Government, Religion and Society in Northern England: 1000-1700.(Review)

Edited by John C. Appleby and Paul Dalton. Pp. xiii + 224. Stroud: Sutton Publishing, 1997. [pounds]40. 0 7509 1057 7

This is a collection of papers from a Northern History conference, held in 1995 by Liverpool Hope University College. The editors are to be congratulated on putting their new university firmly on the academic map in a way their compeers might envy, and for their courage in tackling such a controversial and wide-ranging field as government, religion and society in the North. They have grasped a potentially contentious nettle: the question of what constitutes the North of England. Professor Pollard's provocative paper on the mythology of the whole concept as a fifteenth-century invention will have blown the cover of many Northern historians, happily living off the legacy of that myth and busily engaged in pointing out Northern differentness.

For there is of course no one North. There are the Borders proper, commonly …