Dr Jonathan Healey: List of publications

© The University of Leeds, 2014. 'The Northern Manor and the Politics of Neighbourhood: Dilston, Northumberland, 1558-1640'. Manorial courts remained important institutions of local government and legal culture well into the early modern period, yet there are few detailed studies of their operation. In northern England, where customary tenure and common land often survived late, and where the development of rival institutions associated with the parish andcounty took longer than the South, these small local assemblies had a particularly important role to play in government. This article looks in detail at the operation of one such court, that of Dilston in Northumberland. Dilston's manorial court remained very active up until the Civil War, both as a local administrative and regulatory body and as a small-claims court. Its records are especially unusual in that they combine lists of bylaws, prosecutions, and civil litigation with lists of tenants, subdivided into two types of tenure. This not only allows a very detailed picture to be drawn of the workings of the court, but also of the ways in which individuals within the local community used it. Overall, the court seems to have met community needs for regulation and dispute resolution effectively, though there are signs of decay by the time of Charles I.

Troutbeck in the Lake District has a long run of landholding records, dating from the village's first appearance in the thirteenth century until modern times. This article uses these to recreate the nature of landholding across a broad span of history from the high Middle Ages to the end of the eighteenth century. It finds that numbers of customary landholders continued to grow despite the recurrent disasters of plague, famine and war in the fourteenth century, and showed growth again between the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. The seventeenth century then brought two major changes: there were a growing number of subtenants up until the 1620s. Then, after old restrictions on the parcelling of tenements were lifted in the 1670s, landholdings started to fragmentf and a group of small customary landholders developed and survived into the eighteenth century.

There is much we still do not know about the relationship between land, population and famine in early modern England. In his classic work on Famine in Tudor and Stuart England, Andrew Appleby presented a broadly Malthusian picture in which population growth in the upland north-west was accompanied by the subdivision of peasant holdings and the expansion of cultivation at the margins of sustainability. This article questions the uniformity of this picture. Evidence from the Barony of Kendal in Westmorland suggests that tenant numbers had peaked by about 1560, while manor courts successfully controlled enclosure and the subdivision of holdings. Indeed, evidence from the early seventeenth century suggests that rather than forming a famine-prone mass, customary tenants in the area enjoyed at least some prosperity. At the same time, however, the period from the late sixteenth to the early seventeenth century saw the development of a large population of subtenants, and it was this group that suffered most from famine in 1623.