STATE OF THE UNION: PERSPECTIVES ON ENGLISH IN THE LATE *

‘Imperialism’, Sir Keith Hancock famously scolded, ‘is no word for scholars’.1 But is it a word for medievalists? Posed in mischief, this is a question with a grim subtext. It is increasingly acknow- ledged that some form of ‘imperial experience’ remains at hand, its capacity to inspire debate undiminished.2 The imperial turn in contemporary world affairs has provoked a storm of semantics, polemics and apologetics on the matter of .3 Haute vulga- risation and high dudgeon are prime characteristics of the genre.4 Neither sits well with the empirical tradition in English historical scholarship. Medievalists might be forgiven for suspecting, in the manner of Hancock, that ‘imperialism’ is one more master noun turned tyrant.5 I begin with two contrary assumptions. The first is that disputation is its own defence. As two imperial luminaries

* Research for this essay was undertaken during my tenure as a Past and Present Society research fellow at the Institute of Historical Research, London (2006–7), and latterly as part of the Irish Chancery Project, Trinity College, , funded by the Irish Research Council for the Humanities and Social Sciences. I am grateful to David Ditchburn, Sea´n Duffy, Robin Frame and Alexander Grant for commenting on earlier versions. 1 W. K. Hancock, Wealth of Colonies (, 1950), 1. 2 Cf. A. G. Hopkins, ‘Back to the Future: From National History to Imperial History’, Past and Present, no. 164 (Aug. 1999), 199: ‘A start can be made by recogniz- ing that the imperial experience, which inspired the major debates on empire, is no longer to hand’. 3 As Stephen Howe noted, even before the most extreme manifestations of the new military imperialism, ‘currently observable trends in the world of the early twenty-first century give the history of Empire a renewed relevance’: Stephen Howe, ‘The Slow Death and Strange Rebirths of Imperial History’, Jl Imperial and Hist., xxix (2001), 138. 4 Even the most recent literature on ‘empire’ is sprawling. For a valuable survey, see Frederick Cooper, ‘Empire Multiplied: A Review Essay’, Comparative Studies in Society and History, xlvi (2004). Other relevant works are cited in the course of this essay. 5 Cf. Elizabeth A. R. Brown, ‘The Tyranny of a Construct: and Historians of Medieval Europe’, Amer. Hist. Rev., lxxix (1974); Rees Davies, ‘The Medieval State: The Tyranny of a Concept?’, Jl Hist. Sociology, xvi (2003); Timothy Reuter, ‘Medieval: Another Tyrannous Construct?’, in his Medieval Polities and Modern Mentalities, ed. Janet L. Nelson (Cambridge, 2006).

Past and Present (2011) ß ThePastandPresentSociety,,2011 doi:10.1093/pastj/gtq054 2of40 PAST AND PRESENT have put it: ‘Spacious subjects need to be opened up to new ideas rather than shut down by scholarly introversion’.6 The second is that empire need not be irreducibly complex. I propose to use the term simply to signify an extensive polity in which a core society exercises formal or informal power over outlying regions gained or maintained by coercion.7 This definition is blandness itself, but it allows us to categorize as an ‘empire’ the extensive polity with which this essay is concerned: late medieval and its subject territories. And with a move from polity to policy, it also opens up the question of the nature of English imperialism in the late Middle Ages. The enterprises of England’s medieval kings have, of course, been diagnosed as ‘imperialist’ before. In a series of interlocking essays, John Gillingham has argued that many symptoms asso- ciated with modern imperial projects — among them, a civilizing ideology and notions of racial superiority — may be located as far back as the early twelfth century in the writings of William of Malmesbury.8 It was the late Sir Rees Davies, however, who en- trenched the notion that England’s first empire was a medieval empire.9 Davies’s trace the irruption of the English state across Britain and from the late eleventh century — the insular experience of Robert Bartlett’s ‘Euro- peanization of Europe’, itself a process ongoing since c.900,

6 P.J. Cain and A. G. Hopkins, ‘The Theory and Practice of British Imperialism’, in Raymond E. Dumett (ed.), Gentlemanly Capitalism and British Imperialism: The New Debate on Empire (Harlow, 1999), 196. 7 This accords with the basic definitions offered in Michael Mann’s taxonomy of : see his ‘American Empires: Past and Present’, Canadian Rev. Sociology and Anthropology, xlv (2008), esp. 8; and Susan Reynolds, ‘Empires: A Problem of Comparative History’, Hist. Research, lxxix (2006), esp. 158–9. In this essay ‘empire’ is consequently to be distinguished from ‘the Empire’, which in medieval Europe denoted the Western and Byzantine Empires, twin descendants of Rome: Robert Folz, The Concept of Empire in Western Europe from the Fifth to the Fourteenth Century, trans. Sheila Ann Ogilvie (London, 1969), esp. ch. 12. It is also not to be confused with the meaning of imperium as employed, for example, by English monarchs during the high and late Middle Ages, on which, see Walter Ullmann, ‘‘‘This Realm of England is an Empire’’’, Jl Eccles. Hist., xxx (1979). 8 John Gillingham, ‘The Beginnings of English Imperialism’, Jl Hist. Sociology,v (1992); see also John Gillingham, The English in the Twelfth Century: Imperialism, National Identity and Political Values (Woodbridge, 2000), esp. chs. 3, 5, 6, 9. 9 R. R. Davies, The First English Empire: Power and Identities in the , 1093– 1343 (Oxford, 2000); see also R. R. Davies, Domination and Conquest: The Experience of Ireland, and , 1100–1300 (Cambridge, 1990). STATE OF THE UNION 3of40 if not before.10 Davies draws his story to a close in 1343, by which time his first English empire is ‘overextended’ (an occupa- tional hazard, it seems, of empires generally) and its internal contradictions are becoming manifest.11 What happened next? Early modernists have been given to understand that this fore- runner of the then ‘disintegrated, apparently for good’.12 David Armitage eloquently sums up the brief passed to him by medievalists: ‘Failure to enforce institutional uniformity, incomplete assimilation of subject peoples, the cultural estrange- ment of the English settlers from metropolitan norms, and mo- narchical indifference all conspired to bring about its collapse’.13 The present essay attempts a fresh interpretation of the period after 1343. Its premise is that the political and cultural infrastruc- ture of the ‘first English empire’ was more durable than has been allowed. The reorientation of English policy towards from 1337 did not mean that England’s insular possessions were allowed to fall into dereliction. From the 1360s the English crown engaged in a concerted effort to resuscitate its colony in Ireland, a process that climaxed with Richard II’s Irish exped- itions of the 1390s and sputtered on into the fifteenth century. Fourteenth-century Wales was relatively quiescent, but the early fifteenth century witnessed a ‘classic example of an anti-colonial rebellion’,14 prompting some of the most draconian (albeit ill-enforced) legislation to ring-fence the values of the metropole in the Middle Ages, and engendering a residual suspicion of the Welsh that lasted deep into the fifteenth century.15 And in 1417 English enterprises in France took on a new aspect with the

10 Robert Bartlett, The Making of Europe: Conquest, Colonization and Cultural Change, 950–1350 (London, 1993), ch. 11; cf. Chris Wickham, ‘Making Europes’, New Left Rev., ccviii (1994), esp. 139–41. 11 Davies, First English Empire, esp. 175–7 (quotation at p. 176); R. R. Davies, ‘The Failure of the First British Empire? England’s Relations with Ireland, Scotland and Wales, 1066–1500’, in Nigel Saul (ed.), England in Europe, 1066–1453 (London, 1994), 132. 12 David Armitage, ‘Greater Britain: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis?’, Amer. Hist. Rev., civ (1999), 427. 13 Ibid. The quotation may also be found in David Armitage, The Ideological Origins of the British Empire (Cambridge, 2000), 28. 14 R. R. Davies, ‘Colonial Wales’, Past and Present, no. 65 (Nov. 1974), 23; see also R. R. Davies, The Revolt of Owain Glyn Dwˆ r (Oxford, 1995), esp. ch. 6. 15 Statutes of the Realm, 11 vols. in 12 (London, 1810–28), ii, 128–9 (2 Hen. IV, c. 16); 140–1 (4 Hen. IV, cc. 26–34); Cal. Pat. Rolls, 1399–1401, 469–70. See Ralph A. Griffiths, ‘After Glyn Dwˆ r: An Age of Reconciliation?’, Proc. Brit. Acad., cxvii (2001), esp. 162. 4of40 PAST AND PRESENT systematic reduction and colonization of . As Gerald Harriss has reminded us, not without a degree of Anglocentrism: ‘Such a conquest and occupation of the major part of a neigh- bouring kingdom was without parallel in northern [continental] Europe since 1066’.16 Moreover, the fact that the land market in Normandy continued to be lively into the 1440s when the Lancastrian occupation was on the eve of its collapse is an indi- cation that the commitment of the new ‘Anglo-’ was sincere.17 This cursory survey of England’s ventures in the century after 1343 suggests that there may be profit in extending the story of the ‘first English empire’ geographically to include the continental possessions and chronologically to at least the fall of in 1453. If we are to explore how this empire worked, then due allowance must be made for change as well as continuity. Several threads in Davies’s story undoubtedly unravel in the late Middle Ages. Within the archipelago, the expansion and centralization so characteristic of the English state in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries are less conspicuous in the ensuing period. The point may be made by juxtaposing two conceits that appear to have captured the imagination of historians: after the ‘second tidal wave’ of English colonization comes the ‘ebb tide of the English empire’.18 The maritime metaphors are compelling;19 yet expan- sionism and empire, while linked, should not be conflated. Peter J. Marshall, expounding the theme of the making and unmaking

16 Gerald Harriss, Shaping the Nation: England, 1360–1461 (Oxford, 2005), 551–2. 17 C. T. Allmand, ‘The Lancastrian Land Settlement in Normandy, 1417–50’, Econ. Hist. Rev., 2nd ser., xxi (1968), 469. For Englishmen who remained in France after the collapse of the Lancastrian cause, see C. T. Allmand, Lancastrian Normandy, 1415–1450: The History of a Medieval Occupation (Oxford, 1983), 80 n. 119. 18 The phrases appear, respectively, in Davies, Domination and Conquest, 12; and in Davies, First English Empire, ch. 7. For further discussion, see John Gillingham, ‘A Second Tidal Wave? The Historiography of English Colonization of Ireland, Scotland and Wales in the 12th and 13th Centuries’, in Jan M. Piskorski (ed.), Historiographical Approaches to Medieval Colonization of East Central Europe: A Comparative Analysis against the Background of Other European Inter-Ethnic Colonization Processes in the Middle Ages (New York, 2002); Brendan Smith, ‘Lordship in the British Isles, c.1320–c.1360: The Ebb Tide of the English Empire?’, in Huw Pryce and John Watts (eds.), Power and Identity in the Middle Ages: Essays in Memory of Rees Davies (Oxford, 2007). 19 Even if, as Loomis once wryly remarked, ‘Britannia did not so early claim to rule the waves’: Louise R. Loomis, ‘Nationality at the Council of Constance: An Anglo-French Dispute’, Amer. Hist. Rev., xliv (1939), 524 n. 52. STATE OF THE UNION 5of40 of the ‘first’ British empire in the eighteenth century, has chosen to distinguish expansion from ‘empire’ itself.20 Empire, in other words, may endure even if the process of expansion — in terms of cultural diffusion and territorial accretion — slows or grinds to a halt. England’s relationship with its northern neighbour is instructive in this regard. From the mid fourteenth century it becomes increasingly difficult to weave the assertive Scottish kingdom into a ‘four nations’ symphony of British political devel- opment,21 except as an exercise in counterpoint.22 But if Scotland represents a proximate and embarrassing imperial blunder for England, there is ample evidence for what Cain and Hopkins have characterized as ‘imperialism of intent’ as distinct from ‘im- perialism of result’.23 With two brief exceptions in 1328 and 1502, the king of England never relinquished his claim to the ‘submission, homage, and other peculiar rights due from of old to the crown of England from the kings of the Scots and their people’.24 And, while formal rule proved elusive, English

20 P. J. Marshall, The Making and Unmaking of Empires: Britain, India, and America, c.1750–1783 (Oxford, 2005), 4–5. 21 It was never easy, as Davies notes in his Domination and Conquest, esp. p. x. See also Robin Frame, ‘Overlordship and Reaction, c.1200–c.1450’, in his Ireland and Britain, 1170–1450 (London, 1998), 188–9. 22 Alexander Grant characterizes the late Middle Ages aptly as ‘a time of disengage- ment, of divergence instead of convergence’: see his ‘Scottish Foundations: Late Medieval Contributions’, in Alexander Grant and Keith J. Stringer (eds.), Uniting the Kingdom? The Making of British History (London, 1995), 101. 23 P. J. Cain and A. G. Hopkins, British Imperialism, 1688–2000, 2nd edn (Harlow, 2002), 54. The same ‘empire of intent’ could be posited of those regions of Ireland over which the royal government lost direct control from the mid fourteenth century, as indeed of most of France during the Hundred Years War. 24 The phrase occurs in Gesta Henrici Quinti: The Deeds of the Fifth, ed. and trans. Frank Taylor and John S. Roskell (Oxford, 1975), 139. See also Adae Murimuth continuatio chronicarum: Robertus de Avesbury de gestis mirabilibus regis Edwardi Tertii, ed. E. M. Thompson (London, 1889), 286–96; ‘Richard II: Parliament of October 1383’, ed. Chris Given-Wilson, in The Parliament Rolls of Medieval England, 1275–1504, ed. Chris Given-Wilson, 16 vols. (Woodbridge, 2005), available online at 5http://www .sd-editions.com/PROME4(hereafter PROME), item 3 (‘le roiaume d’Escoce [si est tielment] annexe [d’auncientee a la coroune] d’Engleterre’). In general, see E. L. G. Stones, ‘The Appeal to History in Anglo-Scottish Relations between 1291 and 1401: Part II’, Archives, ix (1969). For the persistence of such claims in the fifteenth century and later, see David Ditchburn, ‘Union before Union: The Failure of ‘‘Britain’’ in the Middle Ages’, in Andrew Mackillop and Michea´lO´ Siochru´ (eds.), Forging the State: European State Formation and the Anglo-Scottish Union of 1707 (Dundee, 2009). As for the exceptions, Edward III repudiated the 1328 treaty in 1333, and the ‘Treaty of Perpetual Peace’ of 1502 lapsed c.1512–13 when Henry VIII went to war with France and James IV maintained the ‘auld alliance’ — leading to the ill-fated invasion of England in 1513. For the vigorous reassertion by Henry VIII of England’s claims to (cont. on p. 6) 6of40 PAST AND PRESENT pressure was frequently suffered — not least during the extended spells that David II and James I spent south of the border as in- voluntary guests of the English crown.25 If expansion is not essential to empire, neither is centraliza- tion a necessary concomitant of imperialism. Davies — giving a Weberian gloss to the medieval English state — distinguished the ‘patriarchal and tributary’ character of England’s relations with the Celtic peripheries in the eleventh and twelfth centuries from the increasingly ‘bureaucratic and integrative’ approach from the thirteenth century.26 The growth of England’s preco- cious bureaucratic kingship has long been a cardinal theme of English historiography; but if Edward I’s misadventures in Scotland teach any lesson it is that integration had its limits. Mark Ormrod’s ‘fiscal perspective’ on England’s imperial enter- prises, in his words, ‘appears to be consistent with, and serves to reinforce, the body of recent scholarship that views Edward I’s rampantly expansionist and ruthlessly centralist stance as a highly significant but comparatively brief and unsustainable interlude in the longer history of English medieval state- and empire-build- ing’.27 This is as we should expect: recent scholarship has argued persuasively that ‘the long-term survival of empires depended on their rulers limiting their transformative ambitions even as

(n. 24 cont.) overlordship of Scotland, see Roger A. Mason, ‘The Scottish Reformation and the Origins of Anglo-British Imperialism’, in Roger A. Mason (ed.), Scots and Britons: Scottish Political Thought and the Union of 1603 (Cambridge, 1994). 25 A. A. M. Duncan, ‘Honi soit qui mal y pense: David II and Edward III, 1346–52’, Scot. Hist. Rev., lxvii (1988); Michael Penman, David II, 1329–71 (, 2004), ch. 5; Michael Brown, James I (Edinburgh, 1994), 17–24; E. W.M. Balfour-Melville, The English Captivity of James I, King of Scots (London, 1929). A comparative study examining both periods of captivity together and exploring the psychological and political effects on the Scots would be illuminating. 26 R. R. Davies, ‘The English State and the ‘‘Celtic’’ Peoples, 1100–1400’, Jl Hist. Sociology, vi (1993), 3–4. See also R. R. Davies, ‘‘‘Keeping the Natives in Order’’: The English King and the ‘‘Celtic’’ Rulers, 1066–1216’, Peritia, x (1996). 27 Mark Ormrod, ‘The English State and the Plantagenet Empire, 1259–1360: A Fiscal Perspective’, in J. R. Maddicott and D. M. Palliser (eds.), The Medieval State: Essays Presented to James Campbell (London, 2000), 214. For similar conclusions re- garding the abortive Edwardian colonization of Scotland, see Michael Prestwich, ‘Colonial Scotland: The English in Scotland under Edward I’, in Roger A. Mason (ed.), Scotland and England, 1286–1815 (Edinburgh, 1987); James Campbell, ‘England, Scotland and the Hundred Years War in the Fourteenth Century’, in Clifford J. Rogers (ed.), The Wars of Edward III: Sources and Interpretations (Woodbridge, 1999), esp. 207. STATE OF THE UNION 7of40 they extended their power’.28 In the high age of early modern expansion, when the means of coercion were considerably greater, European empires remained essentially devolved and im- perial power often rested as much on ‘negotiation’ with settler and indigenous populations as on force.29 Even in a contempor- ary world capable of self-immolation, there are clear vulnerabil- ities in an imperialist policy that rests on outsized military muscle and neglects economic, political and ideological sources of power.30 That an imperial framework has not found favour for the late Middle Ages may have less to do with the utility (or, for that matter, tyranny) of the construct, than a bifurcated historiog- raphy that tends to treat ‘British’ history and Anglo-French his- as discrete subjects. The enterprises of England’s kings, however, embraced both spheres and should not be disaggre- gated.31 The subject is a capacious one, not least because of the tremendous social and cultural variation across, and indeed within, England’s provinces and dominions. Hybridity, if any- thing, adds to the interpretative strength of ‘empire’, but it makes integrated treatment extremely challenging.32 I wish to offer three perspectives that may ease the task of conceptualiza- tion.

28 Cooper, ‘Empire Multiplied’, 247. 29 Jack P. Greene, Negotiated Authorities: Essays in Colonial Political and Constitu- tional History (London, 1994), ch. 1. 30 Michael Mann, Incoherent Empire (London, 2003); Michael Mann, ‘The First Failed Empire of the 21st Century’, Rev. Internat. Studies, xxx (2004). Mann’s analysis draws on his classic work, The Sources of Social Power,i,A History of Power from the Beginning to AD 1760 (Cambridge, 1986), esp. ch. 1. 31 See, for example, Frame, ‘Overlordship and Reaction’, 187–8, for a persua- sive argument that the insular and continental spheres should not be compartmen- talized. Likewise Nicholas Canny has argued that much of the ‘new’ British history of the early modern period has been Anglocentric and neglectful of continental Europe: Nicholas Canny, ‘Irish, Scottish and Welsh Responses to Centralisation, c.1530–c.1640: A Comparative Perspective’, in Grant and Stringer (eds.), Uniting the Kingdom?, esp. 147–8. See also Andrea C. Ruddick, ‘ and the Limits of Medieval British Isles History’, in Brendan Smith (ed.), Ireland and the English World in the Late Middle Ages: Essays in Honour of Robin Frame (Basingstoke, 2009), ch. 5. 32 On ‘hybrid empires’, see George Steinmetz, ‘Return to Empire: The New U.S. Imperialism in Comparative Historical Perspective’, Sociological Theory, xxiii (2005), 353–6. ‘Difference within Empires’ is also a key theme of Jane Burbank and Frederick Cooper, Empires in World History: Power and the Politics of Difference (Princeton, 2010), esp. 11–13. 8of40 PAST AND PRESENT I

POLITICAL STRUCTURES Empires, historians have been assured, are political systems.33 How then, without resorting to diagrammatic representation complete with hubs and spokes, might one describe the organiza- tional logic of England’s dominions in the late Middle Ages?34 One modish model that recommends itself is that of a or multiple kingdom.35 Long before the treaty of Troyes (1420) gave the claim of England’s ruling to the French crown something more than a soupc¸on of substance,36 it is possible to conceive of the constellation of lands subject to the king of England in these terms.37 Indeed, in 1328, shortly after Edward III was rebuffed from consideration for the kingship of France, a solicitous councillor proposed, perhaps by way of con- solation, that he might adopt a compound royal style that would include his lesser titles.38 Although the idea was rejected, Edward III’s operations in the two decades after he assumed the title ‘king of France’ in 1340 cumulatively amounted to a bid not merely for the former ‘’, but for a viable dual monarchy.39 The process faltered after the renewal of hostilities in 1369 and,

33 S. N. Eisenstadt, The Political Systems of Empires (New York, 1963). 34 See, for example, Alexander J. Motyl, Imperial Ends: The Decay, Collapse, and Revival of Empires (New York, 2001), 13. 35 On the distinction, see Conrad Russell, ‘Composite Monarchies in Early Modern Europe: The British and Irish Example’, in Grant and Stringer (eds.), Uniting the Kingdom?, esp. 133–4. 36 Foedera: conventiones, literae, et cujuscunque generis acta publica . . ., ed. Thomas Rymer, 20 vols. (London, 1704–32), ix, 895–904. 37 Steven G. Ellis, ‘From Dual Monarchy to Multiple Kingdoms: Unions and the English State, 1422–1607’, in Allan I. Macinnes and Jane Ohlmeyer (eds.), The Stuart Kingdoms in the Seventeenth Century: Awkward Neighbours (Dublin, 2002); Nigel Saul, ‘Henry V and the Dual Monarchy’, in Saul (ed.), England in Europe. 38 The proposed royal style ran as follows: ‘Edwardus Dei gracia rex Anglie, domi- nus Hybernie et Vasconie, insularum maris, dux Aquitannie, comes Pontivi et Montis Trolli’ (Edward, by the grace of God, king of England, of Ireland, Gascony and the , of , and of and Montreuil), quoted from National Archives, London, Public Record Office, C 47/30/1/33, in Pierre Chaplais, English Medieval Diplomatic Practice, Part I: Documents and Interpretation,2 vols. (London, 1982), i, 154 n. For comment, see W. M. Ormrod, ‘A Problem of Precedence: Edward III, the Double Monarchy, and the Royal Style’, in J. S. Bothwell (ed.), The Age of Edward III (York, 2001), 136. 39 W.M. Ormrod, ‘The Double Monarchy of Edward III’, Medieval Hist., i (1991); Craig Taylor, ‘Edward III and the Plantagenet Claim to the French Crown’, in Bothwell (ed.), Age of Edward III. STATE OF THE UNION 9of40 under Richard II, there was renewed interest in the ‘matter of Britain’.40 Had Richard’s much-rumoured plans to elevate the land of Ireland to the dignity of a kingdom borne fruit,41 the Lancastrians might have found themselves after 1420 vying to rule an eclectic polity that boasted three kingly titles. The relationship between the core of this multiple kingdom and its components was multiplex, not to say bewildering, the con- trasts perhaps being at their most conspicuous in attitudes to- wards belligerents. Racial prejudices seem to harden discernibly as we move westwards from France towards Ireland. Richard II was rebuked amid the tense atmosphere of the ‘Wonderful’ par- liament of 1386 for forgetting that his cousin, the king of France, was not his friend but his ‘chiefest enemy’ — a gaffe inconceivable with reference, say, to his ‘wild’ Gaelic enemies across the Irish Sea who were perceived as uncivilized (though perhaps not irre- deemably so).42 A similar range of attitudes emerges if we take as our yardstick another aspect of ‘colonial policy’: marriage.43 English soldiers serving on the Continent were relatively free to marry local inhabitants, while settlers in post-conquest Wales seem gradually to have overcome their preference for endog- amy — clearly in evidence in the first half of the fourteenth century — as they began to form unions with the native

40 Michael Bennett, ‘Richard II and the Wider Realm’, in Anthony Goodman and James L. Gillespie (eds.), Richard II: The Art of Kingship (Oxford, 1999). 41 Thomae Walsingham, quondam monachi S. Albani, historia anglicana, ed. H. T. Riley, 2 vols. (London, 1863–4), ii, 148; Chronicon Angliae ab Domini 1328 usque ad annum 1388, ed. Edward Maunde Thompson (London, 1874), 372; The Westminster Chronicle, 1381–1394, ed. and trans. L. C. Hector and Barbara F. Harvey (Oxford, 1982), 248–9; ‘Richard II: Parliament of February 1388, Text and Translation’, ed. Chris Given-Wilson, PROME, pt 2, ‘Appeal of Treason’, article 11. Adam Usk makes a similar claim in respect of Thomas Holand in 1399: The Chronicle of Adam Usk, 1377– 1421, ed. C. Given-Wilson (Oxford, 1997), 76–7. Note also how, in 1395, shortly after Richard II’s first Irish expedition, Philippe de Me´zie`res indulged the king by address- ing him as ‘King of Great Britain [‘‘Grant Bretaingne’’], and North Wales, Lord of Ireland and King of ’: Philippe de Me´zie`res, Letter to King Richard II: A Plea Made in 1395 for Peace between England and France, ed. G. W. Coopland (Liverpool, 1975), 28, 101. 42 Knighton’s Chronicle, 1337–1396, ed. and trans. G. H. Martin (Oxford, 1995), 356–61. For a similar rumour in the reign of Henry VI, see R. A. Griffiths, The Reign of Henry VI, 2nd edn (Stroud, 1998), 642. For the perception in English literature of Ireland as ‘other-worldly’ and of the Gaelic population as ‘wild’, see Elizabeth L. Rambo, Colonial Ireland in Medieval English Literature (London, 1994), 40–4, 49–64. For Richard II’s efforts to ‘civilize’ Gaelic during his Irish expedition of 1394–5, see nn. 187 and 190 below. 43 Cf. Michael Adas, ‘Imperialism and in Comparative Perspective’, Internat. Hist. Rev., xx (1998), 387. 10 of 40 PAST AND PRESENT Welsh;44 in Ireland, however, where the fourteenth century saw the English colony come under severe strain, intermarriage with the indigenous population was officially proscribed.45 At some level, these contrasts stem from a difference in ‘constitutional’ status between the remnants of the Plantagenet inheritance that lay within the and those insular territories that England had acquired through conquest. But this dichotomy, while not without its logic, does not do justice to the tangled reality. In the case of Gascony, protracted wrangling over sover- eignty complicated its status to such an extent that, even after the coronation of Henry VI as king of France (1431), the duchy seems to have been considered (like , Ireland and Wales) to be an inalienable parcel of the English crown.46 And, whereas Gascony cannot be classed as a ‘colony of settlement’ with a substantial settler population living cheek by jowl with ethnically distinct natives (as in Ireland and Wales),47 there was much that was ‘im- perial’ in the abrasive rule of the principality of Aquitaine under Edward, the Black Prince.48 Lancastrian Normandy presents a

44 Although in Wales the question of racial status continued to have significant implications: these are explored in R. R. Davies, ‘The Status of Women and the Practice of Marriage in Late-Medieval Wales’, in Dafydd Jenkins and Morfydd E. Owen (eds.), The of Women: Studies Presented to Professor Daniel A. Binchy on his Eightieth Birthday (Cardiff, 1980), esp. 100–4. For intermarriage in Wales, see R. R. Davies, ‘Race Relations in Post-Conquest Wales: Confrontation and Compromise’, Trans. Hon. Soc. Cymmrodorion (1975), 52; A. D. M. Barrell and M. H. Brown, ‘A Settler Community in Post-Conquest Rural Wales: The English of Dyffryn Clwyd, 1294–1399’, Welsh Hist. Rev., xvii (1995), 352–3. For examples of intermarriage in France, see Jonathan Sumption, The Hundred Years War, ii, Trial by Fire (London, 1999), 458; Allmand, Lancastrian Normandy, 80 nn. 118–19, and pp. 102–4. 45 Statutes and Ordinances and Acts of the Parliament of Ireland: King John to Henry V, ed. Henry F. Berry (Dublin, 1907), 432–3. Of course, despite the provisions of the Statute of Kilkenny (1366), intermarriage persisted between the Gaelic and English populations: see Gillian Kenny, Anglo-Irish and Gaelic Women in Ireland, c.1170–1540 (Dublin, 2007), esp. ch. 7. 46 Anne Curry, ‘Lancastrian Normandy: The Jewel in the Crown?’, in David Bates and Anne Curry (eds.), England and Normandy in the Middle Ages (London, 1994), 236. 47 As more than one historian has noted: C. T. Allmand, ‘Review of Margaret Labarge, Gascony, England’s First Colony, 1204–1453 (London, 1980)’, History, lxv (1980), 465; Frame, ‘Overlordship and Reaction’, 184. 48 ‘Imperial’ represents a minor qualification to David Green’s persuasive argument that we may analyse the Black Prince’s rule in Aquitaine in terms of a ‘colonial policy’: David Green, ‘Lordship and Principality: Colonial Policy in Ireland and Aquitaine in the 1360s’, Jl Brit. Studies, xlvii (2008), esp. 7. Cf. the distinction between ‘imperial’ and ‘colonial’ rule insisted on by J. G. A. Pocock in ‘The New British History in Atlantic Perspective: An Antipodean Commentary’, Amer. Hist. Rev., civ (1999), (cont. on p. 11) STATE OF THE UNION 11 of 40 midway case. From 1417 estates were sequestered and (unlike in Gascony) a sizeable landed settlement was imposed. But although many royal donations of lands were made in fee tail with restrictions on their alienation to anyone other than Englishmen,49 there was little attempt at ‘Anglicization’ in the sense of wholesale intrusion of and institutions on the model of the conquered territories of Ireland and Wales.50 England’s empire in the late Middle Ages was, then, like its legatee, a ‘constitutional hotch-potch’.51 It was, above all, the royal dynasty that made of it a ‘union in diversity’.52 The domin- ions played an important role in the family policy of Edward III,53 and much the same could be said of Henry IV: both kings created distinct spheres of influence for their male progeny — Wales, Ireland and the north serving as early stomping grounds for their first, second and third sons respectively. Overseeing these activities was the head of the family. At a meeting of the king’s council in the summer of 1412, for instance, Prince Hal, presid- ing in place of his ailing father, monitored at a single sitting the problems afflicting Calais, Ireland, the principality and March of Wales, and the castles of and Berwick in Scotland.54 Late medieval England was, however, no longer simply ‘a family firm’.55 Its governance was increasingly participatory and

(n. 48 cont.) 499 n. 25: ‘A ‘‘colony’’ is a settlement established by emigration. It is by metaphor, and not particularly happily, that the term has been transformed to the case of indigenous populations subject to alien empire (thus permitting discontented settler nationalists to identify their case with the latter)’. 49 Allmand, ‘Lancastrian Land Settlement in Normandy’, esp. 465, 467–9; C. T. Allmand, ‘The Collection of Dom Lenoir and the English Occupation of Normandy in the Fifteenth Century’, Archives, vi (1964), 207. 50 Robert Andrew Massey, ‘The Lancastrian Land Settlement in Normandy and Northern France, 1417–1450’ (Univ. of Liverpool Ph.D. thesis, 1987), p. x. 51 , The End of the British Empire: The Historical Debate (Oxford, 1991), 4. 52 A. F. McC. Madden, ‘1066, 1776 and All That: The Relevance of English Medieval Experience of ‘‘Empire’’ to Later Imperial Constitutional Issues’, in John E. Flint and Glyndwr Williams (eds.), Perspectives of Empire: Essays Presented to Gerald S. Graham (London, 1973), 19. 53 Ormrod, ‘Double Monarchy of Edward III’, 74–5; W. M. Ormrod, ‘Edward III and his Family’, Jl Brit. Studies, xxvi (1987); Green, ‘Lordship and Principality’, 4 n. 5. 54 Proceedings and Ordinances of the , ed. Sir Harris Nicolas, 7 vols. (London, 1834–7), ii, 34–5. 55 The phrase is that of John Gillingham in reference to the Angevin empire: see his The Angevin Empire, 2nd edn (London, 2001), 116. 12 of 40 PAST AND PRESENT (within limits) representative.56 The English parliament, whose power was spurred on by the exigencies of wartime supply, habit- ually opened with the appointment of commissioners to receive petitions from Ireland, Wales, Scotland, Gascony and the Channel Islands. This invites the question: ‘who cared about the colonies?’57 The attitude of the commons to the ‘extremitees du roialme’ was deeply ambivalent.58 At times, as during the run of success in Normandy between 1415 and 1422, something ap- proaching a ‘lobby’ in favour of colonization can be detected within its ranks;59 yet, even flushed with victory, the commons could be parsimonious as they greeted further demands for sub- sidies with ‘dark — though private — mutterings and curses, and by hatred of such extortions’.60 Paradoxically, these curses could serve to reinforce the bond between the outlying regions and the core. To loosen the grasp of the commons on the purse strings of their constituents, cash-strapped English chancellors argued in the late 1370s that the overseas territories, including isolated out- posts at Calais, Cherbourg and Brest, were ‘barbicans of the realm’.61 The dominions as a first line of defence was an idea that cut both ways. As a means of attracting attention to the west- ern peripheries, we find it recycled with a dash of alarmist rhetoric in the Libelle of Englyshe Polycye (c.1436) with its famous argu- ment that Ireland was ‘a boterasse and a poste / Undre England, and Wales is another’.62 Indeed it was hard to wean the political

56 Gerald Harriss, ‘Political Society and the Growth of Government in Late Medieval England’, Past and Present, no. 138 (Feb. 1993). 57 Cf. Jacob M. Price, ‘Who Cared about the Colonies? The Impact of the Thirteen Colonies on British Society and Politics, circa 1714–1775’, in Bernard Bailyn and Philip D. Morgan (eds.), Strangers within the Realm: Cultural Margins of the First British Empire (Chapel Hill, 1991). 58 ‘Richard II: Parliament of January 1394’, ed. Chris Given-Wilson, PROME, item 1. 59 Jean-Philippe Genet, ‘La Normandie vue par les historiens et les politiques anglais au XVe sie`cle’, in Pierre Bouet and Ve´ronique Gazeau (eds.), La Normandie et l’Angleterre au Moyen Aˆge (, 2003), 286–90, 292–306. 60 Chronicle of Adam Usk, ed. Given-Wilson, 270–1. 61 ‘To which it was answered that Gascony and the other strong places which our lord the king had overseas are and ought to be like barbicans to the , and if the barbicans are well guarded, and the sea safeguarded, the kingdom shall find itself well enough secure’: ‘Richard II: Parliament of October 1378’, ed. Chris Given-Wilson, PROME, item 25. One historian elevates this to a ‘barbican policy’: Anthony Tuck, Richard II and the English Nobility (London, 1973), 46. 62 The Libelle of Englyshe Polycye: A Poem on the Use of Sea-Power, 1436, ed. George Warner (Oxford, 1926), 36. STATE OF THE UNION 13 of 40 nation at large from its habit of dependence on the crown even when this tendency ran counter to the royal will itself, as in the early 1390s when a proposal to cede Aquitaine to the provoked protests from the Gascons, seconded by the English Commons, that they should only be ruled by the king of England or his heir apparent.63 The circumstances attending the Gascon protest point to the tensions inherent in a composite structure, notably the knotty question of local privileges. The , for in- stance, revelled in its distinctiveness and its charter of privileges was confirmed in 1423 by John, duke of Bedford, as regent of Henry VI.64 Unlike those of Normandy, the ‘liberties’ of English Ireland closely paralleled those of England itself; but we cannot infer from this that the colonists’ sense of local identity was weak.65 They were quite capable — like the settler population in ‘British America’ three centuries later66 — of lifting themselves up by their English liberties to assert a measure of autonomy.67 Nor were such concerns merely a preoccupation of provincials. England suffered from acute accession jitters in 1340 and again in 1420, when the kingship of France was added to the royal style. On both occasions, parliament expressed its concern that England might be ‘placed in subjection’ to France and it sought

63 J. J. N. Palmer, England, France and Christendom, 1377–99 (London, 1972), 154–63. A short time previously, in 1388, the Lords Appellant claimed that Richard II’s creation of the duchy of Ireland in favour of Robert de Vere (d. 1392), which included the alienation of regalities, was to ‘the open disinheritance of his crown of the kingdom of England, and the entire destruction of the loyal lieges of the king our said lord and of his said land of Ireland’: ‘Richard II: Parliament of February 1388, Text and Translation’, ed. Given-Wilson, PROME, pt 2, ‘Appeal of Treason’, article 11 (quotation); Westminster Chronicle, ed. and trans. Hector and Harvey, 246–9. 64 Philippe Contamine, ‘The Norman ‘‘Nation’’ and the French ‘‘Nation’’ in the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries’, in Bates and Curry (eds.), England and Normandy, 225. 65 Robin Frame, ‘Exporting State and Nation: Being English in Medieval Ireland’, in Len Scales and Oliver Zimmer (eds.), Power and the Nation in European History (Cambridge, 2005). 66 John M. Murrin, ‘A Roof without Walls: The Dilemma of American National Identity’, in Richard Beeman, Stephen Botein and Edward C. Carter II (eds.), Beyond Confederation: Origins of the Constitution and American National Identity (Chapel Hill, 1987), 340: ‘At one level the Revolution was thus the culminating moment in the process of anglicization’. 67 The most famous case from medieval Ireland is the so-called ‘declaration of parliamentary independence’ of 1460: Statute Rolls of the Parliament of Ireland: Reign of King Henry VI, ed. Henry F. Berry (Dublin, 1910), 644. 14 of 40 PAST AND PRESENT assurances that England should always ‘be free and quit of the aforesaid subjection and obedience in every way’.68 In short, the metropole was not to be rendered peripheral.69 Clearly, the English empire in the late Middle Ages was highly differentiated and decentralized; but a devolved political struc- ture is not necessarily more brittle as a consequence. J. H. Elliott has remarked of composite monarchy in the early modern period that the ‘very looseness of the association was in a sense its great- est strength’.70 The question that arises is whether the English ‘official mind’ in the late Middle Ages could tolerate freedom of action in its outlying provinces. Certainly, in the case of Ireland and Wales, the crown’s demands for cultural, legal and adminis- trative uniformity would suggest an answer firmly in the nega- tive.71 But the Westminster government seems in practice to have been more flexible than historians have inferred from its official pronouncements. Just as in the empire forged by the Spanish monarchy from the sixteenth century, royal ministers were sub- ject to such a multiplicity of incompatible standards that they could exercise remarkable latitude and, in effect, ‘obey but not execute’ the king’s commands.72 The justification for inaction was grounded in the fact that the king could not always be fully informed of affairs in the peripheries and was frequently misled

68 Statutes of the Realm, i, 292 (14 Edw. III, stat. 3); ‘Edward III: Parliament of March 1340’, ed. W. Mark Ormrod, PROME, pt 2, item 9; ‘Henry V: Parliament of December 1420’, ed. Chris Given-Wilson, PROME, item 25. 69 It may be relevant, in this context, to recall the remark attributed to Henry VII on the occasion of the marriage in 1503 of his daughter, Margaret Tudor (d. 1541), to James IV of Scotland that ‘the greater would draw the less’: Norman Macdougall, James IV (Edinburgh, 1989), 250. Roger Mason has recently argued that James IV ‘would have seen such a [dynastic] union as an extension of the Stewart not the Tudor imperium’: Roger A. Mason, ‘Scotland, Elizabethan England and the Idea of Britain’, Trans. Roy. Hist. Soc., 6th ser., xiv (2004), 282. 70 J. H. Elliott, ‘A Europe of Composite Monarchies’, Past and Present, no. 137 (Nov. 1992), 69. 71 For a typical statement of the maxim that Ireland should be governed by English law (‘qe la terre Dirlaund deit par la lei engleische estre governee’), see Documents on the Affairs of Ireland before the King’s Council, ed. G. O. Sayles (Dublin, 1979), no. 192, quotation at p. 169. As Rees Davies put it, a ‘multiple kingdom can scarcely be built on such foundations’: Davies, First English Empire, 196. 72 John Leddy Phelan, ‘Authority and Flexibility in the Spanish Imperial Bureau- cracy’, Administrative Science Quart., v, (1960), 49–50, 58–60. Phelan offers a useful addendum to the more familiar ‘model’ set out in Albert Beebe White, Self- Government at the King’s Command: A Study in the Beginnings of English Democracy (London, 1933). STATE OF THE UNION 15 of 40 by false information.73 Inaction, or simply looking the other way, also operated as an aspect of the discretionary authority of royal ministers because ‘selective enforcement’ of the king’s instruc- tions enabled them ‘to convert potential authority into real authority’.74 If the royal dynasty and the apparatus of central government formed the superstructure of England’s late medieval empire, the infrastructure was provided by an aristocratic governing class through which the crown articulated its power on a local and regional level.75 To the extent that some magnates acquired lands and titles in more than one region, they acted to knit together the king’s dominions.76 If we can speak of multiple king- doms, why not also, a rung or two down the tenurial ladder, multiple earldoms, such as those of the Butlers ( of Ormond and Wiltshire), the Mortimers (earls of March and ) and the Talbots (earls of and Shrewsbury)? The merit of the concept may lie in the fact that the tensions inherent in a composite lordship in terms of administration, dele- gation and absenteeism were of a kind with those experienced by a composite monarchy. A case in point is the fifteenth-century composite lordship of the Butlers of Ormond, whose extensive estates in Ireland served as a powerful base from which the family projected its interests onto the English scene; however, after the succession in 1452 of James, fifth of Ormond and earl of Wiltshire, the interests of the main branch of the family

73 For an ordinance of 1357 that sought to deal with the problem of false informa- tion from Ireland being peddled at court, see Statutes of the Realm, i, 359 (31 Edw. III, stat. 4, c. 7). 74 Phelan, ‘Authority and Flexibility in the Spanish Imperial Bureaucracy’, 50. For a case of ‘selective enforcement’ of the Welsh ordinances of 1401, see the case of Sir John Skudamore [Skidmore] (d. 1435), cited in Ralph A. Griffiths, The Principality of Walesin the Later Middle Ages: The Structure and Personnel of Government,i,South Wales, 1277–1536 (Cardiff, 1972), 140–1. For the confirmation of the Welsh ordinance in question, see ‘Henry VI: Parliament of July 1433’, ed. Anne Curry, PROME, item 30. 75 Though not quite in the sense of the ‘traditional aristocratic empires’ imagined by John H. Kautsky in his The Politics of Aristocratic Empires (Chapel Hill, 1982). Nonetheless, Kautsky’s conclusions concerning the devolved state of ‘aristocratic empires’ are relevant, esp. ch. 6. 76 For transregional landholding in an earlier period, see Robin Frame, ‘Aristoc- racies and the Political Configuration of the British Isles’, in his Ireland and Britain. See also Brendan Smith, ‘The British Isles in the Late Middle Ages: Shaping the Regions’, in Smith (ed.), Ireland and the English World, 16–17. 16 of 40 PAST AND PRESENT shifted decisively to England, thereby creating serious structural imbalance.77 In effect, the Irish portion of the Butler lordship fell victim to its own success. Other composite lordships were effectively stillborn. The earldom of , created in 1395 for Edward, earl of Rutland (d. 1415), scarcely survived its first in- cumbent.78 But to judge from an ode, composed by the famous Welsh bard Iolo Goch, to Roger, fourth earl of March and earl of Ulster (d. 1398), the commitment of multiple earls to their mul- tiple holdings could be sincere. The poet displays an astonishing knowledge of Irish topography and the challenges that faced the Mortimers in their efforts to exploit their Irish estates, which, in addition to the earldom of Ulster, included the lordships of , Trim and Leix.79 Mortimer’s career was cut short when he was killed in a skirmish with the Irish of in July 1398, while both his father and son died prematurely in Ireland. What is striking, however, is the family’s determination to make good its Irish inheritance and its attempts to do so by integrating it with their lordships further afield. The Wigmore chronicle reports that c.1380, Edmund Mortimer, third earl of March (d. 1381), was shipping timber to Ireland from his lord- ship in Usk in order to repair the bridge at Coleraine in the fur- thermost reaches of his earldom of Ulster.80 These two structures — one centred on the dynastic link to the crown, the other on the aristocracy — are intended as aids to

77 See David Beresford, ‘The Butlers in England and Ireland, 1405–1515’ (Univ. of Dublin Ph.D. thesis, 1999), esp. chs. 2–3. 78 G. E. Cokayne, The Complete , Scotland, Ireland, Great Britain and the , 2nd edn, ed. Vicary Gibbs, 13 vols. in 14 (London, 1910–59), iii, 418. Edmund Plantagenet (d. 1460), the second surviving son of Richard, duke of York (d. 1460), was also styled earl of Rutland and earl of Cork: see ibid., xi, 252–3. 79 Iolo Goch: Poems, ed. Dafydd Johnston (Llandysul, 1993), no. 20. For comment, see Gruffydd Aled Williams, ‘Cywydd Iolo Goch i Rosier Mortimer: Cefndir a Chyd-Destun [Iolo Goch’s Ode to Roger Mortimer: Background and Context]’, Lleˆn Cymru, xxii (1999). (I am very grateful to Gruffydd Williams for furnishing me with a version of this article in English.) The Mortimers’ spectacular conglomeration of lands is also captured by the Wigmore chronicle, whose account is later used by Adam Usk: Sir William Dugdale, Monasticon Anglicanum, ed. John Caley, Henry Ellis and Rev. Bulkeley Bandinel, 6 vols. in 8 (London, 1817–30), vi, pt 1, pp. 353–4; Chronicle of Adam Usk, ed. Given-Wilson, 46–9. 80 R. R. Davies, Lordship and Society in the March of Wales, 1282–1400 (Oxford, 1978), 236–7; Dugdale, Monasticon Anglicanum, ed. Caley, Ellis and Bandinel, vi, pt 1, p. 353. STATE OF THE UNION 17 of 40 thought, and as complements to each other, not alternatives. The point I wish to emphasize is that England’s dominions in the late Middle Ages were no Frankenstein’s monster of territorial ap- pendages, but rather constituted an interdependent network, a concatenation of lands. Consider military operations. The settler community in late medieval Ireland was skilled at picking oppor- tune moments in the war with France to appeal to the king for attention as, for instance, in 1360 when the ink was still wet on the Treaty of Bre´tigny, and again in 1421.81 The tendency for English interests to swing pendulum-like between archipelago and con- tinent is a commonplace. With a minor shift in perspective we can also appreciate that it was almost a structural requirement of the late medieval empire to maintain secondary outlets for aggressive energy. Nicholas Canny has recently asked rhetorically with regard to the seventeenth century: ‘what would have been the political and social consequences for Britain if it had not been able, at the conclusion of each of its major military engagements, to offload many of its officers and fighting men in Ireland?’82 His question has application to the medieval period. A preliminary answer is suggested by juxtaposing two moments in the Hundred Years War separated by ninety years. In the aftermath of Bre´tigny in 1360 both Ireland and Castile became new theatres of war and so served as a safety valve for the surplus manpower of the .83 Contrast the ignominious English withdrawal from Normandy in 1450, which was followed in England by wide- spread social upheaval in which the returning companies threw in their lot with the rebels.84

81 Parliaments and Councils of Mediaeval Ireland, ed. H. G. Richardson and G. O. Sayles (Dublin, 1947), no. 16; Statutes . . . John to Henry V, ed. Berry, 563. 82 Nicholas P. Canny, ‘Foreword’, in Kevin Kenny (ed.), Ireland and the British Empire (Oxford, 2004), p. ix. 83 Christopher Allmand, The Hundred Years War: England and France at War, c.1300–1450 (Cambridge, 1988), 21: ‘Contrary to what some historians have thought, the campaign in Spain was not a mere side issue. It reflected the growing problem of how to deal with surplus manpower once peace had been made in a major theatre of war’. 84 I. M. W.Harvey, Jack Cade’s Rebellion of 1450 (Oxford, 1991), 131; Anne Curry, ‘The Loss of Lancastrian Normandy: An Administrative Nightmare?’, in David Grummitt (ed.), The English Experience in France, c.1450–1558: War, Diplomacy and Cultural Exchange (Aldershot, 2002), 44–5. 18 of 40 PAST AND PRESENT II

SERVICE AND COMMUNICATIONS An empire is, of course, more than a political structure. It is also an ‘imagined community’.85 Indeed, the two things are crucially interrelated. The coherence of a devolved and extended polity depends on the propagation of a political culture that serves as a binding agent among provincial elites and counteracts tenden- cies towards assimilation or autonomy.86 One of the things that made England’s empire imaginable amid a plethora of languages, laws and local liberties was collective experience, most obviously service in the king’s enterprises. The author of the Gesta Henrici Quinti illustrates the mentality of the nation-in-arms rather well: ‘Our England [Anglia nostra]’, he wrote after the victory at Agincourt, ‘has reason to rejoice and reason to grieve’.87 Recruitment for the king’s armies took place with fluctuations in intensity across England’s dominions from Aquitaine to the far north of England, Wales and, intermittently, Ireland88 — and even spilled beyond them into Scotland.89 Some regions had their specialities — for instance, the prized archers of

85 Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, revised edn (London and New York, 1991). 86 See the remarks, for the early Middle Ages, of Chris Wickham in his Framing the Early Middle Ages: Europe and the Mediterranean, 400–800 (Oxford, 2005), 59, 61. 87 Gesta Henrici Quinti, ed. and trans. Taylorand Roskell, 98–9. On the propagand- ist purpose of the Gesta, see J. S. Roskell and F. Taylor, ‘The Authorship and Purpose of the Gesta Henrici Quinti, II’, Bull. John Rylands Lib., liv (1972). 88 Malcolm Vale, ‘The War in Aquitaine’, in Anne Curry and Michael Hughes (eds.), Arms, Armies and Fortifications in the Hundred Years War (Woodbridge, 1994), 81–2; Neil Jamieson, ‘The Recruitment of Northerners for Service in English Armies in France, 1415–50’, in Dorothy J. Clayton, Richard G. Davies and Peter McNiven (eds.), Trade, Devotion and Governance: Papers in Later Medieval English History (Stroud, 1994); see also Anne E. Curry, ‘The Nationality of Men-at-Arms Serving in English Armies in Normandy and the Pays de Conqueˆte, 1415–1450: A Preliminary Survey’, Reading Medieval Studies, xviii (1992); A. D. Carr, ‘Welshmen and the Hundred Years War’, Welsh Hist. Rev., iv (1968); A. D. Carr, ‘A Welsh Knight in the Hundred Years War: Sir Gregory Sais’, Trans. Hon. Soc. Cymmrodorion (1977). The involvement of forces from the English colony in Ireland was small but important in terms of forging or reaffirming links between the colonial aristocracy and court: see Robin Frame, English Lordship in Ireland, 1318–1361 (Oxford, 1982), 153–6. For Irish participation in the campaigns of Henry V, see Richard Hayes, ‘Irish Soldiers at the Siege of (1418–19)’, Irish Sword, ii (1954). 89 For the involvement of (normally disaffected) Scots in England’s armies, see David Ditchburn, Scotland and Europe: The Medieval Kingdom and its Contacts with Christendom, c.1215–1545,i,Religion, Culture and Commerce (Edinburgh, 2000), 220–3; cf. n. 157 below, for Scots who fought in the service of France. STATE OF THE UNION 19 of 40 Cheshire, ‘whose standing . . . was analogous to that of men-at- arms raised elsewhere in England’;90 or the light hobby horse of Ireland, which had been a valuable scouting and patrolling animal in Edward I’s wars against Scotland,91 and whose occasional ap- pearance in the fifteenth century was sufficiently novel to attract the attention of the author of a poem on the in 1436: And euer among an Irissh man On his hoby that swiftly ran; It was a sportfull sight How his dartes he did shake.92 Military service, whether on campaign across the Channel or in defence of a local frontier,93 gave the governing classes across England’s lands a stake in ‘empire’. As a nineteenth-century radical might have put it, England’s late medieval empire was a ‘gigantic system of out-door relief for the aristocracy’.94 Indeed, given the role that a burgeoning armigerous class played in England’s wars, it is tempting to set a cat among the pigeons and ascribe England’s expansionist dynamic in this period to the forces of ‘gentlemanly feudalism’.95 K. B. McFarlane cer- tainly overstated the profit motive in his famous sound bite

90 Philip Morgan, War and Society in Medieval Cheshire, 1277–1403 (Manchester, 1987), 109. 91 James Lydon, ‘The Hobelar: An Irish Contribution to Medieval Warfare’, in Peter Crooks (ed.), Government, War and Society in Medieval Ireland: Essays by Edmund Curtis, A. J. Otway-Ruthven and James Lydon (Dublin, 2008). 92 ‘The Siege of Calais’, in Historical Poems of the 14th and 15th Centuries, ed. Rossell Hope Robbins (London, 1959), 289, ll. 121–4. 93 For military institutions on the frontiers in Ireland and the north of England, see Robin Frame, ‘Military Service in the Lordship of Ireland, 1290–1360: Institutions and Society on the Anglo-Gaelic Frontier’, in his Ireland and Britain; J. A. Tuck, ‘War and Society in the Medieval North’, Northern Hist., xxi (1985). The Lancastrian settlement in Normandy entrenched the obligation of military service based on tenure: Anne Curry, ‘Le Service fe´odal en Normandie pendant l’occupation anglaise (1417–1450)’, in La ‘France anglaise’ au Moyen Aˆge: colloque des historiens me´die´vistes franc¸ais et britanniques (Actes du 111e Congre`s national des socie´te´s savantes, , 1986, Section d’histoire me´die´vale et de philologie, i, Paris, 1988). 94 Hopkins, ‘Back to the Future’, 210, quoting from John Bright, Speeches on Questions of Public Policy, 2nd edn, ed. James E. Thorold Rogers (London, 1869), 470. 95 Cf. P. J. Cain and A. G. Hopkins, ‘Gentlemanly Capitalism and British Expansion Overseas, I: The Old Colonial System, 1688–1850’, Econ. Hist. Rev., 2nd ser., xxxix (1986). ‘Feudalism’, weasel word that it is, may be no more contro- verted than is ‘capitalism’. For discussion, see Peter Coss, ‘From Feudalism to Bastard Feudalism’, in Natalie Fryde, Pierre Monnet and Otto Gerhard Oexle (eds.), Die Gegenwart des Feudalismus (Go¨ttingen, 2002). 20 of 40 PAST AND PRESENT that the combatants in the Hundred Years War ‘made no pretence of fighting for love of king or lord, still less for England or for glory, but for gain’.96 For many, perhaps most, advancement through military service proved a chimera.97 Nonetheless the idea of social and material improvement (albeit garbed in loftier language) re- mained a powerful motive for a career in arms,98 and for a lucky few the windfalls were large, whether in the form of titles, booty and pensions,99 or the more abiding advantages that stemmed from personal contacts made on campaign.100 Edward III’s cre- ation of six new earls in 1337 exemplifies the connection between service, performed or pending, and advancement: the king not only rewarded a group of favoured associates but also furnished himself with a bevy of active soldiers for the French war.101 It is not at court, however, that we find the most striking testimony to England’s success in cultivating an ethic of martial service, but on the wild colonial frontier. The Gaelic bard Gofraidh Fionn O´ Da´laigh mock-scolded Edward III for taking Maurice fitz Maurice (d. 1358), the future second earl of Desmond, away on campaign to France; but it is clear from the poet’s tone (which reflected the opinions of his patron) that royal service re- dounded to Maurice’s credit:

Great is our anger against thee, O king of England; the ground thereof is that, though her spirit was high, thou has brought sorrow upon Banbha [Ireland] . . . With his fosterer, the king of England — a mighty expedition — he [Maurice] goes to France, the beautiful land of swans, of feasts, and of dark wine.

96 K. B. McFarlane, The Nobility of Later Medieval England: The Ford Lectures for 1953 and Related Studies (Oxford, 1973), 21. 97 Andrew Ayton, ‘War and the English Gentry under Edward III’, History Today, xlii, 3 (1992); Philippa C. Maddern, ‘Social Mobility’, in Rosemary Horrox and W. Mark Ormrod (eds.), A Social , 1200–1500 (Cambridge, 2006), 123–4. 98 , ‘Chivalry’, in Raluca Radulescu and Alison Truelove (eds.), Gentry Culture in Late Medieval England (Manchester, 2005), esp. 40–1. 99 For case studies of men who made it big, see Michael Prestwich, ‘The Enterprise of War’, in Horrox and Ormrod (eds.), Social History of England, 81–2, 86–8. 100 Michael J. Bennett, Community, Class and Careerism: Cheshire and Lancashire Society in the Age of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (Cambridge, 1983), 184–91. 101 Andrew Ayton, ‘Edward III and the English Aristocracy at the Beginning of the Hundred Years War’, in Matthew Strickland (ed.), Armies, Chivalry and Warfare in Medieval Britain and France (Stamford, 1998), 188–90. STATE OF THE UNION 21 of 40 The tidings of France, the knowledge of England — a merry tale — will be found with the skilful (youth), so tall and bright, elegant and white- footed.102 Similar pride in service can be located in Iolo Goch’s elegy on Sir (d. 1356) of Llansadwrn, Carmarthenshire, which recalls his prowess in the service of the English crown in France and Scotland.103 If war fostered comradeship in arms, then equally the feats of the soldiers caught the attention of those left at home. In the eighteenth century Adam Smith noted how In great empires the people who live in the capital, and in the provinces remote from the scene of action . . . enjoy, at their ease, the amusement of reading in the newspapers the exploits of their own fleets and armies . . . They are commonly dissatisfied with the return of peace, which puts an end to their amusement.104 The situation that obtained in the late Middle Ages was not alto- gether dissimilar. The bulk of the English population was spared the devastation visited upon England’s neighbours.105 Coastal attacks occasionally brought home the harsh reality of war; but hostile incursions were usually the lot of the Anglo-Scottish border and the that marched with Wales.106 In the absence of face-to-face encounters with ‘otherness’ — doubtless as instru- mental in the shaping of a national identity in this period as during

102 ‘Mo´r ar bfearg riot a rı´ Saxan’ [Great Is our Anger against Thee, O King of England], in Osbern Bergin, Irish Bardic Poetry: Texts and Translations, ed. David Greene and Fergus Kelly (Dublin, 1970), no. 17, trans. 244–5. 103 Iolo Goch: Poems, ed. Johnston, no. 7. On Sir Rhys ap Gruffydd, see Griffiths, , 99–102. Sir Rhys ap Gruffydd may also have commissioned Iolo Goch’s ode to King Edward III, which describes the king as the ‘hammerer of the Scots’ and recalls his victories at Neville’s Cross and Cre´cy as well as the capture of Calais in 1347: Iolo Goch: Poems, ed. Johnston, no. 1. For discussion, see David [Dafydd] Johnston, ‘Iolo Goch and the English: Welsh Poetry and Politics in the Fourteenth Century’, Cambridge Medieval Celtic Studies, xii (1986), esp. 81–5. 104 Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (1776), ed. Joseph Shield Nicholson (London, 1886), 391. 105 For the attitude ‘at home’ to the king’s enterprises abroad, see W. M. Ormrod, ‘The Domestic Response to the Hundred Years War’, in Curry and Hughes (eds.), Arms, Armies and Fortifications. 106 On the Welsh and Scottish borders respectively, see Ralph A. Griffiths, ‘Wales and the Marches in the Fifteenth Century’, in his King and Country: England and Wales in the Fifteenth Century (London, 1991); Alastair J. Macdonald, Border Bloodshed: Scotland and England at War, 1369–1403 (Edinburgh, 2000). In English Ireland the omnipresent threat of Gaelic incursions was one of the factors that made the adher- ence of the colony to the crown so fervent, particularly in the late Middle Ages when the extent of the English settlement in Ireland began to contract: Robin Frame, ‘‘‘Les Engleys ne´es en Irlande’’: The English Political Identity in Medieval Ireland’, in his Ireland and Britain, 139–40. 22 of 40 PAST AND PRESENT the second Hundred Years War of the Hanoverians107 — know- ledge of the enemy had to be imparted by other means. Commu- nications were rudimentary, but fluent.108 To a limited extent, news flowed through ‘official’ media such as newsletters,109 whose tidings might be disseminated by royal proclamation or from the pulpit;110 but unofficial, improvised news networks were surely the norm. Rumour, sustained by political songs,111 percolated through the general population, at times shading into sedition, as in 1405 when an unfortunate Norfolk esquire found himself in hot water for informing two Lancastrian partisans, rather too effusively, about the high wages Glyn Dwˆ r was offering to those who joined his company.112 Feelings sometimes ran deep, as in 1393 when the commonalty of Cheshire rose in re- sponse to Richard II’s proposals for peace with France, which threatened their job security;113 or in 1450, when the collapse of Normandy spawned dark rumours of treachery.114 Nor were those on the western peripheries of the empire utterly removed from the drama in the principal theatre of war. Chroniclers in Ireland are found bending the ears of passers-by for scraps of information. The Kilkenny annalist Friar Clyn tells us that he received through the reports of messengers the news of Edward

107 , ‘Britishness and Otherness: An Argument’, Jl. Brit. Studies, xxxi (1992), esp. 316 for the war with France. 108 Colin Richmond, ‘Hand and Mouth: Information Gathering and Use in England in the Later Middle Ages’, Jl Hist. Sociology, i (1988). 109 Kenneth A. Fowler, ‘News From the Front: Letters and Despatches of the Fourteenth Century’, in Philippe Contamine, Charles Giry-Deloison and Maurice H. Keen (eds.), Guerre et socie´te´ en France, en Angleterre et en Bourgogne, XIV e–XV e sie`cle (Lille, 1991), esp. 76–81, 83–4. The correspondence between Richard II and the English council during his Irish campaign of 1394–5 might also be considered as part of this genre: see ‘Unpublished Letters from Richard II in Ireland, 1394–5’, ed. Edmund Curtis, Proc. Roy. Irish Acad., xxxvii (1927), section C, no. 14. 110 Ormrod, ‘Domestic Response to the Hundred Years War’, 97. 111 For example, the rumour that David II of Scotland had soiled the font at his baptism, for which, see A. G. Rigg, ‘Propaganda of the Hundred Years War: Poems on the Battles of Cre´cy and Durham (1346): A Critical Edition’, Traditio, liv (1999), 175. 112 Simon Walker, ‘Rumour, Sedition and Popular Protest in the Reign of Henry IV’, Past and Present, no. 166 (Feb. 2000), 31. 113 The St Albans Chronicle: The Chronica Maiora of Thomas Walsingham,i,1376– 1394, ed. and trans. John Taylor, Wendy R. Childs and Leslie Watkiss (Oxford, 2003), 944–8; Morgan, War and Society in Medieval Cheshire, 193–4. 114 Maurice Keen, ‘The End of the Hundred Years War: Lancastrian France and Lancastrian England’, in his Nobles, Knights and Men-at-Arms in the Middle Ages (London, 1996), 239–40. STATE OF THE UNION 23 of 40 III’s manoeuvres in the Low Countries in 1337.115 Likewise, the chronicler Henry Marlborough breathlessly reports in 1420 from his parish in north county Dublin that rumours were sweeping through Ireland to the effect that Thomas, sixth earl of Desmond, had died in France and that Henry V attended his funeral at Rouen.116 If an English ‘empire’ was imaginable in part because it brought those domiciled in far-flung regions together in a common cause, then just as important was the corollary: diffusion of personnel. The peripatetic nature of ‘imperial service’ took many a career soldier or administrator on a progress through the king’s domin- ions. Well before his adventures in the March of Wales and the mud at Agincourt, the future Henry V passed the summer of 1399 in Ireland, where he was knighted and then held in honourable captivity in Trim castle, county Meath, while his father usurped Richard II’s crown.117 This is an illustrious example; but Henry’s experience of multiple theatres of war was far from unique.118 The Yorkshire clerk Thomas Barneby (d. 1427) rose to promin- ence under Henry IVas receiver of the prince of Wales in Anglesey (1403) and later chamberlain of north Wales; a decade later, in 1416, he was ensconced in Normandy as treasurer of Harfleur; by 1423 he had received an appointment as constable of Bordeaux and he died in Gascony on 28 March 1427.119 Barneby’s move to France followed hard upon accusations that he had colluded with

115 The Annals of Ireland by Friar John Clyn, ed. and trans. Bernadette Williams (Dublin, 2007), 222–3. Clyn also records English victories at Halidon Hill, Sluys, Cre´cy, Neville’s Cross and Calais: ibid., 210–11, 226–7, 240–1, 242–3. 116 Bodleian Library, Oxford, Laud Misc. 614, fo. 100. Note also the report of a Gaelic annalist in 1450 that ‘we haue heard from pilgrims at Rome’ that ‘All the King of Englands Conquest in France was taken from him, but only Calice, 3140 men being slaine in Roan, and Lord ffurnwell was taken prisoner therin’: see ‘The Annals of Ireland, from the Year 1443 to 1468, Translated from the Irish by Dudley Firbisse . . . in the Year 1666’, ed. J. O’Donovan, in The Miscellany of the Irish Archaeological Society, i (Dublin, 1846), 226. 117 Christopher Allmand, Henry V (New Haven and London, 1997), 12. 118 See, for example, Simon Walker,‘Janico Dartasso: Chivalry, Nationality and the Man-at-Arms’, History, lxxxiv (1999). For the case of the Nottinghamshire knight Sir Nicholas Goushill, see Andrew Ayton, ‘English Armies in the Fourteenth Century’, in Curry and Hughes (eds.), Arms, Armies and Fortifications, 30–1. 119 R. A. Griffiths, ‘The Glyn Dwr Rebellion in North Wales through the Eyes of an Englishman’, Bull. Board Celtic Studies, xxii (1967); Anne Curry, ‘Harfleur et les Anglais, 1415–1422’, in Bouet and Gazeau (eds.), La Normandie et l’Angleterre au Moyen Aˆge, 253–6; M. G. A. Vale, English Gascony, 1399–1453: A Study of War, Government and Politics during the Later Stages of the Hundred Years War (Oxford, 1970), 247. 24 of 40 PAST AND PRESENT the native Welsh, and it thus enabled him to keep his career on its upward trajectory. For others, relocation was forced by exogen- ous factors. The Essex-born Robert Wikeford (d. 1390) served the king on diplomatic missions in the Low Countries and Aquitaine before being appointed as constable of Bordeaux in 1373;120 in 1375, amid the collapse of the Black Prince’s princi- pality of Aquitaine, Wikeford was provided to the archbishopric of Dublin and served two controversial terms as chancellor of Ireland. We glimpse him in transit, c.1376, petitioning the crown for allowances in his account as constable of Bordeaux as he wishes to set out to take up his new office in Ireland.121 A later archbishop of Dublin jumped ship in a similar manner: Michael Tregury (d. 1471) served as first rector of the university of Caen in 1439–40; with the English position in Normandy crumbling in 1449, Tregury exchanged new hazards for old when he was pro- vided to the archbishopric of Dublin in succession to Richard Talbot (d. 1449), whose more famous brother, Sir John, earl of Shrewsbury and Waterford, was to be killed in the barrage of artillery at Castillon in 1453.122 A small world indeed.123 A prosopographical study of the journeys — or ‘secular pilgrim- ages’, to borrow Benedict Anderson’s concept124 — of soldiers and functionaries such as these would be extremely revealing of their variegated identities and of how it was that ‘culture’ in its widest sense was transmitted and absorbed. Sometimes cultural transmission took place in the most literal and pedestrian of fash- ions, in the baggage train of civil servants whose careers and inter- ests formed an arc linking Westminster, Dublin and, indeed,

120 T. Runyan, ‘The Constabulary of Bordeaux: The Accounts of John Ludham (1372–73) and Robert de Wykford (1373–75)’, Mediaeval Studies, xxxvi (1974), esp. 224–6. 121 He was clearly aware of the precarious environment into which he was ventur- ing, because he requested a retinue of six men-at-arms and twelve archers to accom- pany him in Ireland at the king’s wages: National Archives, London, Public Record Office, SC 8/171/8533, printed in Documents on the Affairs of Ireland, ed. Sayles, no. 244. 122 Allmand, Lancastrian Normandy, 113; Register of Wills and Inventories of the Diocese of Dublin in the Time of Archbishops Tregury and Walton, 1457–1483, from the Original Manuscript in the Library of Trinity College, Dublin, ed. and trans. Henry F. Berry (Dublin, 1898), esp. pp. xviii–xxv. 123 Robin Frame, ‘The Wider World’, in Horrox and Ormrod (eds.), Social History of England, who cites the case of Tregury at p. 450. 124 See Anderson, Imagined Communities, 55–6. STATE OF THE UNION 25 of 40 other colonial outposts.125 Other cultural tourists harboured ex- plicitly imperialist motives. John Hardyng (d. 1465) got his start as a peddler of bogus documents when he was commissioned by Henry V to investigate England’s right to overlordship of Scotland; after three years north of the Tweed, Hardyng travelled to Bois-de-Vincennes in 1422, where he furnished his patron with his first tranche of evidence.126 Still other itineraries resulted in the transmission of culture in another sense by encouraging a species of ‘reactive acculturation’,127 detectable, for instance, in a Gaelic poet’s satire on a bellicose of county in the late fourteenth century, Sir Thomas Clifford: After computing the disfigurements of his body from his soles to the top of his grizzled head I will see how many inches are in each left limb of Clifford . . . The drip of his crooked nose — certainly there is here the very pattern of Ugliness — every secretion from his nostrils is an undrinkable cliff stream.128 Travellers in the other direction also had to contend with deep-seated prejudice. One man who mostly prevailed over such obstacles in the later 1370s was a career soldier of Gaelic origin identified in record sources as ‘Cornelius de Clone’. In reward for his service to the English crown Cornelius received a knighthood, the royal manor of Crumlin in county Dublin, and a charter of denizenship for himself and his kin.129 Thus far he could be cast as a medieval prototype for Roy Foster’s ‘Mick on

125 Rees Davies, ‘The Life, Travels, and Library of an Early Reader of Piers Plowman’, Yearbook of Langland Studies, xiii (1999); Kathryn Kerby-Fulton and Steven Justice, ‘Langlandian Reading Circles and the Civil Service in London and Dublin, 1380–1427’, in Wendy Scase, Rita Copeland and David Lawton (eds.), New Medieval Literatures, i (1997). 126 C. L. Kingsford, ‘The First Version of Hardyng’s Chronicle’, Eng. Hist. Rev., xxvii (1912); Documents and Records Illustrating the History of Scotland, and the Transactions between the Crowns of Scotland and England, Preserved in the Treasury of Her Majesty’s Exchequer, ed. Francis Palgrave, i (London, 1837), 367–76. 127 For the term, see Robert I. Burns, ‘The Significance of the Frontier in the Middle Ages’, in Robert Bartlett and Angus MacKay (eds.), Medieval Frontier Societies (Oxford, 1989), 326. 128 Ann Dooley, ‘‘‘Na´mha agus cara dar gceird [An Enemy and a Friend to our Art]’’: A Da´n Leathaoire’, Celtica, xviii (1986), 145–6 (stanzas 36, 41). Sir Thomas was a younger brother of Roger IV Clifford of (d. 1389): see Vivienne J. C. Rees, ‘The Clifford Family in the Later Middle Ages, 1259–1461’ (Univ. of Lancaster M.Litt. thesis, 1973), 91–2. 129 Cal. Pat. Rolls, 1381–5, 226; Cal. Fine Rolls, 1377–83, 347; Cal. Close Rolls, 1381– 5, 154; Rotulorum patentium et clausorum cancellariae Hiberniae calendarium,i,Hen. II–Hen. VII, ed. Edward Tresham (Dublin, 1828), 109, nos. 81, 95–6. 26 of 40 PAST AND PRESENT the make’; in England, however, he remained something of a ‘marginal man’.130 Cornelius was in London in 1382 at the height of anti-Wycliffite hysteria, where his Gaelic background may have made him particularly susceptible to accusations of Lollardy. Consequently he found it expedient to expunge suspi- cions about his faith through miraculous intervention. After an elaborate procession of barefooted clergy through the city’s streets, he attended mass and, when the celebrant broke the bread, Cornelius reportedly saw ‘the name of Jesus written in letters of flesh, raw and bloody, which was wonderful to behold’.131 His ‘pilgrimage’ demonstrates rather neatly both the extent and the limits of cultural assimilation. Cultural exchanges and confrontations of a similar kind would have overtaken the English settlement in Lancastrian Normandy had it long endured.132 A glimpse of the faltering process of ac- commodation is provided by Rouen’s vibrant book-trade, whose English patrons preferred books of hours to follow the use of Sarum:133 blunders in a manuscript created for Sir Thomas Hoo in 1445 are revealing of a francophone scribe grappling with the English language.134 Culture did not have to be ‘high’ to allow us to track its transmission; we can also observe what might be called the ‘culture of governance’ on the move. Risde´ard O´ hE´ idighea´in (d. 1440), an archbishop of Cashel of Gaelic origin

130 R. F. Foster, ‘Marginal Men and Micks on the Make: The Uses of Irish Exile, c.1840–1922’, in his Paddy and Mr Punch: Connections in Irish and English History (London, 1993). 131 Knighton’s Chronicle, ed. and trans. Martin, 260–3. For discussion, see Herbert B. Workman, John Wyclif: A Study of the English Medieval Church, 2 vols. (Oxford, 1926), ii, 271–3. 132 Robert Massey, ‘Lancastrian Rouen: Military Service and Property Holding, 1419–49’, in Bates and Curry (eds.), England and Normandy, esp. 285–6. 133 Catherine Reynolds, ‘English Patrons and French Artists in Fifteenth-Century Normandy’, in Bates and Curry (eds.), England and Normandy, esp. 310–11. The Sarum Use — which originated in the diocese of Salisbury (hence ‘Sarum’) in the twelfth century — was the order of divine service commonly used in the south of England and Wales, especially between the thirteenth century and the Reformation; it was also observed in Ireland and Scotland. 134 John Scattergood, ‘Dublin, Royal Irish Academy Library MS 12 R 31: A French Scribe Copies English’, in his Manuscripts and Ghosts: Essays on the Transmission of Medieval and Early Renaissance Literature (Dublin, 2006), esp. 206–14. Compare the struggle a Gaelic scribe had in translating ’s Expugnatio Hibernica into Irish around the same period: Whitley Stokes, ‘The Irish Abridgment of the ‘‘Expugnatio Hibernica’’’, Eng. Hist. Rev., xx (1905), and comment in James Lydon, ‘The Middle Nation’, in Crooks (ed.), Government, War and Society in Medieval Ireland, 337. STATE OF THE UNION 27 of 40 who moved in the orbit of the Butler earls of Ormond, is known to have possessed a copy of the English version of a treatise on par- liamentary procedure known as Modus tenendi parliamentum.135 Nor did the ‘culture of governance’ always radiate outwards from the metropole. Innovations in English chancery procedure intro- duced by John Thoresby (d. 1373), chancellor of England from 1349 to 1356, may be traced back to Thoresby’s experience as president of a ‘chancery’ at Calais during Edward III’s campaigns of the mid 1340s.136 There are also signs of cross-pollination be- tween the king’s dominions: the process of settling the conquered lands in Normandy and northern France, for instance, may have been influenced by the experience of the English colony in Ireland.137 Military techniques were likewise a transferable skill. Just as England’s set-piece victories at Morlaix, Cre´cy and Poitiers in the first phase of the Hundred Years War built on the revolutionary combination of dismounted men-at-arms flanked by archers that was first tested in the Anglo-Scottish campaigns at Dupplin Moor and Halidon Hill,138 so the English government seems to have appreciated the strategic parallels between the frag- mented frontiers of Ireland, the north and the March of Wales. The chief governors of Ireland who targeted Gaelic poets in the second decade of the fifteenth century were, in all probability, actuated by their experience repressing the Glyn Dwˆ r revolt, where national ambitions were fostered by the bardic classes.139

135 Thomas Duffus Hardy, ‘On the Treatise Entitled ‘‘Modus tenendi parliamen- tum’’, with Especial Reference to the Unique French Version Belonging to the Earl of Winchelsea’, Archaeol. Jl, xix (1862), 265 [misprinted as 255], 274. 136 W.M. Ormrod, ‘Accountability and Collegiality: The English Royal Secretariat in the Mid-Fourteenth Century’, in Kouky Fianu and DeLloyd J. Guth (eds.), E´ crit et pouvoir dans les chancelleries me´die´vales: espace franc¸ais, espace anglais (Louvain- la-Neuve, 1997), 65–6. 137 Christopher Allmand, ‘La Normandie devant l’opinion anglaise a` la fin de la Guerre de Cent Ans’, Bibliothe`que de l’E´ cole des Chartes, cxxviii (1970), 355; Keen, ‘End of the Hundred Years War’, 250. 138 Matthew Bennett, ‘The Development of Battle Tactics in the Hundred Years War’, in Curry and Hughes (eds.), Arms, Armies and Fortifications, 4–5; Clifford J. Rogers, ‘The Military Revolutions of the Hundred Years’ War’, Jl Military Hist., lvii (1993), 248, 251–2; Michael Prestwich, ‘Was There a Military Revolution in Medieval England?’, in Colin Richmond and Isobel Harvey (eds.), Recognitions: Essays Presented to Edmund Fryde (, 1996), 22–3. 139 The chief governors in question were Sir John Stanley (d. 1414) and Sir John Talbot(d. 1453): both men held the office of the king’s lieutenant in Ireland (1413–14 and 1414–20 respectively), having earlier served in Wales during the Glyn Dwˆ r revolt. For their service in Wales and Ireland, see under ‘Stanley, Sir John’, and ‘Talbot,John, first earl of Shrewsbury and first earl of Waterford’, both in Oxford DNB. For their (cont. on p. 28) 28 of 40 PAST AND PRESENT Then there is the related issue, recently raised by Susan Reynolds, of ‘the degree to which a metropolitan society’s own ideology was changed by having an empire’.140 At times these ‘reverber- ations’ can be seen very clearly.141 Nigel Saul has argued, for instance, that Richard II’s exalted concept of his own majesty — a distinguishing feature of his final years of ‘tyranny’ — was first unveiled during his expedition to Ireland of 1394–5 in the submissions the king took from the Gaelic chiefs.142

III

‘PATTERNS OF DOMINANCE’143 The mention of ideology in the foregoing discussion of cultural transmission reminds us of the dark side — or, rather, the hum- drum reality — of imperial projects: coercion. Cultural transmis- sion, in short, is often a euphemism for cultural imposition. Hand in hand with coercive inculcation of cultural norms went a legit- imizing ideology that, in the words of Edward Said, includes the notion ‘that certain territories and people require and beseech domination’.144 The ‘island mythologies’ that Rees Davies so brilliantly deconstructed were by no means cast aside with the opening of the Hundred Years War.145 Later, during the dual monarchy of Henry VI, a series of justifications for the Lancastrian claim to the French crown was put into circulation.

(n. 139 cont.) attacks on members of the Gaelic bardic classes, see Katharine Simms, ‘Bards and : The Anglo-Irish Aristocracy and the Native Culture’, in Bartlett and MacKay (eds.), Medieval Frontier Societies, 184–5. For the role of historical mythology and Merlinic prophecy in sustaining anti-English sentiment in Wales, see Davies, Revolt of Owain Glyn Dwˆ r, 88–93; R. R. Davies, ‘The Peoples of Britain and Ireland, 1100– 1400, IV: Language and Historical Mythology’, Trans. Roy. Hist. Soc., 6th ser., vii (1997), 22. 140 Reynolds, ‘Empires: A Problem of Comparative History’, 164; see also Hopkins, ‘Back to the Future’, 212: ‘In paying the rent, empire also shaped the mind’. 141 Frederick Cooper and Ann Laura Stoler, ‘Between Metropole and Colony: Rethinking a Research Agenda’, in Frederick Cooper and Ann Laura Stoler (eds.), Tensions of Empire: Colonial Cultures in a Bourgeois World (Berkeley, 1997), 1. 142 Nigel Saul, ‘Richard II and the Vocabulary of Kingship’, Eng. Hist. Rev.,cx (1995), 865–8. 143 As in the title of Philip Mason’s book, Patterns of Dominance (Oxford, 1970). 144 Edward W. Said, Culture and Imperialism (London, 1993), 8 (italics as in original). 145 Davies, First English Empire, ch. 2. STATE OF THE UNION 29 of 40 In addition to esoteric propaganda in chronicle and verse,146 the trappings of the dual monarchy were displayed in the pageantry and pomp of royal ceremonial, and disseminated orally in the proclamation of royal instruments (whose protocols included the compound royal style) and visually in seals, coinage and her- aldic insignia.147 Thus, for a few decades in the mid fifteenth century, the iconography of the dual monarchy was blazoned simultaneously in Notre Dame de Paris and, more modestly, on the font of St Patrick’s in Trim, county Meath.148 Propaganda was not, however, a sauce ge´ne´rale to be ladled over subject territories to mask offensive provincial flavours. Empires must cater to local palates. A case in point is the playing of the national card. When Michael de la Pole, chancellor of England, declared at the opening of parliament in November 1384 that England was ‘entirely surrounded . . . by deadly enemies all in league with one another’, he enumerated the threats as follows: ‘the French who abound greatly in number, the Spanish who abound greatly in galleys, the Flemish who [abound] with their many great ships, and the Scots who can readily enter the king- dom of England on foot’.149 Thus the English crown was quite

146 Antonia Gransden, ‘Propaganda in English Medieval Historiography’, Jl Medieval Hist., i (1975), esp. 373–4; Antonia Gransden, ‘The Uses Made of His- tory by the Kings of Medieval England’, in Culture et ide´ologie dans la gene`se de l’e´tat moderne (Rome, 1985), esp. 468–9; P. S. Lewis, ‘War, Propaganda and Historiog- raphy in Fifteenth-Century France and England’, Trans. Roy. Hist. Soc., 5th ser., xv (1965). 147 For discussion of the compound style employed during the dual monarchy (i.e. rex Anglie et Francie for ‘domestic’ affairs, and rex Francie et Anglie for correspondence with continental rulers), see Chaplais, English Medieval Diplomatic Practice, Part I,i, 154–5; Ormrod, ‘Problem of Precedence’, 151; and see also n. 38 above. For visual propaganda, see J. W. McKenna, ‘Henry VI of England and the Dual Monarchy: Aspects of Royal Political Propaganda, 1422–1432’, Jl Warburg and Courtauld Insts., xxviii (1965). For the seals of Henry V and Henry VI, see also Brigitte Bedos-Rezak, ‘Ide´ologie royale, ambitions princie`res et rivalite´s politiques d’apre`slete´moignage des sceaux (France, 1380–1461)’, in La ‘France anglaise’ au Moyen Aˆge, esp. 493. 148 B. J. H. Rowe, ‘King Henry VI’s Claim to France in Picture and Poem’, Library, 4th ser., xiii (1932), 82; Michael Potterton, Medieval Trim: History and Archaeology (Dublin, 2005), 409. For ‘Lancastrian’ Paris, see Guy Llewelyn Thompson, Paris and its People under English Rule: The Anglo-Burgundian Regime, 1420–1436 (Oxford, 1991). 149 ‘Richard II: Parliament of November 1384’, ed. Chris Given-Wilson, PROME, item 2. The same vulnerability motif can be found in the chancellor’s speech at the opening of parliament in October 1383, which refers to the ‘mortal enemies [threat- ening] this small kingdom of England’: ‘Richard II: Parliament of October 1383’, ed. Given-Wilson, PROME, item 4. 30 of 40 PAST AND PRESENT capable of whipping up national fervour in its own interests; but the drum had to find a different beat (after 1422, a specifically Valois one) to attract a following in ‘English France’.150 In de- ploying an accumulation of legitimizing myths, the crown often seemed to be at odds with itself. But confusion of argument was in fact a sign of sophistication — a strategy dubbed ‘‘‘multivocal’’ or ‘‘polyvalent’’ signaling’ in the jargon of political science.151 Even within the stronghold of Normandy, Henry V was deliberately coy as to the basis for his title to the duchy.152 Likewise, when Henry IV demanded the homage of Robert III, king of Scots, during his formidable but ineffective campaign in Scotland in 1400, he justified his claims on the basis of the traditional his- torical precedents for English overlordship, supplemented by an appeal to the Scottish nobility that he himself was ‘half a Scot’.153 Such propaganda could prove counterproductive in that it encouraged the composition of a hostile polemical litera- ture more strident than anything sponsored by the English mon- archy in the period.154 Indeed, Anglophobia more generally served as the basis for a fragile collective consciousness among England’s enemies. Fragile is perhaps the operative word: co-ordinated ‘inter-peripheral’ action was easily undermined by national and regional chauvinism. So much is clear from the Welsh bard’s satire on the ‘filthy rump-eating Irishman’,155 or

150 See Jean-Philippe Genet, ‘Le Roi de France anglais et la nation franc¸aise au XVe sie`cle’, in Rainer Babel and Jean-Marie Moeglin (eds.), Identite´ re´gionale et conscience nationale en France et en Allemagne du Moyen Aˆge a` l’e´poque moderne (Sigmaringen, 1997), esp. 52–3. 151 Daniel H. Nexon and Thomas Wright, ‘What’s at Stake in the American Empire Debate’, Amer. Polit. Science Rev., ci (2007), 254 (quotation), 264. 152 Allmand, Lancastrian Normandy, 122–6; Curry, ‘Lancastrian Normandy: The Jewel in the Crown?’, esp. 241–9. W. M. Ormrod indicates that the same was true of Edward III: see his ‘England, Normandy and the Beginnings of the Hundred Years War, 1259–1360’, in Bates and Curry (eds.), England and Normandy, 203 n. 37. 153 Stephen I. Boardman, The Early Stewart Kings: Robert II and Robert III, 1371– 1406 (East Linton, 1996), 230–1; see also Stones, ‘Appeal to History in Anglo- Scottish Relations between 1291 and 1401: Part II’, 80–3. 154 For such texts produced in France and Scotland, see Craig Taylor, ‘War, Propaganda and Diplomacy in Fifteenth-Century France and England’, in Christopher Allmand (ed.), War, Government and Power in Late Medieval France (Liverpool, 2000); Steve Boardman, ‘Late Medieval Scotland and the Matter of Britain’, in Edward J. Cowan and Richard J. Finlay (eds.), Scottish History: The Power of the Past (Edinburgh, 2002). On the relative scarcity of officially spon- sored English polemics, see Ormrod, ‘Domestic Response to the Hundred Years War’, 97. 155 Iolo Goch: Poems, ed. Johnston, no. 37. STATE OF THE UNION 31 of 40 the contemptuous French view of the Scots as ‘mutton guz- zlers’.156 But there are also movements in the contrary direc- tion:157 the ‘auld alliance’ between Scotland and France was a fickle arrangement to be sure, but it was one sustained not only by mutual self-interest but a common fund of Anglophobic imagery, such as the famous Anglicus caudatus — the tailed Englishman.158 If England’s attempts to assert ideological hegemony over its ‘enemies’ were negligible in their results, it may be because much of the propaganda was intended primarily for the audience within. To borrow the terminology of James Scott, the ‘public transcript’ of domination may have operated ‘as a kind of self-hypnosis within ruling groups to buck up their courage, im- prove their cohesion, display their power, and convince them- selves anew of their high moral purpose’.159 This conclusion certainly fits the ostentatious display of the twin coronations of Henry VI at Westminster (1429) and Paris (1431), which came at a point when the English position in France needed ideological buttressing to counter the coronation of Charles VII at Reims (17 July 1429).160 As to ‘high moral purpose’, this is nowhere better illustrated than in what John McKenna memorably characterized as ‘that curious development by which the formidable and some- what vicious Englishmen of the fourteenth century began to em- phasize their special devotion to peace in the very midst of an

156 Brian G. H. Ditcham, ‘‘‘Mutton Guzzlers and Wine Bags’’: Foreign Soldiers and Native Reactions in Fifteenth-Century France’, in Christopher Allmand (ed.), Power, Culture and Religion in France, c.1350–c.1550 (Woodbridge, 1989). The pre- vailing continental (and often contemptuous) view of the Scots may be sampled in Philippe Contamine, ‘Froissart and Scotland’, in Grant G. Simpson (ed.), Scotland and the Low Countries, 1124–1994 (East Linton, 1996). 157 Philippe Contamine, ‘Scottish Soldiers in France in the Second Half of the Fifteenth Century: Mercenaries, Immigrants or Frenchmen in the Making?’, in Grant G. Simpson (ed.), The Scottish Soldier Abroad, 1247–1967 (Edinburgh, 1991). 158 P. Rickard, ‘Anglois Coue´ and L’Anglois qui Couve’, French Studies, vii (1953); B. D. H. Miller, ‘Anglois Coue´: Further Evidence’, French Studies, xviii (1964). For the Scottish version of the myth, see Ditchburn, Scotland and Europe, i, 276. Franco-Welsh interaction is best illustrated by the career of ‘Owen of Wales’ (d. 1378), for whom, see A. D. Carr, Owen of Wales: The End of the House of Gwynedd (Cardiff, 1991). 159 James C. Scott, Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts (New Haven and London, 1990), 67. Note also his comment that ‘the self-dramatisation of domination may actually exert more rhetorical force among the leading actors them- selves than among the far more numerous bit-players’ (p. 69). 160 Genet, ‘Le Roi de France anglais et la nation franc¸aise au XVe sie`cle’, esp. 48–53. 32 of 40 PAST AND PRESENT aggressive expansion on the Continent’.161 One factor that oper- ated to make internal propaganda necessary was the considerable domestic opposition to war. If there was an ‘empire of English letters’ in late medieval England’s cultural sphere,162 it was opposed by a counterculture of resistance to war and foreign ex- ploits.163 Opposition on a material level was commonplace, as was the opinion that the war was too costly in terms of loss of life.164 But a more radical vein of criticism emerged in the late fourteenth century, associated particularly with the Lollards, that inveighed against any shedding of Christian blood.165 That the contemporary reportage should have been sensitive to the horrors of war is a point of some moment, for it is a conces- sion to the plight of the non-combatant that is absent from much of modern scholarship, on Ireland in particular.166 Studies of England’s continental campaigns increasingly emphasize, how- ever, that scorched earth and other atrocities were not incidental to the conduct of war, but were routinized and strategic.167

161 John W.McKenna, ‘How God Became an Englishman’, in DeLloyd J. Guth and John W. McKenna (eds.), Tudor Rule and Revolution: Essays for G. R. Elton from his American Friends (Cambridge, 1982), 30. For the trope of ‘peace’ as employed by English royal propagandists, see Genet, ‘La Normandie vue par les historiens et les politiques anglais’, esp. 284–5; Nicolas Offenstadt, Faire la paix au Moyen Aˆge: discours et gestes de paix pendant la Guerre de Cent Ans (Paris, 2007), esp. 95–8. 162 The phrase occurs in Sylvia Federico, New Troy: Fantasies of Empire in the Late Middle Ages (Minneapolis, 2003), 131. 163 John Barnie, War in Medieval English Society: Social Values in the Hundred Years War, 1337–99 (Ithaca, 1974), ch. 5. Cf. the literature of the early modern period, which was often hostile to empire-building: David Armitage, ‘Literature and Empire’, in Nicholas Canny (ed.), The Oxford History of the British Empire,i,The Origins of Empire (Oxford, 1998). 164 See, for example, Chronicle of Adam Usk, ed. Given-Wilson, 271. 165 Barnie, Warin Medieval English Society, 122–5; Nigel Saul, ‘A Farewell to Arms? Criticism of Warfare in Late Fourteenth-Century England’, in Chris Given-Wilson (ed.), Fourteenth Century England II (Woodbridge, 2002), esp. 142–3. 166 Although the balance has been redressed of late by students of the early modern period in Ireland: David Edwards, Pa´draig Lenihan and Clodagh Tait (eds.), Age of Atrocity: Violence and Political Conflict in Early Modern Ireland (Dublin, 2007). For a diachronic study of empires that places at the centre of its analysis the experience of the oppressed, see Timothy H. Parsons, The Rule of Empires: Those Who Built Them, Those Who Endured Them, and Why They Always Fall (Oxford, 2010). Note, also, the ad- monition of Nicholas B. Dirks: ‘When imperial history loses any sense of what empire meant to those who were colonized, it becomes complicit in the history of empire itself’. See his The Scandal of Empire: India and the Creation of Imperial Britain (Cambridge, Mass., 2006), 332. 167 Clifford J. Rogers, ‘By Fire and Sword: Bellum Hostile and ‘‘Civilians’’ in the Hundred Years’ War’, in Mark Grimsley and Clifford J. Rogers (eds.), Civilians in the Path of War (Lincoln, Nebr., 2002). STATE OF THE UNION 33 of 40 For those unprotected by chivalric courtesies (the mass of the population), the suffering inflicted by England’s French cam- paigns was bitter.168 Even in Lancastrian Normandy, where Bedford’s effort to gain legitimacy for the English occupation depended on ‘winning hearts and minds’, grand notions were brushed aside when the occupation came under pressure. In 1435, Sir John Fastolf advocated ‘a more sharpe and more crulle werre’ that would involve the ‘brennyng and distruynge alle the lande as thei pas, bothe hous, corne, veignes, and all treis that beren fruyte for mannys sustenaunce, and all bestaile that may not be dryven, to be distroide’.169 Ireland too witnessed its share of such tactics. A case in point is Richard II, whose Irish ‘policy’ in the 1390s has been hailed as an ‘imaginative new framework for relations between the crown and the native Irish’ and an ‘unprecedented opportunity to establish peace’ in Ireland.170 Novel and imaginative Richard may have been; but his was no bloodless conquest. The elaborate submissions that Richard received from the lords of Gaelic Ireland were, as Froissart records, predicated on the application of overwhelming military force.171 Richard’s initial campaign was focused on Leinster, whose Gaelic king, Art Mo´r Mac Murchadha, was to become Richard’s beˆte noire. The province was heavily garrisoned and Richard’s forces harried the native non-combatant popula- tion. As one letter reports, the English captains ‘nobly made it their utmost endeavour to harass the above-said enemies . . . The Earl M[arshal] . . . had many fine encounters with them, in one of which he slew many of the people of the said MacMurrough

168 See Richard W. Kaeuper, Chivalry and Violence in Medieval Europe (Oxford, 1999), esp. 176–85; C. T. Allmand, ‘The War and the Non-Combatant’, in Kenneth Fowler (ed.), The Hundred Years War (London, 1971). 169 Letters and Papers Illustrative of the Warsof the English in France during the Reign of Henry the Sixth, King of England, ed. Joseph Stevenson, 2 vols. (Rolls ser., xxii, London, 1861–4), ii, pt 2, p. 580. For comment, see M. G. A. Vale, ‘Sir John Fastolf’s ‘‘Report’’ of 1435: A New Interpretation Reconsidered’, Nottingham Medieval Studies, xvii (1973). For such tactics as ‘an intentional element in Edward [III]’s military policy’, see Clifford J. Rogers, ‘Edward III and the Dialectics of Strategy’, in Rogers (ed.), Wars of Edward III, esp. 272 and nn. 32–4. 170 The quotations are taken respectively from Nigel Saul, Richard II (New Haven and London, 1997), 290; Dorothy Johnston, ‘Richard II’, in Sea´n Duffy (ed.), Medieval Ireland: An Encyclopedia (New York, 2005), 411. 171 Froissart’s Chronicles, ed. John Jolliffe (London, 1967), 369. 34 of 40 PAST AND PRESENT and burned . . . nine villages, and preyed cattle up to the number of 8,000’.172 The promiscuous waging of war by ‘fire, sword and famine’173 against England’s many enemies invites us to contemplate whether the ‘codes of conduct’ governing English use of violence varied discernibly between the Celtic peripheries and France.174 A difference of attitude is certainly detectable at an elite level. The six leaders of the Mic Mhurchadha dynasty of Leinster who were executed by English chief governors or allowed to die in captivity in the later fourteenth century175 seem to have been dispatched with fewer qualms than, say, Henry V’s unfortunate prisoners at Agincourt.176 An explanation for this might be sought in the in- creasingly formal relationship worked out between Gaelic lord- ships and the English crown in this period, which entitled the crown to treat belligerent Gaelic chiefs as rebels, not enemy com- batants.177 But it would be misleading to generalize from this about the extent of violence in Ireland. Warfare on the Irish fron- tier was normally a low-key affair of cattle raids and feuds.178 It may well be that, as on the Anglo-Scottish border,179 the habitual absence of English armies on the scale of those that crossed to fight in France meant that the level of devastation was compara- tively slight. Moreover, English strategies for dealing with natives

172 ‘Unpublished Letters from Richard II in Ireland, 1394–5’, ed. Curtis, 286, 293. 173 The phrase occurs in Chronicle of Adam Usk, ed. Given-Wilson, 144–5. 174 Cf. Michea´lO´ Siochru´, ‘Atrocity, Codes of Conduct and the Irish in the British Civil Wars, 1641–1653’, Past and Present, no. 195 (May 2007). 175 Robin Frame, ‘Two Kings in Leinster: The Crown and the MicMhurchadha in the Fourteenth Century’, in Terry Barry, Robin Frame and Katharine Simms (eds.), Colony and Frontier in Medieval Ireland: Essays Presented to J. F.Lydon (London, 1995), 166. 176 Gesta Henrici Quinti, ed. and trans. Taylor and Roskell, 90–3. 177 ‘The fuller the recognition of Irish lords by the crown, the greater the risk of extreme penalties should they be seen as defaulting on their duties’: Frame, ‘Two Kings in Leinster’, 168. Cf. the treatment of Scottish ‘rebels’ in the latter stages of Edward I’s attempted subjugation of Scotland: Michael Prestwich, ‘England and Scotland during the Wars of Independence’, in Michael Jones and Malcolm Vale (eds.), England and her Neighbours, 1066–1453: Essays in Honour of Pierre Chaplais (London, 1989), esp. 192–4, 196–7. 178 Robin Frame, ‘The Defence of the English Lordship, 1250–1450’, in Thomas Bartlett and Keith Jeffery (eds.), A Military History of Ireland (Cambridge, 1996). 179 A. King, ‘‘‘According to the Custom Used in French and Scottish Wars’’: Prisoners and Casualties on the Scottish Marches in the Fourteenth Century’, Jl Medieval Hist., xxviii (2002), esp. 287. STATE OF THE UNION 35 of 40 in Ireland were diverse.180 Hostage-taking was often a more cer- tain means of control than summary execution, even if the ran- soms were minute by comparison with the stupendous sums exchanged in the French war.181 When Niall Garbh II O´ Domhnaill, king of Tı´r Conaill (modern Donegal), died in cap- tivity on Man in 1439 after much temporizing by the English government, the lament composed for him is almost unseemly in its jubilation that his ransom went unpaid:

The money promised for him — what a calamity — was a drain on the wealth of the Ulaidh . . . Sorry are ye . . . that he died unransomed; your grief, O Foreigners, greatly lessens mine!182 Tı´r Conaill lay on the penumbra of English power in Ireland. The lament shows how far ‘informal’ English influence could pene- trate as late as the mid fifteenth century. It also suggests that, for the king’s ministers in Ireland, the attraction of Gaelic hostages was not dissimilar to that of the crown’s continental prisoners of war: their value was strategic rather than pecuniary, to be assessed by the ‘political and personal leverage’ that accrued to the royal government.183 If coercion underpinned English imperialist ambitions in this period, it remained only one means of advancing domination — and not necessarily the most effective one.184 ‘The most suc- cessful ideological effects’, Pierre Bourdieu has written, ‘are the ones that have no need of words, but only of . . . complicitous

180 Robin Frame, ‘English Officials and Irish Chiefs in the Fourteenth Century’, in his Ireland and Britain. 181 Michael K. Jones, ‘Ransom Brokerage in the Fifteenth Century’, in Contamine, Giry-Deloison and Keen (eds.), Guerre et socie´te´ en France, en Angleterre et en Bourgogne. 182 Aithdioghluim Da´na: A Miscellany of Irish Bardic Poetry, ed. and trans. Lambert McKenna, no. 23, verses 23–4, quoted in Katharine Simms, ‘Niall Garbh II O Donnell, king of Tı´r Conaill, 1422–39’, Donegal Annual, xii (1977), 19. 183 Chris Given-Wilson and Franc¸oise Be´riac, ‘Edward III’s Prisoners of War: The and its Context’, Eng. Hist. Rev., cxvi (2001), 830. It was precisely the loss of such leverage that made Sir John Stanley (d. 1414) the object of fierce criticism when, as chief governor of Ireland (1389–91), he released from captivity Niall O´ c O´ Ne´ill, heir to the most powerful Gaelic lordship in Ulster: Cal. Pat. Rolls, 1389–92, 404; Documents on the Affairs of Ireland, ed. Sayles, no. 277. 184 This is a principal theme of Davies, Domination and Conquest, esp. ch. 1. For a similar conclusion regarding the conquest of North America, see Francis Jennings, The Invasion of America: Indians, Colonialism, and the Cant of Conquest (Chapel Hill, 1975), 105: ‘Europeans used a great variety of means to attain mastery, of which armed combat was only one’. 36 of 40 PAST AND PRESENT silence’.185 This is a matter on which there is evidence of contem- porary concern. The harangue of a Scottish cleric in the 1360s that his people were threatened with ‘destruction, eradication and total extermination’ was prompted not by fears of a Final Solution to England’s Scottish problem, but rather by the (abortive) negotiations then under way for the transferral of the Scottish succession to one of Edward III’s sons.186 A similar process is detectable in Richard II’s ‘magnanimous’ vision (also ultimately abortive) articulated during his Irish expedition of 1394–5 of an Ireland in which indigenous and settler populations alike would be his liege subjects. Whether or not the Gaelic chiefs were sincere in their submissions is, in a sense, beside the point.187 The policy of opening up the fountainhead of royal justice to the Gaelic Irish was itself integral to the process of extending English domination, much as were the later ‘reforming’ policies of the Tudors or the ‘legal imperialism’ advocated by Sir John Davies in the early seventeenth century.188 It was, moreover, a decidedly paternalis- tic policy, predicated upon the adoption of English customs, ap- parel and the mores of English political life. It is in this light that we should interpret the celebrated story recounted by Froissart’s informant on matters Irish, ‘Henry Chrystede’, who claimed to have tutored the Gaelic chiefs in civility.189 As an ‘object lesson in colonial pedagogy’,190 Chrystede’s tutorials could hardly be

185 Pierre Bourdieu, The Logic of Practice, trans. Richard Nice (Cambridge, 1990), 133. 186 ‘deletionem, euulsionem et exterminium totale populi istius’: see ‘A Question about the Succession, 1364’, ed. A. A. M. Duncan, in Miscellany of the Scottish History Society, xii (Scot. Hist. Soc., 5th ser., vii, Edinburgh, 1994), x50 (quotation at pp. 52–3). The document is placed in a wider context by Len Scales, ‘Bread, Cheese and Genocide: Imagining the Destruction of Peoples in Medieval Western Europe’, History, xcii (2007), esp. 290. 187 Cf. Dorothy Johnston, ‘Richard II and the Submissions of Gaelic Ireland’, Irish Hist. Studies, xxii (1980), where emphasis is placed on the voluntary nature of the submissions to Richard II, which (the author argues) provided the native chiefs with an opportunity to have their grievances redressed by the king, who was obliged to protect them against the encroachment of members of the English colony. Her interpretation has proved influential and is followed in Saul, Richard II, 282. 188 Nicholas Canny, ‘Introduction: Spenser and Reform in Ireland’, in Patricia Coughlan (ed.), Spenser and Ireland: An Interdisciplinary Perspective (Cork, 1989); Hans S. Pawlisch, Sir John Davies and the Conquest of Ireland: A Study in Legal Imperialism (Cambridge, 1985). 189 Froissart’s Chronicles, ed. Jolliffe, 366–8. 190 Cf. Parna Sengupta, ‘An Object Lesson in Colonial Pedagogy’, Comparative Studies in Society and History, xlv (2003). For discussion of the episode, see Claire (cont. on p. 37) STATE OF THE UNION 37 of 40 bettered. Froissart’s tale may be apocryphal,191 but Richard did indeed confer knighthood on some prominent Gaelic lords, not- ably Niall O´ c O´ Ne´ill192 and Turlough O´ Conchobhair Donn: the latter had gilded spurs placed upon his heels while on board the king’s ship docked at Waterford awaiting Richard’s return to England in May 1395.193 The strategy underlying this grand spectacle was familiar to the king’s Plantagenet forebears. ‘Knighthood’, Rees Davies has written, ‘was one route to social assimilation and subjection’.194 But it is another Welshman who describes the consequences of assimilation best. In a splenetic letter of 1401, Owain Glyn Dwˆ r informed Charles VI of France that ‘my nation, for many years now elapsed, has been oppressed by the fury of the barbarous Saxons; whence because they had the government [regimen] over us, and indeed, on account of that fact itself, it seemed reasonable with them to trample upon us’.195 It is the strengthening clause (‘on account of that fact itself’) that commands attention. Toooften, scholars overplay the distinction between ‘state-sponsored imperialism, which promoted military conquest, plantation, and active colonization’ on the one hand, and ‘reforming assimilationist policies’ on the other.196 These were two edges of the same sword.197

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(n. 190 cont.) Sponsler, ‘The Captivity of Henry Chrystede: Froissart’s Chroniques, Ireland, and Fourteenth-Century Nationalism’, in Kathy Lavezzo (ed.), Imagining a Medieval English Nation (Minneapolis, 2004). 191 Johnston, ‘Richard II and the Submissions of Gaelic Ireland’, 2 n. 6. 192 Edmund Curtis, Richard II in Ireland, 1394–5, and Submissions of the Irish Chiefs (Oxford, 1927), letter no. 13, from Niall O´ c O´ Ne´ill, who describes himself as ‘Vester humillimus N. O’Neyll de vestra creacione miles’ (at p. 136, trans. 214). 193 Curtis, Richard II in Ireland, notarial instrument XXIII (at p. 100, trans. 187). 194 Davies, Domination and Conquest, 51. Cf. the comment of Tacitus that the Britons thought themselves civilized by bathing and banqueting like Romans when in reality ‘it was a part of their enslavement’: Tacitus, Agricola and Germany, trans. Anthony R. Birley (Oxford, 1999), 17 (Agricola, XXI). 195 Welsh Records in Paris, ed. T. Matthews (, 1910), 83 ( text at p. 40). 196 The distinction appears, for instance, in Jane H. Ohlmeyer, ‘A Laboratory for Empire? Early Modern Ireland and English Imperialism’, in Kenny (ed.), Ireland and the British Empire, quotations at p. 28. 197 For incisive comments to this effect on the interpretation of ‘reform’ govern- ment in early modern Ireland, see Willy Maley, ‘Apology for Sidney: Making a Virtue of a Viceroy’, Sydney Jl, xx (2002). 38 of 40 PAST AND PRESENT ‘The tyranny, cruelty and usurpation of the English are notorious to all the world as manifestly appears in their usurpation against France, Scotland, Wales, Ireland and neighbouring lands’:198 so charged the Benedictines of Dunfermline, not without some spe- cial pleading, in 1442.199 They were also leaning against a rhet- orical rotten door, for within a decade the Lancastrian occupation of Normandy had collapsed and Sir John Talbot was on the point of making his last stand in Gascony.200 Nonetheless, the argu- ment from notoriety,201 coming at so late a date and unfettered by scholarly decorum, usefully reinforces two points at the core of the present essay. The first is programmatic: like the monks of Dunfermline, we should seek to consider jointly the totality of England’s enterprises, whether continental or archipelagic. And in doing so in an exploratory fashion, this essay has suggested that in matters of empire, as in other fields, the late Middle Ages was not a period of retrogression; rather, it was possessed of its own imperialist dynamic. That is the second point. To return to the maritime metaphors of Rees Davies, England’s empire in the late Middle Ages may have been in retreat from its high-water mark (at least within Britain and Ireland), but neither in pretension nor in actuality had it all ebbed away. From these two conclusions springs a third of wider signifi- cance concerning the ‘afterlife’ of this medieval empire.202 By tracing England’s imperial lineage to the mid fifteenth century, we are brought to within a generation of the Cabot voyages, themselves the prelude to Seeley’s ‘expansion of England’.203

198 The Correspondence, Inventories, Account Rolls and Law Proceedings of the Priory of Coldingham, ed. J. Raine (Surtees Soc., xii, London, 1841), 247. 199 The context for the remark is a long-running dispute over the priory of Coldingham, for which, see, inter alia, R. B. Dobson, ‘The Last English Monks on Scottish Soil’, Scot. Hist. Rev., xlvi (1967). See also Walter Bower’s account of the Coldingham affair in his Scotichronicon, vi, Books XI and XII, ed. D. E. R. Watt (Aberdeen, 1991), 61–73. 200 M. G. A. Vale, ‘The Last Years of English Gascony, 1451–1453’, Trans. Roy. Hist. Soc., 5th ser., xix (1969). 201 Their invective was scarcely unique: see Catherine Reynolds, ‘‘‘Les Angloys, de leur droicte nature, veullent touzjours guerreer’’: Evidence for Painting in Paris and Normandy, c.1420–c.1450’, in Allmand (ed.), Power, Culture and Religion in France. For an earlier Scottish view of English treatment of the Welsh and Irish, see ‘Question about the Succession, 1364’, ed. Duncan, x27 (pp. 38–9). 202 Cf. Susan E. Alcock, ‘The Afterlife of Empires’, in Susan E. Alcock et al. (eds.), Empires (Cambridge, 2001), 369. 203 J. R. Seeley, The Expansion of England (1883), ed. John Gross (Chicago, 1971). STATE OF THE UNION 39 of 40 Consequently, it becomes possible to trace plausible continuities between England’s medieval and early modern phases of empire-building, which have otherwise seemed ‘tenuous and ana- logical’.204 English imperialism in the sixteenth century found much ideological nourishment, including its potent conviction in providence,205 in the glories of a recent past. The legend of ‘Arthur as ’ persisted and was invested with new global significance,206 while the charisma of Edward III and Henry V inspired the Tudors, most obviously in that dynasty’s quixotic tilting at the French crown.207 With the late sixteenth century came the turn of Ireland. Here again the late Middle Ages proved to be more than an ‘imperial hangover’ from which crapu- lent Elizabethans awoke refreshed only to indulge in a trans- oceanic binge.208 Both at the level of theory and of practice, England’s long Irish experience proved formative. The men who experimented in this ‘laboratory’ of the early modern empire209 were versed in the foundational ethnographic texts of Gerald of Wales,210 and sought to learn from the trial and error of Ireland in the late Middle Ages.211 Their conclusions were

204 Armitage, Ideological Origins of the British Empire,7. 205 McKenna, ‘How God Became an Englishman’, esp. 38–43. 206 John Withrington, ‘King Arthur as Emperor’, Notes and Queries, xxxv (1988); Stewart Mottram, ‘‘‘An Empire of Itself’’: Arthur as an Icon of an English Empire, 1509–1547’, in Elizabeth Archibald and David F. Johnson (eds.), Arthurian Literature XXV (Woodbridge, 2008). 207 D. A. L. Morgan, ‘The Political After-Life of Edward III: Apotheosis of a Warmonger’, Eng. Hist. Rev., cxii (1997), esp. 874–5; Clifford S. L. Davies, ‘‘‘Roy de France et roy d’Angleterre’’: The English Claims to France, 1453–1558’, in Jean-Marie Cauchies (ed.), L’Angleterre et les pays bourguignons: relations et comparaisons (XV e–XVI e s.) (Publication du Centre Europe´en d’E´ tudes Bourguignonnes, xxxv, Neuchaˆtel, 1995); Clifford S. L. Davies, ‘Henry VIII and Henry V: The Wars in France’, in John L. Watts (ed.), The End of the Middle Ages: England in the Fifteenth and Sixteenth Centuries (Stroud, 1998). 208 Cf. Kenny (ed.), Ireland and the British Empire, 6 (editor’s intro.), where he argues: ‘Asserting an unbroken continuity between the Norman colonization of Ireland and Britain’s early modern Atlantic adventures is . . . implausible’. 209 As decribed in Ohlmeyer, ‘Laboratory for Empire?’ 210 Hiram Morgan, ‘Giraldus Cambrensis and the Tudor Conquest of Ireland’, in Hiram Morgan (ed.), Political Ideology in Ireland, 1541–1641 (Dublin, 1999); Willy Maley, Nation, State and Empire in Literature: Shakespeare to Milton (Basingstoke, 2003), esp. ch. 3. 211 A prime example being Sir John Davies in his A Discoverie of the True Causes Why Ireland Was Never Entirely Subdued, nor Brought under Obedience of the Crowne of England, untill the Beginning of his Maiesties Happie Raigne (London, 1612, STC 6348). 40 of 40 PAST AND PRESENT appalling in their consequences. Not the least of the ironies pre- sented by contemporary disquisitions on the virtues of an enlight- ened empire is the familiarity of the argument.212

Trinity College, Dublin Peter Crooks

212 The most influential academic spokesman for the enterprise is Niall Ferguson. The titles under which his books were published in America are revealing of their didactic purpose: Niall Ferguson, Empire: The Rise and Demise of the British World Order and the Lessons for Global Power (New York, 2003); Niall Ferguson, Colossus: The Price of America’s Empire (New York, 2004), esp. ch. 5, ‘The Case for Liberal Empire’. For criticism, see Michael Mann, ‘Delusions of Empire: Recent Neo- Conservative and Neo-Liberal Writings on American Foreign Policy’, Socio-Econ. Rev., ii (2004); Cooper, ‘Empire Multiplied’, 248–9, 254–62.