William Palmer

Scenes from Provincial Life: History, Honor, and Meaning in the Tudor North [*]

The early Tudor North is often regarded as a lawless and disordered society where leading magnates depended upon violence and codes of honor to maintain order. These codes of honor compelled magnates to fight to maintain their reputations and also to assert their independence from central authority. Through an examination of several episodes in northern history, however, most of them brought to light by the most famous historian of the region, Mervyn James, it can be shown that northern magnates did not have a code of honor and usually shrank from violence as a way of settling disputes.