Against All England

AGainST All England Regional Identity and Cheshire Writing, 1195–1656 ROBerT W. BarreTT, JR. University of Notre Dame Press Notre Dame, Indiana © 2009 University of Notre Dame Press Copyright © 2009 by University of Notre Dame Notre Dame, Indiana 46556 www.undpress.nd.edu All Rights Reserved Manufactured in the United States of America Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Barrett, Robert W., 1969– Against all England : regional identity and Cheshire writing, 1195–1656 / Robert W. Barrett, Jr. p. cm. — (ReFormations: medieval and early modern) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN-13: 978-0-268-02209-9 (pbk. : alk. paper) ISBN-10: 0-268-02209-7 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. English literature —England—Cheshire—History and criticism. 2. Literature and society—England—Cheshire. 3. Cheshire (England)—In literature. 4. Cheshire (England)—Intellectual life. I. Title. PR8309.C47B37 2009 820.9'94271—dc22 2008035611 This book is printed on recycled paper. © 2009 University of Notre Dame Press Introduction For centuries, the county of Cheshire was the northern bulwark of the Welsh Marches, one of England’s key border zones. As such, it offers an ideal opportunity for a revisionary critique of pre- and early modern English national identity from the vantage point of an explicitly regional literature. The provincial texts under review in this book— pageants, poems, and prose works created in Cheshire and its vicinity from the 1190s to the 1650s—work together to complicate persistent academic binaries of metropole and margin, center and periphery, and nation and region. In addition to the blurring of established spatial categories, the close study of early Cheshire writing and performance also serves to reconfigure England’s literary and social histories as pro- cesses of temporally uneven accretion. The vantage point of Cheshire demonstrates that the regions of the nation do not move in lockstep from one historical period to the next. Indeed, by covering nearly five centuries of literary production within a single geographical location, I challenge still dominant chronologies of literary history that empha- size cultural rupture and view the Renaissance as a sharp break from England’s medieval past. My longue durée historicist account of Cheshire writing reveals instead the strategies whereby local writers, texts, and performances maintain regional continuity in response to the administrative pressures of academic and political centers.1 In the following chapters, regional space/time emerges as a viable alternative to the national space/time that still defines both countries and canons. Premodern Cheshire’s suitability for my project derives from the county’s awareness of itself as a community separate from its English and Welsh neighbors. This sense of regional distinction is already fully developed in the oldest extant piece of Cheshire writing, the ca. 1195 Liber de Luciani laude Cestrie (“The Book of Lucian in Praise of Chester”).2 Lucian’s book is a description of the county town of Chester produced 1 © 2009 University of Notre Dame Press 2 Introduction by one of the monks resident in the city’s Benedictine Abbey of St. Wer- burgh’s. In a section of the text glossed De moribus provincialium (“On the character of the provincials,” p. 65), Lucian launches into a glowing account of his fellow Cestrians. Most of the regional virtues he lists are nondescript ones, common in any encomiastic discourse. But a few quali- ties stand out as specifically Cestrian: Si quis autem petit, vel in pleno, vel in proximo, secundum habitationem morum provinciales tangere, instar reliquorum viventium pro locis terrarum, ceteris Anglis in parte dissimiles, in parte meliores, in parte inveniuntur equales . Britonibus ex uno latere confines, et per longam transfusionem morum, maxima parte consimiles. (p. 65) (If anyone wants to compare, either fully or as closely as possible, the character of the provincials in relation to that of those liv- ing elsewhere, he will find them partly different from the other English, partly better, and partly equal . confined on one side by the Britons and, through a long transfusion of morals, mostly similar to them.) The Cestrians are a hybrid population, neither truly English nor truly Welsh.3 Their preconquest Mercian origins connect them with their east- ern neighbors, but their daily traffic (marital, mercantile, and military) with their western neighbors pulls them in the opposite direction. According to Lucian, the regional landscape bears primary respon- sibility for the Cestrians’ status as heterogeneous dissimiles. Their Anglo- Welsh tranfusio morum is possible due to the liquid nature of the River Dee, the county’s western boundary. The connection between ripar- ian topography and ethnic instability is not made explicit in De laude Cestrie: the section of the text devoted to the Dee (De amne diva, p. 46) concentrates on the river as a nexus of international trade between Chester, Aquitaine, Spain, Ireland, and Germany. But we do find a con- temporary version of it in Gerald of Wales’ Itinerarium Kambriae, the first version of which was completed ca. 1191. In book 2, chapter 11, Gerald reports that “Item, ut asserunt accolae, aqua ista singulis men- sibus vada permutat; et utri finium, Angliae scilicet an Kambriae, © 2009 University of Notre Dame Press Introduction 3 alveo relicto magis incuberit, gentem illam eo in anno succumbere, et alteram praevalere, certissimum prognosticum habent” (“The local inhabitants maintain that the Dee moves its fords every month and that, as it inclines more towards England or Wales in this change of channel, so they can prognosticate which nation will beat the other or be unsuccessful in war in any particular year”).4 The territory through which Gerald travels with Archbishop of Canterbury Baldwin in 1188 is a space marked by conflicting allegiances, generally secure within the English imperium but always open to Welsh incursions. It is also the zone in which Lucian’s hybrid Cestrians dwell: although De laude Cestrie is not indebted to the Itinerarium, Lucian’s transfusio does contain a hint of fluidity in its derivation from the Latin infinitive transfundere, “to pour out from one vessel into another.” Gerald’s Dee flows from one channel into another as time passes, marking the historically contingent bound- aries of national identities. Lucian and his neighbors exist in a similar state of flux, acquiring Welshness at the expense of their Englishness. Topography is not the only engine powering Cestrian exception- alism: the county culture also derives its patriotism from Cheshire’s unusual position within the premodern English polity. Post-Conquest Cheshire was a county palatine, an administrative region holding rights and privileges equivalent to those possessed elsewhere by the sovereign (in this case, the English Crown). This palatine designation is technically a back-formation: the first surviving reference to the earl of Chester as a comes palatinus comes in 1293, fifty-six years after the 1237 death of John the Scot, the last Anglo-Norman earl.5 How- ever, while the Cheshire governed by the Anglo-Norman earls from 1070–1237 may not have been a palatinate in name, it effectively was one in practice: [T]here appears to be abundant evidence that Cheshire stood apart, in the minds of contemporaries, from England. Although the importance of the county’s absence from the Pipe Rolls has been minimized, that absence reflects a considerable degree of independence. Thus there was no royal demesne in Cheshire. The chief administrative official, the justice of Chester, was neither appointed by the king nor responsible to him. The king derived no benefit from scutages or tallages levied in the county. Royal © 2009 University of Notre Dame Press 4 Introduction justices did not visit it; fines and amercements levied there did not reach the king.6 Stemming from the Anglo-Norman need for military flexibility in the Welsh Marches, these (and other) administrative distinctions did not immediately vanish with the earldom’s annexation by the Crown in 1237, nor did they disappear upon the 1301 creation of Edward, son and heir of Edward I, as the first in a line of royal earls of Chester.7 Many of them even survived the Henrician political reforms of the 1530s and 1540s, decades that otherwise saw Cheshire subjected to English justices of the peace (1536), national taxation (1540), and Parliamentary repre- sentation (1543).8 These palatine practices remained vital in large part because they were grounded in a pair of county-specific institutions: the county court (presided over by the justice) and the county exchequer (supervised by the chamberlain), both of which continued in one form or another until 1830—and thus into modernity.9 These two bodies had powers similar to those of their national parallels. For example, “Within the palatinate, the chamberlain occupied a position akin to that of the chancellor in the kingdom: he had custody of the Chester seal and was responsible for making out and sealing writs and charters.”10 Cheshire’s bureaucratic instantiations of autonomy were accom- panied by the emergence of an ideology of regional independence, an explicitly palatine discourse. As Geoffrey Barraclough has noted, “per- haps not the least important” outcome of the county’s 1237 royal annexation “was to stimulate in Cheshire both a sense of community and a sense of differentiation from the rest of England.”11 The socio political dynamic Barraclough identifies here is crucial to my argument: Cheshire becomes increasingly Cestrian even as centrally located English gov- ernments appropriate (or eliminate) its unique institutions. To a large degree, regional identity depends on the loss of regional power, grow- ing in strength as administrative autonomy diminishes. However, as Lucian’s comments on Cheshire’s problematic Englishness demonstrate above, Cestrian awareness of the county’s “sense of differentiation” also predates the earldom’s 1237 reversion.

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