The Tudors had endeavoured to achieve state formation through the imposition of a general ‘English civility’ upon the whole kingdom. Yet Steve Ellis has argued that their ambitions ultimately were 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. These negative observations were not confined to Northumberland. Mervyn James claimed that it took early modern Durham almost a hundred and fifty years for a (Hobbesian) ‘civil society’ to emerge out of the more archaic society that obtained there: a society which had been dominated by ‘great families’ who exercised authority over the gentry and their dependants. Such dependencies and allegiances were to be replaced by the concept of a hereditary gentility. With its emphasis on order and decorum, it came to be the defining feature of local ascendancy. The defeat of the northern rising, and the removal of the county's most powerful family, the Nevilles, advanced the process, but, even so, it was long and drawn out. Thus, both the north-eastern counties continue to be considered in the historiography as out of step with the rest of the kingdom, although not necessarily in precisely the same respect. Variations within the area may have been more nuanced, or finely drawn, than a simple dichotomy between the administrative counties of Northumberland and Durham, however. Nor can it automatically be assumed that Newcastle conformed to either, or any, of those impressions. At the same time, King James VI of Scotland was encouraging his nobility to adopt the kind of behaviour that was more suited to a Christian and civil society and to abandon their ‘barbarous feidis’, as an ‘exampill to the far Hielandis and Bourdouris, quhair sic forme of unquheit is usit’. On either side of the Anglo-Scottish border, the official discourse stressed the incivility of those living in the vicinity of the borders.

Negative impressions of the north-eastern parts were not confined to the borders: they extended to include the southernmost tip of the bishopric. 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 an inn in Northallerton confirmed every rumour heard about the North.