Historians of the English north in the late Middle Ages have recently engaged with a number of issues of importance to students of both the English regions and of the period. Of these, two stand out for the purposes of this chapter. The first considers the prospect of the ‘far north’ as a unique frontier society, sufficiently set apart from the main currents of English society by virtue of the dictates of border warfare and its close proximity to England's perennial enemy. This envisages a region bordered, roughly, by the Scottish borders to the north, and by the palatinate of Durham and the sparsely settled county of Westmorland to the south. Lancastrian influence, as a result of the efforts of John of Gaunt and Henry IV, now extended northwards into Durham and Westmorland from Yorkshire and Lancashire: Durham by the appointment of the Lancastrian clerk Thomas Langley as prince bishop, and Ralph Neville, by virtue of his marriage to John of Gaunt's daughter and Henry IV's half-sister, Joan Beaufort, and his commensurate elevation to the earldom of West-morland. By the second half of the reign of Henry IV, both counties were solid outposts of partisan Lancastrian power. That is to say, they were controlled by a group of men whose allegiance predated and transcended their fidelity to their lord king, by virtue of their shared allegiance to him as duke of Lancaster prior to 1399.