The book’s conclusion briefly examines the Northern Rebellion  of 1569, a revolt centered again on the entanglement of centralization and religious reform with the South set against the North. This northern Catholic revolt proves a fitting culmination to the book because, here, we find the same convoluted dynamic of intimacy and revulsion, of derision and desire of the North of England evident in each chapter. The putting down of the revolt, the bloody and destructive retribution that followed by Elizabeth I’s government, recalls the “Harrying of the North” by William I exactly 500 years prior. But the aftermath of 1569 witnesses an emergent British identity form between England and Scotland, an identity afforded by the Northern Rebellion, that would drive England into the age of imperialism and, eventually, toward the Industrial Revolution from which so many critics claim the North–South divide originates. The chapter concludes by briefly pondering modern readings of a still-extant North–South divide in poetry, fiction, and film in order to illustrate just how essential North–South discourse, forged in the Middle Ages, continues to inform the modern rift.

Chapter 4 focuses on the ideas and activities of republican underground networks in England and Europe. It addresses the ways in which various groups of republicans conceptualised their cause and their visions for a restoration of the Commonwealth government in England. The Northern Rising in 1663, which saw Neville arrested and led to his banishment from the country, was among the more prominent attempts of the underground community in England to restore republican rule. Sidney meanwhile was driving an agenda for change from the Continent, gathering allies and money to invade England with the help of foreign troops. Ludlow, however, hesitated to join any conspiracies, both out of distrust for the republicans’ European allies and out of fear of jeopardising his position in Switzerland. The conspirators’ activities culminated in the aborted Sidney Plot of 1665, which on the one hand exposed the fractures in the exile community and, on the other, changed the exiles’ longer-term prospects by dashing their hopes for an imminent return to republican rule at home.

This chapter reassesses the aesthetics of the early modern broadside ballad, arguing for the paradoxical readerly and writerly value of literary inadequacy. The authenticity gap, between the reality of the pre-Reformation past and the stylised conventions through which these broadsides approached it, offered an opportunity in which both writers and readers were complicit. One was the commodification of ‘northern-ness’ in popular literary culture in the years after the Northern Rising, which reveals in miniature the cultural and political work this kind of print could carry out: for example in William Elderton’s A New Yorkshyre Song. It also opened up creative possibilities ifor entrepreneurial writers and printers. These are very much at work in invocations of the cheap print merry world in William Kemp’s Nine Daies Wonder (1600) and Thomas Nashe’s Lenten Stuffe (1599), both from the disorderly world of commercial entertainment, who use these tropes both to shape and legitimate their authorial personas and as springboard for innovation.