in dialect, and whilst the content and style of programmes had developed in embryo during the 1930s, Kelly was able to capitalise on the BBC’s efforts to increase output from the regional stations after 1945. During this time the North Region was led by John Coatman, a passionate supporter of regional broadcasting, and, as Briggs has observed, with the BBC’s attention diverted by the emergence of commercial television, the regions enjoyed a period of considerable autonomy in sound broadcasting between 1945 and 1955.23 In 1968 Donald Edwards, the newly appointed General Manager of Local Radio Development, spoke of sound broadcasting’s contribution to the ‘amazing cultural revival in the provinces in recent years’.24 Kelly confirmed that the 1950s gave local producers unprecedented freedoms, recalling how ‘there was an atmosphere of “there you are, there’s the region, get on with it”’.25 He exploited these opportunities to the full, introducing comic writers and performers that would become integral to the 1960s ‘cultural revival’ in north-eastern England. He also worked hard to establish the profile of broadcasts such as Wot Cheor Geordie beyond the region. In a BBC publicity file for 1948, the programme was included in the ‘Northern Variety’ category. When the Head of Variety in London wrote to Kelly requesting a recording of Wot Cheor Geordie, Kelly sent the tapes with the assurance that the dialect could be ‘toned down for a wider audience without losing its humour’.26 The universal qualities of Wot Cheor Geordie are readily endorsed by one of the programme’s most prolific contributors. In 1948 Leonard Barras, a clerk at Swan Hunter’s shipyard, sent a sketch for four characters for consideration by Kelly. Quickly accepted, Barras’ humorous sketches were central to the programme during the 1950s. According to Alan Plater, Barras’ early career reflected the autonomy afforded to local radio during the 1950s, which furnished a critical mass of writers working in the 23 Briggs, ‘Northern Sound Broadcasting’, p. 181; Asa Briggs, The History of Broadcasting in the UK,Vol.V: Competition 1955-1974 (Oxford, 1995), p. 624. 24 Ibid. 25 BBC Radio Newcastle, Babies and Broadcasters (Newcastle, 1991), pp. 30-1. 26 This is the North of England Home Service (Manchester, 1948), ed. Richard Jordan, p. 24; BBC, WAC, N53, Richard Kelly Memo to Standing, 29 September 1949.


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region ‘that in turn provided an outlet for new and experimental writing’.27 Barras acknowledges the importance of this development to writing in north-eastern England, but is also sensitive to the question of local autonomy, recalling how Kelly ‘sweated a bit’ under the pressure from Manchester. Kelly later described his time at the BBC in Newcastle as a campaign against the double imperialism of Manchester and London,‘[w]e were little more than a colonial appendage of Manchester, which itself was little more than a colonial appendage of London.’28 Whilst Barras has come to be associated with the evolution of a specific north-eastern drama, in which he is distinguished by his characteristic ‘Geordie surrealism’, he remains reticent about being cast as a ‘regional writer’, I have always resisted the suggestion that I was a ‘Geordie writer’. I have to be a writer who concentrates on writing funny material and if the circumstances require it, I’ll write in Geordie … the best comedy is universal anyway.29

Where, then, did his inspiration come from, if not Geordie popular culture? He began writing after the Second World War with his humorous column in the Sunday Sun, but he also acknowledges developments in national radio during the 1950s, particularly humorous programmes such as Round the Horn and Take it from Here, as important influences for his later work. Commenting on Barras’ surrealism, Alan Plater has nevertheless emphasised that whilst he may not have set out to reflect regional particularity, his work, like that of any writer, metropolitan or otherwise, contains a nuanced range of references which in his case will be more readily appreciated by audiences from the old industrial regions.30 In sharp contrast to Leonard Barras’ pursuit of humour that transcended time and place, the arrival of ‘The Little Waster’ at the BBC in Newcastle during the early 1950s introduced a comic to Wot Cheor Geordie who delighted in his role as north-eastern funny man. By the 1940s Bobby Thompson was an established stand-up comic, performing in workingmen’s clubs and pubs throughout the region. Admired as the spokesman of the working class, a part which he relished, he frequently appeared in character as ‘The Little Waster’ and regaled audiences with tales of wife trouble, debt and the dole. During the early 1950s Richard Kelly orchestrated the rise of Bobby Thompson as a radio star, introducing him first in Wot Cheor Geordie and later providing him with his own show, Bob’s your Uncle. Clearly Kelly believed he had provided north-eastern radio with a considerable asset, 27 Interview with Alan Plater, 10 June 2004. 28 Roger Burgess, Babies and Broadcaster:The Story of 54 New Bridge Street, Newcastle upon Tyne, 1826-1994 (Newcastle, 1994), pp. 30-1. 29 Interview with Leonard Barras, 8 March 2004. 30 Interview with Alan Plater, 10 June 2004.

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I think we have a find in Bobbie Thompson. His style has been compared to that of Al Read and there undoubtedly are certain similarities but it seems clear to me that he has developed his act quite independently of anyone else. I am devoting quite a lot of time to him and my practice is to record his act in the studio here and play it back to him, pointing out faults of tempo, passages of unintelligible dialect etc. He is, incidentally, almost illiterate … Wherever he is understood he brings the house down, which is why I am concentrating on ironing out dialect a little without spoiling the fun.31

Kelly’s role in editing Thompson’s material reiterates the importance, as pinpointed by Snell, of mediators, including broadcasters, to making meaning in the cultural arena during the twentieth century.32 As a standup,Thompson’s appeal was widespread, but before his move to radio there would have been no efforts to edit his material for consumption by live audiences. It is difficult to gauge whether Thompson’s appeal was broadened within north-eastern England as a result of Kelly’s efforts, but, despite the Tyneside bias, Wot Cheor Geordie was apparently enjoyed by listeners in areas of rural Northumberland and County Durham as well as the major conurbations. This underlines the part played by radio in the process whereby elements of popular culture derived on Tyneside became part of a broader north-eastern cultural characterisation after the Second World War, a process that intensified with the arrival of television. Conversely, listener research undertaken outside the North East revealed that audiences found the programme difficult to understand. As one BBC researcher commented, ‘the dialect was troublesome. The humour was of a kind that appeals only to a local,’ referring, presumably, to inhabitants of Northumberland and Durham.33 This view was affirmed in 1951 when, buoyed by the huge success of the programme within north-eastern England – by this time it was regularly enjoying audiences of more than a million – Kelly offered the programme to Scotland. To his surprise the Director of Scottish Programmes rejected the idea on the grounds that ‘much of the content would be incomprehensible to Scottish listeners’.34 Audience research based on the North Regional Section, which included listeners outside the Durham and Northumberland orbit, revealed that the most popular items of Wot Cheor Geordie were the songs sung by the Northumbrian Serenaders and the Willie Walker band, also popular with BBC officials in London.35 31 32 33 34 35

BBC,WAC, N9/53, Memo from Richard Kelly, 21 November 1951. Snell, ‘Regional Novel’, pp. 1-54. Ibid. BBC,WAC, N9/53, Memo from Director of Scottish Programmes, 6 July 1951. BBC, WAC, N9/53 LR/50/621, Listener Research Report, 4 April 1950. These findings nevertheless need to be treated with caution given that the sample used was extremely small.


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Despite his commitment to Thompson and Wot Cheor Geordie, Richard Kelly remained ambiguous about the relationship between regional broadcasting and regional culture. During the 1950s Kelly developed a form of radio documentary known as ‘vox pop’ which used local themes and settings. Although there were precedents, Voice of the People appears to have brought a novel dimension to radio for listeners in north-eastern England. As one broadcaster on Voice of the People recalled, ‘it’s impossible to convey the shock of hearing Geordie accents coming out of the Rediffusion wooden wireless set which had hitherto spoken only the voice of Whitehall and the occasional cockney comic. It was like seeing your granny suddenly reading the news on the telly.’36 Kelly would probably have consented to the programme’s success in harnessing the idioms of ordinary life, but was uncomfortable with its function as a regional voice.37 When the programme name was changed from Voice of the People to Voice of the North Kelly complained, ‘what was wrong with “people” and why it was changed to “North” I still don’t know,’ pointing to the broadcast’s wider importance with the claim that ‘Today started on the same day as Vox Pop … soon our idea of vox-pop was accepted by all other regions, and they started doing it. Not as well as we did mind you.’38 That Kelly appeared to swing between consolidating north-eastern cultural particularity and playing it down in equal measure is explained in part by the marginal position of north-eastern England within the ‘broadcasting North’. As we have seen, the 1940s and 1950s were a time of increased creative autonomy for regional broadcasting, yet the tensions between broadcasting in north-eastern and northern England remained enduring. The Newcastle station lagged behind many of its neighbours due to technical restrictions and the most pressing concern was poor reception. Despite having been equipped with a new transmitter in 1937, the wavelength for Stagshaw continued to be shared with Northern Ireland, prompting one irate listener to write to the Evening Chronicle in 1946 complaining that ‘the North East Region has been neglected ever since the commencement of public service broadcasting in this country’. Coatman in Manchester was sensitive the fact that the ‘failure (or inability) of the BBC to give Stagshaw … to “the people of Newcastle” seemed to suggest that the unity of the North was being taken for granted’.39 This serves to remind of the part played by the advent of radio in the representation of regional culture. On the one hand, radio appeared to furnish a platform for new cultural expression, echoing the way in which 36 J. Walker, ‘How to Rise Invisibly to the Top’, Granada Television: The First Generation, ed. J. Finch, M. Cox and M. Giles (Manchester, 2003), p. 50. 37 P. Scannell, Radio,Television and Modern Life:APhenomenological Approach (Oxford, 1996), p. 74. 38 Evening Chronicle, 1 January 1970. 39 Briggs, ‘Northern Sound Broadcasting’, p. 185.

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music halls were a catalyst to the development of popular music during the nineteenth century.Arguably the oral qualities of Geordie popular culture, which underscored the popularity of music hall, offered similar opportunities to a media that had sound as its anchoring concern. To a degree these opportunities were realised, north-eastern humour and music were immortalised to popular acclaim in the programmes featured in this discussion and both programme-makers and writers confirmed that radio provided a forum for an unprecedented interplay between writers, actors, comedians and musicians.This clearly built on existing cultural forms but, in producing specifically for this new media, this also encouraged the development of new cultural practices. One of the noteworthy consequences of these media developments was the growing conflation, both within and without the region, of Tyneside culture, especially its humour and music, with a broader characterisation of north east culture. Given that the imprint of the State and national culture was an overwhelming feature of radio policy, it can also be said to have played a part in the emergence of a north-eastern cultural characterisation in broadcasting. Added to this, the regionalisation of broadcasting heightened the awareness of the North East as a region within a region, and prompted listeners to look favourably upon the London-based National Programme and define themselves against the broadcasting North’s headquarters in Manchester. In the North East the unsatisfactory radio provision acted as a catalyst to a growing regionalism within north-eastern England: listeners and programme makers in the region only began using the term ‘North-East’ radio as it became apparent that the region lacked adequate facilities for broadcasting. It has been suggested recently that the term ‘North East’ spread in public and popular discourse during the twentieth century in conjunction with the emergence of a victim complex, consolidated during the Depression.40 The use of the regional descriptor by radio broadcasters struggling with the ‘double imperialism’ of London and Manchester appears to have continued a pattern of utilising ‘North East’ to underline the region’s underprivileged status (within the nation-state) after 1945.This conclusion needs to be countered by the observation that the raw material, the literature, the songs and the dialect plays which formed the core of the growing north-eastern cultural characterisation after the Second World War, were a product of a genuine and optimistic cultural ferment, much of which was concentrated in Newcastle, which radio development, in part, had helped to stimulate.41 40 B. Lancaster, ‘An Agenda for Regional History’, Regions and Regionalism, forthcoming. 41 Alan Plater described the atmosphere of creativity and cultural activity in Newcastle during the 1950s as ‘the 1960s getting pregnant’. Interview with Alan Plater, 10 June 2004.


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Television in the North East since 1959 In 1959 the Duke of Northumberland threw the switch that sent the studios of Tyne Tees Television live for the first time. The launch of the region’s commercial television station was accompanied by the strains of a specially collated ‘Three Rivers Fantasy’, a medley of north-eastern songs that included ‘Bobby Shaftoe’, ‘Billy Boy’, ‘The Collier’s Rant’ and ‘The Blaydon Races’. Undoubtedly selected to reflect the ambition to be the most regional of all the independent broadcasting companies, it also acknowledged the successful appropriation of popular song by radio.42 Tyne Tees Television soon sought to extend this continuity to comedy. Against the expressed wishes of Kelly, his de facto mentor, Bobby Thompson accepted a position at the newly opened station as the host of a solo show.43 But Thompson, a stand-up, proved to be unsuited to performing sketches that had been written for him.With poor ratings and an unenthusiastic cast the show barely lasted the year. The failure of the Bobby Thompson Show was an unfortunate start for a television company that was inaugurated with the claim to ‘broadcast more programmes of north-eastern interest than the BBC’.44 But Tyne Tees Television was not misplaced in the ambition to pioneer the representation of regional culture, as both audience research and institutional developments recognised television as a pivotal agent in this process.The resumption of regional radio networks after the interruption of the Second World War and the development of a regional television service with the advent of commercial television in 1955 consolidated the institutional capacity for the representation of regional culture. As distinct from BBC television, which was anchored in the existing national framework, independent television originated in the regions, and following its inauguration coverage was established in London, the Midlands and in northern England.45 During the 1960s the North, or more precisely the Manchester broadcasting hub, quickly assumed a dominant position. The fascination with industrial culture, which had preoccupied social reportage during the 1930s, found new expression in television. The North’s 1960s cultural moment was crystallised in programmes such as Coronation Street, The Liver Birds and Z Cars.46 This period also saw the emergence of television dramas and serials, such as The Likely Lads and When the Boat Comes In, that have come to be seen as sustaining north-eastern cultural particularity during the twentieth 42 Bernard Sendall, Independent Television in Britain, Vol. II: Expansion and Change, 1958-1968 (London, 1983), p. 7. 43 Joe Ging, A Geordie Scrapbook (London, 1990), p. 66. 44 The Viewer 1 (1959), p. 3. 45 Briggs, History of Broadcasting,Vol.V, p. 623. 46 Rob Shields, Places on the Margin:Alternative Geographies of Modernity (London, 1991), p. 219.

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century. As with radio, this new form of representation furnishes a discussion of the construction of a north-eastern regional narrative. The experience of north-eastern England, as a region within a region, once again comes to the fore, as does the interplay of international, national and local frames of reference in the construction of regional identities.Viewers during this period wanted to see programmes that pictured events in their region with ‘national’ importance and wished to ‘feel that broadcasters are members of their own region and belong to no-one else’.47 This tension between being recognised and recognising oneself was arguably felt more acutely in north-eastern England, where the relationship with the greater North continued to be ambiguous.48 During the 1950s the advent of television was eagerly awaited in north-eastern England, the last English region to be without a transmitter. In a sour note, on the opening of the BBC station at Pontop Pike, D. Stephenson, controller of the BBC North Region based at Manchester, referred to ‘the teeming millions of the North East … and their noisy press’.49 The question of representing north-eastern culture within, or against, ‘the North’ can be considered alongside the question of external influences.The two decades after 1945 are commonly identified with the growing ‘Americanisation’ of British popular culture, strengthened by the arrival of commercial television.The belief that ‘British tradition’ and the ‘British way of life’ were being eroded by such developments needs to be considered alongside the wider social shift, embodied in the explosion of youth culture during the 1960s, that contributed to the alleged break-up of working-class communities during that time. ‘The North’, having produced the era’s most important popular music acts, as well as films and television programmes that have become iconic markers of the 1960s, was pivotal to these developments. Considering how such shifts were negotiated in a north-eastern setting, the following discussion reveals that the working-class inheritance, and in particular the legend of northeastern hardship and community, remained crucial to the representation of north-eastern culture as distinctive in television. The rise to dominance of ‘the North’ in television during the 1960s was to become synonymous with the development of Granada, the company that was awarded the licence to broadcast in 1956. In its first celebratory history Tyne Tees Television recorded how ‘viewers in the North East, well accustomed to finding themselves near the end of any national queue’, were to wait until 1959 before sampling this new form of 47 Annan Report, Cmnd 6753 (London,1977), p. 153. 48 Drawing on Habermas’s distinction between the conflicting rationalities of self-interest and sociability, Scannell suggests that broadcasting straddles the system and lifeworld. P. Scannell, Radio,Television and Modern Life: A Phenomenological Approach (Oxford, 1996), p. 23. 49 BBC,WAC,T16/221/1, Memo from Stephenson.


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representation.50 The notion that viewers in north-eastern England had been impaired by the delay in the arrival of commercial television was exploited by company directors, the brothers Alfred and George Black, during the initial marketing of Tyne Tees Television. Although the Board of Directors included Sir Richard Pease, local MP and industrialist, and the Darlington-based solicitor Claude Darling, it was the brothers George and Alfred Black, members of a long-established family of north-eastern theatrical impresarios, who made the headlines in the region. Inaugurating The Viewer, Tyne Tees Television’s own listing magazine, the Blacks made the following ambitious claim for north-eastern England and for the newly established station, [T]he region stretching from beyond the Tees in the south to well beyond the Tyne in the north is a region with a culture, a tradition and a way of life entirely of its own.Yet none of this has so far been reflected in either steam radio or TV. Those days are now over … We shall in fact, be broadcasting every week more programmes of north-eastern interest than the BBC has done in years.51

The first broadcast from the studio in Newcastle promised to fulfil this ambition with locally produced news featuring an interview with Prime Minister Harold Macmillan, formerly MP for Stockton-on-Tees. This glittering accolade was nevertheless followed by an episode of Highway Patrol (a formulaic American police series) and an evening of entertainment programmes including I Love Lucy and Double Your Money.52 By the early 1960s the Blacks’ brand of light entertainment and variety was established as the signature of Tyne Tees Television, a fact which elicited complaints from both viewers and the Independent Television Authority. But the sustained criticism that the station’s output was too commercial, too popularist and too light-hearted prompts us to reflect on the function of a regional television station. North-eastern England was widely acknowledged as sustaining a strong popular culture, and Tyne Tees Television was, if nothing else, an agent of popular culture. Prior to the opening of the station the Blacks had spent much time touring workingmen’s clubs gathering material for television. But following the disastrous Bobby Thompson Show there was understandable trepidation about the cross-over between stand-up comedy and television.What is more, despite the Blacks’ insistence on north-eastern England as a discrete cultural entity, Malcolm Morris, programme controller during the late 1960s, testifies to the difficulties of realising this representation in television: ‘it wasn’t easy to give the area a definable image … the Scots could spray a 50 Tyne Tees Television, Tyne Tees Television:The First Twenty Years (Newcastle, 1980), p. 2. 51 The Viewer 1 (1959), p. 3. 52 Sendall, Independent Television, 2, p. 8.

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few kilts and pipers around the studio … but what’s the quick recipe for creating a comparable entity out of a region … especially at a time when everybody is trying to forget about the cloth cap anyway.’53 The solution, according to Alan Plater, would have been to engage with the critical mass of north-eastern writers that had underpinned the flourish of radio during the 1950s.Whilst there was clearly a pool of writers working in the early 1960s, the station had limited success in harnessing this talent. Compared to its rivals,Tyne Tees Television produced no regional drama of note, whilst writers including Leonard Barras,Alan Plater and Ian Le Frenais were writing for other television stations by the 1960s. Successful television comedy was by this time characterised by self-conscious moves away from the variety format, reflected in the use of episode-length narrative and the replacement of the ‘funny man’ – epitomised by Bobby Thompson – by character actors.54 Northern actors and writers were pivotal to this development whilst northern playwrights underscored the emergence of the televised North as the ‘people’s theatre’ during the 1960s. Plater pinpoints the unwillingness of Tyne Tees Television to look beyond the commercial dimension and engage with the emergent pool of north-eastern writers during the 1960s as a significant shortcoming.This, he maintains, was a serious impediment to cultural representation in north-eastern England since many of the programmes that helped shape the image of ‘the North’ in popular national imagination were penned by north-eastern writers working in London or Manchester.55 Despite their obvious enthusiasm for northern writers, neither the BBC nor Granada required a great deal of topographical accuracy, and were satisfied so long as programmes could be recognised as ‘an ill-defined, generalised lump of good old earth called “The North”’.56 Whilst north-eastern writers working for a north-eastern television company might not have guaranteed topographical authenticity, Plater emphasises that the moment of metropolitan fascination with the northern working-class subject was an important point of departure for later plays that offered more nuanced representations. Z Cars was his metropolitan gesture, the work that allowed him to go on and write about the North East.57 But unlike north-western England, where the presence of Granada arguably contributed to the emergence to popular and critical acclaim of more complex representations of ‘the North’ in the writing of Alan Bleasdale and Willy Russell, amongst others, this opportunity for cultural representation was relatively neglected in north-eastern England. 53 54 55 56

Newcastle Evening Chronicle, 31 October 1969. Goddard, ‘Hancock’s Half Hour’, Popular Television, p. 16. Interview with Alan Plater, 10 June 2004. A. Plater, ‘The Drama of the North East’, Geordies: Roots of Regionalism, ed. R. Colls and B. Lancaster (Edinburgh, 1992, repr. Newcastle, 2005), p. 73. 57 Interview with Alan Plater, 10 June 2004.


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Paradoxically, the predominance of American imports at Tyne Tees Television may actually have assisted in the emergence on television of programmes that have been central to the representation of north-eastern culture during this period. Following his appointment as Director General of the BBC in 1959, Hugh Greene’s strategy for recovering audiences from ITV was to produce programmes that would distinguish the Corporation from the commercial stations and genre of entertainment characterised by American serials such as Highway Patrol. Z Cars, a police drama set in an industrial northern town featuring ‘real life’ crime, was broadcast on the BBC in 1962, and reflected the ambition to rival the imports on the independent television stations with the popular authenticity of ‘northern realism’.58 Two years later the advent of BBC 2 provided the Corporation with new opportunities to exploit the televisual appeal of this genre.The first episode of The Likely Lads was broadcast on 16 December 1964 and broke new ground with its combination of situation comedy and northern realism. By 1965 ten million viewers were regularly watching the programme that featured the lives of two men, Bob Ferris, played by the Cornish actor Rodney Bewes, and Terry Collier, played by the Sunderland born James Bolam. Written by Dick Clement and Ian Le Frenais, the north-eastern upbringing of Le Frenais provided the inspiration for the show set in an engineering factory.The lives of Bob and Terry nonetheless bore little resemblance to Le Frenais’; as the son of a corporate accountant in Whitley Bay, the writer freely admits to never having worked in a factory.59 But the success of The Likely Lads was not dependent on the integrity of its north-eastern setting, but rather on its successful combination of situation comedy and northern realism. Both Clement and Le Frenais were convinced that north-eastern England was the ideal conceptual location for the comedy because of its ready affiliation with the aspects of northern realism they wished to convey: it was suitably industrial and had a strong male working-class culture. The programme’s title also signals the desire to probe the generational shifts experienced during the 1960s. Bob and Terry, two young workers enjoying new-found sexual and financial freedom whilst still anchored in the culture of working-class respectability, might have been ranked by older men as ‘likely’, an ambivalent quality that conveyed a grudging nostalgia for youth’s flamboyance. Since the overriding ambition was to secure the programme’s working-class style it mattered less that the ‘North’ they presented eschewed topographical identification.60 Precise 58 S. Laing, ‘Bang in some Reality: The Original “Z Cars”’, Popular Television, ed. Corner (London, 1991), p. 127. 59 Richard Webber with Dick Clements and Ian Le Frenais, Whatever Happened to the Likely Lads? (London, 1999), p. 12. 60 Ibid.

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geographical location was also precluded by the constraints of the industry. Clement, reiterating Alan Plater, recalls that there was a distinct shortage of character actors capable of working in dialect and economic considerations meant that location filming was a rarity. Much of the first series was filmed in London, close to Television Centre in a street near Willesden Junction where ‘two rows of proper back to back houses with little brick loos at the end of the garden’ provided the ideal northern location.61 Audiences in north-eastern England must have found it difficult to recognise their region in this fictionalised setting of ‘back to backs’ with gardens. In the event the region first sampled the comedy when it was repeated on BBC 1 since BBC 2 was not available until November 1966 in the North East.62 Alongside metropolitan fascination with the northern working-class subject, The Likely Lads also reflected the contemporary state of industrial politics. Whilst Clement and Le Frenais’ north-eastern England was industrial, its embodiment in Bob and Terry also carried the suggestion that, to use Rob Colls’ expression, the region had been ‘reborn’ after 1945.63 The Second World War temporarily revived coal mining and with the pits belonging to ‘the people’ after 1947, the industry came to symbolise the ambition for a modern Britain. The national commitment to the improvement of industrial regions was cemented in north-eastern England in 1963 with the appointment of Lord Hailsham as Minister with special responsibility for the area. His brief included producing a strategy for reviving the region’s heavy industries, and for ensuring that economic revival went hand in hand with improvements in infrastructure and communications.64 But modernising ambitions were not confined to outsiders and were perhaps most spectacularly embodied in the flamboyant local politician and regionalist T. Dan Smith, leader of the Newcastle Labour Council during the 1960s. Keen to rid north-eastern England of its heavy industrial mindset, his policies were ambitious and involved the promotion and support for developments in science, technology and higher education. He was also sensitive to the emergence of a youth culture that enjoyed unprecedented levels of affluence and his policies aimed to ‘reflect the consciousness of an age of increasing leisure’.65 Boosted by the inmigration of a young population from the rural hinterland and beyond who were free of the cultural and economic constraints imposed on their predecessors by Depression and war, this development contributed to a clear shift in the urban cultural landscape of north-eastern England. 61 62 63 64 65

Ibid, p. 24. BBC,WAC,TI6/641,TV Policy (1966). R. Colls, ‘Born Again Geordies’, Geordies, ed. Colls and Lancaster, pp. 1-35. The North East:A Programme for Development and Growth, Cmnd 2206 (London, 1963). T. Dan Smith, An Autobiography (Oxford, 1972), p. 80.


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As elsewhere in the country, new influences such as American beat culture played a significant part. Developments in music witnessed the emergence from the local scene of bands such as the Animals who also drew heavily on American influences; lead singer Eric Burdon, originally of Walker, was described at one stage as Britain’s first white blues vocalist.66 The brothers Mike and Ian Carr of County Durham formed the EmCee Five jazz band during this time and were performing regularly at the region’s major urban venues by the early 1960s. Ian Carr reflects that an ‘artistic flowering’ was consolidated by the arrival of the Animals, but also identifies the return to the North East of established regional protagonists, like the author Sid Chaplin and his wife Renee, during the late 1950s, as important to the revitalisation of north-eastern culture.These views point to the role of generational differences and generational shifts in shaping regional cultural representation. Ian Le Frenais could certainly be construed as embodying the generational shifts dealt with in The Likely Lads but, like many young writers of the time, he had left the North East during the early 1960s in search of work. Whilst popular musicians were able to find a platform for their art, with the exception of Chaplin, the same could not be said for young writers, particularly if they wished to work in television. Based outside the region, Le Frenais and his contemporaries were unlikely to alter the dominant representation of north-eastern culture. The opportunity to alter the trajectory of cultural representation was present in the emergence of a youth culture that combined metropolitan, international and local references in the production of new cultural practices, but north-eastern England did not retain the aspiring artists, musicians and knowledge producers that could have effected this development. Regionalist politicians were well aware of the pivotal part played by youth in sustaining a vibrant regional culture, and alive to the difficulties of retaining this element in a small region.Ted Fletcher, a veteran of the Spanish Civil War, Chairman of the Labour Party in Newcastle during the 1950s and the Labour MP for Darlington after 1964, worked alongside T. Dan Smith during the 1960s to promote cultural revival in Newcastle and the regional hinterland. So impressed was he with the EmCee Five that he offered a civic subsidy to keep the band ‘on home territory’.67 In the event the offer was unable to dissuade band members from leaving the region to pursue their musical careers in London and abroad.Whilst the same process could doubtless be discerned in many areas outside London, compared to north-western England, the cultural legacy of the 1960s appears to be relatively circumscribed in the 66 B. Lancaster, ‘Review of G. Pearson, Sex, Brown Ale and Rhythm and Blues’, Northern Review 9 (2001), pp. 133-5. 67 I. Carr, ‘Novocastrian Jazz 1950s and Early 1960s’, Northern Review 4 (1996), p. 15.

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North East. As Alan Plater has observed, the critical mass of creativity sustained by Newcastle University during the 1950s and 1960s was to be short-lived, Ian Carr was there, David Mercer was there and all the gang in the art school, my special mate was Jim Collier, our special mates were Jack and George, abstract painters working in the art school and yes it was very exciting and I have this theory that the four of us, had we not been separated … with other add on people who were around at that time, like Jack Shepherd the actor, we could have become “Beyond the Fringe”. [my italics]68

Whilst Laing has suggested that metropolitan fascination with the Northern subject had waned by the time the second series of Z Cars was screened in 1965, interest in the Northern Coalfield, or to be precise,‘the plight of the miner’, an enduring attraction for broadcasters since the 1930s, was revived by the late 1960s.69 When the Aberfan colliery disaster struck in 1966 it once again served to remind of the drudgery and suffering that British mining communities continued to endure.Television played an important part in articulating the tensions that underpinned the ongoing attempts to ‘modernise’ the coal industry. The BBC was applauded for the coverage of the disaster; the rejection of the Chairman of the Coal Board’s advice that there be no live coverage produced unedited footage praised for its sensitivity and responsibility.70 During these years both the BBC and Granada produced television dramas that reflected the national tensions plaguing the attempts to modernise coal mining. Many of these productions were set in north-eastern England and arguably helped to shore up mining as a central feature of the representation of north-eastern culture on television. In 1969 ‘one of the first network plays written and played in full blooded north-east accents’ was screened on BBC 1 in the evening slot allocated to the ‘Wednesday Play’.71 Initially written for the stage, Close the Coalhouse Door was conceived by Sid Chaplin, who in his turn had been inspired to write a play about the history of a mining village from Bill Hays’ production of Brendan Behan’s The Hostage staged at the Newcastle Playhouse during the 1960s.72 Written collaboratively by Sid Chaplin, Bill Hays and Alan Plater, with music by Alex Glasgow, the play conveys the strong sense of historical consciousness shared by the playwrights.As Plater reflects, 68 69 70 71 72

Interview with Alan Plater, 10 June, 2004. Laing, ‘Bang in some Reality’, p. 127. Briggs, History of Broadcasting,Vol.V, p. 536. Plater, ‘Drama of the North East’, p. 76. A. Plater,‘Song for my Father:The C.P.Taylor Memorial Lecture’, Northern Review 3 (1996), p. 12.


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As far as my Tyneside is concerned, history began with the industrial revolution and everything I have written about the area springs from that perception … What I tried to do in Close the Coalhouse Door was to embrace the music-hall tradition – the jokes, the stand-up routines, the funny hats and above all, the subversive energy.73

The play received a rapturous reception in Newcastle when it opened and its enduring appeal in the North East was confirmed by the successful revival by Live Theatre on the Newcastle Quayside in 1994.74 It was screened on national television in 1970 preceded by a special edition of Panorama with Lord Robens discussing the politics of coalmining in the presence of some ‘well scrubbed colliers’. Compared to this, the play was applauded for addressing the grimmer realities of the industry. But its use of music was less favourably received than it had been on Tyneside; one television reviewer found the combination of ‘music hall ditty’ and historical reconstruction contrived: ‘there were periods when the whole thing became an unpersuasive charade’. On the other hand, the metropolitan appetite for the ‘pitman’s struggle’ was undiminished and praise was heaped on the passionate declamation of the miner’s dignity and despair.75 This response to the play’s comic format underlines the difficulties of realising the nuances of vernacular humour on television, but in the wider sense Close the Coalhouse Door reinforced the enduring interest in mining, heightened during the 1970s in the context of the 1973-74 miners’ strikes. With Labour in office again in 1974 mining was never far from national consciousness. Granada’s thirteen-part adaptation of A.J. Cronin’s The Stars Look Down went on air the following year. The story of a north-eastern mining community between 1910 and 1932 was adapted by Alan Plater and directed by Howard Baker, Alan Grint and Roland Joffe.76 Filmed in Langley Park, County Durham, local reaction to the advent and authenticity of the television production was mixed. Many inhabitants felt that it was a slight on Langley Park to be chosen to depict life in the Depression, and whilst enjoying the bustle of the film crew the consensus was that the series exaggerated the extent of material deprivation in the area for visual effect.77 For metropolitan critics, however, such strategies amounted to good aesthetics and the programme had one Times reviewer enthusiastically likening the photographic composition to Lowry.78 73 74 75 76

Ibid, pp. 14-15. The Times, 23 October 1968. The Times, 23 October 1969. A. Plater, ‘Behind the Cycle Sheds’, Granada Television:The First Generation, ed. J. Finch, M. Cox and M. Giles (Manchester, 2003), p. 117. 77 Evening Chronicle, 19 September 1974. 78 The Times, 5 September 1975.

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In 1976 the BBC produced a rival serial for the national network depicting north-eastern mining life during the Depression with When the Boat Comes In. The programme featured the life of a Tyneside mining family during the Depression, following the progress through the union ranks of a young miner, Jack Ford, played by James Bolam. Sid Chaplin, Tom Haddaway and Alex Glasgow, who also wrote the theme tune, all contributed episodes for the first series, whilst the second series was written by the London-based James Mitchell.79 The programme was well received in the North East: first indications are that it is much superior to The Stars Look Down and if it is slightly nearer the soap opera edge than Days of Hope the stories are rounded and transfixing. North country language is spoken lucidly and without any comic Scott Dobson overtones … Certainly if you are looking for Geordie creations in whom the rest of the country may believe in then this characterisation is the first I have seen on telly. It bears no relationship to the music hall of Mike Neville: it has dignity and depth.80

The pivotal role of Scott Dobson as the impresario of post-war Geordie cultural revival was secured with the help Frank Graham, who published many of Dobson’s humorous books, including Larn yersel Geordie, during the late 1960s. The aspects of regional culture which such initiatives attempted to revive are rooted in what Murphy has described as the ‘pubman Geordie’ and connected to the music hall legacy.81 During the twentieth century these features of north-eastern culture have travelled less easily beyond the region than the image of the long-suffering pitman and, despite the ubiquitous comic appeal of Andy Capp, the humorous representation of north-east culture apparently also evoked unease within the region. Equally, the tenacity of the mining theme was sustained by voices from within the region, as much as by outside onlookers. Applause for the programme’s rejection of Geordie caricature was echoed by Catherine Cookson, writing in the Radio Times in 1976, I had gathered that James Mitchell and his fellow writers had decided not to lard their scripts with thick Geordie dialect, and they were wise, for our esoteric speech can be transmitted adequately by the use of idiom and inflexion and still remain comprehensible … for me the test of a play is when I become involved to such an extent that I am actually transported into the time and place being presented. The second series was so authentic that I was living the life at the kitchen – which was accurate right down to shape of the sugar basin and the beaded cover for the milk jug … What struck me most forcibly was the authenticity of the 79 Journal, 27 March 1977. 80 Journal, 15 January 1976. 81 J. Murphy, ‘Heritage and Harmony’ (unpublished MA thesis, University of Sunderland, 2003).


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backgrounds. I had thought that the old North East had been mostly pulled down, but the camera crew found that there were still back to backs and cobbled streets in existence …82

This praise for the programme’s authenticity by Tyneside’s ‘favourite daughter’ provides an interesting insight into the relationship between television drama and the representation of regional culture in the North East. For, as Colls contends, Cookson’s account of life ‘in a back street’, as expressed both in her novels and in the much-nurtured legend of her own upbringing, was strenuously concentrated on the production of memories of hard times: ‘Cookson’s Tyne Dock and Jarrow were not only ugly, they were wretched; their people not only poor but scabrously so ... This is “hard” “gritty” “northern” “industrial” “life” – make no mistake’.83 Cookson’s appreciation of When the Boat Comes In needs to be seen alongside her own contribution to the legend of north-eastern hardship, and her enthusiasm for the programme read as a reflection of perceived support for her own account of Tyneside. This point serves to underline the role of television as an agent in the consolidation of regional particularity. Clearly a region with as significant an industrial inheritance as the North East produced writers that were drawn to the exploration of this theme, but the broader fascination was rooted in a national preoccupation with class and the politics of mining. This provides an interesting reversal of Joyce’s suggestion that regional identity during the nineteenth century was equipped to override social differences.84 During the twentieth century it would appear that, as far as their representation through television was concerned, regional nuances were often diluted by the overriding ambition to communicate class differences which the ‘gritty North’, or more often the North East, was ideally placed to intimate. Whilst left-leaning television programme makers claimed to be challenging the social order with their radical representation of the working class, these programmes similarly had to connect with national codes.85 In the depiction of north-eastern culture a preoccupation with class allowed the mining theme to dominate television drama, also helping to ensure that regional homogeneity was portrayed at the expense of diversity. The appetite for this theme was clearly reflected in the critical acclaim which When the Boat Comes In enjoyed: in 1977 the series won a prestigious award from the Radio Industries Club. Seen from this angle, the absence of serious drama tackling the ‘plight of the miner’ on Tyne Tees 82 Radio Times, 14-20 February 1976. 83 R. Colls, ‘Angel of the North: An Appreciation of Catherine Cookson’, Northern Review 7 (1998), pp. 59-61. 84 Patrick Joyce, Visions of the People: Industrial England and the Question of Class (Cambridge, 1991), p. 283. 85 C. Brunsdon, ‘Crossroads: Notes on Soap Opera’, Screen 22.4 (1981), pp. 32-7.

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Television, whilst ostensibly the result of financial constraint and limited creative vision, could actually be said to have reflected a more diverse representation of north-eastern culture than either Granada or the BBC were able to sustain. Northern Arts: A Blueprint for Regional Cultural Policy Unlike radio and television, the emergence of cultural policy after 1945 was distinguished by discernible efforts to dispel the myth of the emasculated region. In 1961 the first regional arts association to be formed in England, the North East Association for the Arts (renamed Northern Arts in 1967), was heralded by the Director of the Scotland Arts Council as the ‘cynosure of Great Britain, and the model for cultural efficiency that the rest of the country aspires to’.86 The progressive ethos was shared by Arthur Blenkinsop, one of the organisation’s founders, a Labour MP for Newcastle East between 1945 and 1951 and for South Shields between 1964 and 1976. It was his ambition that the association fulfil a role for culture which the North East Development Council was achieving for industry. The parallel between the work of the NEDC and the new regional arts council was also noted by a journalist in The Economist, While the NEDC is trying to dispel the impression that the region consists largely of slag heaps and grime … the year old North East Association for the Arts is trying to crack the image of the region which has hearty barbarians, rolling their ‘r’s’ and blowing crude pipes as its main constituents.87

Although this process built upon an established legacy of cultural improvement, the regional arts association movement was initiated in the North East, and not elsewhere. The initiative to form a regional arts association preceded the decision by the Arts Council of Great Britain to develop regional cultural policy. This took shape with the creation of a new post of Chief Regional Officer, a position taken by Nigel Abercrombie in 1968.88 Eric White, Assistant Secretary to Council for the Encouragement of Music and the Arts from 1942 and Literature Director to the Arts Council from 1966 to 1971, has written that the realisation of the ambition to bring together all the local authorities and county boroughs that were to make up the North East Association for the Arts was unprecedented, This was a completely new style of arts association.There was no question of confining it to a federation of local arts centres, clubs and societies, as in 86 Newcastle Library Local Studies Collection, L706, Northern Arts, December Arts Diary and Gallery Guide (1966). 87 The Economist, 13 October 1962, cited in Northern Arts: Our First 25 Years, 1961-86 (Newcastle, 1986), p. 5. 88 Eric W.White, The Arts Council of Great Britain (London, 1975), pp. 243-5.


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the Midlands and South West. It intended to exercise a wide range of powers to encourage the arts in the region.89

One explanation for the North East’s pioneering role in this development may be sought in the intersection between culture and political regionalism which reached its pinnacle during the 1960s. White singled out Blenkinsop as seminal in securing the support of the region’s political community for this venture. Basil Bunting, writing in his capacity as president of Northern Arts during the 1970s, also recalled Blenkinsop’s pivotal role in the creation of Northern Arts, When Arthur Blenkinsop first began to stir things up in this part of the world he founded a magazine, a short lived one … to which I was invited to contribute … that invitation was the first hint I heard of a movement which became Northern Arts.90

A close friend of Sir Charles Trevelyan, Blenkinsop fits the character type of left-leaning cultural improver and politician that emerged during the interwar years.91 For such individuals the marriage of cultural improvement and socialist politics was given strength by institutions such as the People’s Theatre in Newcastle, host to contemporaries with similar political and cultural ideals and sponsored by ‘progressive’ regional elites such as the Trevelyans. Blenkinsop’s capacity to draw together the regional authorities that were to make up Northern Arts was undoubtedly assisted by his knowledge of, and anchoring in, the region’s progressive cultural community. Equally important was his prominence in the white-collar union APEX, which sponsored his political career and provided a readymade network of regional political contacts that Blenkinsop was able to tap in his role as secretary of Northern Arts. Blenkinsop’s success demonstrates how the existence of a political network was able to sustain the development of a regional cultural institution. This ‘elective affinity’ between cultural activists and politicians in the region also assisted Frank Atkinson, who was able to draw upon the gathering momentum of regionalism in the North East to secure political support for the creation in 1970 of Beamish Open Air Museum in County Durham. In 1972 Basil Bunting was elected president of Northern Arts. In this year vicepresidents included Barbara Hepworth, Tyne Tees Television executive Anthony Jelly and T. Dan Smith, with the Duke of Northumberland as the organisation’s patron.92 With a poet and regionalist as president (Bunting 89 Ibid. 90 Basil Bunting’s presidential speeches, published by the Northern Arts Gallery for the 1977 ‘Current British Arts Exhibition’ (Newcastle, 1977). 91 N.Vall, ‘Cultural Improvers in North East England, 1920-1960: Polishing the Pitmen’, NH 41 (2004), pp. 163-80. 92 In 1974 it was decided that Smith’s name be dropped from the list of vice-presidents (TWAS, Northern Arts Bound Volumes, Minutes of the Management Committee, April 1974).

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had written in 1953 of the need in the North for a ‘paper’ to represent ‘the very northern point of view and to remind the north that literature exists’), Northern Arts certainly appeared to be embedded firmly in regional culture.93 When the Director for the Scotland Arts Council, Ronald Mayor, visited the North East in 1966 he concluded that the success of Northern Arts reflected the peculiarities of the region which, unlike Scotland, supported ‘a large compact population, a number of large urban areas adjoining each other, each vying with each other for the edge in some form of superiority or other, but very much the same kind of urban area or city with the same kind of people’.94 The emergence of Northern Arts appears to have consolidated the external perception of the North East as sustaining a cohesive culture; at the same time, the difficulties experienced in mobilising the cultural resources of the region’s inhabitants serve as a reminder of the ambivalent connection between the institutional ‘identity of a region’ and regional consciousness. Despite Northern Arts’ self-conscious ambition to offer a cultural corrective, the organisation remained anxious to engage with the region’s working-class associations, and throughout the 1960s there was a debate about how best to introduce ‘artistic activities’ to these venues.95 Despite ongoing efforts, either through a direct approach such as subsidising artists-in-residence in shipyards, or indirectly by liaising with working-men’s clubs, the enduring concern over this issue suggests that these initiatives met with limited success. The difficulties of connecting with industrial culture were also reflected in the absence of support for the arts by regional industrialists. In 1963 the response from industry to the organisation’s fundraising had been disappointing.This was perhaps unsurprising given that the association did not arise as an affirmation of cultural resources, but as a response to a cultural lacuna. North Arts originated as a consortium of local authorities brought together to help address the fact that the North East possessed no regional orchestra. This impediment was linked to the unwillingness of local firms to endorse or support cultural activities, and comparisons were made with cities such as Liverpool, where the Liverpool Philharmonic was sustained by patronage from local industrial companies.96 Such a tradition in the North East may have helped Michael Hall, the founder of the Northern Sinfonia, who was hampered initially by the absence of experienced players in the region and forced to engage musicians from ‘the remnants of the Yorkshire Symphony Orchestra … and the Manchester and Liverpool freelance pool’.97 93 B. Lancaster, ‘Editorial’, Northern Review 1 (1995), p. 1. 94 Newcastle Library Local Studies Collection, L706, December Arts Diary and Gallery Guide, Northern Arts (1966). 95 TWAS, Northern Arts Bound Volumes, NEAA General Meeting, November 1961. 96 TWAS, Northern Arts D.4346, North East Association for the Arts,Annual Report, 1963-64. 97 The Guardian, 14 December 1959, cited in Bill Griffiths, Northern Sinfonia: A Magic of its Own, (Newcastle, 2004) p. 4.


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The paradox that this model for cultural efficiency was created to construct new rather than affirm existing cultural practices, allows us to pull together the threads of this discussion and reflect upon the nature of the relationship between regional culture and its representation. The articulation of the ‘North East’ as a discrete cultural space could often be related to a perceived cultural impediment. In radio north-eastern broadcasters struggled to gain a foothold within the broadcasting north, and this prompted a call for improved radio facilities within the North East and subsequently for north-eastern broadcasting.A similar process was discerned in the development of commercial television. Tyne Tees Television’s claim to be the most regional of all the television stations built upon the idea of the emasculated region, expressed in the fact that the North East was the last English region to have a television transmitter and to gain an independent television station. But Tyne Tees Television was unable to sustain the broadcasting strength which underpinned the creation of television companies such as Granada in the North West, responsible for attracting many of the North East’s writers and actors and producers. That the station which hoped to generate more regional programmes than the BBC came to be viewed as the agent of American cultural colonisation points to the historical complexities that underpin the perception of north-eastern cultural particularity.Tyne Tees Television claimed that the region’s cultural cohesion underpinned the creation of the station, but this proved to be tenuous in the evolution of the company. Similarly, whilst the Director of the Scotland Arts Council asserted that a strong north-eastern culture was pivotal to Northern Arts, the association was in fact established to recreate regional culture. Despite the hope that the organisation would offer a cultural corrective, Northern Arts did little to undermine the dominant perception of the emasculated region. As we have seen, this representation was instead reinforced in national television, the twentieth century’s major agency of popular culture. This discussion has endeavoured to show that the connections between cultural practice in the North East and the representation of north-eastern culture have often been contingent. To demonstrate this is not to suggest that recurrent themes in cultural representation, such as ‘the plight of the miner’, are not anchored in lived historical experiences, they clearly are, and the popular legitimacy of the regional caricature distinguishes the North East from many other English regions. But in order to avoid contributing further to the process of essentialising north-eastern culture, it remains crucial to understand why such themes have dominated cultural representation. In the struggle for dominance of the regional narrative, the promotion of a homogenised identity based on selected cultural attributes has been identified as a common strategy amongst regional elites. For Aronsson this underlines ‘the active role interpreters and knowledge

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producers have as not only mapping but making regional landscapes’.98 Yet during the twentieth century the influence exerted over ‘the regional master narrative’ in the North East was largely a measure of the region’s peripheral status and its limited cultural power (within the nation-state). The case of the North East may therefore offer additional perspectives on the territorial impact of the process of ‘globalisation’, usually depicted as intensifying local and/or regional identities in the face of the decline from the ‘nation-state’ paradigm.99 During late modernity the representation of a cohesive regional identity did not signal the North East’s enfranchisement from the nation-state. Instead the North East’s dependence on the national media infrastructure has been revealed. Structural factors have impinged on the region’s cultural selfrepresentation throughout this period. For instance, in comparison with most other English regions, the low number of viewers limited the advertising revenue available for the development of commercial television from the outset. A similar situation pertained at the BBC, where the distribution of resources to regional stations was apportioned according to the volume of local licences.The programme profile adopted at Tyne Tees was as much a product of low advertising revenue as it was a conscious rejection of the repertoire promised from the start. Indeed, the recent incorporation of Tyne Tees into ‘Granadaland’ echoes the strategy of the BBC’s 1930s ‘Regional Scheme’ in which economic and technical considerations dictated the boundaries of the sound broadcasting regions. At the same time, the question of the region’s size needs to be set in the context of a palpable and historic absence of patronage of, and investment in, the arts.A recent North East Regional Information Partnership State of the Region report found that the North East had the lowest number of ‘cultural audience seats’ of any region in England, Scotland and Wales.100 This builds on a historic trend towards underdevelopment in cultural infrastructure: Newcastle was the last regional capital in England to instigate a public library and art gallery, and whilst the North East pioneered the regional arts council initiative during the twentieth century, this was in response to the fact that the region was the only area in the country to be without a symphony orchestra.101

98 P.Aronsson,‘Old Cultural Regionalism’, Regions and Regionalism, ed. Lancaster, Newton and Vall, p. 9. 99 D. Marquand, ‘Nations, Regions and Europe’, National Identities, the Constitution of the UK, ed. Bernard Crick (London, 1991), p. 30. 100 North East Regional Information Partnership, State of the Region Report (Newcastle, 2003). 101 O. Ashton and J. Hugman, ‘Letters from America: George Julian Harney, Boston USA, and Newcastle upon Tyne, England, 1862-1888’, Massachusetts Historical Society Proceedings, 107 (1995); Griffiths, Northern Sinfonia, p. 4.


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This essay has revealed that during the twentieth century a range of factors contributed to an enduring image of cultural cohesion in northeastern England. The limitations of the regional media have been emphasised as significant in the prevalence of external representations of regional caricatures, in particular the ‘legend of north-eastern hardship’, on television. But the status of north-eastern England, as a periphery both within ‘the North’ and in the nation, was also a significant factor that contributed to the adoption of the term ‘North East’ amongst regional broadcasters. Further, the experience of the North East as a small region may have inhibited the potential of youth culture for altering or challenging the dominant regional narrative. Whilst acknowledging that north-eastern England undeniably sustained a vibrant popular culture during the twentieth century, this essay has sounded a note of caution against seeing this as an expression of regional cohesion.To understand the implication of this conclusion for the broader concerns of regional studies, further comparative investigation of similar developments in different regional contexts would be necessary.

Conclusion: Finding North-East England ADRIAN GREEN and A.J. POLLARD

We set out to answer the question as to whether the North East of England can be shown to have been a coherent and self-conscious region over the centuries. In some respects this has turned out to be two questions.Was the North East a single region, and if so, did the people who lived there share a sense of regional identity? The identity of a region, as Paasi commented, is not the same as regional identity.1 In providing answers, we have discovered, much depends on the definition of region and conceptualisation of regional identity. Simple geographical models are inadequate. The notion that the North East as a region is, and always has been, the area between the Pennine watershed, the Tweed, the North Sea and the Tees, determined by the physical bounds, is unsustainable. While views might differ over the extent to which a sense of place is tethered culturally and socially to landscape and topography, it is undoubtedly human agency that makes a region. One of the first and most compelling conclusions to emerge from these studies is that the idea of a north-east region as conventionally conceived is a modern phenomenon. Precisely how modern is a matter of continuing debate. It may be effective advocacy to assert that this has always been a region with a unique history and culture, but it is inaccurate history. In seeking to locate North-East England in more secure historical terms, it is worth clarifying further the geographical context by highlighting some key dynamics which have not been fully addressed in this volume. The area known today as North-East England is ultimately defined by its location in the north and east of England.The North East has always been – and continues to be – a part of a larger North.2 It is rarely 1 2

Above, pp. 2, 17. See Alan H.R. Baker and Mark Billinge, eds, Geographies of England:The North-South Divide Imagined and Material (Cambridge, 2004); H.M. Jewell, The North-South Divide:The Origins of Northern Consciousness in England (Manchester, 1994); N. Kirk, ed., Northern Identities:The Construction of Identity in Northern England from 1800 to the Present (Ashgate, 2000); Dave Russell, Looking North: Northern England and National Imagination (Manchester, 2004).

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emphasised that it is also a part of a larger East – readily discernible in the characterisation of the region but never much a feature of articulated identities.This absence of a conscious Easternness, with a lack of resonance equivalent to Northernness, itself points up the cultural and political contingencies of consciously articulated identities.Yet this eastern aspect is witnessed in climate, rainfall, vegetation, field and settlement patterns, building techniques and – to an important extent – communication links and trade. These certainly distinguish the areas east and west of the Pennines. The Pennine uplands may themselves be regarded as a separate zone, with the High Pennines potentially a region in its own right, with a lead mining industry and vernacular architecture that cut across county boundaries and watersheds, but again with no famed regional identity.3 Coastal communications further extend the eastern reach of the North East.Trade to London, from the Tyne,Wear and Tees, with crucial contacts at Whitby, Hull, King’s Lynn and Great Yarmouth, connected the coastal communities between Thames and Tyne, and to some extent bound them into a distinctively eastern economy. Coastal trade was especially important from the later sixteenth century, with the export of coal to fuel London’s hearths and industries. Yet, crucially, Newcastle – as a major provincial town since the middle ages – has always been the largest English urban centre at the furthest distance from London. This has created a special dynamic with London – at once both distanced and intimately connected with the capital. Newcastle has been an important conduit for the import of goods and habits, and it has also been far enough away from metropolitan influence to encourage cultural distinctiveness. However, we must not assume a linear process here – London’s cultural and economic influence has waxed and waned over the centuries, as has Newcastle’s role as a ‘regional capital’.4 Moreover, London has not been the only source of external influence. The North East is physically closer to the metropolitan and commercial centre of Scotland, and an enduring English rather than British context to regional history has undoubtedly diminished recognition of Scottish interactions – especially after the border ceased to be an international frontier in the seventeenth century. While Northumberland has always been especially marked by its proximity to Scotland (witness, for instance, the strength of Presbytarianism or Jacobitism), Scottish influence also 3 4

R.W. Brunskill,‘Vernacular Architecture of the Northern Pennines:A Preliminary Review’, NH 11 (1976 for 1975), pp. 107-42. For the first flourishing of the coal trade and the links between London and Newcastle see J.B. Blake, ‘The Medieval Coal Trade of North-East England’, NH 2 (1967); C.M. Fraser, ‘The Pattern of Trade in the North-East of England, 1266-1350, NH 4 (1969). For the limited nature of the links between London and Newcastle in the later middle ages, however, see The Cambridge Urban History of Britain,Vol. I: 600-1540, ed. D.M. Palliser (Cambridge, 2000), p. 579, Map 22.7:‘Residence of debtors to Londoners c. 1400’.

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reached further south.5 One of the grounds for the establishment of a University at Durham in 1652 was the fact that formerly many in the northern counties sent their sons to the Universities in Scotland.6 It is ironical that this volume has given more attention to Welsh and Irish immigration than Scottish connections.The North Sea presents a further arena of interconnection, and this volume has not dwelt upon the significance of external relations – known to be particularly significant with the Netherlands and the Baltic.7 One historical episode might serve to encapsulate these relations. When the Scottish army occupied the north-east of England in the 1640s, they did so because of the strategic significance of controlling the supply of coal to London. For a while the fiercely parliamentary Sunderland, occupied and protected by the Scots from royalist-controlled Newcastle, was vital in keeping London provided.8 Charles Phythian-Adams suggests that in stopping at the Tees, the Scottish army respected the southern boundary of the Anglo-Scottish frontier zone.9 Also telling are the reactions of inhabitants to this crisis; refugees from the bishopric of Durham fled not only to Yorkshire but five hundred families went to East Anglia via King’s Lynn and many others crossed the North Sea to the United Provinces.10 This episode, like so much of the detailed research in this volume, shows that politics, along with economic and geographic considerations, are integral to the formation of regional identities. This part of England, linked by land and sea with London, Scotland and northern Europe, might have first begun to acquire the shape and identity of a modern region, if not develop a self-conscious regional identity, between 1560 and 1760. Its foundation was the great northern coalfield; 5

M. Greenhall,‘Cattle to Claret: Scottish Economic Influence in North-East England, 16601750’, History Today 56, No. 10 (October 2006), pp. 22-7. 6 ‘The Humble Desire of the Gentlemen, Free-holders, and Inhabitants of the County and City of Durham, And Other Northern Counties, for Founding a College at Durham’ (London, 1652).We are grateful to Maureen Meikle for this reference. 7 See, however, Britain and the Baltic: Studies in Commercial, Political and Cultural Relations, ed. P. Salmon and T. Barrow (Sunderland, 2003), the proceedings of a conference organised by the AHRC Research Centre, and also The North Sea World in the Middle Ages: Studies in the Cultural History of North-Western Europe, ed. T.R. Lizka and L.E.M. Walker (Dublin, 2000); D. Kirby and M-L. Hinkkanen, The Baltic and the North Seas (2000). 8 M.M. Meikle and C.M. Newman, Sunderland and its Origins: Monks and Mariners (Chichester, 2007), Chapter 5, passim. 9 C. Phythian-Adams, ‘Frontier Valleys’, The English Rural Landscape, ed. Joan Thirsk (Oxford, 2000), p. 256 and passim. 10 P.Willis,‘The Experience of Scottish Occupation in Newcastle upon Tyne and the Bishopric of Durham 1640-1647’ (unpublished MA thesis, University of Durham, 2002) cites TNA, SP 16/466/111, 9 September 1640; E 33(4), A Declaration Wherein Satisfaction is given Concerning Sir Edward Dering (London, 1644), p. 5; J.R. Boyle and F.W. Dendy, eds, Extracts from the Records of the Merchant Adventurers of Newcastle-Upon-Tyne, SS 93 (1895),Vol. I, p. 146: William Barker’s petition for £6 8s to send his family to Holland. See also Sarah Barber, ‘Attitudes towards the Scots in Northern England, 1639-1652’, NH 35 (1999).

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its heartland was the Tyne and Wear. Its engine of growth was Newcastleupon-Tyne, the head customs port which dominated overseas trade from Whitby to Berwick from the fourteenth century. Newcastle was already a long-standing exporter of Tyneside coal and the supplier of wealthy customers in south Northumberland and the northern bishopric (including Durham Priory). Its leading citizens had moved increasingly at ease in the landed societies of those districts since the fourteenth century.11 Its role as a regional focal point developed after 1560 with the rapid growth of the demand for coal in London and elsewhere.12 Yet in the seventeenth century it was rivalled by Sunderland, which became a significant urban community and port in its own right. Before the Reformation and throughout this period the city’s control over the river Tyne was also contested by both the prior of Tynemouth and the bishop of Durham as lord of Gateshead. The significance of the Grand Lease of 1578 lies in it being the means whereby the city and its merchants finally gained control of all shipping on the Tyne from the bishop of Durham as lord of Gateshead.13 As Holford, King and Liddy show, in the later middle ages the Tyne divided communities in Northumberland and Durham. Newcastle, until it gained county status itself in 1400, was in Northumberland. On either bank of the river were two largely separate and self-conscious ‘county’ communities.14 At the level of the ruling elites, this separation continued after the Reformation. While Newton points out that there was a plethora of associations and identities in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, Durham and Northumberland societies remained distinct. Migration to work in the developing coal, steel, salt, sugar and glass industries on Tyne, Wear and Derwent, in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, was largely drawn from Northumberland and Durham, but this nevertheless created a concentration of industrial occupations within the coalfield, rather than across the still largely rural North East. And, so far as we can judge, these 11 M. Threlfall-Holmes, ‘Newcastle Trade and Durham Priory, 1460-1520’ in North-East England in the Later Middle Ages, ed. C.D. Liddy and R.H. Britnell (Woodbridge, 2005), pp. 141-52; A.C. King and A.J. Pollard, ‘Northumbria in the Later Middle Ages’, Northumbria: History and Identity, ed. R. Colls (Chichester, 2007), forthcoming. 12 Diana Newton, North-East England, 1569-1625: Governance, Culture and Identity (Woodbridge, 2006), pp. 35-40. 13 See D. Levine and K. Wrightson, The Making of an Industrial Society:Whickham, 1560-1765 (Oxford, 1991), pp. 18-23; Newton, North-East England, pp. 37-8; and Meikle and Newman, Sunderland, Chapters 4 and 5. 14 For discussion of the concept of county community as applied to the later middle ages see Christine Carpenter,‘Gentry and Community in Medieval England’, Journal of British Studies 33 (1994) and for the seventeenth century, C. Holmes, ‘The County Community in Stuart Historiography’, Journal of British Studies 19.2 (1980), pp. 54-73. Note however that M.M. Meikle, A British Frontier? Lairds and Gentlemen in the eastern Borders, 1540-1603 (East Linton, 2004), characterises Northumberland as being composed of gentry communities.

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working communities were more marked by occupational than regional identities.15 Thus the emerging industrial, commercial, social and cultural configuration focused on the Tyne at Newcastle in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries overlaid and only slowly displaced earlier configurations focused on the county of Northumberland and the county palatine of Durham. This division was reflected and retained in ecclesiastical organisation. Before the creation of the diocese of Newcastle in 1882, the diocese of Durham had been divided into two archdeaconries, north and south of the river. The separation of the two deepened that division.As Lee points out, the division of the diocese broke the iconic link that Durham cathedral had hitherto provided for the whole of the North East. The cathedral had been a focal point for changes in worship during the Reformation, both for reformers and their opponents, whereas in most other dioceses the Reformation had largely been worked out at parish level.16 In the nineteenth century, while the Church in Durham engaged with the coalmining communities that dominated the physical and social landscapes of the central palatinate, whatever success it enjoyed – and its determination to serve the needs of the new communities was significant – inevitably tended to highlight continued Durham particularity rather than regional unity. Even within the industrial complex itself, as Milne’s study of business regionalism between 1850 and 1914 demonstrates, there was a binary divide. While there was a gathering consensus that the North East Coast was a recognisable industrial entity, in practice there was a significant division. The West Hartlepool/Middlesbrough district was in explicit rivalry with the Tyne/Wear. Investment in shipping and the pattern of supply and procurement was similarly divided between north and south. Employers’ and employees’ associations showed the same split.The coalfield enjoyed separate county-based owners’ organisations and unions. The reality was that the industrial zone based on the Great Northern Coalfield was divided between at least two rival districts. As Milne concludes, ‘the binary north-south division is a recurrent theme, with Newcastle and Middlesbrough serving as centres of gravity for their respective districts. 15 The use of the term ‘Geordie’ is telling here: now a label for miners/Tynesiders, it captures the elision of occupational and geographical identities, but originally applied only to Tynesiders from the later nineteenth century. Its origins are opaque. See R. Colls and B. Lancaster, Geordies: Roots of Regionalism (Edinburgh 1992, repr. Newcastle, 2005), pp. xi-xvi. 16 See C. Haigh, ed., The English Reformation Revised (Cambridge, 1987); D. Marcombe, D. Knighton and C. Stephen, eds, Close Encounters: English Cathedrals and Society since 1540, Studies in Local and Regional History 3 (Nottingham, 1991); M. James, Family, Lineage and Civil Society: A Study of Society, Politics and Mentality in the Durham Region, 1500-1640 (Oxford, 1974); Newton, North-East England, pp. 117-42; A.J. Pollard, ‘Introduction’, in Liddy and Britnell, North-East England, pp. 9-10.

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While they shared many economic characteristics, they rarely collaborated in them.’ By 1914 an overlying rhetoric of pride had developed in the achievement of ‘north-east’ industrialists, encompassing in the case of shipbuilders all the yards from Middlesbrough to Blyth. This rhetoric of collective success may have later remained in the memory, but intense competitive and localised business rivalry was the experience at the time.17 The flexibility and tensions inherent in north-eastern industrial identities were not limited to those at the top of the industrial heap.They were an important aspect of social life among the working classes as well, who also took a pride in their industrial achievements and output. In the twentieth century, rivalries between Tynesiders and Wearsiders, or the ‘Sand Dancers’ of South Shields, were at least as intense as those with Middlesborough. Writing in 1962, Cambridge geographer Gus Caesar nicely captures their spirit of rivalry and intense identity: If a Wearsider visits a pub in Scotswood Road, Newcastle, on a Saturday evening, things may go hard with him, especially if by chance Sunderland have beaten Newcastle at soccer that same afternoon. But if a Wearsider meets a Geordie in a more distant part of Britain, they may well linger over a drink together for they have many interests in common. These relationships epitomize much of the North-East with its intense local rivalries but strong regional unity.18

We can trace the origins of Wearside and Tyneside rivalries back to the seventeenth century, when extensive industrialisation began. Sunderland emerged as a Puritan centre in the early seventeenth century, with a distinct set of allegiances in the civil war of the 1640s, in contrast to the more Royalist Newcastle.19 But soccer and the masculine pub culture, highlighted by Caesar, are more modern features, which have themselves been transformed by the experience of de-industrialisation and subsequent regeneration of urban centres. This volume lacks any focused consideration of recreational life, gender or class.20 How far was family life 17 See above pp. 130-2 and also G. Milne, North-East England, 1850-1950:The Dynamics of a Maritime Industrial Region (Woodbridge, 2006), pp. 133-7 in which it is argued that some old settlements such as Wallsend and Jarrow were ‘reborn’ in the late nineteenth century to resist absorption into larger towns such as Newcastle. 18 A.A.L. Caesar, ‘North-East England’ in Great Britain: Geographical Essays, ed. J.B. Mitchell (Cambridge, 1962), p. 455. 19 R. Howell, Newcastle upon Tyne and the Puritan Revolution: A Study of the Civil War in North England (Oxford, 1967); Meikle and Newman, Sunderland, Chapter 4. For evidence, however, of the manner in which the civic leaders of Newcastle and Sunderland could work together when their interests were threatened by rivals elsewhere see above, p. 86-8. 20 But see Mike Huggins,‘Sport and the Social Construction of Identity in North-East England, 1800-1914’, Northern Identities, ed. N. Kirk (Aldershot, 2000), pp. 132-62; D.A.J. MacPherson and Donald M. MacRaild,‘Sisters of the Brotherhood: Female Orangeism on Tyneside in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries’, Irish Historical Studies 137 (2006), pp. 40-60. Other topics that might be explored, but are not here, include commuting to work zones after the development of the railway system and working-class housing patterns and styles.

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regionally distinctive? Or was it, despite the inflections of dialect, more sharply delineated by class? Notwithstanding the emergence and development of a regional entity based on the Great Northern Coalfield, deep divisions, both older and newer, remained embedded in the North East until well into the twentieth century. It is not simply that there were, as Newton puts it, ‘kaleidoscopic identities transfigured and reconstituted at every turn’, but that there were continuing fault lines within and cutting across the industrial region. To some extent these were the remnants of the older county formations which were so firmly separated by the Tyne. But there were also newer divisions, a division between north and south of this region which were in fact created (or recreated) by industrialisation itself. Moreover, large-scale immigration and rapid population increase further disrupted it. Migration was not just a question of inward movement, as Lee points out, but also of a constantly shifting population within the coalfield, even across the Tyne. How could these transitory and shifting populations in the nineteenth century (themselves repeating the pattern of high mobility in the coalfield of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries) develop a sense of belonging and of being rooted in a region? Arguably, it is this demographic dynamic – of high levels of migration followed by reduced mobility, as occupational continuity over several generations encouraged a certain social and geographical inertia – that created the regional identities of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, in the North East as elsewhere in industrial, and, as a corollary, rural, Britain. It is no coincidence that at the end of the twentieth century, when the North East was widely identified as having the strongest regional identity in England – and thus the target for a referendum – it also enjoyed the lowest levels nationally of geographical mobility out of the region.21 This partly reflects the region’s relative social deprivation, but was also a product of the strength of cultural and family ties; a point reinforced by the return of many young migrants. In general terms, the relationship between demography and regional identity is likely to be close. John Marshall suggests that greater regional identity may follow from the concentration of populations with low mobility, while Phythian-Adams makes the point that expressions of community identity often occur at moments of population contraction.22 The role of demographic dynamics is an aspect of the region’s history in which more research needs to be undertaken. 21 Office for National Statistics, ‘Region in Figures, North East; Volume 9’ online edition: http://www.statistics.gov.uk/StatBase/Product.asp?vlnk=6627. 22 D. Rollison, ‘Exploding England: The Dialectics of Mobility and Settlement in Early Modern England’ Social History 24.1 (1999), pp. 1-16; see also P. Fumerton, Unsettled: The Culture of Mobility in Early Modern England (Chicago, 2006).

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Acknowledging these limitations to the scope of our work, a narrative can, nevertheless, be constructed of the gradual spread of a Tyneside hegemony, through distinctive phases both before and after the heyday of the nineteenth century. It is a narrative, however, subject to several important caveats. There were two separate counties and ecclesiastical organisations, different ethnic groups and divided religious denominations, in and through which there remained vigorous social and cultural relationships. Moreover this hegemony never encompassed all the territory associated with the modern region. In its ebb and flow it has been contested on the Wear, in the far north and in the far south.The Scottish border zone was always different.After the making of peace with Scotland, those in northern Northumberland looked north to Scotland as much as they did to Newcastle, as indeed they also had done before the Wars of Independence began in 1296 and continued to do into modern times.23 In the Tees valley to the far south there was an independent and thriving preindustrial and industrial society and economy with its hinterland spanning North Yorkshire as well as south Durham.24 These were not just peripheries; they were to a large extent separate zones. The ‘North East’ was, and to an extent still is, essentially a Tyneside hegemony, which over the centuries has stretched its tentacles ever further into Northumberland and Durham. Just as the realm of England was brought under the economic, social and cultural sway of London over the centuries, so too the modern region of the North East has been the creation of Newcastleupon-Tyne. While the emerging identity of such a region, gradually extended and forged from a myriad of competing and contested county, ecclesiastical, urban and commercial particularities and interests, can be mapped from the late sixteenth century, the consciousness of its being a region, and the articulation of a regional identity, was a much later development. Certainly before 1600, and probably considerably later, the equivalent of selfconscious regional identities was multiple. Before the late sixteenth century, it is now becoming apparent, there was no such coal-based North East, and arguably no single region. As Holford, King and Liddy argue, 23 See Keith Stringer, ‘Identities in Thirteenth-Century England: Frontier Society in the Far North’, Social and Political Identities in Western History, ed. C. Bjorn, A. Grant and K. Stringer (Copenhagen, 1994), pp. 28-66; Meikle, A British Frontier? 24 A.J. Pollard, ‘“All Maks and Manders”: The Local History of the Tees Valley in the Later Middle Ages’, Cleveland History 65 (1994), pp. 13-27; Newton, North-East England, pp. 1212;Tony Barrow, The Port of Stockton-on-Tees, 1702-1802, Paper in North Eastern History 14 (Middlesbrough 2005); John Banham, Backhouses Bank of Darlington, 1774-1836, Paper in North Eastern History 9 (Middlesbrough, 1999). But see Charles Phythian-Adams,‘Frontier Valleys’, pp. 244-8, 250 and esp. 262 where it is stressed that English frontier valleys such as the Tees ‘unambiguously defined in physical terms’ were ‘enduring in their informal function’ and ‘continued to separate cultural blocks’.

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while there were significant links across the Tyne between the ‘men of the liberty of Durham’ and the ‘men of Northumberland’, the privileges of the liberty were a significant factor in preventing the emergence of a northeastern identity throughout the later middle ages. The Anglo-Scottish wars, contrary to recent interpretation, did little to engender such an identity: indeed it tended to accentuate the differences between Durham and Northumberland.25 When we can discern signs of identification with a larger, more dispersed region in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, it merges into the sense of the north as a whole, east and west of the Pennines, in which the Humber appears to be its southern terminus to the east.With the Trent as its contributory, the Humber marked the medieval and early modern North–South divide, and the conventional administrative divisions in church and state.26 Northern opposition to Tudor Reformation in the Pilgrimage of Grace in 1536 rapidly spread from the Humber, west across the Pennines and north to the Scottish borders. One concentration of rebels fixed Oxen-le-Fields, just north of the Tees on the main road, as their meeting place. It was this host that marched behind St Cuthbert’s banner, but it was drawn, as were the rebels of 1569, from both southern Durham and northern Yorkshire.27 Throughout the earlier history of the north-eastern parts of England, diversity and multiple identities had predominated and it has proved almost impossible to find a sense of regional identification being articulated. On the one hand we have a kaleidoscope of identification with rivers and their valleys, or with the borders, providing far more fragmented focuses of loyalty and association, echoes of which still reverberated in the late nineteenth century. Superimposed on this, certainly still powerful in the sixteenth century, we have the pull of two distinctive ‘countries’ of 25 Above, pp. 40-6.This discussion modifies the conclusion drawn in 1990 that in the fifteenth century, ‘the presence of the Scots to the north, the continuing state of war and the threat of invasion helped weld the north-east into a region with a common identity.This identity was strengthened by the power of the great magnates who held estates in all three counties [of Northumberland, Durham and Yorkshire], and who customarily led the region in war against the common enemy,’ A.J. Pollard, North-Eastern England during the Wars of the Roses (Oxford, 1990), p. 397. See also Alastair J. Macdonald, ‘John Hardyng, Northumbrian Identity and the Scots’, North-East England, ed. Liddy and Britnell , pp. 29-42; Pollard and King, ‘Northumbria in the Later Middle Ages’, forthcoming; Newton, North-East England, pp. 143-52 and K. Wrightson, ‘Elements of Life: The Remaking of the North-East, 15001700’, Northumbria, ed. Colls, forthcoming. 26 Jewell, North-South Divide, pp. 23-5; Pollard, North-Eastern England, pp. 9-10. 27 R.W. Hoyle, The Pilgrimage of Grace and the Politics of the 1530s (Oxford, 2001), pp. 209-55; Michael Bush, The Pilgrimage of Grace: A Study of the Rebel Armies of October 1536 (Manchester, 1996), pp. 136-62; see also E.H. Shagan,‘Rumours and Popular Politics in the Reign of Henry VIII’, The Politics of the Excluded, c. 1500-1850, ed. T. Harris (Basingstoke, 2001) pp. 30-59. Note too that in 1652 the petition for the establishment of a University at Durham for the education of their sons was presented by inhabitants of the County and City of Durham and other Northern Counties (above n. 6).

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Northumberland and Durham. Both Durham and Northumberland were accustomed to act independently as self-proclaimed communities, whether petitioning to the Crown or coming to terms with the Scots. Just how separate they were is revealed in 1523 when the earl of Westmorland was briefly acting as the deputy warden (to the duke of Richmond) of the East and Middle March. He petitioned the Crown that he be granted a convenient place in Northumberland ‘to lie upon’, be given authority to retain ‘Northumbrians’ in his service and to appoint all officers of the Crown in the county. It was necessary, he explained, because ‘I am a stranger in that country having neither kinfolk nor allies there, nor no lands there at this day, whereby I might entertain them and have their assistance.’28 The earl of Westmorland, whose principal seats lay at Brancepeth and Raby in the bishopric, without land, kith or kin in Northumberland, represented himself as a foreigner there.When the king did not grant his request, Westmorland resigned. Similarly, as Maureen Meikle revealed, Lord Eure was a stranger in Northumberland at the end of the century.29 Well into the early nineteenth century, as Rushton shows through his telling examination of legal arrangements, local particularisation remained intensely strong. One might have expected that after the multiple schisms in religion of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the law would have provided a unifying cultural force. The very diversity of the legal system, not just the peculiarity of Durham, reveals that there was little to bring a region together in this aspect of people’s lives.Those who waged at law or who petitioned parliament for changes in it did so from particularist, not regional, standpoints. In particular, the rivalry between Sunderland and Newcastle cut across any latent interest in the two combining to represent the general interests of north-eastern ports. It was not until the later nineteenth century, as Milne shows, that those with shipping and commercial interests combined together to promote their common purpose. The dominant relationship that emerges is one between the localities and the centre, bypassing any kind of intermediate forum. As Rushton concludes, ‘it seems implausible that in the early modern period people felt subjectively, or experienced in any practical way, a “regional” identity, at least in standing before the law or in the public process of its creation.’30 28 BL, Caligula B.VI, fols 510-11.We are grateful to Claire Etty for drawing our attention to this evidence. The earl’s situation was temporary, for at the time the Neville estate in southern Northumberland, at Bywell, was in the hands of the dowager countess. Of course, he may have been making an excuse to be relieved of his post; if that is so, the reasons he chose to advance are revealing. 29 Meikle, British Frontier?, p. 110 and above, pp. 63-4. 30 See above, p. 92.

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In the eighteenth century it appears that the decisive fault line was between local versus national culture.31 A recent collection of essays on Creating and Consuming Culture in North-East England, 1660-1830, set out to discover ‘who precisely participated in this national culture?’ The findings of that collection indicate that local versus national culture was framed more precisely in terms of provincial versus metropolitan values, with a mutualistic rather than antagonistic relationship between local and national culture, with no clearly apparent ‘regional’ space between.32 There were, however, developments in the eighteenth century that might have promoted regional awareness. The Newcastle Courant was established in 1711 and was widely distributed across Durham, Northumberland and beyond into Westmorland, Cumberland and the North Riding of Yorkshire, and its advertising pages reflected a similar geography.33 Newcastle was the third provincial town to print a paper outside London, shortly after Bristol and Norwich.These provincial versions of the London papers, founded by entrepreneurial printers, may have been expected to foster a regional identity through a parallel process to that which Benedict Anderson claims for print culture as a necessary mechanism for imagining national communities.34 They certainly highlighted the roles of Bristol, Norwich and Newcastle as ‘regional capitals’ in the first half of the eighteenth century, but the appearance of rival papers based in smaller towns with more reduced hinterlands soon fragmented this regional monopoly on imagined communities in print. The contents of the Newcastle newspapers also reveal that London’s cultural supremacy waned towards the end of the eighteenth century.35 London was no longer the cultural benchmark it had been for the polite classes in the early to mid eighteenth century, and the bourgeoisie of Newcastle now measured its cultural attainments (such as the founding of the Literary and Philosophical Society in 1793, or the rebuilding of the town centre by 31 See D. Wahrman, ‘National Society, Communal Culture: An Argument about the Recent Historiography of Eighteenth-Century Britain’, Social History 17.1 (1992), pp. 43-72. 32 H. Berry and J. Gregory, ‘Introduction’, Creating and Consuming Culture in North-East England, 1660–1830, ed. Berry and Gregory (Ashgate, 2004), p. 2 and passim; A. Green, ‘A Clumsey Countrey Girl:The Material and Print Culture of Betty Bowes’, ibid., pp. 72-92, stresses the limited force of regional – rather than national, provincial and family – frames of reference for Durham gentry women. 33 Wrightson,‘Elements of Identity’; A. Green,‘Houses and Households in County Durham and Newcastle-upon-Tyne, c. 1570-1730’ (unpublished Ph.D. thesis, University of Durham, 2000), pp. 188-234. 34 B. Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London and New York, 1983); see also H. Barker, Newspapers, Politics and English Society, 1695-1855 (Harlow, 2000). 35 H. Berry, ‘Promoting Taste in the Provincial Press: National and Local Culture in Eighteenth-Century Newcastle upon Tyne’, British Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies 25.1 (2002), pp. 1-18.

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Richard Grainger in the 1820s and ’30s) increasingly in relation to the other great industrial northern towns. The waxing and waning of nascent regional identities and their inherent fragmentation is illuminated by Lee. Lee shows how, in their efforts to win back to the Anglican fold inhabitants of the pit villages of the Durham coalfield, the nineteenth-century Durham clergy deliberately appealed to the symbolism of St Cuthbert, his Church and the AngloSaxon past as a means of creating a shared identity between clergy and parishioner. And to a considerable extent it succeeded. By the early decades of the twentieth century Durham city and its cathedral were the focal point for the annual miners’ gala. The special relationship between the saint and his folk was reinvented. But this theatre of memory was exclusive to Durham; Northumberland miners had their separate picnic. It was a reincarnation, a rediscovery of a much older identity with the bishopric which, as Holford, King and Liddy as well as Newton show, was a powerful cement in the later middles ages and immediate postReformation era.And while Durham continually reinvented its association with its saint, Northumberland re-enacted in ballad and verse the martial exploits of its late-medieval border heroes against the Scots. Memories of St Cuthbert and of border reivers – sustained and periodically revived throughout the centuries – emphasised two different and separate traditions and reinforced separate identities. Moreover, waves of immigration in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries tended to counter any sense of emerging consciousness of regional identity as different groups brought their ethnic identities with them. Strident in the case of the Irish, more muted in the case of the Welsh, they not only cut across a burgeoning regional identity but also, in the case of the Irish, rejected English national identity. The Irish and Welsh, the Allens demonstrate, retained distinct identities in the region, the Irish for religious and political reasons far more distinctively and prominently so before 1921, but they seem to have made little difference to the identity of the region. Irish and Welsh associational life was common across all regions. To some extent the development and continuation of separate national ethnic identities of being Irish and Welsh cut across and hindered the development of regional identity in the nineteenth century. While ethnic identity became more privately articulated and less visible over time, there seems to have been little evidence that assimilated Irishness or Welshness contributed significantly to the development of what one might call northeasternness. In both waves of migration in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, ethnic identities of immigrant communities seem to have remained stronger than any assimilation into a host region. MacPherson and Renton similarly conclude that, in the face of strong ethnic association and ethnic conflict, regional or local identity in the

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twentieth century was politically a weak force. Ethnic politics undercut regionalism. John O’Hanlon, who sought to bridge the gap between Irish nationalism and the English Labour movement, appealed to intensely local loyalties, Tyneside itself, and not to a wider regionalism. Even then his appeal to Tyne localism failed. Half a century later Chris Mullard explicitly rejected the new regionalism in favour of anti-racist national politics.And, as the failure of the devolutionist campaign in the 2004 referendum showed, regionalism, as a political movement, remained a weak force even at the beginning of the twenty-first century. A sense of there being a region of the North East, revealed in the evolving use and application of the phrase to describe the modern region, needs to be seen in this context. A sense of regional identity, let alone any overt regionalism, did not reach its twenty-first-century form until the second half of the twentieth century. Even in the late nineteenth century the word ‘northern’ was used as frequently to describe what is now the North East, with concomitant confusions, for instance in broadcasting, that continued well into the twentieth century. Additionally many other organisations and identities were focused on the river estuaries of Tyne, Wear and Tees. And the emphasis was on the coast. The nineteenth and early twentieth centuries formed a transitional stage, between an era when identification with the three river valleys was strong and the modern perception of the North East. In the early twentieth century, Milne stresses, the differences and distinctions between the Tyne/Wear and Tees/Hartlepool area were still marked. It was perhaps not until the mid twentieth century, with the advent of television, that the idea of the region was fully articulated. It is notable, and the choice was deliberate because of the awareness of local susceptibilities, that the commercial television company was named Tyne Tees when it was set up. In 1959 the first edition of its magazine, The Viewer, assured its readers that ‘the region stretching from beyond the Tees in the south to well beyond the Tyne in the north is a region with a culture, a tradition and a way of life entirely its own.’36 While Tyne Tees in fact did little to enhance that perception, the BBC in its regional broadcasting and the print media was soon busy inventing that culture, tradition and way of life for audience consumption. Vall stresses how cultural identity in the region was constructed in reaction to a perceived lack of culture, and brings out the tension between ‘high’ cultural correctiveness and indigenous practice. Paradoxically, a distinctive north-eastern image came to be shaped by the media out of a particular time in its twentieth-century history.While Northern Arts (note the name) put the North East on the map as an identifiable place needing culture, the cultural identity that was forged was not exactly the identity its promoters had in mind.Television and print captured the image of cloth 36 See above, p. 93.

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cap and whippet. And, paradoxically, that image, which so rapidly became associated with the North East, was in essence the image of the Durham pit village.The Durham miner and the Geordie were amalgamated in the public imagination to represent this particular regional identity.37 As Vall’s essay also reveals, managers and producers of regional broadcasting saw the region as little more than greater Tyneside.As often as not when they used the phrase ‘North East’, they had Tyneside in mind. ‘Geordies’, The Guardian headline proclaimed, ‘look to saint for inspiration’. The same perception seems to have been shared by Chris Mullard when he equated ‘Geordyism’ with ‘North Eastism’. There is nothing particularly new in this.The North East is to some extent an appropriation by Tynesiders. Its regional identity, as it was perceived in the late twentieth century both by those who were active in forging it and by those who observed from outside was, as the region itself, essentially Tyneside writ large. Thus the culture, tradition and way of life entirely its own, predominant since 1960, draws on the collective memory and experience of the recent industrial past, especially on Tyneside and in Durham.38 This shared narrative of a common past, partial as it is, is a vital element in the modern creation of a regional identity, just as in earlier centuries border ballads and the cult of St Cuthbert were integral to the shaping of earlier subregional identities. The story of the mythologising of the ancient kingdom of Northumbria brings this home. Since the monks of Durham first represented themselves as the true heirs of the Anglo-Saxon kingdom at the beginning of the twelfth century, antiquaries, historians and image makers have called upon this heritage. Their use has always been highly selective, tailored to meet the needs of the moment, whether to endow legitimacy on a new and insecure institution, as the reformed monastery at Durham was in the early twelfth century, or to celebrate the roots of the English nation in the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms as did William Hutchinson in the late eighteenth century, or to bolster Tyneside industrial confidence in the late nineteenth century by finding its roots in an equally heroic age.39 37 ‘Geordy’, strictly speaking applied to Tynesiders, is only the most dominant of several local labels for inhabitants of specific districts, of which another example is ‘Makkam’ for an inhabitant of Sunderland. It is nevertheless often applied to all inhabitants of the North East. Colls and Lancaster, eds, Geordies:The Roots of Regionalism, perhaps performs a similar sleight of hand! 38 The Beamish Museum, ‘the first regional open air museum in England’ founded in 1970, has played an important role in fostering this. Note, however, that although it specifically serves the authorities of Northumberland, Tyne/Wear, Durham and the one-time Cleveland, it was established as the Open Air Museum for the North of England (http://www.beamish.org.uk). 39 D.W. Rollason, Northumbria, 500-1100: Creation and Destruction of a Kingdom (Cambridge, 2003), pp. 287-90; R. Sweet, ‘“Truly Historical Ground”: Antiquarianism in the Long Eighteenth Century’, Northumbria, ed. Colls, forthcoming; R. Colls,‘Born-Again Geordies’, Geordies: The Roots of Regionalism, ed. R. Colls and B. Lancaster (Edinburgh 1992, repr. Newcastle, 2005), pp. 3-8.

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So it was, too, in the late twentieth century when advocates of regional devolution could imagine that the North East last enjoyed independence as the Anglo-Saxon kingdom.And, as modern interpretation of the history of the Anglo-Saxon kingdom leads one to conclude, it was a considerable imaginative leap.The recovered, as opposed to imagined, history of the two counties before 1300 reveals a different past. Anglo-Saxon history, to its and our great advantage, is documented.40 Modern interpretation of the sources reveals that the ancient kingdom of Northumbria is an entirely inappropriate model for the modern region.The first English ‘kingdoms’ of Bernicia, north of the Tees, and Deira, south of the river, were united as the kingdom of Northumbria in c. 600, which reached its furthest extent by c. 700, but began to crumble by the ninth century. Northumbria itself was an inherently unstable and loosely knit kingdom. Its heartlands, from which control was exercised and where the dominant elites lived, lay in the East Riding, Wearside and in the Tweed basin. At its greatest extent it incorporated Lothian, Strathclyde and Cumbria and extended as far south as Nottinghamshire. Its sway was disrupted, and the kingdom effectively destroyed, by the Viking invasions and settlement. By the mid ninth century a Scandinavian kingdom of York was established, roughly equating to the earlier Anglo-Saxon kingdom of Deira. Scandinavian influence and settlement penetrated only a short distance north of the Tees, whose valley formed a hybrid Scandinavian/Anglo-Saxon zone. The Viking kings of York recognised the religious community at Durham as a client ruler north of the river, controlling a district which extended to the Tyne. Further north there emerged an earldom of Northumbria based on Bamburgh. Both the religious community of St Cuthbert at Durham and the earls of Northumbria claimed to represent the remnant of the kingdom of Northumbria. The West-Saxon kings, who conquered the Viking kingdom in the tenth century, incorporated Yorkshire, creating a shire for the first time, into the new, unified kingdom of England. They did not attempt to extend their direct rule beyond the Tees, but they did recognise an enlarged earldom of Northumbria, stretching from the north bank of the river, within which lay the area under the control of the community of St Cuthbert. This was the situation inherited by the Normans. Faced by opposition from the surviving Anglo-Saxon earl of Northumbria,William I extended 40 This and the following paragraphs draw upon Rollason, Northumbria;W.M.Aird, St Cuthbert and the Normans: The Church of Durham, 1071-1153 (Woodbridge, 1998); idem, ‘Northern England or Southern Scotland? The Anglo-Scottish Border in the Eleventh and Twelfth Centuries and the Problem of Perspective’, Government, Religion and Society in Northern England, 1000-1700, ed. J.C. Appleby and P. Dalton (Stroud, 1997), pp. 27-39; William E. Kapelle, The Norman Conquest of the North: The Region and its Transformation, 1000-1135, (Chapel Hill, 1979); Richard Fletcher, Bloodfeud: Murder and Revenge in Anglo-Saxon England (London, 2002).

224


his rule into Durham and Northumberland, reformed the ecclesiastical structure of Durham and formally established the county palatinate as a Norman marcher lordship. Even so, the southern boundary of this palatinate was not originally the Tees. The wapentake of Sadberge, containing the barony of Gainford (refocused on the newly built Barnard Castle further up stream) and the lordship of Hart remained separate, matching, it seems, the old Scandinavian division. It was not until the reign of Richard I that Sadberge was incorporated into the palatinate. The truncated Northumbria was not only cut off from Yorkshire, but also from Scotland. The kings of the Scots represented themselves as the true heirs of the kingdom of Northumbria south of the Forth; in Stephen’s reign they took control of eastern England as far south as the Tees. It was not certain until after 1200, under the terms of the treaty of York in 1237, that the two modern counties of Northumberland and Durham would in fact be part of the kingdom of England.The history of the two counties, as they were to become, from Anglo-Saxon settlement until the thirteenth century is distinctive. But the Anglo-Saxon kingdom of Northumbria was but a part of this history, and a relatively short-lived element of it. From 1000 the counties were a contested march which could as easily have been absorbed into the kingdom of the Scots as into the realm of England. In this period of uncertainty all parties, including the monks of the reformed Benedictine monastery at Durham, represented themselves as the true heirs to Northumbria. If one were to find the roots of the modern region in its Anglo-Saxon past, they would lie in the post-1000 earldom of Northumbria rather than in the earlier kingdom. For two and a half centuries, fully attached neither to the kingdom of England nor to the kingdom of the Scots, the emerging county of Northumberland and liberty of Durham, already divided by the river Tyne, shared a particular and uncertain status in Britain. To this extent the modern region was foreshadowed.41 But the idea that the modern North East has a continuous history running back to the Anglo-Saxon kingdom of Northumbria derives from the claims made by the first historians to inhabit the peninsula at Durham, the compiler, or perhaps editor, of the Historia de Sancto Cuthberto in the 1030s and Simeon of Durham in the early twelfth century.Then as now historians are not to be trusted. It is in fact, from its inception, another identity-creating myth. As we emphasised in the Introduction, the notion of regional identities has very largely been associated with ‘modernisation’. This raises the question of how different were medieval and early modern from modern regional identities? This periodisation is clearly too broad, and reference to an overarching process of modernisation too simplistic, but this project has 41 See also the comments of Holford, King and Liddy, above pp. 28-9.

CONCLUSION

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revealed the need for historians to explore more precisely the changing social, cultural and political contexts in which identities are formed. Identification with landscape, knowledge of association with social actors in different scales of interaction, and the role of kin, friends and interactions via literacy and print, are likely to have been very different processes in different periods, and certainly mark apart the industrial from the pre-industrial past. We may even ask whether the mentalities and mechanisms of interaction current before 1700 were amenable to a notion of regional identity only readily discernible in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. We are thus left with a very fragile history of an incoherent and barely self-conscious region. One might tentatively propose a pattern out of this, which is that regional identities in the North East have ebbed and flowed. One could suppose that waves of migration from Anglo-Saxon to New Commonwealth successively created and enhanced diversity, but that in time convergence and absorption allowed alternative identities to emerge which were grounded in the territory in which people lived. Before the late sixteenth century there was no coal-based North East as it is understood today, and no single region. Separate identities were more clearly focused on the borders to the north and the bishopric with its distinctive cult of St Cuthbert to the south. For several centuries the Tyne, as well as bringing together communities on its two banks, also tended to divide them. Although the imprints of these historic identities have tenaciously survived, and been enhanced by newer divisions created by industrialisation itself, they were eventually displaced and replaced by the modern regional identity. But this did not take the form we recognise today until the twentieth century – within living memory.There is a case for arguing that the regional history of the North East from the thirteenth century, when it was irrevocably incorporated into the kingdom of England, and perhaps even before then, has been the history of two English regions giving way to one. And, certainly, it was not a region for itself, if ever, until long after historians have tentatively detected it as beginning to form a region in itself. There has not been a coherent and self-conscious region over the longue durée. If this analysis holds, it has significant implications for the histories of regions and regionalism. Of perhaps more local concern, the current region, centuries in the making, may be more fissured and fragile than we like to imagine.

Index Abercrombie, Nigel, 202 Aberfan, 198 Abrahams, Bennie, 174-5 Alexander III, king of Scots, 41 Alice in Wonderland, 136 Allen,William, 144 Alnwick, 67,110 Ancient Order of Hibernians, 141, 164 Anderson, Benedict, 219 Anderson, Henry, 62 Andy Capp, 200 Anglo-Scottish Wars, 40-6, 217-18 Archaeologia Aeliana, 105-6 Armstrongs, 122, 124 Aronson, P., 182 Arts and Humanities Research Council, 2-3 Arts Council of Great Britain, 202 Aspinall, Bernard, 134 Atkinson, Frank, 203 Bagier, Gordon, 178 Baker, Howard, 199 Balliol, John, king of Scots, 40 Baltic sea, 211 Bamburgh, 79, 46, 110, 223 Bank of England, 74 Bannerman, Sir Henry Campbell, 171 Baring, Charles, bishop of Durham, 110 Barnard Castle, 11, 40, 68, 224 Barnes, Richard, bishop of Durham, 53 Barras, Leonard, 186-7, 194 Barrington, Shute, bishop of Durham, 95 Bavaria, 14

BBC see British Broadcasting Corporation Bearpark, 106 Beaumont, Henry, 45; Louis de; bishop of Durham, 43, 44-5 Bede, 2, 30, 107, 110 Bedlingtonshire, 39, 41 Beecham, Jeremy, 179 Behan, Brendan, 198 Bek, Antony, bishop of Durham, 32 Belfast, 122 Bernicia, 30, 35, 184, 223 Bertram, Sir John, 47 Berwick, 64, 67 Bewcastle, 56 Bewes, Rodney, 195 Birkenhead, Eisteddfod, 154 Bishop Auckland, 11, 140, 145, 150, 156 Black Britain, 171, 175-6 Black, Alfred and George, 193 Blaydon Races. A Tale of Geordie Marley, 185 Bleasdale, Alan, 194 Blenkinsop, Arthur, 203 Blyth, 87, 117, 145, 156, 214; river, 12 Bob’s your Uncle, 187 Bobby Thompson Show, 193 Bolam, James, 195, 200 Bonar Law, Andrew, 167 Border ballads, 59, 220, 222 Borders, the, 10, 73, 40-5, 49, 53-7, 59, 63-4, 83-4, 217, 222 Braddick, Michael, 61, 76, 80 Bradley, Dr Michael McWilliams, 164 Brancepeth, 28, 44, 68, 218 Braudel, Fernand, 7 Breuilly, John, 7

228

INDEX

Brigantes, 51-2 Briggs, Asa, 181 Bristol, 219 British Broadcasting Corporation, 183-96, 198-200, 202, 205-6, 221 Brittany, 14 Bruce, Robert, king of Scots, 40, 46 Brunton Park, 158 Bulmer, Sir Bertram, 67 Bunting, Basil, 203 Burdon, Eric, 197 Burnmoor, 102 Burt,Thomas, 96 Bury, Richard, bishop of Durham, 33 Butt, Isaac, 144 Butterby, 67 Byrne, David, 147, 161 Caernarfon Castle, 154 Caesar, Gus, 214 Camden,William, 10, 28, 51-4, 56, 59 Carey, Sir John, 53 Carr, family of, 66; Robert, earl of Somerset, 68 Carr, Mike and Ian, 197-8 Carson, Sir Edward, 167 Catalonia, 14 Catholic Benefit Society, 139-40 Catholic News, 147 Catholic Young Men’s Society, 142 Cecil,William, Lord Burghley, 53, 65 Chaplin, Renee, 197; Sid, 197-8, 200 Chase, Malcolm, 149 Chaytor, Christopher, 67;Thomas, 67-8 Cheshire, 80 Chester-le-Street, 11, 67, 177 Chillingham Castle, 43 Church of England, 24, 76-7, 94-101, 104-8, 110-12, 220 Claxton,William, 67 Cleator Moor, 141-2 Clement, Dick, 195-6 Clervaux, Elizabeth, 67 Cleveland and Durham Eisteddfod, 150 Close the Coalhouse Door, 198-9 Clyde, river, 19 Clydeside, 122-3, 127

Coal mining, coal trade, see Great Northern Coalfield Coal Owners’ Association, 126 Coatman, John, 186, 189 Cohen, A. P., 9 Coke, Edward, 72, 75 Colley, Linda, 7 Collier, Jim, 198 Colls, Rob, 18, 196, 201 Comyn, family of, 41 Conference of Regional and Local Historians, 5 Consett Ironworks, 148 Conyers family, of Sockburn, 68 Cookson, Catherine, 200-1 Co-operative societies, 141 Cooter, Roger, 134, 137 Coquet, river, 28 Corbridge, 67, 184 Cork, 141 Cornwall, 8, 14, 104 Coronation Street, 191 Council of the North, 61, 80 Cowen, Joseph, 146 Craddock,Thomas, 82 Cressy, David, 6 Crewe, Nathaniel, 3rd baron of Stene, bishop of Durham, 78 Crilly, David, 145 Croft-on-Tees, 67, 105 Cronin, A. J., 199 Crook, 140 Croxdale, 68 Cullercoats, 88 Cumberland, 34, 51, 56, 58, 66, 69, 83, 219 Cumbria, 223 Cuningham,William, 68 Curran, Pete, 168, 170-1 Cymmrodorion, Honourable Society of, 136, 151-8 Daly, John, 143 Darling, Claude, 193 Darlington, 44, 129, 138, 150, 197 Davies, B. O., 150 Davies, Mansel, 156

INDEX

Davies, Sir Rees, 152 Davitt, Michael, 143 Days of Hope, 200 Deasy, John, 145 Deconinck-Brossad, Françoise, 104 Defoe, Daniel, 9 Deira, 30, 35, 184, 223 Derwent, river, 12 Devlin, Joseph, 147 Dobson, Scott, 200 Dobson’s Drie Bobbes, 22 Double your Money, 193 Douglas, Archibald, earl, 55 Down, county, 137 Dublin, 141 Dudley, Robert, earl of Leicester, 62 Duma, Reggie, 179 Durham, archdeaconry, 78, 96,109; bishopric, 29, 33-4, 36-9, 43-3, 45-7, 51-2, 56, 58, 211-12; bishops, 29-30, 31-6, 43, 212; see also individual bishops; cathedral, 59, 93, 95, 107-8, 112, 213; church courts, 77-9; city, 44, 52, 59, 61, 67, 85, 89, 95 137, 220; county, 1, 27-9, 51, 53, 55, 59, 60-1,134, 216-17, 223-4; county community, 47, 55, 65-7, 69, 216-7, see also Haliwerfolc; diocese, 28, 59, 61, 66, 94-101, 108-111, 220; see also church courts; impact of war on, 401, 44; Irish community, 137-8, 163; Miners Union, 146; palatinate, 18, 29-34, 41, 61, 73-4, 79-83, 224; parishes, 76-7, 99-101, 111; pit village, 93-4, 96-104, 107-12, 198200, 221-2; priory 3, 29, 32, 36, 59, 212, 222, 224; radio audiences, 184, 188; St Cuthbert Roman Catholic Church, 106; University, 2, 211; Welsh community, 148 Easington, 98 East Anglia, 8 East Newton, 67 Edward I, 42-3 Edward II, 34, 45 Edward III, 43 Edward VI, 85

229

Edward, prince of Wales, later Edward VIII, 121,153 Edwards, Donald, 186 Eedes, Richard, 106 Elizabeth I, 57, 61, 77 Felton, Sir William de, 43 Ellis, Joyce, 84 Emmett, Robert, 144 Engineer,The, 117 Eure, John de, 46; Ralph, lord, 55, 624, 218; Sir Ralph, 44 Everitt, Alan, 17 Fawcett, C. B., 126, 130 Felling, 184 Fenwick, family of, 66; Sir John, 68 Ferryhill, 109 Fielding, Steve, 159, 164 Finchale, 36 Fishburn, 109 FitzRoy, Henry, duke of Richmond, 218 Flambard, Ranulf, bishop of Durham, 31 Fletcher,Ted, 197 Ford Castle, 43 Fordham, John, bishop of Durham, 32, 34, 37 Forster, Sir John, 63-4 Forth, firth of, 35 France, 14 Franklin, Canon, 142 Fund for Discharged Irishmen, 141 Gainford, 224 Gargrave, Sir Thomas, 54 Gascony, 14 Gateshead, 11, 31-4, 37, 62, 84, 90, 127, 137-8, 212 Gaunless valley, 109 Gee, Henry, 106 Gellner, Ernest, 7 Geordie, 178, 187, 189-90, 200, 222 see also Wot Cheor Geordie and Larn Yersel Geordie George,Thomas E., 148 Germany, 14

230

INDEX

Gibbside, 36 Giddens, Anthony, 20 Gilley, Sheridan, 134-5 Gisland, 56 Glasgow, 131, 168; Alex, 198, 200 Glyn Dwr, Owain, 28 Gosforth, 154 Graham, Frank, 200 Grainger, Richard, 220 Granada TV, 192, 194, 198, 205 Gray, family of, 63-4; Sir Ralph, 68; Sir Thomas, 28, 44; Sir Thomas, the elder, 45; Sir William, 117 Graystanes, Robert, 44 Great Northern Coalfield, 12-13, 334, 52, 54, 56, 62-3, 85-7, 93-112, 114-17, 163, 196, 198-9, 210-11, 213-14, 220-2 Great Northern Railway, 19 Great Yarmouth, 210 Greene, Hugh, 195 Grint, Alan, 199 Guardian, The, 1 Haddaway,Tom, 200 Haliwerfolc, 29, 31, 37-9, 43 Hand on the Sun, 172 Harbottle, Richard, 179 Hardyng, John, 28 Harris, Jose, 159 Hart, 40, 224 Hartlepool, 84, 95, 129, see also Hartlepools Hartlepools, 120, 127-8, 131 Hastings, Francis, earl of Huntingdon, 53, 55 Hatfield,Thomas, bishop of Durham, 36 Hay, Douglas, 72 Hays, Bill, 198 Healy,Tim, 143 Heath, Edward, 174 Hebburn, 163-4 Hegg, Robert, 58 Henry I, 31-2 Henry II, 32

Henry IV, 51, 55 Henry IV, part 1, 51,55 Henry V, 32; Prince Hal, 51 Henry VI, 42 Henry VIII, 73 Henson, Herbert Hensley, 95, 107 Hepworth, Barbara, 203 Heron, Sir William, 43 Hertfordshire, 59 Hetherington, Peter, 1 Heton, Sir Thomas de, 43 Hexham, 11, 110 bishop of, 144 Hexhamshire, 29, 41 Hickman, Mary, 133, 139 Highway Patrol, 193, 195 Hilton, Henry, Lord, 82 Historia de Sancto Cuthberto, 224 Hogg, Quentin, Lord Hailsham, 196 Holinshead, Raphael, 69 Homildon Hill, battles of, 46 Hood,Thomas, 101 Hoppitt, Julian, 7 Hoskins,W. G., 4-5, 7 Hostage,The, 198 Houghton, 102 Howe, Darcus, 172 Hudson, Pat, 9, 12 Hull, 117, 122, 123, 128, 210 Humber, 35, 217 Hunter, G. B., 131 Hutchinson,William, 222 Hylton, Castle, 44 Sir William de, 44 I Love Lucy, 193 Independent Television Authority, 193 Innes, Joanna, 74, 85 Ireland, 134, see also Irish and under Middlesbrough, Newcastle,Tyneside Irish National Foresters, 141, 164; T. M. Healy, (Cleator Moor) branch, 141-2 Irish National League, 144-5,164 Irish Tribune, 146-7 Irish, the, 134, 137-48, 159, 220, see also under Durham, Newcastle,

INDEX

Northumberland,Tyneside Iron Trade Employers’ Association, 127 Iron-making, 114 Jack and George, 198 Jackson, Ralph Ward, 116 James VI and I, 50, 64, 83, 141 Jarrow, 25, 140, 162-7, 201; by-election of 1907, 162, 167-71, 176-7; Express, 166-7; Guardian, 169; Ladies Land League branch, 166; Land League branch, 166; St Bede’s Catholic Church, 139, 164-5 Jelly, Anthony, 203 Jenkins,William, 148 Joffe, Roland, 199 John of Tynemouth, 34, 45 Johnstone, John, 52 Jones, H. M., 156 Jones, Merfyn, 156 Jones,W. J., 80 Jordan, Colin, 174 Journal,The, 173 Joyce, Patrick, 20, 201 Keating, Joseph, 143-4 Kelloe, 107 Kelly, Michael, 143 Kelly, Richard, 186-9, 191 Kiernan, Owen, 175 King’s Lynn, 210-11 Knott, James, 121 Kubicek, Robert, 119 Labour Leader, 170 Lacy, Richard, bishop of Middlesbrough, 146 Laing, S., 198 Lake-Thomas, A, 156 Lancashire, 18, 51, 69, 80, 137, 142 Lancaster, Bill, 185 Land League, the, 164 Langford, Paul, 72 Langley Park, 199 Langley,Thomas, bishop of Durham, 32, 34-6, 42, 46-7 Langton, John, 12, 20

231

Langton,Walter, 42 Lapsley, G.T., 80 Larkin, Michael, 144 Larn yersel Geordie, 200 Lavery, Felix, 137 Lawson, Jack, 101-2, 177 Le Frenais, Ian, 194-7 Leadgate, 104 League of St Cross, 142 Leifchild, J. R., 97 Lewis, Richard, 150 Liddell, Sir Henry, 72 Lightfoot, Joseph, bishop of Durham, 110 Likely Lads,The, 191, 195-7 Lindisfarne, 110 Liver Birds,The, 191 Liverpool, 121-2, 131,167, 169-70, 204 Living, Edward, 184 Lloyd, Edgar, bishop of Newcastle, 132 Lloyd George, David, 156 Gwilym, 156 London, 1, 9-10,13, 19-21, 59, 65, 712, 81, 86-7, 122, 137, 141, 152, 184, 187, 190-1,194,196-7, 210-12, 219; and North Eastern Railway 21 Lothian, 223 Low Counties, the, 14 Lowry, L. S., 199 Lowry, Richard. 144 Lumley Castle, 44 Lumley, John, lord, 67 Ralph, lord, 44 Lydell, Richard, 88-9 Machine Workers Association, 127 Macmillan, Harold, 193 Madison, Henry, 68 Manchester, 122, 137, 204; BBC North Region, 183-4, 187, 189-90, 192, 194; City F.C., 173 Manning, Henry, cardinal, 142 Marches, the, 44 see also borders Marley, family of, 36 Marshall, Alfred, 114 Marshall, John, 5, 215 Martin, John, 144

232

INDEX

Masham, family of, 36 Mathews,Theobald, 142 Matthew,Tobias, dean and bishop of Durham, 49-50, 55, 106 Mauretania, SS, launch of, 131 Mayo, co., 137 McAnulty, Bernard, 145-6 McCord, Norman, 12 McGivern, Edward, 184-5 Mehmood,Triq, 172 Mercer, David, 198 Mercia, 14 Mersey, 123 Methodists, 101, 104, 111, 150 Middlesbrough, 1,115-16, 118, 120, 130, 137, 146, 149, 213-14; Irish community, 143-4; St Hilda’s Church, 150;Welsh community,151 Middleton in Teesdale, 79 Gilbert de, 44-6; Sir John, 47 Mitchell, James, 200 Mitford Castle, 45 Monckton Milnes, Richard, lord Houghton, 110 Monkwearmouth, 81 Moorside Edge, 184 Moran, Gerard, 135 Morpeth, 11, 67, 79 Morris, Malcolm, 193 Mortimer, Sir Edmund, 28 Mullard, Chris, 162-3, 171-6, 178-9, 220 Murdoch, Alexander, 6 Murphy, J., 200 William, 139 Naray, Harash, 174 National Land League of Great Britain, 146 National Union of Welsh Societies, 154-5 Neal, Frank, 135 Netherlands, 211 see also Low Countries Neville, family of, 28, 43; Ralph, 4th earl of Westmorland, 218; Ralph, lord, 42

Neville, Mike, 178, 200 Neville’s Cross, battle of, 46 Newbottle, 102 Newcastle, Armstrong College, 118, 153; Bishop (CE) of see Lloyd; Catholic diocese of, 142 see also Hexham, bishop of; city and county of, 1 14, 19, 30, 67, 72, 90, 115; Civil War, 211; commercial centre, 21, 52, 59, 87, 210, 212-3; Community Relations Commission, 163, 173-6, 177; cultural revival, 196-8; Cymmrodorian society (Tyneside) branch, 153-8; diocese of (CE), 110, 112, 213; dispute with bishops of Durham, 30, 34-8, 84-8; Eisteddfod, 155; Irish community of, 137-8, 143-6; Literary and Philosophic Society, 219; library and art gallery, 206; mercantile and industrial elite, 46, 54, 57, 61-3, 657, 120, 127-30; Newspapers, 172-3; Courant, 219; Daily Chronicle, 137, 148-9; Evening Chronicle, 189; Weekly Chronicle, 93-4,103, 138; People’s Theatre, 185, 203; Playhouse, 198; race relations in, 172-6; radio station, 183-4; regional capital, 206, 210, 213, 215, 219; riots, 75, 139; rivalry with Sunderland, 218; Society of Antiquaries, 105; St Andrew’s Catholic Church, 139; St Mary’s Cathedral, 142; University, 2, 155, 186, 198 see also Armstrong College;Welsh community, 151-8; see also under Tyneside Newcastle and Gateshead Chamber of Commerce, 132 Norfolk, 22 Norham, 44, 47 Norhamshire, 39, 41 Norris, P., 138 North East Coast Association of Secretaries, 129 North East Coast Institution of Engineers and Shipbuilders, 128-9, 132

INDEX

North East Development Council, 202 North East Open Air Museum, Beamish, 203 North East Railway Co., 143 North East Regional Information Partnership, 206 North East Shipbuilders’ associations, 127 North Eastern Railway Co., 124-5, 131-2 North of England Institute of Mining and Mechanical Engineers, 129 North of England United Coal Trade Association, 126 North Shields, 139, 144; Literary Institute, 143 Northallerton, 50 Northern Arts, 202-5, 221 Northern Reform League, 146 Northern Sinfonia, 204, 206 Northumberland, archdeaconry of, 78, 97; Character of inhabitants, 52-8, 59; county of, 11, 13, 20, 27-30, 32, 35, 51, 56, 59-60, 64, 66, 69, 134, 213, 218,223-4; earls and duke of see under Percy; Gentry of, 31, 37-9, 467, 57, 61, 63, 65-7, 212; impact of war on 40-7, 210; Irish community, 137-8; law enforcement, 76-8, 83-4; Miners Association, 146; radio audiences, 184,188; relationships with Scots, 41, 210,216; sheriff of, 33 Northumbria, 14, 21, 28-31, 45, 222-4 Police, 174; University, 2 Northumbrian Serenaders, 188 Norwich, 219 Nottinghamshire, 223 O’Brien, J.F.X., 145 O’Brien,William, 144 O’Connor, Joseph, 145 T.P., 167-70 O’Hanlon, John, 25, 161-71, 176-9, 221 O’Sullivan, Patrick, 134 Ogle, family of, 66

233

Robert, 47; Robert de, 42 Orange Order, the, 139 Ottadini, 52 Owen, E. L., 154 Owen, Sir Isambard, 153 Paasi, Anssi, 17,182 Page, Sir Francis, 72 Palmer, Sir Charles, 124, 167-8 Parnell, Charles Stuart, 166 Paston, Clement, 21-2 John, 21-2 Pease, family of, 116 Richard, 193 Percy, Henry, 1st earl of Northumberland, 28, 51, 55; Henry, 2nd earl of Northumberland, 42; Henry, lord, 42; Sir Henry, ‘Hotspur’, 51-2; Hugh, 10th duke of Northumberland, 191, 201 Phythian- Adams, Charles, 16, 30, 56, 211, 215 Pilgrimage of Grace, 74, 217 Plater, Alan, 186-7, 194, 196, 198-9 Pocock, John, 6-7, 17 Pontop Pike, transmitter station, 192 Powell, J. Enoch, 172 Power, Richard, 145 Presbyterian Church, 77-8 Provence, 14 Pudsey, Hugh see Puiset Puiset, Hugh le, bishop of Durham, 32, 93, 95, 112 Purdue, A.W., 166 Raby, 28, 44 68, 218 Radio Industries Club, 200 Radio Times, 200 Rafferty, John, 173, 178 Raine, James, 106-7 Ramsay, Dean, 143 Randolf,Thomas, earl of Moray, 46 Redcar, 1, 150 Redesdale, 29, 41, 55-6 Redmond, John, 170-1 Richard I, 224 Richmond,Yorks., 11

234

INDEX

Ridden, Geoff, 178 Rites of Durham, 58 Robens, Alf, Lord, 199 Roberts, Brian, 1 Rollison, David, 10, 16 Roman Catholics, 66-8, 78, 101, 109, 111, 169; Church, 138-41, 159, 165 Ropner, Robert, 121 Rossa, O’Donovan, 143 Round the Horn, 187 Roycroft, Brian, 178 Rushyford, 44 Russell,Willy, 194 Ryhope, 103, 107 Ryton, 32 Sadberge, 224 St Patrick, National Brotherhood of, 135, 142 St Patrick’s Day, celebrations, 144-7, 164 St Patrick’s Total Abstinence Society, 142 St Aidan, 107-8 St Columba, 107-8 St Cuthbert, 1, 18, 27-9, 36-8, 43, 589, 67, 109-110, 220, 222-5 exhumation of, 106-7 St David, 154 societies, 136 St David’s Day celebrations, 153-5 St Ives, 104 St Mary’s League of the Cross, 143 St Oswald, 107-8 St Vincent de Paul, society of, 140 Samuel, Raphael, 140 Savage, Edward, 143 Saxton, Christopher, 69 Scalacronica, 44 Scarborough, 86 Scotland, Scots, 14, 18, 27, 40-6, 49, 51, 55, 57, 63, 71, 73, 87, 134, 188, 206, 210-11, 215, 217, 224 Arts Council, 202, 204-5 Scott, Peter, 1 Scrope, Emmanuel, 11th lord of Bolton, 68

Seaham, 107 Seaton Sluice, 88 Selby, family of, 63-4, 67 Walter de, 46; Sir William, 62, 64 Shadforth, 103 Shakespeare,William, 51-2 Sharp, Sir Cuthbert, 105 Shepherd, Jack, 198 Shipbuilding, 114, 120-3, 163, 165 Shipowning, 117, 119-22 Short Bros, 121 C. C., 104 Sidney, Sir Philip, 59 Sill, Michael, 97-7 Skirlaw,Walter, bishop of Durham, 34 Sligo, co., 137 Smith,T. Dan, 196-7, 203 Snell, Keith, 188 Sockburn, 105 South Shields, 34-6, 38, 88-90, 11516, 127-8, 202 Irish community, 143-4; ‘Sand Dancers’, 214 Spain, 14 Stagshaw, transmitter station, 189 Stars Look Down,The, 199-200 Stella, 67 Stephen, king of England, 224 Stephenson, D., 192 Stockton-on-Tees, 13, 19, 118, 121, 138, 150,193 Strathclyde, 223 Stuart, Arbella, 50 Sunderland, 218 Sunderland, 19, 82, 86, 115, 86, 125, 128; in Civil War, 211, 214; Irish community, 137,143; Polytechnic, 155; port, 87-90, 116, 120; ropemaking, 123; shipbuilders, 128-9; University of, 2; see also Monkwearmouth,Wearside Surtees, Robert, 18 Sussex, 59 Sutton,Thomas, 62 Swan Hunter, 122, 131,186 Swansea, 154 Sweet, Rosemary, 85

INDEX

Swift, Roger, 134-5, 138 Swinburne, Alan, 45;William, 41 Symeon of Durham, 28, 30, 37, 224 Syren & Shipping, The, 118 Take it from Here, 187 Tees, river, 11, 13, 27-8, 32, 36, 38-9, 73, 68, 117-18, 209-11, 215, 221, 223 see also Teesside Teesdale, 55 Teesside, 116-18, 120-5, 127-31, 136; University of, 2;Welsh community, 149-50 Tempest, Jane, 67 Thames, 210 Thomas, Edward, 149 Thompson, Bobby, 187-9, 191, 194 Thornell, Eleanor, 67 Thornton, Roger, 46 Throckley, 97 Times,The, 19-21, 170-1 Tomaney, John, 1 Tow Law, 138 Trent, 69, 217 Trevelyan, Sir Charles, 203 Trimdon, 103-4, 107 Tursdale, 67 Tweed, river, 11, 27-8, 41, 55-6, 64, 209, 223 Tyne, river, 2, 13, 24, 43, 45, 117-18, 210, 214, 221, 224-5; bridge, 34-7, 46-7, 85; contested control of, 2939, 212; see also Tyneside Tyne Tees Television, 191-5, 201-3, 205-6, 221 Tynedale, 29, 40-1, 64 Tynemouth, 19, 72, 89-90 Tyneside, 19-20, 56-7, 65, 108, 11618, 120-5, 127-31, 137, 213-16, 221-2; culture, 185, 190, 199-201; Geographical Society, 129; Irish Brigade, 147-8; Iish community, 161-71; New Comonwealth immigrant community, 171-6, 1779; rivalry with Wearside, 86-90, 116; Welsh community, 148, 154-5 Tyrone, co, 164

235

United Irish League, 164, 168-9, 175 Urdd Gobaith Cymru (Welsh League of Youth), 157 Urdd y Delyn (Order of the Harp), 157 Van Mildert,William, bishop of Durham, 95, 105 Vane-Tempest, George, 5th marquess of Londonderry, 107 Victoria, 73 Viewer,The, 193, 221 Vidal, Paul de la Blanche, 8, 10 Vikings, 30, 223 Voice of the North, 189 Voice of the People, 189 Walcher, bishop of Durham, 31 Wales, the Welsh, 122-3, 135, 148-59, 152-3, 162, 206, 220 see also under Durham, Newcastle,Teesside, Tyneside Walker, 162 Wallace,William, 40 Wallsend, 131, 140, 145, 162-3, 165-7; Slipway Co., 122;T. M. Healy branch of Irish National League, 166 Walsh, John, 143 Waltheof, earl of Northumbria 28 Walton, John, 182 Ward, David, 150 Warwick, 172 Washington, co Durham, 165 Wear, river, 12-13, 38, 85-90, 221 see also Wearside Weardale, 55 Wearmouth, 118 Wearside, 65, 86-90, 120-5, 127-31, 213-15, 223 Webb, Sydney and Beatrice, 76 Webster & Co, 123 Weldon, Jamess E. C., dean of Durham, 109 Wensleydale, 68 West Auckland, 95 West Hartlepool, 116-18, 120-1, 124,

236

INDEX

213 see also Hartlepools West Indian Standing Conference, 172 West Rainton, 102 Westminster, 24, 27, 55, 74, 80-1 Westmoor Engineering Ltd, 123 Westmorland, 34, 51, 56, 58, 66, 69, 219 see also Neville, earl of When the Boat Comes In, 191, 200-1 Whickham, 32, 36, 62 Whitby, 87,117, 210-11 White, Eric, 202 Whitley Bay, 195 Widdrington, family of, 63-4; Sir Henry, 64, 68; Sir John, 47 Willesden Junction, 196 William I, king of England, 28, 223 Willington Quay, 140, 145, 162 Wilson, Harold, 172 Witton le Wear, 44 Witton Park, 150 Wolfe Tone, 144 Worcestershire, 59 Wot Cheor Geordie, 185-9 Wrightson, Keith, 6, 12 ‘Wynn, Sir Watkin, pudding’, 153 York, 30, 37, 51, 68, 223; province of, 61 Yorkshire, 14, 18, 19, 38, 53-4, 63, 657, 69, 219, 137, 223; symphony orchestra, 204 Z Cars, 191, 194-5, 198

Regions and Regionalism in History Volumes already published I: The Durham Liber Vitae and its Context, edited by David Rollason, A. J. Piper, Margaret Harvey and Lynda Rollason, 2004 II: Captain Cook: Explorations and Reassessments, edited by Glyndwr Williams, 2004 III: North-East England in the Later Middle Ages, edited by Christian D. Liddy and R. H. Britnell, 2005 IV: North-East England, 1850–1914: The Dynamics of a Maritime Region, Graeme J. Milne, 2006 V: North-East England, 1569–1625: Governance, Culture and Identity, Diana Newton, 2006 VI: Lay Religious Life in Late Medieval Durham, Margaret Harvey, 2006 VII: Peasants and Production in the Medieval North-East: The Evidence from Tithes, 1270–1536, Ben Dodds, 2007 VIII: The Church of England and the Durham Coalfield, 1810–1926: Clergymen, Capitalists and Colliers, Robert Lee, 2007 IX Regional Identities in North-East England, 1300–2000, edited by Adrian Green and A. J. Pollard, 2007 X Liberties and Identities in Later Medieval Britain, edited by Michael Prestwich, 2008

Regional Identities in North-East England, 1300-2000 (Regions and Regionalism in History)

Captain Cook: Explorations and Reassessments (Regions and Regionalism in History)

North-East England in the Later Middle Ages (Regions and Regionalism in History)

North-East England, 1569-1625: Governance, Culture and Identity (Regions and Regionalism in History)

Russian Regions and Regionalism: Strength Through Weakness

Region, Regional Identity and Regionalism in Southeastern Europe (Ethnologia Balkanica)

Regional Development in the Knowledge Economy (Regions and Cities)

Clusters and Regional Development (Regions and Cities)

Legends, Tradition and History in Medieval England

Regionalism in architecture: Proceedings of the regional seminar

Regionalism in Global Trade

Regionalism in Global Trade

Peasants and Production in the Medieval North-East: The Evidence from Tithes, 1270-1536 (Regions and Regionalism in History)

Peasants and Production in the Medieval North-East: The Evidence from Tithes, 1270-1536 (Regions and Regionalism in History)

Royalist Identities (Early Modern Literature in History)

Material Identities (New Interventions in Art History)

U.S. Leadership, History, and Bilateral Relations in Northeast Asia

Collaborative Development in Northeast Asia

Devolution & Regionalism: The UK Experience (Regions and Cities)

Albanian Identities: Myth and History

History of Civilization in England: Volume 1

The Liturgy in Medieval England: A History

History of Civilization in England: Volume 2

The Liturgy in Medieval England: A History

The Liturgy in Medieval England: A History

Regional Interests and Regional Actors: Wales and Saxony As Modern Regions in Europe (The Cass Series in Regional and Federal Studies)

Regionalism in the European Union

Attribute-Identities in Microreductions

History of Gypsy Identities

Regional Identities in North-East England, 1300-2000 (Regions and Regionalism in History)

Captain Cook: Explorations and Reassessments (Regions and Regionalism in History)

North-East England in the Later Middle Ages (Regions and Regionalism in History)

North-East England, 1569-1625: Governance, Culture and Identity (Regions and Regionalism in History)

Russian Regions and Regionalism: Strength Through Weakness

Region, Regional Identity and Regionalism in Southeastern Europe (Ethnologia Balkanica)

Regional Development in the Knowledge Economy (Regions and Cities)

Clusters and Regional Development (Regions and Cities)

Legends, Tradition and History in Medieval England

Regionalism in architecture: Proceedings of the regional seminar

Regionalism in Global Trade

Regionalism in Global Trade

Peasants and Production in the Medieval North-East: The Evidence from Tithes, 1270-1536 (Regions and Regionalism in History)

Peasants and Production in the Medieval North-East: The Evidence from Tithes, 1270-1536 (Regions and Regionalism in History)

Royalist Identities (Early Modern Literature in History)

Material Identities (New Interventions in Art History)

U.S. Leadership, History, and Bilateral Relations in Northeast Asia

Collaborative Development in Northeast Asia

Devolution & Regionalism: The UK Experience (Regions and Cities)

Albanian Identities: Myth and History

History of Civilization in England: Volume 1

The Liturgy in Medieval England: A History

History of Civilization in England: Volume 2

The Liturgy in Medieval England: A History

The Liturgy in Medieval England: A History

Regional Interests and Regional Actors: Wales and Saxony As Modern Regions in Europe (The Cass Series in Regional and Federal Studies)

Regionalism in the European Union

Attribute-Identities in Microreductions

History of Gypsy Identities

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