Did Northerners really dislike ‘Southrons’ that much?
A. There’s no doubt that there was a lot of animosity between subjects from the north and those from the south in Tudor England. The northerners were resentful about being politically marginalised. In the fourteenth century, York was an important location. It hosted parliament several times and some of the royal courts sat here. One of the requests put forward by the rebels in the Pilgrimage of Grace in 1536 was to hold a parliament at York. Memories were certainly long in this period. York was still important as a base for military expeditions into Scotland. St. Mary’s Abbey was used as a treasury for conveying money north to the garrisons on the border with Scotland right up until its dissolution in 1539. Thus, the dissolution may have robbed the city of its last vestiges of political importance. The city had already been in financial decline for a while and generally urban centres were neglected under Henry VIII. Therefore the corporation itself was never going to be a big player on
