a much greater modern role in the political class and bureaucracy of united Italy than northerners have in Britain. As Gramsci observed, while the urbanised society of northern Italy produced industrial technicians, the southern rural bourgeoisie sent forth state officials and professionals.59 Since his time, the South has supplied as many Italian prime ministers as the North, not to mention the two most recent heads of state, whereas in postwar Britain, London and the Home Counties have accounted for ten prime ministers, the North only two, Eden and Wilson, both of whom had drifted away from the region by early adulthood.60 Italy, for all its fissures, is a modern nation state with considerable provincial autonomies. The UK is the opposite: a hyper-centralised administration set within a pre-modern, composite kingdom – ‘not really a national state’, argued Tom Nairn, but rather ‘a southernlowland hegemonic bloc uniting a hereditary elite to the central processing unit of commercial and financial capital’.61
This text, far too long in the making, began life immediately preceding the 2008 financial crisis, when left politics was in the doldrums. It made sense, at the time, to follow the precedent of Gramsci’s third and final iteration of the Southern Question, in the Prison Notebooks, and shift the burden of the regional question from the revolutionary left to the liberal-conservative centre. The overarching problematic was conceived like this: what challenges did the rise and fall of the industrial North present to a remote and unsympathetic British state, and how have policy decisions taken in London – rarely for the best of motives – guided the region’s economic parabola from manufacturing powerhouse to twentyfirst-century also-ran?
The crash of 2008 put paid to the New Labour ‘economic miracle’ against which the book polemicises, but the 2016 Brexit vote then threw the regional question into high relief. Although the northern economy was in worse shape than before, a mass protest vote had made it politically salient again. This prompted fresh considerations. What roles has the North, and the social groups within it, played within the social-power configurations of the British Isles? Only in fits and starts have social classes within the region threatened to become ‘leading and dominant’ on the national stage. It is unusual, of course, for a historically less populous and less wealthy region to hegemonise a richer and better-located one: Prussia’s rule over the Rhineland was gifted by outside powers, in a conjuncture that prized military over economic strength. The North of England may not have Scotland’s power of secession, but it’s always exerted pressure, from a subaltern position, on the affairs of state, in ways particular to the historical moment: the ructions of a medieval borderland, its magnates wont to tread on kings, aren’t those of a precocious industrial society or subsiding post-industrial one, where different social forces are in motion. In this sense, what’s been termed the ‘problem of the North’ changes from one era to the next.62
Retreating into a pure form of regional history would provide few answers to any of these points. Northern questions aren’t resolved on home territory: sovereign power and political accountability lie elsewhere. So we delve into the politics of Westminster and Whitehall, observing these proceedings from a northern perspective, to see what English history looks like when stood upon its head.
The first question of all is how the middle swathe of Britain ended up as the unloved ward of an English state whose centre of operations lay 200 miles to the south, the perambulations of its kings and queens rarely straying beyond Watling Street in all the years until the territory they ruled over had so increased its domestic extent that Victoria and Albert could withdraw to the seclusion of Balmoral in Aberdeenshire.1 England and Scotland are both so long in the tooth, as political structures go, that state formation on this European outcrop dates back to the Early Middle Ages, superimposed on yet older rounds of uneven cultural development usually operating to the advantage of the island’s southern climes. The greatest Iron Age monumental landscapes lie within walking distance of one another in the Wiltshire countryside, while the civic life of Roman Bath, London and St Albans was leagues ahead of the garrison economy of the border country beyond Chester and York.
True, the more or less complete collapse of social organisation following the legions’ withdrawal in the fifth century temporarily upended this regional hierarchy. A meeting-point of the Saxon and Celtic worlds, the Anglo-Saxon kingdom of Northumbria fused together their cultural elements to light up the Dark Ages and make a signal contribution to the revival of art and letters in the Latin West. The monks of Jarrow and Lindisfarne produced the foundational text in the history of the English peoples and some of the finest decorative manuscripts in the Hiberno-Saxon style, while York’s cathedral school furnished the template for the palace school at Aachen, where Alcuin of York marshalled the Carolingian Renaissance. Alcuin’s paean to ‘York’s famed city’ describes how his own tutor, Ælberht, sought out books in foreign lands, building a library of ‘priceless treasures’.2
But a long North Sea flank exposed Northumbria to the Scandinavian invasions of the eighth and ninth centuries which destroyed Ælberht’s celebrated library and swallowed up York into the Viking world. By a process of elimination, it was left to the kingdom of Wessex at Britain’s southern limit, the only Anglo-Saxon polity to withstand the Norsemen’s advance, to act as nucleus for the English state. Æthelstan of Wessex, self-styled ‘king of all Britain’, seized control of the kingdom of York in 927. After a period of confusion, York’s last Norwegian ruler was felled at Stainmore in the Pennines, at a stroke reducing it from a Viking statelet to an English provincial town.3
Æthelstan’s Anglo-Saxons never fully assimilated their Northumbrian annexe, however, entrusting its governance to resident Anglo-Scandinavian earls. Yorkshire was an unwieldy addition to the Wessex shire system, more than twice the size of any other county. There were no royal sheriffs in the country to its north, nor would the Domesday survey be hazarded in these parts. In Cumbria, an obscure Celtic polity lingered under Scottish lordship for a quarter of a century after the Norman Conquest. Circumstances dictated, therefore, that the prospects for Norman rule in the North wouldn’t be decided by a distant battle at Hastings.
Bending with the wind, the last Anglo-Saxon Archbishop of York crowned William of Normandy at Westminster on Christmas Day 1066. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle relates that Ealdred prised an oath from the Conqueror to ‘hold this nation as well as the best of any kings before him did’. Ealdred’s stricture was given short shrift by the king’s lieutenants, Odo of Bayeux and William fitz Osbern, who ‘built castles widely throughout this nation, and oppressed the wretched people; and afterwards it always grew very much worse’.4 They brought the ecclesiastical province of York under Canterbury’s sway and initiated a tenurial revolution in the shadows of the fortresses bemoaned by the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. The Domesday survey shows a couple of dozen Continental barons in receipt of more than 90 per cent of Yorkshire manors.5 The land was parcelled out into territorially compact baronies, very unlike the jumbling of fiefs in more securely held southern counties. One of Odo’s retainers, Ilbert de Lacy, administered an enormous cluster of confiscated estates in the West Riding from the Norman castle town of Pontefract, which guarded an entrance into the Vale of York and crossing points over the Aire river.
The biggest of the myriad challenges to the onset of Norman rule arose in the North East, among a people accustomed to running their own affairs. According to the Wiltshire chronicler William of Malmesbury, southern England’s nearest equivalent to Bede, the Northumbrians ‘had been taught by their ancestors either to be free or to die’.6 The Conqueror initially went down the West Saxon route of appointing native strongmen to the earldom of Northumbria, but his original candidate was no sooner in place than murdered by a member of the house of Bamburgh, and his replacement – Cospatric, a kinsmen of the assailant – absconded to join the party of Edgar Ætheling, English claimant to the throne, affronts
