7 - Cultural identities

Summary

According to Mervyn James, the diocese of Durham was ‘saddled’ with a ‘sense of history’. He explained that ‘inevitable decline and “decay” ‘meant they turned to their ancient traditions as a means of escape from the uncertainties of the world in which they lived, and, instead, contemplated the glories of their antiquity. This coincided with a growing interest by the county gentry at large in antiquarian studies, led by scholars such as William Camden, who began compiling his Britannia in the 1570s. In part, the elites’ heightened regard for the ‘past’ was driven by a determination to validate (or even create) their own pedigrees, and was often appropriated by them for precisely that purpose. In county Durham, for example, William Claxton of Wynyard had also been collecting material for a history of Durham since the 1570s, and he was closely involved with the work of the visitation heralds in 1575. However, Claxton was a prominent Catholic, who had been a follower of the earl of Westmorland, and his interest reflected the concerns of many of those of a similar disposition in the diocese of Durham, which had at their heart the cult of St Cuthbert. This, more than anything else, underpinned their conscious memory, from 1569, through the 1590s, into the 1620s, and beyond. But it was not the only manifestation of a distinctive sense of identity experienced by those living in the north-eastern parts of England. The urban centres celebrated religious festivals which simultaneously demonstrated their civic pride and yet another sense of particularity. Increasingly, travelling players came from London to Newcastle, bringing from the metropolis to the north-eastern reaches of the kingdom a version of national culture that commemorated a much wider sense of the ‘past’. Moreover, it has been observed that the people of Northumberland ‘prided themselves on being different from other English folk, projecting their menfolk as a warrior elite’, most notably in ballads – some of which were known throughout the kingdom – which venerated their chivalrous heroism.

Collective memories

In his ‘Apologie for Poetrie’, which appeared in 1595, the widely travelled Sir Philip Sidney noted that it was customary in Hungary for ‘songes of their Auncestors valour’ to be a feature of their ‘Feasts, and other such meetings’. When he came to provide an English equivalent he turned to the kingdom’s north-eastern extremities.