Visitors who come to the city of Durham to-day and look on cathedral and castle have some vague idea of a time when the Bishop of Durham had "the power of life and death," as it is popularly called; but what this means, and what the peculiar constitution of the neighbourhood was, they do not, as a rule, understand. It may be worth while to try and get a clearer view of the Bishopric of Durham, and more especially of the main portion between Tyne and Tees, which forms the modern county. We to-day are so much accustomed to a strong central Government controlling the whole of England, that we find it hard to think of a time when certain districts had a large independence, and were ruled by a local Earl or by Bishop, rather than by the King in the capital. Yet there were such times both in England and upon the Continent. The district so ruled is known as a franchise or liberty, and the history of its independence, won, maintained, or lost, generally forms an attractive subject of study, with many exciting episodes in it. The assertion is certainly true of Durham; and although it is not possible to go into detail within the space of an introductory article like this, it may be possible to explain what the Bishopric was, and how it came to get its distinctive characteristics and its later modification.
The franchise of the Bishop of Durham may be most aptly understood if we try to regard all the members of it mentioned above as a little kingdom, of which Durham City was the capital. The Bishop of Durham was virtually the King of this little realm, and ruled it, not only as its spiritual head, but as its temporal head. As its spiritual head, he was in the position of any ordinary Bishop, and possessed exactly the same powers as other prelates. As its temporal head, he had a power which they generally did not possess. Dr. Freeman has explained his position in the following words: "The prelate of Durham became one and the more important of the only two English prelates whose worldly franchises invested them with some faint shadow of the sovereign powers enjoyed by the princely Churchmen of the Empire. The Bishop of Ely in his island, the Bishop of Durham in his hill-fortress, possessed powers which no other English ecclesiastic was allowed to share.... The external aspect of the city of itself suggests its peculiar character. Durham alone among English cities, with its highest point crowned, not only by the cathedral, but by the vast castle of the Prince-Bishop, recalls to mind those cities of the Empire—Lausanne, or Chur, or Sitten—where the priest, who bore alike the sword and the pastoral staff, looked down from his fortified height on a flock which he had to guard no less against worldly than against ghostly foes."[1] And this sovereignty was no nominal thing, for the Bishop came to have most of the institutions that we connect with the thought of a kingdom. He had his own courts of law, his own officers of state, his own assemblies, his own system of finance, his own coinage, and, to some extent, he had his own troops and his own ships. As we understand all this, we shall appreciate the significance of the lofty throne erected by Bishop Hatfield in Durham Cathedral. It was placed there in the flourishing days of the Bishop’s power, and is not merely the seat of a Bishop, but the throne of a King. So too, hard by, in the Bishop’s castle, as the chronicler tells us, there were two seats of royalty within the hall, one at either end. No doubt it was before the Bishop, sitting as Prince in one of these, that the great tenants of his franchise—the Barons of the Bishopric, as they were actually called—did homage in respect of their lands. Perhaps, when he sat in the other from time to time as Bishop, his clergy and others recognized his spiritual authority, or submitted themselves to his "godly admonitions."
The county of Durham has been marked out by nature, more or less distinctly, as separate from the neighbouring counties. The Tees on the south, and the Tyne on the north, with the Derwent running from the western fells to the Tyne, sufficiently differentiate it. In what follows we will keep mainly to the district represented by the modern county, leaving out of view the members outside to which reference has been made. Its history, until modern times, is largely ecclesiastical, owing to its peculiar constitution, in which the Bishop plays so important a part. It had, indeed, virtually no history until the Church became the great civilizer in Northumbria. Its prehistoric remains are few, if interesting. Its occupation by Brigantes, a Celtic tribe, is a large fact with no details. In the days when Romans made the North of Britain their own, there is still no history beyond the evidence of Roman roads, with camps at Binchester, Lanchester, and Ebchester. Certainly no Roman Christian remains have been found as yet; but when in the seventh century Christianity came to the Anglian invaders who settled in these parts after the departure of the Romans, the history of the English people was born within the confines of the modern county. Bede, the first of English scholars and writers, compiled his history in the monastery of Jarrow. He tells us all we know of the earliest Durham Christians—of Benedict Biscop and of Hilda, who, with himself, are the first three historic personages in the district. In one pregnant sentence he tells us how churches were built in different places, how the people flocked together to hear the Word, and how landed possessions were given by royal munificence to found monasteries. These monasteries became the centres of religion, civilization, and learning all over Northumbria; and, in particular, the monasteries of Jarrow and Wearmouth, twin foundations of Benedict Biscop, were the commencement of everything best worth having between Tyne and Tees.
Thus religion, art, and literature, were born in Durham. In the last years of the eighth century a terrible calamity fell upon the wider province, of which Durham was only a part, when the Danes raided Lindisfarne, where had been the starting-point of the Northumbrian Church. When the mother was thus spoiled and laid desolate, the daughters trembled for their safety, but they were left for awhile, not unassailed, yet not destroyed. In those days of disturbed peace further gifts of land were made to the Church, and in these we trace large slices of Durham handed over in the ninth century to the monks of Lindisfarne by those who had the power to give. And here we must notice that the great treasure of the monastery at Lindisfarne was the body of St. Cuthbert, the great Northumbrian saint, to whom the endowments named were most solemnly dedicated. They formed the nucleus of the Bishopric—the beginnings of the Patrimony of St. Cuthbert, which is only another name for the Bishopric. Repeated invasion of the Danes at last drove the monks out of Lindisfarne, and destroyed the Durham monasteries of Jarrow and Wearmouth. The Lindisfarne monks left their island, and bore away for safety’s sake the body of St. Cuthbert, and after various wanderings brought it back to rest within the fortified enclosure of Chester-le-Street, and so within the confines of Durham. Here the Danish conquerors confirmed previous gifts, and added others to them, until the lands of St. Cuthbert increased very widely, whilst Chester-le-Street became a centre of pilgrimage.
For 113 years Chester-le-Street was the Christian metropolis of the North, until the final fury of the Danes began to fall upon Northumbria. In 995 another exodus began, and the clergy bore off the body to Ripon, returning a few months later when the tempest seemed to have abated. Many legends cluster round this return, but in any case the fact is clear that the Bishop and his company took up their abode, not at Chester-le-Street, but on the rocky peninsula of Dun-holm, or Durham, which the River Wear nearly encircled. In this way the seat of ecclesiastical authority was changed for the second time, and Durham City now became the centre of the still-expanding Bishopric. Great prestige gathered round the Saxon cathedral in which the shrine of the saint was placed, for Kings and Princes vied with one another in doing honour to it. So Canute, walking to the spot with bare feet, gave fresh donations of Durham land and confirmed what others had bestowed.
But again dark days fell upon the North. To say nothing of Scottish encroachments upon the Bishopric, which were sustained in the eleventh century, the worst blow fell when the Norman Conquest took place. In no part of England was a more determined patriotism opposed to William than in Durham. Submission was nominal, and desperate efforts were made to keep Northumbria as a separate kingdom by placing Edgar Atheling upon an English throne in York. When the Conqueror made a Norman called Cumin his Viceroy in these parts, the men of Durham rose and murdered him within their city. It was an act that William never forgave and never forgot. He wrought such a deed of vengeance that the whole of the smiling district from York to Durham was turned into a wilderness. When he came to die he is represented to have said of this ruthless episode: "I fell on the English of the Northern counties like a ravening lion. I commanded their houses and corn, with all their tools and furniture, to be burnt without distinction, and large herds of cattle and beasts of burden to be butchered wherever they were found. It was thus I took revenge on multitudes of both sexes, by subjecting them to the calamity of a cruel famine; and by so doing, alas! became the barbarous murderer of many thousands, both young and old, of that fine race of people."
William placed foreigners in most positions of importance. To the See of Durham he appointed Walcher from Lorraine, and the new prelate came from his consecration at Winchester, escorted across the belt of depopulated, ravaged land, until he reached Durham. North of the Wear the Patrimony of St. Cuthbert was as yet largely untouched, but the men of Durham had no love for the foreigner, and no wish to regard him as their lord. Fortunately for him the Earl of Northumbria stood his friend, and built for him in 1072 the Norman castle overlooking
