North-East England, 1569–1625: Governance, Culture and Identity (review)

Northeast England, the modern region comprising the historic counties of Northumberland and Durham and the city of Newcastle-upon-Tyne, is commonly regarded as having a peculiarly strong regional identity. Accordingly, it was the first English region to be granted (November 2004) a referendum on the establishment of a regional assembly with devolved powers. In this pithy study, Newton examines the historical antecedents of that assumed identity, focusing on the elites of the area—the county gentry, the higher clergy of the diocese of Durham, and the leading citizens of Newcastle—and upon the generations on either side of a pivotal event, the regnal union of England and Scotland in 1603.

The strong thematic coherence of the book is established with an opening discussion of the theory and historiography of local and regional identity, emphasizing the complex relationships between physical geography, social space, and symbolic boundaries. Thereafter, in a series of chapters combining the growing secondary literature with extensive original research, Newton explores the size and composition of the northeast's elites; marital endogamy; landholding; the structure and dynamics of local government, with particular reference to the problems of border administration; the allegedly "uncivil" nature of the area; elite sociability and education; religious allegiances; and the forms of cultural identity fostered by the cult of St. Cuthbert, the border ballad tradition, and the growth of antiquarian study of the region's past.

Newton covers all of this material deftly and economically, and her conclusions emerge strongly. In the perceptions of both its inhabitants and of a nervous central government, the northeast was part of a generic "north," posing particular problems of governance, and its local rulers were happy to play on that reputation when it suited them. But it was neither backward nor "uncivil." Its elites engaged with one another as neighbors but were not especially tightly bound by regional, as distinct from county, ties. They perceived themselves as part of a larger national elite, albeit conscious of deriving their place from their position in the social and political structures of particular areas and concerned to consolidate that standing. Their political activity was focused on their county, city, or the border marches, rather than the region as such. They were not notably conservative in religion, and neither the Catholic recusant nor radical Protestant minorities formed homogeneous groupings. Cultural traditions and historical awareness were subregional in nature rather than elements of an enduring, or emergent, regional consciousness.

Notwithstanding a few quibbles, Newton provides a persuasive argument that the northeast at this date is best envisaged as a "mosaic of sub-regions" (65). Its larger regional identity was a later creation, albeit stirring already in the precocious industrial development of Tyneside and the growing economic power of Newcastle. But, as she argues, "people adopt or embrace different identities, at different times, for different purposes" (9); identities are "multi-layered and shifting" (8). This study of a period before the "North East" as we know (or think we know) it existed, raises the questions of how far the dominant image of the modern region ever displaced the many subregional and, indeed, supraregional loyalties and identities that Newton detects among its Elizabethan and Jacobean elites, and indeed how long that image will endure. In 2004 the regional electorate voted overwhelmingly against the creation of a regional assembly.