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FIFTEENTH-CENTURY DURHAM AND THE PROBLEM OF PROVINCIAL LIBERTIES IN ENGLAND AND THE WIDER TERRITORIES OF THE ENGLISH CROWN

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Proxime Accessit, Alexander Prize 1999

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 February 2002

Tim Thornton
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Abstract

IT is remarkable when an historical interpretation has stood almost unchallenged for one hundred years. Yet this is the case with the approach to the history of the county palatine of Durham outlined by G. T. Lapsley in 1900; it is a story of the steadydecline of this once highly autonomous jurisdiction which has been retold by virtually all those whohave written on the subject since. It is even more remarkable when thatinterpretation has acted as a vital support for two much more far-reaching paradigms.In the case of Lapsley’s interpretation of Durham, these extend not just elsewhere in the British Isles but also to North America. On the one hand is the approach to the territories ofthe English crown as a precociously centralised polity, characterised by the effectiveauthority of the crown’s institutions and the rapid decline of what little provincial particularismhad once been present. WithLapsley’s Durham a pale shadow of its formerself by the fifteenth century, historians have been able to propose that even the strongestof the ancient palatinates was effectively defunct and the power of the centreunopposed. On the other hand, there is the paradigm which sees EnglishNorth America as the scene of a conflict between the direct authority of an ambitious crown anda burgeoning desire for local self-government which was eventually successful.

Type
Review Article
Information
Transactions of the Royal Historical Society , Volume 11 , December 2001 , pp. 83 - 100
Copyright
Copyright © Royal Historical Society2001

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References

1 Gaillard Thomas Lapsley, The County Palatine of Durham: A Study in Constitutional History(1900); Constance M. Fraser, ‘Prerogative and the Bishops of Durham, 1267–1376’,English Historical Review[hereafterEHR], 74 (1959), 467–76; Jean Scammell, ‘The Origin and Limitations of the Liberty of Durham’,EHR, 81 (1966), 449–73. I would like to thank Cliff Davies, Ralph Griffiths, Mark Ormrod and Tony Pollard for their patient and helpful comments on this paper.

2 Marxist work, e.g. A. L. Morton,A People’s History of England(1938); Whig historiography, e.g. George Macaulay Trevelyan,England in the Age of Wycliffe(1899, 4th edn 1909); hisHistory of England (1926, 3rd edn with corrections 1952); and more recent influential interpretations such as Mervyn James,Family, Lineage and Civil Society: A Study of Society, Politics and Mentality in the Durham Region, 1500–1640 (Oxford, 1974); Philip Corrigan and Derek Sayer,The Great Arch: English State Formation as Cultural Revolution(Oxford, 1985).

3 E.g. recently D. M. Loades,Power in Tudor England(Basingstoke and London, 1997), 33.

4 Jack P. Greene argued for the acceptance of considerable autonomy in early seventeenth-century America thanks to the distance from the centre and lack of an effective force that could be deployed by the central authority:Peripheries and Center: Constitutional Development in the Extended Polities of the British Empire and the United States, 1607–1788(Athens, Ga., and London, 1986), esp. chapter I. Greene developed the approach of Charles H. McIlwain,The American Revolution: A Constitutional Approach(New York, 1923). Cf. Stephen Saunders Webb, who emphasised strong central rule through military governorships: ‘Army and Empire: English Garrison Government in Britain and America, 1569 to 1763’,William and Mary Quarterly, third series, 34 (1977): 1–31;idem, The Governors-General: The English Army and the Definition of Empire, 1569–1681(Chapel Hill, NC, 1979).