It is a truth universally acknowledged that land was the basis of social and political power in late medieval England. The power of the bishops of Durham was certainly founded upon the possession of land. The origins of the palatinate lay in the pre-Conquest piecemeal acquisitions of property by the church of Durham, principally but not exclusively between the rivers Tyne and Tees. Custody of this property was vested in the church and the quasi-monastic community of St Cuthbert over which the bishop of Durham presided. To this lordship was later added – in the local context of the Viking invasions of the late ninth century – jurisdictional privilege and immunity. After the Conquest, the division of the patrimony of St Cuthbert to form separate estates for the bishop and the newly constituted Benedictine cathedral priory reduced the property under the bishop's direct control. But the process of enfeoffment for knight service simultaneously enhanced the bishop's territorial rights over the land between Tyne and Tees. In the first half of the twelfth century, as Bishop Ranulph Flambard (1099–1128) granted land predominantly in the heartland of the palatinate to an incoming Norman nobility, a baronial elite emerged between Tyne and Tees comprising about ten individuals who were known collectively as the barones et fideles sancti Cuthberti and who owed the bishop the service of more than one knight. These barons were the principal tenants-in-chief of the bishop and held their land of him.