New Evidence of Justice-Giving by the Early Tudor Council of the North, 1540–43*

Abstract

The Council of the North was regularly reinstituted under the early Tudor kings to keep the peace in a region that they saw as unsettled and susceptible to sedition. Yet this was not simply an imposition of governmental supervision from on high. The Council also served to meet popular demand for more accessible royal justice in the northern counties. Analysis of this provincial judicial activity and its potential benefits are limited by the lack of any central surviving archive for the Council today. This short article examines a series of judgments that it made between 1540 and 1543 in a suit between two Yorkshiremen, newly discovered among miscellaneous and uncatalogued legal materials at The National Archives. It provides a transcription of four orders made in this case, seemingly copied out of original order books, and contextualises them within the re-development of the Council under the Bishop of Llandaff in the late 1530s.