landlords everywhere to pull out of demesne cultivation and become rentiers instead.18
The burdens of serfdom, then, were generally lighter in the North, but rural benightedness – the absence of towns and literacy – was correspondingly deeper. Musgrove, citing county-by-county statistical studies by Conan Doyle and Havelock Ellis, argues persuasively that the North was historically marked by a much lower quotient of intellectuals – thinkers, writers, artists – than the South. Jewell supplies supporting evidence, pointing out the monopoly of higher education (Oxford, Cambridge, the Inns of Court) held by the South down to the 1820s, leaving the North in a very different situation than Scotland. As Musgrove puts it, ‘highly productive contexts for the intellectual life do not include militarised frontiers or heavily industrialised towns. It was the misfortune of northern England after the age of Bede that its greatness was based on both.’19
Accounting for no more than one-eighth of medieval England’s population and wealth, the land above the Mersey, Trent and Humber presented too narrow a platform for its magnates to sustain a leading role in the elite revolts which plagued the country’s weaker kings.20 Northumberland and Yorkshire landowners of middling wealth were first to stir against King John, refusing to sponsor or enlist in his attempt to claw back French territories lost to the Capetian monarchy, so that ‘Northerners’ became a tag for the 1215 Revolt as a whole, but estate holders from eastern and southern counties ultimately had the run of the Magna Carta committee.21
It required a large inflow of resources from the centre, continued for many years, to put the northern aristocracy on a stronger footing. Conquest of the principality of Wales in 1284 left Cumberland and Northumberland standing on England’s only land frontier with an independent state. The attack on Scottish independence, beginning with capture of Berwick and victory at Dunbar in 1296, opened up opportunities for rising northern dynasties to accumulate estates and offices at the Crown’s pleasure.22 Even after Edward III pivoted English aggrandisement from Scotland to France in 1337, Anglo-Scottish conflict would rumble on for centuries. Wardens of the march were subsidised by the royal court to hold the North against the Scots using private armies recruited from Durham, Yorkshire and the Border counties. Henry Percy, a Yorkshire magnate who had fought at Berwick and Dunbar, acquired the castle and barony of Alnwick from Antony Bek, Bishop of Durham, in 1310. The Nevilles, descended from Anglo-Danish thegns in County Durham, also won royal favour through military service on the frontier. In the century leading up to Bosworth, the Percys held the wardenship of the east march for eighty years and there were Neville equivalents in the west for close on sixty.23 Extra spending power, broad jurisdiction and the prestige of high office provided them with extraordinary numbers of retainers.
The splintering of the Plantagenet dynasty into the cadet branches of Lancaster and York, after defeat in the Hundred Years War turned a rapacious English baronage in on itself, saw unprecedented intrusions into national politics by these bastard-feudal affinities. Richard Neville, Warwick the Kingmaker, controlled the marcher wardenships and other key posts in the border counties, and ruled over north Yorkshire from Middleham Castle in Richmondshire, where he briefly imprisoned Edward IV. But the support networks of such towering figures far outran any one region. Warwick also held a string of strategic commands on either side of the Channel. He was keeper of the seas, captain of the Calais garrison, warden of the Cinque Ports, constable of Dover. Moving against Henry VI in 1460, he exploited his mercantile connections to stir a popular revolt in Kent and London against the Lancastrian regime.
The dynastic struggles of 1455–85 were never, therefore, the cross-Pennine joust that their historiographical framing as a ‘War of the Roses’ implies. But after Warwick was cut down at the Battle of Barnet in 1471, his estates and offices fell to Edward IV’s youngest brother, Richard, Duke of Gloucester, who built up the country’s largest aristocratic affinity on the basis of sequestered Neville assets. Abiding on his estates in preference to spending time at court, Gloucester forged few bonds among the southern gentry – sheriffs, Justices of the Peace, servants of the royal household. Outraged by his coup d’état in 1483, their support leaked across the Channel to the Tudor court-in-waiting. In response, Richard shoehorned a few dozen members of his ducal affinity into forfeited estates, local-government offices and military posts in southern counties, a controversial – and tellingly brief – inversion of England’s normal direction of gravity.24
Gloucester’s demise was sealed by an unexpected brittleness of his northern power base. Thomas Stanley, an officeholder in the Cheshire and Lancaster palatinates involved in multiple demarcation disputes with the prince over the years, would intervene decisively at Bosworth on the side of his stepson, Henry Tudor, receiving the earldom of Derby in thanks. He is even said to have placed the royal coronet on Henry’s head when the battle was won. What the Ricardian interlude shows is that under premodern conditions, not even a member of the royal line could scrabble together quite enough strength in the North to reign in defiance of Establishment opinion. The sine qua non of governing England was to have its southern heartland on side.
Stanley Bindoff of University College London once wrote that ‘Tudor rule meant the rule of the South over the North’.25 It also spelled the rule of London over the rest of the country. A rarity among European capitals for being both a seat of government and a major international port, London swelled to a population of 185,000 in the course of the sixteenth century – a threefold increase – as its merchants gained a stranglehold over the cloth trade with the Continental entrepôt of Antwerp, while an upturn in culture and the arts under court sponsorship culminated in the Elizabethan theatre.26 All but two of the twenty most prosperous Tudor towns were located in a belt of southern England running from Totnes in Devon to Canterbury in Kent, or else in an East Anglian extension between Colchester and Lynn. In the reign of Henry VIII, England north of the Trent accounted for only 8 per cent of taxable lay wealth, sharply down from its medieval peak, whereas the seven counties surrounding London paid 21 per cent.27 ‘The entire economy of England was ruled from London. Political centralisation, the power of the English Crown, the highly concentrated nature of trade, all combined to make the capital great,’ remarked Fernand Braudel.28 It was ‘so superior to other English towns’, a Swiss travel writer opined in 1599,
that London is not said to be in England, but rather England to be in London, for England’s most resplendent objects may be seen in and around London; so that he who sightsees London and the royal courts in its immediate vicinity may assert, without impertinence that he is properly acquainted with England.’29
Distant from this ferment, northern England adopted a conservative posture in the seminal contests of the early modern era, unsuccessfully championing a succession of backward-looking causes: traditional religion, baronial privilege, Crown against Parliament. When the Henrician Reformation moved up a gear in 1536 through the Ten Articles of Faith, dissolution of the smaller monasteries and legislation to extinguish the authority of the Bishop of Rome, it set off the biggest revolt of the Tudor age – one significant not just for its size but also for its regional profile. Until this point, popular rebellion had been largely confined to commoners in easy riding distance of London and the royal court at Westminster. The 1381 Peasants’ Revolt centred on populous south-eastern counties hardest hit by Richard II’s poll tax and itching to be free of labour laws imposed to prop up seigniorial power after the Black Death. The proto-Protestant Lollard uprising of 1414 barely made any impression north of the Trent: because literacy was less widespread in the region, there were fewer entry points for unorthodox religious ideas. The 1450 Jack Cade rebellion, at the fag-end of the Lancastrian dynasty, sprang out of a self-assertive county community of minor freeholders in Kent as news of defeat in Normandy reverberated along the London-to-Dover highway.30 Popular unrest didn’t become entirely absent from the Tudor South, as the religiously variegated commotion during Edward VI’s minority would attest: the Catholic-enthused Prayer Book rebellion in the South West coinciding with Protestant-inclined unrest closer to the capital. Nevertheless, the worst upheaval was pushed out to peripheral areas, where unprecedented royal interference in parish religion ran up against
