For the better part of a millennium, there were places in England where the King's writ did not run. In the far north, a bishop minted his own coins, raised his own army, appointed his own judges and pardoned his own felons. In Cheshire, an earl governed a county that Magna Carta did not reach. In Lancashire, a duke ran courts in his own name and dated documents by the year of his own accession. These were the "princely liberties" — franchises in which a subject exercised jura regalia, the rights of the Crown itself. Their slow strangulation over five centuries is one of the central, under-told stories of how England became a single, centrally governed state — and their strange survivals, in the Duchy of Lancaster and the Duchy of Cornwall, remain live and contested in 2026.
The technical vocabulary matters. Medieval and early-modern lawyers spoke of "liberties" and "franchises" — portions of royal authority carved off and held by a subject. A modest franchise might be the right to hold a market, take tolls, or run a manorial court. At the summit sat the palatinates, or counties palatine, where a lord held what the historian C. M. Fraser, in her landmark 1956 study in the medieval-studies journal Speculum ("Edward I of England and the Regalian Franchise of Durham"), called the "regalian franchise" — the full bundle of royal rights. The word "palatine" derives from the Latin palatinus, "of the palace": the palatine lord exercised inside his territory the powers a king exercised in his.
In practice this meant the return of writs (the King's writ had to be handed to the lord's officers to execute), the right to hold courts of chancery, exchequer and common pleas, to appoint sheriffs and justices, to keep the profits of justice, to hold pleas of the Crown, and in the grandest cases to raise troops, mint coinage and pardon crimes. As a review of Michael Prestwich's scholarly volume Liberties and Identities in the Medieval British Isles put it, "liberties, franchises and regalities had a crucial role to play in the functioning of the medieval state… For the most part liberties worked in cooperation with royal power rather than outside and apart from it, although… the crown [held] the ultimate sanction of forfeiture." This is the key to understanding them: they were not rebellions against royal authority but delegations of it, usually granted where the Crown's own reach was weakest — on the violent frontiers with Wales and Scotland.
No liberty was grander than the County Palatine of Durham, ruled not by a lay lord but by the Bishop of Durham. Its origins lay in the Anglo-Saxon "Liberty of Durham" and the lands of the community of St Cuthbert, but the decisive step came after the Norman Conquest, when William the Conqueror and his successors built the bishopric into a buffer state against the Scots. From around 1075 the bishop functioned as a prince-bishop, and by the late thirteenth century Durham was recognised as a full palatinate.
The bishop's powers were staggering in scope. He had his own chancery, exchequer and courts; he appointed the sheriff and the custos rotulorum; he administered forest law through his own forest courts; royal writs needed his permission to run; and he operated a mint on Palace Green in Durham that struck silver pennies until Henry VIII closed it in 1536. The bishop even bore heraldic marks of temporal sovereignty — a mitre encircled by a coronet, and a crozier crossed with a sword rather than two croziers.
The most famous encapsulation of this power came in August 1302, from Master William de St Botolph, steward to the formidable Bishop Antony Bek: "There are two kings in England, namely the lord king of England wearing a crown in sign of his regality, and the lord bishop of Durham wearing a mitre in place of a crown, in sign of his regality in the diocese of Durham." Historians treat the boast as hyperbole, but it captured a genuine constitutional reality. Bek was as much soldier and statesman as churchman — he led a division of the English army at Falkirk in 1298 — and his prolonged defiance of both King and Pope, culminating in Edward I's seizure of his temporalities in 1302, showed how the concentration of regal power in one subject's hands could generate exactly the tensions the Crown feared.
The County Palatine of Chester was the earliest of the great lay palatinates, created by William the Conqueror shortly after 1066 when he enfeoffed Hugh d'Avranches as earl to subdue and hold the Welsh border. The earls of Chester ruled almost as independent princes: Cheshire had its own baronial parliament, its own exchequer with "barons of the exchequer" mirroring Westminster, and its own justice exercising the powers of King's Bench and Common Pleas. Such was its separateness that Magna Carta did not apply there; the earl issued his own version to his barons, and the county returned members to the Parliament of England only in the reign of Henry VIII. Since 1301 the earldom of Chester has been conferred on the heir apparent alongside the title Prince of Wales.
The Duchy of Lancaster came latest and proved most durable. The "heritage of Lancaster" dated to 1265, when Henry III granted his son Edmund lands forfeited by Simon de Montfort; Edmund became first Earl of Lancaster in 1267. In 1351 Edward III elevated Henry of Grosmont to Duke of Lancaster and made Lancashire a county palatine for his lifetime. When the powers lapsed on Henry's death in 1361, they were revived and made hereditary in 1362 for the most famous duke of all, John of Gaunt, Edward III's third surviving son. Within the palatinate the duke appointed the sheriff, judges and justices, ran his own chancery, issued writs under his own seal, and even dated documents from 6 March 1351, the founding date of the palatinate.
Lancaster's fate turned on dynastic accident. When Gaunt died in 1399, Richard II confiscated the Lancastrian inheritance — an act of arbitrary seizure that drove Gaunt's exiled son Henry Bolingbroke to return, depose Richard, and take the throne as Henry IV. Crucially, Henry kept the duchy separate from the other Crown possessions rather than allowing it to be "swallowed up in the crown." That decision, later reinforced by Edward IV, preserved the Duchy of Lancaster as a distinct estate and franchise — the reason it still exists today.
Where did these powers come from? In theory, from royal grant; in practice, often from custom and prescription so old that no charter survived. The great medieval doctrine of "liberty" meant, as the anthropologist David Graeber observed, "a lord's right to do whatever he wanted within his own domains" — a right assumed to rest on conquest. The legend of John de Warenne, Earl of Surrey, captures it: summoned to prove by what right he held his franchises, he is said to have produced a rusty sword, declaring his ancestors had won their lands with it and he would defend them the same way.
That anecdote belongs to the reign of Edward I, who launched the first serious royal counter-offensive. Through the quo warranto inquiries begun in 1275, the Statute of Gloucester (1278) and the Statute of Quo Warranto (1290), Edward demanded that franchise-holders show "by what warrant" they exercised royal powers. The proceedings, exhaustively studied by Donald Sutherland, drew a sharp distinction between libertates held by the lord and regalia held only by Crown grant, and established the enduring principle that royal rights could not simply be assumed. When Bishop Bek was summoned under quo warranto, his franchise was briefly seized; but Parliament ultimately confirmed that he held jura regalia between Tyne and Tees, and in Norhamshire and Bedlington. Edward had established the principle of royal supremacy without yet dismantling the great liberties themselves.
The decisive blow fell under Henry VIII, driven by his minister Thomas Cromwell. Two statutes of 1535–36 transformed the constitutional landscape. The Jurisdiction in Liberties Act 1535 — its original title an "Acte for recontynuyng of certayne liberties and francheses heretofore taken frome the Crowne" — struck at the heart of the palatine idea. It provided that no person but the King could pardon treason or felony, that no person but the King could appoint justices, and that all judicial writs and indictments must run in the King's name, not a subject's. At a stroke the essence of palatine sovereignty was nationalised.
The Act granted narrow, telling exceptions that reveal how the system was being managed rather than instantly abolished: Lancashire's county court could keep a distinct judicial seal; the Bishop of Durham and his temporal chancellor remained justices of the peace; the Bishop of Ely kept the Isle of Ely. In Durham the parallel Act of Resumption of 1536 stripped the bishop of the power to pardon offences and appoint judicial officers, and required the county's justice to run in the King's name. Opposition to Cromwell's assault on liberties fed directly into the Pilgrimage of Grace, the great northern rising of 1536, whose Durham adherents demanded restoration of the palatinate's "liberties."
The same programme reshaped Wales. The Laws in Wales Acts of 1535 and 1542 abolished the marcher lordships — dozens of semi-independent franchises along the border where lords had exercised palatine-style powers — annexed Wales to the realm of England, created five new Welsh counties, extended English law and county administration, gave Wales representation at Westminster, and established the Court of Great Sessions. It was, in effect, the abolition of an entire class of princely liberties in a single generation, and it made Chester's separate military organisation largely redundant.
After the Tudor curtailment, the palatinates limped on as judicial and administrative curiosities for three more centuries. The Tenures Abolition Act 1660 ended the Bishop of Durham's rights as chief feudal lord. But the courts survived remarkably long. The Law Terms Act 1830 abolished the independent jurisdiction of the Chester palatine courts and swept away the Court of Great Sessions in Wales, folding Cheshire into the assize circuits.
Durham was the last great palatinate to fall. When the last prince-bishop, William Van Mildert — co-founder of Durham University — died in February 1836, the Durham (County Palatine) Act 1836 separated the palatine jurisdiction from the bishopric and vested the jura regalia in the Crown "as a separate franchise and royalty." Local pressure, led by Lord Londonderry, saved the Durham Court of Pleas and Chancery Court, now under central control; the Durham County Palatine Act 1858 tidied up the transfer. The palatine chancery courts of Durham and Lancaster proved astonishingly tenacious, surviving until the Courts Act 1971 finally merged them into the High Court — meaning England still had functioning palatine courts within living memory.
Two princely liberties never died. The Duchy of Lancaster has been held by the reigning monarch since Henry IV, as a private estate distinct from both the Crown Estate and the monarch's other property; the sovereign is styled "Duke of Lancaster" regardless of gender, and its net income flows to the Privy Purse. The Duchy of Cornwall, created by Edward III in 1337 for his son the Black Prince, passes automatically to the monarch's eldest son; its current holder is William, Prince of Wales. Cornwall was, in the Cornish Foreshore arbitration of the 1850s, argued to be "quasi sovereign," the Crown having "entirely denuded itself of every remnant of Seignory and territorial dominion" within the county — a claim the Duchy substantially won, leading to the Cornwall Submarine Mines Act 1858.
The vestigial regalian rights survive in concrete form. Both Duchies enjoy bona vacantia: when a person dies intestate and heirless within the County Palatine of Lancaster or within Cornwall, their estate passes not to the Crown but to the Duchy (in Lancaster's case, the proceeds are directed to charity). Both are treated by the government as Crown bodies and are therefore exempt from corporation tax and capital gains tax — the direct modern descendant of the medieval principle that the King's rights are not the subject's. The Duke of Cornwall also retains rights to royal fish, appoints several local officials, and acts as port authority for the main harbour of the Isles of Scilly.
These medieval survivals became front-page news in late 2024. A five-month joint investigation by The Sunday Times and Channel 4's Dispatches, broadcast on 2 November 2024 as "The King, the Prince and their Secret Millions," identified 5,410 landholdings and properties held by the royal duchies and detailed how they profit from what the newspaper called "a series of commercial rents and feudal levies on land largely seized by medieval monarchs." According to accounts published by the estates and cited in the investigation, King Charles's income from the Duchy of Lancaster rose 5% to £27.4 million in 2023/24, while Prince William's Duchy of Cornwall brought in £23.6 million, with the Cornwall estate valued at more than £1 billion.
The documented arrangements read like a medieval survival: charges for the right to cross rivers, moor boats, dig graves and run cables under beaches. Among the specific deals uncovered were an £11.4 million, 15-year agreement for Guy's and St Thomas' NHS Foundation Trust to store electric ambulances in a Duchy of Lancaster warehouse; a £37.5 million agreement between the Duchy of Cornwall and the Ministry of Justice to lease Dartmoor Prison (reported by The Sunday Times as about £1.5 million a year); and undisclosed charges to the Army for the right to train on the Duchy's 67,500 acres of Dartmoor. Critics, including the anti-monarchy campaign group Republic, whose February 2025 "Ditch the Duchies" report argues the estates "are public property, not the private property of Charles and William" and calls for their assets to pass to a new "National Estate," say the exemptions are indefensible.
A long-running Duchy of Cornwall Bill promoted in the House of Lords by Lord Berkeley has repeatedly sought to remove the presumption of Crown immunity and subject the Duchy to the Crown Estate Act 1961, though it has never progressed to law. The government, in written parliamentary answers through 2024 and 2025, has reaffirmed that the Duchies remain "Crown bodies subject to Crown exemption," noting that the Prince of Wales "voluntarily pays income tax at the appropriate level on the revenue surplus from the Duchy of Cornwall." Both estates stress that they are self-financing, receive no public funds, and comply with all relevant legislation.
The story of the princely liberties is, at bottom, the story of the containment of arbitrary power. For centuries, Englishmen and Welshmen lived under lords who could pardon, prosecute, tax and coin at their own discretion, accountable to no elected body and only intermittently to a distant king. The gradual assertion of a single national law — through Edward I's insistence that no one hold royal power without warrant, through Cromwell's insistence that justice run in one name, through the nineteenth-century reforms that folded the last palatine courts into the ordinary judicature — was a genuine advance in equality before the law and the accountability of power.
That the two surviving Duchies still enjoy tax exemptions and feudal levies rooted in that vanished world is precisely why they attract scrutiny: they are the last fragments of a system the rest of the country spent five hundred years dismantling. Whether one regards them as harmless heritage or an anomaly overdue for reform, the debate over their status is, in the deepest sense, the same one Edward I opened in 1278 — quo warranto? By what warrant?