How the Queen was also the Countess of Sadberge

Queen Elizabeth II held many, many titles. She was the monarch of 15 countries and beyond that, in Australia she was the Head and Fountain of Justice, of Order, and of Honour; in the UK she was the Seigneur of the Swans; in the Channel Islands she was the Duke of Normandy; on the Isle of Man she was the Lord of Mann; in New Zealand to the Maoris she was the Rare White Heron of Single Flight; in Canada, she was the Chief Hunter of the Order of the Buffalo Hunt, and in south Durham, due to an accident of history, she was the Countess of Sadberge.

A boulder on the green in the village, to the east of Darlington, commemorates the Golden Jubilee in 1887 of Victoria, who was Elizabeth’s great-great-grandmother and who, a plaque on the stone proclaims, was the "Queen of the United Kingdom, Empress of India and Countess of Sadberge".

Before the arrival of the Normans in 1066, Sadberge, the highest spot for miles around, was the capital of the Tees Valley. Knights from upper Teesdale to the west and Greatham and Eaglescliffe to the east came to the hill to touch weapons in a sign of loyalty. Sadberge was a wapentake – a weapon-touching – which was the name for a Saxon area of administration.

When William the Conqueror arrived, he brushed away all such ancient words, and then the Prince Bishops of Durham grew in power to rule the North East. However, because of its history as an ancient capital, Sadberge kept its own judges who heard cases until 1457, sentencing miscreants to death on the gallows on the nearby hill which is now the home of the Darlington Dogs’ Trust.

The Three Tuns pub may well have been the courthouse and its cellars, where Catholics were said to have been imprisoned by the first Queen Elizabeth, were used as cells into the 1520s. The Sheriff of Sadberge continued to hold a county court in the village into the 17th Century.

All this fell away as local power was concentrated in Durham, but in 1836, the Prince Bishops had their powers removed. The Church Commissioners were set up to take control of their revenues on behalf of the centralised Church of England, and any old titles and honours the bishops had gathered over the centuries were handed over to the Crown.

In the course of this tidying up, it was found that the bishop had inherited from the old wapentake the title of Earl of Sadberge. This coincided with Victoria’s coronation in 1837, and so she became the Countess of Sadberge – just as Sophie is Countess of Wessex with her husband, Edward, the Earl of Wessex.

In the 1880s, the Stockton & Middlesbrough Water Board dug the 12-million gallon Sadberge Reservoir to hold water on its way from upper Teesdale to Teesside. Workmen discovered a huge boulder 12ft down, which had been dropped by a glacier at the end of the Ice Age some 10,000 years earlier. It was installed on the green for the 1887 jubilee and to proclaim Victoria’s title which, it has always been said, was passed down by generations of monarch to Elizabeth.

Will Charles become the new Earl of Sadberge?