The Bowes family had acquired their estates by marriage with an heiress of the house of Balliol early in the fourteenth century. After the fall of Warwick the Kingmaker they became the chief family in the neighbourhood. Old Sir Ralph Bowes, living in 1508, was sheriff of Durham for twenty years. He married Margaret daughter of Sir Richard Conyers; we are concerned with two of their large family, Richard the fourth son who married Elizabeth daughter and co-heiress of Roger Aske of Aske; and Robert, the third son, who married Alice daughter of Sir James Metcalfe[138]. In 1511 Robert Bowes was mentioned as a suitable bridegroom for Elizabeth Aske, aged seven, if his brother Richard should die[139]. Failing the income to be derived from marriage with an heiress, Robert became a lawyer[140], and no doubt made the acquaintance of Robert Aske, William Stapleton, Thomas Moigne, and the other young lawyers who played an important part in the rebellion. They were carrying on the tradition of those lawyers of an earlier age, concerning whom it is written: “We see at Westminster a cluster of men which deserves more attention than it receives from our unsympathetic, because legally uneducated historians. No, the clergy were not the only learned men in England, the only cultivated men, the only men of ideas. Vigorous intellectual effort was to be found outside the monasteries and universities. These lawyers are worldly men, not men of the sterile caste,—they marry and found families, some of which become as noble as any in the land; but they are in their way learned, cultivated men, linguists, logicians, tenacious disputants, true lovers of the nice case and the moot point. They are gregarious, clubable men, grouping themselves in hospices, which become schools of law, multiplying manuscripts, arguing, learning and teaching, the great mediators between life and logic, a reasoning, reasonable element in the English nation.”[141] The attitude of these men—intelligent, well-educated, unlikely subjects for wild hopes and popular enthusiasms—is one of the most striking features of the rebellion. Robert Bowes, though probably one of the youngest, was not the least brilliant, while, unlike the others, he came through safely and even with credit. Norfolk said of him, “Bowes has no equal in the north both for law and war.”[142] His appointment on the Council of the North after the rising was the beginning of a long career in the government service, during which he justified the Duke’s estimate. In the North Riding of Yorkshire the influence of the three northern Earls was about equal.