Agricultural History Review, Volume 54 Part 1 (2006), p. 161

This book is concerned with the later middle ages in the north-east, essentially Northumberland and Durham, and ranges over the political, social, economic and landscape history of the region. There are some references to the pursuit of the elusive concept of ‘regional history’, notably in an introduction by A. J. Pollard, but most of the fifteen authors of these essays are content to discuss places and themes under the umbrella of the ‘north-east’ without attempting to define more generally the character of the lands between the Tees and the Tweed. Readers can see for themselves some unifying forces, such as the bishopric and priory at Durham, and the major town at Newcastle, but can also recognize the great divide between peaceful and productive lowlands in county Durham and the more dangerous and pastoral uplands of the Pennines and the Cheviots. One abiding impression from the number of essays, and their many references to other works, is of the region’s wealth in historical research that has been done, and is being done.

Historians of agriculture and rural society will find some useful essays on estates and landholding, notably Richard Lomas’s definition of the territory controlled by the bishopric and priory of Durham straddling the Scottish border, including the monastic outpost of Coldingham. The Durham monks and bishopric gained much income from these lands before 1300, but the Anglo-Scottish wars reduced their revenues drastically. In the same border area the Grays of Heaton are shown by Andy King to have done well in the fourteenth century from soldiering. Christian Liddy investigates the rise of a branch of the Pollard family, who were minor gentry serving the bishops of Durham. They were able in the fourteenth century to enlarge a small estate in the parish of Auckland St Andrew. Two essays deal with towns: the market towns of Darlington and Northallerton are analyzed by Christine Newman, and Miranda Threlfall-Holmes’s study of Newcastle shows it emerging as a regional capital at the end of the middle ages, and providing the monks of Durham with wine. Both essays reveal aspects of the rural economy, such as the busy fifteenth-century cattle trade at Darlington, and the commercial agents who supplied Durham Priory with agricultural produce, including people based in villages such as Kirk Merrington.

Two essays are especially welcome contributions on the fluctuations in agricultural production after the Black Death. Ben Dodds has already published aspects of his work on tithe receipts, which reflect the fall in grain output. Here he compares the evidence of tithe with other documents, such as rentals and demesne accounts, and shows that together they demonstrate an initial recovery of the arable economy in the 1350s, followed later in the fourteenth century by setbacks, but then some recovery around 1410–30 before the dismal experience of the late 1430s. In parallel with Dodds’s agrarian work, another research team at Durham has been looking at the colonization of the waste in county Durham, and Simon Harris presents the evidence for a contraction of arable and the abandonment of farms on the uplands between the Black Death and the late fifteenth century. A final essay, in which Harris is joined by Helen Dunsford and Brian Roberts, muses more philosophically on the landscape history of Durham, and reminds us that the ups and downs in cultivation which excite our interest in the period between 1200 and 1500 mark merely one episode in long-term settlement history – the uplands were cultivated in the Roman period as extensively as they were to be in the thirteenth century.

There are moments when these separate essays interconnect with one another. Harris notes the evidence from the tithe receipts for the abandonment of hamlets, and Liddy’s gentry family, the Pollards, held a moorland farm of the type investigated by Harris. The possibility of research being illuminated by such points of contact is one of the justifications of regional history, and one hopes that more will emerge from future work. Another way of advancing understanding of regions is the use of comparison, and one appreciates that Dodds, Harris and Liddy are able to make more of their material because they are prepared to search out parallels and contrasts beyond the north-east.