ABSTRACT
The North-East appeared remote and alien to people from the rest of England. For one thing, in the eighteenth century the region had only recently emerged from the Border lawlessness which had characterized it for centuries. Some picaresque accounts of eighteenth-century characters such as the famous piper James Allan suggest that this image remained both powerful and attractive. His wandering, musically creative, intermit-tently criminal, life was dramatized after his death in 1810 (in Durham gaol) by accounts which stressed the casual subculture of the marginal economy of the Borders, with a pattern of individual employment drifting in and out of crime. If even half the story is true, Allan was remarkably lucky to have respectable patrons who rescued him from transportation or even the gallows.1 The problem of evaluating the myth of the wild, lawless and mobile Border people forms an enduring difficulty when confronting contemporary accounts of local north-eastern crimes (see Ch. 4), but it is important to note that locals as well as outsiders were attracted to the image. A second aspect of the North-East’s reputation was simply its geographic location: it is close, perhaps too close, to Scotland. Culturally, in matters of language and religion in particular, north-east England resembled Lowland Scotland more than southern England. Some villages on the English side of the border contained more Presbyterians than Anglicans, as Bishop Chandler’s survey in 1736 demonstrated, and the local dialect was notably more like Scots than English. In other aspects, too, though visitors would have been surprised to know it, north-easterners were closer to their Scottish neighbours: for example, in their literacy rates which were markedly higher than elsewhere in England.2 This may have been the by-product of a much more observable feature which had
attracted attention in the seventeenth century, namely the migration of numerous Scots to the industries of the river valleys of the Tyne and Wear. In the early part of this process, Scottish birth had been a matter of opprobrium. Before 1700, in theory at least, no one born in Scotland could be apprenticed to a trade in Newcastle’s guilds, though evidence suggests that many made a successful entry. Scottishness was used in insults to derogate a person’s character, and, in the early seventeenth century, to allege that someone was a “Scots Runagate Rogue and Vagabond and that no bodie knew from whence he came” would be to invite a slander suit in the church courts. In the Civil War period, it was noted that there were hundreds of Scots, all allegedly fierce Covenanters, in Newcastle. In the eighteenth century, by contrast, Scottish birth was a common feature south of the border, among both rich and poor alike, and was reported without comment. Keelmen, criminals, craftsmen, ministers, and doctors could all have a Scottish connection. The consequence is that, when Scots were condemned or executed in the North-East in the eighteenth century, there were no attributions of criminality to nationality, for it was too common a feature of all social classes.3
