The historic city of Durham has long had its notable admirers, seduced by that familiar tendency: the veneration of the ancient. James Boswell, a guest in the ‘Old Castle’ in 1788, was inspired to comment about the majesty of the bishop of Durham who, in a previous age, had ruled as a ‘prince of an independent palatinate’. Regrettably, Boswell did not reflect further upon the nature of the palatinate and treated his readers instead to a lengthy description of the plentiful food and drink he consumed at the bishop's residence. It was left to the modern editors of his journal to add helpfully, although not altogether accurately, a note to the effect that the medieval bishops of Durham had the authority ‘to create barons, appoint judges, convoke parliaments, raise taxes, coin money, and grant pardons of all kinds’.

When Daniel Defoe visited in the 1720s, he was also struck by the antiquity of Durham and was moved to write that ‘the Bishop of Durham is a temporal prince, that he keeps a court of equity, and also courts of justice in ordinary causes within himself. The county of Durham, like the country about Rome, is called St. Cuthbert's Patrimony.’ Few historians today would share Daniel Defoe's conviction that the palatinate of Durham, lying between the rivers Tyne and Tees, was comparable to the Papal State in Italy. But Defoe was not alone in seeking to understand the history of Durham in relation to continental exempla.