The keelmen were undoubtedly the most turbulent section of the workforce on Tyneside and since many of them lived, often in a ‘necessitous and rude condition’, in Sandgate, just outside the walls of Newcastle, the preservation of public order was a constantly recurring problem for the City's magistrates, the Mayor, Recorder and Aldermen. It seems worthwhile, therefore, to review their efforts to deal with this large body of robust men ever liable ‘to rise and become tumultuous upon the least pretence’.

As the Duke of Northumberland once remarked, ‘any interruption of the coal trade must be attended with great inconvenience not only to the neighbourhood of Newcastle but to the nation in general’, and disturbances that cut off coal supplies to the metropolis were apt to attract the attention of the central government, which was not always welcome to the local authorities. Secretary of State Sir John Coke clearly thought that they had failed to take sufficiently vigorous action to suppress a serious outbreak of disorder among the populace in the Spring of 1633. ‘If you had set a better guard on them [those arrested who had been rescued]’, he wrote to the Mayor, 25 March, ‘and terrified the rest by proclamation and by raising the trained bands, your service had been greater and the tumult sooner settled’. The magistrates’ reply reveals their inherent weakness when faced with a popular uprising. They had made the proclamation in sundry places, evidently with little effect, but ‘doubted their power’ to call out the trained bands of townsmen, besides which, they had found ‘not such forwardness as they expected in them to assist the Mayor’, and feared ‘thereby to add more strength to the rioters’. In an earlier report to the Council they alleged that the burgesses had secretly sided with those creating the tumult. Secretary Coke believed that the real cause of the disorder was not, as had been represented, the construction of a lime kiln on the local drying ground, but the desire of the inhabitants for a change in their government.