Sources

In discussing the sources relating to North Tynedale pride of place must go to the ‘Iter of Wark’, a summary of judicial proceedings conducted by the royal justices dispatched annually from Scotland to hold the eyre at Wark-on-Tyne, the capital of the liberty of Tynedale. The proceedings for two years, 1279 and 1293, have survived.

The Latin text of former was published by Hartshorne in an appendix in the Feudal and Military Antiquities in Northumberland and the Scottish Borders (1858), promptly summarised by Charlton (1859a) and extensively drawn upon by Moore in her study of the English lordships held by the king of Scotland (Moore 1915) and later by volume XV of the Northumberland County History (NCH XV (1940)). The 1293 proceedings, which are held in the Public Record Office, still await the publication they so clearly merit.

Together these provide a vivid impression of life in upper Tynedale towards the end of the 13th century, before conditions were utterly transformed by the escalating crisis between England and Scotland which plunged the two kingdoms into centuries of intermittent warfare. Although the emphasis of these documents is inevitably on human misdeeds, as is the case with all such judicial proceedings, it should be emphasised that the level of violence which they reveal within Tynedale, whilst undeniably present, was not beyond the normal parameters of medieval society. There is no indication that the kind of spiralling descent into chronic lawlessness, which was to give rise to clan society of the reivers during the late medieval and early modern eras, had yet commenced.

Reference should also be made to a series of Inquisitions Post Mortem (IPMs) and related documents, mostly belonging to the period 1326-30 (an assignments of dower and a mandate for the delivery of land), which give a fairly comprehensive impression of the extent, distribution and organisation of settlement at the late 13th century high point as well as revealing the devastating impact of Robert the Bruce’s raids. These have been reproduced in translation in a variety of works, notably the calendared volumes of IPMs and other documents published by the Public Record Office, Bain’s Calendar of Documents relating to Scotland and in the Northumberland County History, volume XV.