In 1495, Henry VII abolished Tynedale's liberty status and annexed it to the county of Northumberland. Its inhabitants, often ‘allied with the Scots, the ancient enemies of this realm, have … committed and done, and still daily and nightly commit and do, great and dreadful murders, treasons, robberies, felonies, depredations, riots and other great offences upon the king our sovereign lord's true and faithful liege people and subjects … within the counties of Northumberland, Cumberland and Westmorland, Hexhamshire, the bishopric of Durham and in a part of Yorkshire … [who] cannot be at all secure in their bodies or goods, or even reside in their own houses, but may either be murdered or taken and carried off into Scotland and there ransomed to the great damage of their body and goods and their complete impoverishment forever’. But it was beyond the power of statute to reform the ‘surnames’ of Tynedale. In 1522, John Kite, bishop of Carlisle, the king's agent in the North, confirmed that, along with their fellows of Redesdale (which enjoyed liberty status until 1536), they committed ‘more theft, more extortion … than there is by all the Scots of Scotland’, so that ‘no man which is not in a hold strong hath or may have any cattle or movable in surety through the bishopric till we come within eight miles of Carlisle; all Northumberland likewise’. By this time, his complaints would have made thoroughly familiar reading at Westminster.