STATE OF THE UNION: PERSPECTIVES ON ENGLISH IMPERIALISM IN THE LATE MIDDLE AGES* ‘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 empire.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, Dublin, 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 (Cambridge, 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 Commonwealth 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: Feudalism 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,Oxford,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 England 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 Ford lectures trace the irruption of the English state across Britain and Ireland 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 empires: 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 British Isles, 1093– 1343 (Oxford, 2000); see also R. R. Davies, Domination and Conquest: The Experience of Ireland, Scotland and Wales, 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 British empire 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 France 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 Normandy. 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-Normans’ 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 Bordeaux 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.