In his study of the changing character of northern society in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Mervyn James captured the essence of this period of transition and evolution in his description of a shift from ‘lineage’ to ‘civil’ society. This lineage society was ‘essentially medieval … its associated culture centred on the great household, gregarious and hospitable, with its swarms of servants and dependants’, and the ‘emphasis in this society was on the cult of “lordship”, the exercise of which in the course of time had come to be thought the natural and inherent prerogative of the leading lineages’. It was a society structured around the aristocratic households and affinities of the region's great landed families, most notably the Neville earls of Westmorland, whose castles of Raby and Brancepeth dominated the Durham landscape, literally and figuratively. This was a world of patrons and clients and, without a major town or city to act as a focal point for their interaction, the gentry of Durham coalesced around and were dependent – socially, economically and politically – upon the region's pre-eminent aristocratic interests. Under the Tudors, according to James, the whole basis of this society was transformed by the individualising forces of urbanisation and commercialisation: as the market rather than the aristocratic household began to determine the character of the region, the members of Durham landed society now engaged directly with central government at Westminster and swore obedience to the crown.