He doesn't know. (HBO)
Growing up in the Northumbrian village of Seaton Delaval, I lived in the shadow of the old aristocracy. The Delavals had hailed from Laval in the Loire valley, coming over with the Conqueror in the 11th century to settle the dangerous earldom of Northumbria and pacify the local Anglo-Saxons. In the 18th century, George Delaval, an admiral who had made his fortune as a diplomat, hired the famous John Vanbrugh to completely rebuild the mouldering family pile into the stately grandeur of the “Geordie Versailles”: Seaton Delaval Hall.
The Delavals are no longer in residence, though. When the male line died out in 1814, the estate passed through marriage to the Astleys of Melton Constable in Norfolk — holders of the ancient barony of Hastings — and that’s why, as well as working for Edward Delaval Henry Astley, 22nd Baron Hastings, in the gift shop of his stately home, I spent my youth hanging out in Astley Park, collecting glasses in the Astley Arms or waiting for the bus on Astley Road to attend Astley High. (Our school’s local rivals at Ridley High were named for the viscounts who’d turned their Blyth fiefdom into a Victorian boomtown, and whose scion has just stood down from the House of Lords.)
“The feudal tradition is strong in Northumberland,” wrote the sociologist Henry Mess in 1928, and well into the 20th century, half of the county was held in great estates of over 10,000 acres. This was in part a legacy of the way the Far North of England had been governed in the Middle Ages. Being far from the royal centres of power in the South, and on the frontier with the usually hostile Kingdom of Scotland, a caste of Northumbrian warlords (and, uniquely in Durham, a Prince Bishop) were given quasi-royal authority to muster armies, hold courts, and punish disobedience. As Parliament treated the defence of the border as a purely local affair, and never raised any taxes for this purpose, they relied on the few northern magnates and their retainers, whom they compensated by adding barony to barony and office to office — until, by the 14th century, the greater part of England north of the Trent was held by the three great Houses of Neville, Lancaster and Percy.
The greatest of the blue-blooded Northumbrian magnates were the Earls, and later the Dukes, of Northumberland. One history of the House of Percy has noted that in the tumultuous North, the “Southern king’s writ hardly ran. In Percy country, there was Percy law backed by a Percy army paid for by Percy money”. The dynasty began with a Norman knight from Calvados who was granted lands in northern England. In the following centuries the family’s fortunes rose and fell with the vagaries of court politics, but they always had their Northumbrian stronghold at Alnwick Castle, from which they dominated the lands from the Tweed to the Tyne — with the assistance of lower-ranking armigerous families like the Delavals of Seaton.
By the 18th century the male line had died out, and, in an aristocratic sleight of hand, Sir Hugh Smithson — an obscure but wealthy Yorkshire baronet who had married a descendent of the last Percy Earl of Northumberland — assumed the famous surname and was elevated to ducal status. (Marcel Proust was fascinated by the sonority and evocation of high lineage of certain ancient titles and was always delighted when he came upon the name of the Duke of Northumberland, which he thought had a “sort of thunderous quality”.)
Not all of England’s landed gentry had the good luck to find that their estates contained colossal mineral wealth, and as David Cannadine showed in The Decline and Fall of the British Aristocracy, the 20th century saw them lose a generation of sons in the First World War — as well as much of their prosperity, prestige and power, as they were assailed by death duties and democratic politics. It wasn’t long after Lloyd George’s famous speech in Newcastle in 1909 — where he quipped that “a fully-equipped duke costs as much to keep up as two Dreadnoughts; and dukes are just as great a terror” — that the House of Lords lost its powers of veto over the commons, a key watershed in British history.
But while other great houses struggled to repel these assaults on their privileges, this was not the fate of the Kings of the North. As Henry Mess pointed out, “there is not the sharp divorce between feudalism and the new industrialism which is found in most other areas”. For the vast landholdings of the Percy dukes included some of the richest coalfields in Britain. This made their fortune and saw them take their place in the North East among a new industrial aristocracy of sharp-elbowed “Lords of Coal” — a group so wealthy that at her wedding to the Scots nobleman John Lyon in 1767, Mary Eleanor, the daughter of the Durham coal baron Sir George Bowes, was probably the richest heiress in Europe. The dynasty they founded led directly to the marriage of Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon to the Duke of York in 1923: Queen Elizabeth II carries the DNA of hard-nosed Tyneside coal-owners.
Join the discussion
Join like minded readers that support our journalism by becoming a paid subscriber
To join the discussion in the comments, become a paid subscriber.
Join like minded readers that support our journalism, read unlimited articles and enjoy other subscriber-only benefits.
SubscribeSome might find this article a piece of archaic (sorry!) flummery, but i enjoyed it; not least due to the revelation, to me at least, of the familial connection of the new owners of Newcastle United to the region.
Does it matter? Depends on whether or not one’s views on ties to the land and blood kinship matter. Again, the coaldust-flecked DNA of good Queen Bess II was a revelation!
I guess the real issue here is: what, if anything, do we lose if these increasingly tenuous traditions of ancient landownership and titles wither away? I’m not sure, but at least the feeling of being rooted in history that such continuity allows might provide some kind of anchor to those who might otherwise feel a little lost in the world.
That’s a bit feudally obsequious to the upper landowning classes.
Or what would we gain if these vast estates weren’t held in perpetuity by the permanent rich because of licking the king’s posterior at court. Redistribution of land to resolve a legacy from the 11th-16th centuries would be hugely beneficial to many.
The ties certainly seem more frayed these days. Local tenant farmers talk of the old Duke (father of the current, not brother) calling in for a drink, taking an interest in the land and families. Apparently he was even seen in Alnwick WMC of occasion.
These days, the constant housing developments under a thin pretence of creating more housing for the public good, blanket plans for forestry over farm land that is productive and held in tenant families for generations and increased rents give the impression the estates only interest is money, at the expense of the landscape and people of Northumberland.
As landscape and appearance of the countryside become ever more important to public perception, there is a strong local feeling that a family of such wealth needn’t be walking rough shod over one of the most unspoilt parts of the country, and although it may be simple jealousy, there is the feeling that planners and government bodies allow the estate to get away with what others wouldn’t because of their perceived size and feudal overtones of the past.
These estates are a funny mixture these days, being run like any other vast commercial business. In a completely different way to companies like JCB and Nissan though, they are deeply entwined with the landscape and day to day lives of the people who live in the areas they own, something it often feels they forget.
I’m surely you’ll have about the same level of success stopping this as 17th and 18th century peasants had when trying to stop enclosures.
A friend’s father was a tenant of the old Duke and was expected to go to the Castle on quarter days to pay his rent in person, like a scene from Far From The Madding Crowd.
When the brother of the current Duke took over, he made a film which was shown in Alnwick Playhouse. The tenant farmers were invited to an evening showing and given a drink; the ‘hinds’ and cottage tenants were invited in the afternoon and given a cup of tea.
My friend now owns most of his land, after the estate sold off most of its Tyne Valley holdings to pay for the Duchess’s garden. He still rents a few fields but his relationship with the estate is far more egalitarian; he visits the Duke’s agent occasionally to wind him up. Coming from an area and a family where farmers own their own land, I find that much more comfortable.
Sorry to lower the tone, but until reading this all I knew about the lords of Northumberland came from The Last Kingdom – Uhtred son of Uhtred, lord of Bebbenburgh.
Interesting, and well done Ralph! Norfolk is even more so than Northumberland. What is perhaps less well known is that throughout Britain, the practical foresight of late 19th C politicians, and indeed Victoria and Albert themselves, the canny elevation of new industrial and financial wealth to the Peerage and the granting of Baronetcys, ” fast tracked” the preservation of estates, as the new aristocrats went out and bought from the old, whose agri revenues declined. Not only did this prevent the decline of large land ownership ( as in France and Italy, for example) but effectively assisted in stability that avoided the revolutions that other nations endured.
What a charmingly naive statement, perhaps it is you who should do some research?
Start within reform of the franchise, and then perhaps turn to Ireland to see how ‘large land ownership’ declined in the face of revolution. Even your beloved Suffolk was not a happy place to be prior to 1914, or even in the 1930’s with the Elmset Tithe riot of 1933.
Beautifully written, but…. This is how manybthink it ought to be, not as it is. The old Duke/Earl/squire was always a generous old eccentric while the present one is not a patch on him. But that is false memory. In the Northumberland case the current one is a huge improvement on his late brother, rest in peace Harry, and his father could be very grand indeed.
But the real point is that modern estates are businesses and have to work efficiently to survive as do their tenants. Agriculture is the least rewarding activity, and the ones that will continue are those that seize the opportunities of the modern world. Squires can be rude or sweet, kind or harsh, abrupt or chummy, just like any businessman or professional. But to pass on to the next generations they must be efficient. As the denizen of Alnwick Castle is – and by most accounts, a modest quiet rather shy person who never expected to be a Duke
“Agriculture is the least rewarding activity”, I very much doubt if John Lewis-Stempel of this site would agree, along with many others.
I suspect they would, because it is! Financially anyway. Most small farms have long ago gone to the wall and the large ones make laughable returns on investment. Lowest returns since the 1930’s. Dairying is a disaster, as are sheep. Cereals may pick up this year – after about 20 years of static prices.
And from a landlords perspective, on a typical estate over the last 40 years returns from letting farms have dropped from circa 75% of gross income to around 25%. Admittedly some of that is big improvements in house rents, for those whose grandfather’s did not sell them off as long term loss makers in the 1950’s and 1960’s!
The Duchess is the brains and driving force.
Not to worry; Farming subsidies will keep the Wolf from the door of the Smithson- Percies.
Actually, due to intelligent and skilful management and investment by The Percy family and trusts…. they wont,… or be needed- Do your research ?!
Five years ago his subsidy was a little over £327,000. ‘They’ have had a similar figure since the whole wretched business of subsidies stared during the last war.
However perhaps your ‘research’ will tell us he no longer receives any subsidy?
I must rembember to visit Seaton Delaval Hall.
I was in Alnwick recently and the state rooms are certainly worth a visit (I even had the courage to ask whether the paintings were copies, given the wealth of masters whose work is on display there).
Alnwick and for that matter Arundel are both appalling kitsch neo-gothic rebuilds, although both pale in comparison to say the likes of Neuschwanstein.
What an extraordinary paean to the brutal age of Feudalism in Northumbria. The fact that an 11th French savage from Calvados is still somehow admired, is quite illogical. This barbarian thug laid waste far and wide, in a career of internecine slaughter only rivalled by the Vikings.
All this off course in stark contrast to the level of wealth and sophistication brought to the area by the Roman Conquest a millennia before, and shown by the extraordinary finds recently unearthed at Vindolanda *.
Whether the “second peasants revolt” you speak of will ever take flight is highly unlikely. The odious habit of forelock tugging seems to more deeply entrenched in Northumbria than many other parts of this “sceptered isle”, for example East Anglia.
(* In particular the ‘birthday’ invitation letter from one Claudia Severa to her friend the wonderfully named Sulpicia Lepidina. Both appear to have been the wives of local Roman commanders.)
I’m with you on this – it’s weird to see supposedly intelligent people on this site bend their knee to the past like this, when their feudal, enslaved ancestors had no choice except to obey.
Nevertheless he is right that Northumberland still is incredibly feudal. I used to deal with someone in our Guildford office who had a very broad Northumberland accent. I eventually asked him his story. It turned out that his wife had been a servant at Alnwick Castle and had become a sort of mother figure to the 10th Duke. When he took over and made Syon House his main residence, he insisted that she went to look after him – and her desperately North-sick husband had to go to. They had always lived in a Percy tied house and had no home of their own.
Yes, on the rare occasions I have visited, I believe the rural north is indeed still very much enveloped in its feudalistic history. On a visit to the impressive residence in Staffordshire of my several times great grandfather surnamed Mainwaring, I was shown a portrait with a noose, which apparently indicated that William the Conqueror had conferred on one of his knights – who displaced a certain Saxon, Ulfac, from the land – the power to hang miscreants. The dispensation has never been repealed.
Lovely post. Very nice
Thanks