This paper seeks to revisit the time-honoured assumption of the exceptional, even devoted, lawlessness of medieval Northumberland. Formidable difficulties hinder the work of scrutiny. The sources are rarely home-grown, mostly deriving from judicial visitations. Until the last decade of the thirteenth century these were primarily eyres, lengthy sessions which came at intervals of several years and entailed a wholesale review of the processes of law enforcement; after the 1290s eyres were mainly succeeded by gaol deliveries, clearances of gaols through trials of their inmates, usually conducted every one or two years. All were directed from Westminster and are recorded in the language of a centralised legal system. There are also chronological problems, inevitable in a paper covering some three hundred years, during which problems and solutions, attitudes and expectations, did not always remain the same.

The basic argument of this paper is straightforward and can be simply expressed. It is not that there was no disorder or criminality in medieval North-umberland, but rather that throughout most of the county, for most if not all of the time, there was a general consensus that crime – which here means the offences that medieval lawyers defined as felonies and which entailed forfeiture of life and goods, primarily homicide and the theft of goods worth more than 12d. – represented an affront to social morality as well as a breach of the king's peace.