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STATE OF THE UNION: PERSPECTIVESON ENGLISH IMPERIALISM IN THE

LATE MIDDLE AGES*

‘Imperialism’, Sir Keith Hancock famously scolded, ‘is no wordfor 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 turnin 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 historicalscholarship. Medievalists might be forgiven for suspecting, in themanner of Hancock, that ‘imperialism’ is one more master nounturned tyrant.5 I begin with two contrary assumptions. The first isthat disputation is its own defence. As two imperial luminaries

* Research for this essay was undertaken during my tenure as a Past and PresentSociety research fellow at the Institute of Historical Research, London (2006–7), andlatterly as part of the Irish Chancery Project, Trinity College, Dublin, funded by theIrish Research Council for the Humanities and Social Sciences. I am grateful to DavidDitchburn, Sean Duffy, Robin Frame and Alexander Grant for commenting on earlierversions.

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 nolonger to hand’.

3 As Stephen Howe noted, even before the most extreme manifestations of the newmilitary imperialism, ‘currently observable trends in the world of the early twenty-firstcentury give the history of Empire a renewed relevance’: Stephen Howe, ‘The SlowDeath 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, seeFrederick Cooper, ‘Empire Multiplied: A Review Essay’, Comparative Studies inSociety and History, xlvi (2004). Other relevant works are cited in the course of thisessay.

5 Cf. Elizabeth A. R. Brown, ‘The Tyranny of a Construct: Feudalism andHistorians of Medieval Europe’, Amer. Hist. Rev., lxxix (1974); Rees Davies, ‘TheMedieval State: The Tyranny of a Concept?’, Jl Hist. Sociology, xvi (2003); TimothyReuter, ‘Medieval: Another Tyrannous Construct?’, in his Medieval Polities andModern Mentalities, ed. Janet L. Nelson (Cambridge, 2006).

Past and Present (2011) � The Past and Present Society, Oxford, 2011

doi:10.1093/pastj/gtq054

http://past.oxfordjournals.org/

have put it: ‘Spacious subjects need to be opened up to new ideasrather than shut down by scholarly introversion’.6 The second isthat empire need not be irreducibly complex. I propose to use theterm simply to signify an extensive polity in which a core societyexercises formal or informal power over outlying regions gainedor maintained by coercion.7 This definition is blandness itself,but it allows us to categorize as an ‘empire’ the extensive politywith which this essay is concerned: late medieval England and itssubject territories. And with a move from polity to policy, it alsoopens up the question of the nature of English imperialism in thelate Middle Ages.

The enterprises of England’s medieval kings have, of course,been diagnosed as ‘imperialist’ before. In a series of interlockingessays, John Gillingham has argued that many symptoms asso-ciated with modern imperial projects — among them, a civilizingideology and notions of racial superiority — may be located as farback as the early twelfth century in the writings of William ofMalmesbury.8 It was the late Sir Rees Davies, however, who en-trenched the notion that England’s first empire was a medievalempire.9 Davies’s Ford lectures trace the irruption of theEnglish state across Britain and Ireland from the late eleventhcentury — 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’, inRaymond E. Dumett (ed.), Gentlemanly Capitalism and British Imperialism: The NewDebate on Empire (Harlow, 1999), 196.

7 This accords with the basic definitions offered in Michael Mann’s taxonomyof empires: see his ‘American Empires: Past and Present’, Canadian Rev. Sociologyand Anthropology, xlv (2008), esp. 8; and Susan Reynolds, ‘Empires: A Problemof Comparative History’, Hist. Research, lxxix (2006), esp. 158–9. In this essay‘empire’ is consequently to be distinguished from ‘the Empire’, which in medievalEurope denoted the Western and Byzantine Empires, twin descendants ofRome: Robert Folz, The Concept of Empire in Western Europe from the Fifth to theFourteenth Century, trans. Sheila Ann Ogilvie (London, 1969), esp. ch. 12. Itis also not to be confused with the meaning of imperium as employed, forexample, 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 ofIreland, Scotland and Wales, 1100–1300 (Cambridge, 1990).

2 of 40 PAST AND PRESENT


if not before.10 Davies draws his story to a close in 1343, by whichtime his first English empire is ‘overextended’ (an occupa-tional hazard, it seems, of empires generally) and its internalcontradictions 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 forgood’.12 David Armitage eloquently sums up the brief passed tohim 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 periodafter 1343. Its premise is that the political and cultural infrastruc-ture of the ‘first English empire’ was more durable than has beenallowed. The reorientation of English policy towards France from1337 did not mean that England’s insular possessions wereallowed to fall into dereliction. From the 1360s the Englishcrown engaged in a concerted effort to resuscitate its colony inIreland, 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 earlyfifteenth century witnessed a ‘classic example of an anti-colonialrebellion’,14 prompting some of the most draconian (albeitill-enforced) legislation to ring-fence the values of the metropolein the Middle Ages, and engendering a residual suspicion of theWelsh that lasted deep into the fifteenth century.15 And in 1417English enterprises in France took on a new aspect with the

10 Robert Bartlett, The Making of Europe: Conquest, Colonization and CulturalChange, 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, ‘TheFailure of the First British Empire? England’s Relations with Ireland, Scotland andWales, 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 Originsof the British Empire (Cambridge, 2000), 28.

14 R. R. Davies, ‘Colonial Wales’, Past and Present, no. 65 (Nov. 1974), 23; see alsoR. R. Davies, The Revolt of Owain Glyn Dwr (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 Dwr: An Age of Reconciliation?’, Proc. Brit. Acad., cxvii (2001),esp. 162.

STATE OF THE UNION 3 of 40


systematic reduction and colonization of Normandy. As GeraldHarriss 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 marketin Normandy continued to be lively into the 1440s when theLancastrian occupation was on the eve of its collapse is an indi-cation that the commitment of the new ‘Anglo-Normans’ wassincere.17

This cursory survey of England’s ventures in the century after1343 suggests that there maybe profit in extending the storyof the‘first English empire’ geographically to include the continentalpossessions and chronologically to at least the fall of Bordeauxin 1453. If we are to explore how this empire worked, then dueallowance must be made for change as well as continuity. Severalthreads in Davies’s story undoubtedly unravel in the late MiddleAges. Within the archipelago, the expansion and centralization socharacteristic of the English state in the twelfth and thirteenthcenturies are less conspicuous in the ensuing period. The pointmay be made by juxtaposing two conceits that appear to havecaptured the imagination of historians: after the ‘second tidalwave’ of English colonization comes the ‘ebb tide of the Englishempire’.18 The maritime metaphors are compelling;19 yet expan-sionism and empire, while linked, should not be conflated. PeterJ. 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 inFrance after the collapse of the Lancastrian cause, see C. T. Allmand, LancastrianNormandy, 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 inDavies, First English Empire, ch. 7. For further discussion, see John Gillingham, ‘ASecond Tidal Wave? The Historiography of English Colonization of Ireland, Scotlandand Wales in the 12th and 13th Centuries’, in Jan M. Piskorski (ed.), HistoriographicalApproaches to Medieval Colonization of East Central Europe: A Comparative Analysisagainst the Background of Other European Inter-Ethnic Colonization Processes in theMiddle 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 JohnWatts (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 rulethe waves’: Louise R. Loomis, ‘Nationality at the Council of Constance: AnAnglo-French Dispute’, Amer. Hist. Rev., xliv (1939), 524 n. 52.



of the ‘first’ British empire in the eighteenth century, has chosento distinguish expansion from ‘empire’ itself.20 Empire, in otherwords, may endure even if the process of expansion — in terms ofcultural diffusion and territorial accretion — slows or grinds toa halt. England’s relationship with its northern neighbour isinstructive in this regard. From the mid fourteenth century itbecomes increasingly difficult to weave the assertive Scottishkingdom into a ‘four nations’ symphony of British political devel-opment,21 except as an exercise in counterpoint.22 But if Scotlandrepresents a proximate and embarrassing imperial blunder forEngland, there is ample evidence for what Cain and Hopkinshave characterized as ‘imperialism of intent’ as distinct from ‘im-perialism of result’.23 With two brief exceptions in 1328 and1502, the king of England never relinquished his claim to the‘submission, homage, and other peculiar rights due from of oldto the crown of England from the kings of the Scots and theirpeople’.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. Seealso Robin Frame, ‘Overlordship and Reaction, c.1200–c.1450’, in his Ireland andBritain, 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: LateMedieval Contributions’, in Alexander Grant and Keith J. Stringer (eds.), Unitingthe 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 Irelandover 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 Henry the Fifth, ed. andtrans. Frank Taylor and John S. Roskell (Oxford, 1975), 139. See also Adae Murimuthcontinuatio 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 at5http://www.sd-editions.com/PROME4(hereafter PROME), item 3 (‘le roiaume d’Escoce [si esttielment] 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 centuryand later, see David Ditchburn, ‘Union before Union: The Failure of ‘‘Britain’’ in theMiddle Ages’, in Andrew Mackillop and Micheal O Siochru (eds.), Forging the State:European State Formation and the Anglo-Scottish Union of 1707 (Dundee, 2009). As forthe exceptions, Edward III repudiated the 1328 treaty in 1333, and the ‘Treaty ofPerpetual Peace’ of 1502 lapsed c.1512–13 when Henry VIII went to war with Franceand James IV maintained the ‘auld alliance’ — leading to the ill-fated invasion ofEngland in 1513. For the vigorous reassertion by Henry VIII of England’s claims to


(cont. on p. 6)

at5http://www


pressure was frequently suffered — not least during the extendedspells 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 aWeberian gloss to the medieval English state — distinguishedthe ‘patriarchal and tributary’ character of England’s relationswith the Celtic peripheries in the eleventh and twelfth centuriesfrom the increasingly ‘bureaucratic and integrative’ approachfrom the thirteenth century.26 The growth of England’s preco-cious bureaucratic kingship has long been a cardinal theme ofEnglish historiography; but if Edward I’s misadventures inScotland 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 toreinforce, the body of recent scholarship that views Edward I’srampantly expansionist and ruthlessly centralist stance as a highlysignificant but comparatively brief and unsustainable interlude inthe longer history of English medieval state- and empire-build-ing’.27 This is as we should expect: recent scholarship has arguedpersuasively that ‘the long-term survival of empires dependedon their rulers limiting their transformative ambitions even as

(n. 24 cont.)

overlordship of Scotland, see Roger A. Mason, ‘The Scottish Reformation and theOrigins 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 (Edinburgh, 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 studyexamining both periods of captivity together and exploring the psychological andpolitical 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’’: TheEnglish King and the ‘‘Celtic’’ Rulers, 1066–1216’, Peritia, x (1996).

27 Mark Ormrod, ‘The English State and the Plantagenet Empire, 1259–1360: AFiscal 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’, inClifford J. Rogers (ed.), The Wars of Edward III: Sources and Interpretations(Woodbridge, 1999), esp. 207.



they extended their power’.28 In the high age of early modernexpansion, when the means of coercion were considerablygreater, European empires remained essentially devolved and im-perial power often rested as much on ‘negotiation’ with settler andindigenous 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 muscleand neglects economic, political and ideological sources ofpower.30

That an imperial framework has not found favour for the lateMiddle Ages may have less to do with the utility (or, for thatmatter, tyranny) of the construct, than a bifurcated historiog-raphy that tends to treat ‘British’ history and Anglo-French his-tory 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 thetremendous social and cultural variation across, and indeedwithin, England’s provinces and dominions. Hybridity, if any-thing, adds to the interpretative strength of ‘empire’, but itmakes integrated treatment extremely challenging.32 I wish tooffer 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 analysisdraws on his classic work, The Sources of Social Power, i, A History of Power from theBeginning 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 historyof the early modern period has been Anglocentric and neglectful of continentalEurope: Nicholas Canny, ‘Irish, Scottish and Welsh Responses to Centralisation,c.1530–c.1640: A Comparative Perspective’, in Grant and Stringer (eds.), Unitingthe Kingdom?, esp. 147–8. See also Andrea C. Ruddick, ‘Gascony and the Limits ofMedieval British Isles History’, in Brendan Smith (ed.), Ireland and the EnglishWorld 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 FrederickCooper, Empires in World History: Power and the Politics of Difference (Princeton, 2010),esp. 11–13.



I

POLITICAL STRUCTURES

Empires, historians have been assured, are political systems.33

How then, without resorting to diagrammatic representationcomplete 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 compositemonarchy or multiple kingdom.35 Long before the treaty ofTroyes (1420) gave the claim of England’s ruling dynasty to theFrench crown something more than a soupcon of substance,36 it ispossible to conceive of the constellation of lands subject to theking of England in these terms.37 Indeed, in 1328, shortly afterEdward III was rebuffed from consideration for the kingship ofFrance, a solicitous councillor proposed, perhaps by way of con-solation, that he might adopt a compound royal style that wouldinclude his lesser titles.38 Although the idea was rejected, EdwardIII’s operations in the two decades after he assumed the title ‘kingof France’ in 1340 cumulatively amounted to a bid not merely forthe former ‘Angevin empire’, 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. ThomasRymer, 20 vols. (London, 1704–32), ix, 895–904.

37 Steven G. Ellis, ‘From Dual Monarchy to Multiple Kingdoms: Unions and theEnglish State, 1422–1607’, in Allan I. Macinnes and Jane Ohlmeyer (eds.), The StuartKingdoms 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 MontisTrolli’ (Edward, by the grace of God, king of England, lord of Ireland, Gascony andthe Channel Islands, duke of Aquitaine, and count of Poitou and Montreuil), quotedfrom National Archives, London, Public Record Office, C 47/30/1/33, in PierreChaplais, English Medieval Diplomatic Practice, Part I: Documents and Interpretation, 2vols. (London, 1982), i, 154 n. For comment, see W. M. Ormrod, ‘A Problem ofPrecedence: 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’, inBothwell (ed.), Age of Edward III.



under Richard II, there was renewed interest in the ‘matter ofBritain’.40 Had Richard’s much-rumoured plans to elevate theland of Ireland to the dignity of a kingdom borne fruit,41 theLancastrians might have found themselves after 1420 vying torule an eclectic polity that boasted three kingly titles.

The relationship between the core of this multiple kingdom andits 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 discerniblyas we move westwards from France towards Ireland. Richard IIwas 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 inconceivablewith reference, say, to his ‘wild’ Gaelic enemies across the IrishSea who were perceived as uncivilized (though perhaps not irre-deemably so).42 A similar range of attitudes emerges if we take asour yardstick another aspect of ‘colonial policy’: marriage.43

English soldiers serving on the Continent were relatively free tomarry local inhabitants, while settlers in post-conquest Walesseem gradually to have overcome their preference for endog-amy — clearly in evidence in the first half of the fourteenthcentury — as they began to form unions with the native

40 Michael Bennett, ‘Richard II and the Wider Realm’, in Anthony Goodman andJames 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 adannum 1388, ed. Edward Maunde Thompson (London, 1874), 372; The WestminsterChronicle, 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 makesa 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 afterRichard II’s first Irish expedition, Philippe de Mezieres indulged the king by address-ing him as ‘King of Great Britain [‘‘Grant Bretaingne’’], Prince of Wales and NorthWales, Lord of Ireland and King of Cornwall’: Philippe de Mezieres, Letter to KingRichard 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 ofHenry VI, 2nd edn (Stroud, 1998), 642. For the perception in English literature ofIreland 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 lords during his Irish expeditionof 1394–5, see nn. 187 and 190 below.

43 Cf. Michael Adas, ‘Imperialism and Colonialism in Comparative Perspective’,Internat. Hist. Rev., xx (1998), 387.



Welsh;44 in Ireland, however, where the fourteenth century sawthe English colony come under severe strain, intermarriage withthe indigenous population was officially proscribed.45 At somelevel, these contrasts stem from a difference in ‘constitutional’status between the remnants of the Plantagenet inheritance thatlay within the kingdom of France and those insular territories thatEngland had acquired through conquest. But this dichotomy,while not without its logic, does not do justice to the tangledreality. In the case of Gascony, protracted wrangling over sover-eignty complicated its status to such an extent that, even after thecoronation of Henry VI as king of France (1431), the duchy seemsto have been considered (like Calais, Ireland and Wales) to be aninalienable parcel of the English crown.46 And, whereas Gasconycannot be classed as a ‘colony of settlement’ with a substantialsettler population living cheek by jowl with ethnically distinctnatives (as in Ireland and Wales),47 there was much that was ‘im-perial’ in the abrasive rule of the principality of Aquitaine underEdward, the Black Prince.48 Lancastrian Normandy presents a

44 Although in Wales the question of racial status continued to have significantimplications: these are explored in R. R. Davies, ‘The Status of Women and thePractice of Marriage in Late-Medieval Wales’, in Dafydd Jenkins and Morfydd E.Owen (eds.), The Welsh Law of Women: Studies Presented to Professor Daniel A. Binchyon his Eightieth Birthday (Cardiff, 1980), esp. 100–4. For intermarriage in Wales,see R. R. Davies, ‘Race Relations in Post-Conquest Wales: Confrontation andCompromise’, Trans. Hon. Soc. Cymmrodorion (1975), 52; A. D. M. Barrell andM. H. Brown, ‘A Settler Community in Post-Conquest Rural Wales: The English ofDyffryn Clwyd, 1294–1399’, Welsh Hist. Rev., xvii (1995), 352–3. For examples ofintermarriage in France, see Jonathan Sumption, The Hundred Years War, ii, Trial byFire (London, 1999), 458; Allmand, Lancastrian Normandy, 80 nn. 118–19, andpp. 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 theStatute of Kilkenny (1366), intermarriage persisted between the Gaelic and Englishpopulations: 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 Batesand 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 MargaretLabarge, 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 argumentthat 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 inthe 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 inAtlantic Perspective: An Antipodean Commentary’, Amer. Hist. Rev., civ (1999),


(cont. on p. 11)


midway case. From 1417 estates were sequestered and (unlikein Gascony) a sizeable landed settlement was imposed. Butalthough many royal donations of lands were made in fee tailwith restrictions on their alienation to anyone other thanEnglishmen,49 there was little attempt at ‘Anglicization’ in thesense of wholesale intrusion of English law and institutions onthe model of the conquered territories of Ireland and Wales.50

England’s empire in the late Middle Ages was, then, like itslegatee, a ‘constitutional hotch-potch’.51 It was, above all, theroyal 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 createddistinct spheres of influence for their male progeny — Wales,Ireland and the north serving as early stomping grounds fortheir first, second and third sons respectively. Overseeing theseactivities was the head of the family. At a meeting of the king’scouncil in the summer of 1412, for instance, Prince Hal, presid-ing in place of his ailing father, monitored at a single sitting theproblems afflicting Calais, Ireland, the principality and March ofWales, and the castles of Roxburgh and Berwick in Scotland.54

Late medieval England was, however, no longer simply ‘a familyfirm’.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, andnot particularly happily, that the term has been transformed to the case of indigenouspopulations subject to alien empire (thus permitting discontented settler nationaliststo 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 Normandyin the Fifteenth Century’, Archives, vi (1964), 207.

50 Robert Andrew Massey, ‘The Lancastrian Land Settlement in Normandy andNorthern France, 1417–1450’ (Univ. of Liverpool Ph.D. thesis, 1987), p. x.

51 John Darwin, 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 EnglishMedieval Experience of ‘‘Empire’’ to Later Imperial Constitutional Issues’, in JohnE. Flint and Glyndwr Williams (eds.), Perspectives of Empire: Essays Presented to GeraldS. Graham (London, 1973), 19.

53 Ormrod, ‘Double Monarchy of Edward III’, 74–5; W. M. Ormrod, ‘Edward IIIand his Family’, Jl Brit. Studies, xxvi (1987); Green, ‘Lordship and Principality’, 4 n. 5.

54 Proceedings and Ordinances of the Privy Council of England, 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 hisThe Angevin Empire, 2nd edn (London, 2001), 116.



(within limits) representative.56 The English parliament, whosepower was spurred on by the exigencies of wartime supply, habit-ually opened with the appointment of commissioners to receivepetitions from Ireland, Wales, Scotland, Gascony and theChannel Islands. This invites the question: ‘who cared aboutthe colonies?’57 The attitude of the commons to the ‘extremiteesdu roialme’ was deeply ambivalent.58 At times, as during the runof success in Normandy between 1415 and 1422, something ap-proaching a ‘lobby’ in favour of colonization can be detectedwithin its ranks;59 yet, even flushed with victory, the commonscould be parsimonious as they greeted further demands for sub-sidies with ‘dark — though private — mutterings and curses, andby hatred of such extortions’.60 Paradoxically, these curses couldserve to reinforce the bond between the outlying regions and thecore. To loosen the grasp of the commons on the purse strings oftheir constituents, cash-strapped English chancellors argued inthe late 1370s that the overseas territories, including isolated out-posts at Calais, Cherbourg and Brest, were ‘barbicans of therealm’.61 The dominions as a first line of defence was an ideathat cut both ways. As a means of attracting attention to the west-ern peripheries, we find it recycled with a dash of alarmist rhetoricin 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 LateMedieval England’, Past and Present, no. 138 (Feb. 1993).

57 Cf. Jacob M. Price, ‘Who Cared about the Colonies? The Impact of the ThirteenColonies on British Society and Politics, circa 1714–1775’, in Bernard Bailyn andPhilip D. Morgan (eds.), Strangers within the Realm: Cultural Margins of the FirstBritish 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 politiquesanglais au XVe siecle’, in Pierre Bouet and Veronique Gazeau (eds.), La Normandieet l’Angleterre au Moyen Age (Caen, 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 kingdom ofEngland, and if the barbicans are well guarded, and the sea safeguarded, the kingdomshall find itself well enough secure’: ‘Richard II: Parliament of October 1378’, ed.Chris Given-Wilson, PROME, item 25. One historian elevates this to a ‘barbicanpolicy’: 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. GeorgeWarner (Oxford, 1926), 36.



nation at large from its habit of dependence on the crown evenwhen this tendency ran counter to the royal will itself, as in theearly 1390s when a proposal to cede Aquitaine to the House ofLancaster provoked protests from the Gascons, seconded by theEnglish Commons, that they should only be ruled by the king ofEngland or his heir apparent.63

The circumstances attending the Gascon protest point to thetensions inherent in a composite structure, notably the knottyquestion of local privileges. The duchy of Normandy, for in-stance, revelled in its distinctiveness and its charter of privilegeswas confirmed in 1423 by John, duke of Bedford, as regent ofHenry VI.64 Unlike those of Normandy, the ‘liberties’ of EnglishIreland closely paralleled those of England itself; but we cannotinfer from this that the colonists’ sense of local identity wasweak.65 They were quite capable — like the settler populationin ‘British America’ three centuries later66 — of lifting themselvesup 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 in1420, when the kingship of France was added to the royal style.On both occasions, parliament expressed its concern thatEngland 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 RichardII’s creation of the duchy of Ireland in favour of Robert de Vere (d. 1392), whichincluded the alienation of regalities, was to ‘the open disinheritance of his crown ofthe kingdom of England, and the entire destruction of the loyal lieges of the king oursaid 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’, article11 (quotation); Westminster Chronicle, ed. and trans. Hector and Harvey, 246–9.

64 Philippe Contamine, ‘The Norman ‘‘Nation’’ and the French ‘‘Nation’’ in theFourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries’, in Bates and Curry (eds.), England andNormandy, 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 NationalIdentity’, in Richard Beeman, Stephen Botein and Edward C. Carter II (eds.), BeyondConfederation: Origins of the Constitution and American National Identity (Chapel Hill,1987), 340: ‘At one level the Revolution was thus the culminating moment in theprocess of anglicization’.

67 The most famous case from medieval Ireland is the so-called ‘declaration ofparliamentary independence’ of 1460: Statute Rolls of the Parliament of Ireland: Reignof King Henry VI, ed. Henry F. Berry (Dublin, 1910), 644.



assurances that England should always ‘be free and quit of theaforesaid subjection and obedience in every way’.68 In short, themetropole was not to be rendered peripheral.69

Clearly, the English empire in the late Middle Ages was highlydifferentiated and decentralized; but a devolved political struc-ture is not necessarily more brittle as a consequence. J. H. Elliotthas remarked of composite monarchy in the early modern periodthat 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 ofaction in its outlying provinces. Certainly, in the case of Irelandand 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 havebeen more flexible than historians have inferred from its officialpronouncements. Just as in the empire forged by the Spanishmonarchy from the sixteenth century, royal ministers were sub-ject to such a multiplicity of incompatible standards that theycould exercise remarkable latitude and, in effect, ‘obey but notexecute’ the king’s commands.72 The justification for inactionwas grounded in the fact that the king could not always be fullyinformed of affairs in the peripheries and was frequently misled

68 Statutes of the Realm, i, 292 (14 Edw. III, stat. 3); ‘Edward III: Parliament ofMarch 1340’, ed. W. Mark Ormrod, PROME, pt 2, item 9; ‘Henry V: Parliament ofDecember 1420’, ed. Chris Given-Wilson, PROME, item 25.

69 It may be relevant, in this context, to recall the remark attributed to Henry VII onthe occasion of the marriage in 1503 of his daughter, Margaret Tudor (d. 1541), toJames 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 Tudorimperium’: 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 byEnglish law (‘qe la terre Dirlaund deit par la lei engleische estre governee’), seeDocuments 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 canscarcely 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 usefuladdendum 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).



by false information.73 Inaction, or simply looking the other way,also operated as an aspect of the discretionary authority of royalministers because ‘selective enforcement’ of the king’s instruc-tions enabled them ‘to convert potential authority into realauthority’.74

If the royal dynasty and the apparatus of central governmentformed the superstructure of England’s late medieval empire, theinfrastructure was provided by an aristocratic governing classthrough which the crown articulated its power on a local andregional level.75 To the extent that some magnates acquiredlands and titles in more than one region, they acted to knittogether 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 (earls ofOrmond and Wiltshire), the Mortimers (earls of March andUlster) and the Talbots (earls of Waterford and Shrewsbury)?The merit of the concept may lie in the fact that the tensionsinherent in a composite lordship in terms of administration, dele-gation and absenteeism were of a kind with those experienced bya composite monarchy. A case in point is the fifteenth-centurycomposite lordship of the Butlers of Ormond, whose extensiveestates in Ireland served as a powerful base from which the familyprojected its interests onto the English scene; however, after thesuccession in 1452 of James, fifth earl of Ormond and earlof 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. Fora case of ‘selective enforcement’ of the Welsh ordinances of 1401, see the case of SirJohn Skudamore [Skidmore] (d. 1435), cited in Ralph A. Griffiths, The Principality ofWales in 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 ordinancein 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 byJohn H. Kautsky in his The Politics of Aristocratic Empires (Chapel Hill, 1982).Nonetheless, Kautsky’s conclusions concerning the devolved state of ‘aristocraticempires’ 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. Seealso Brendan Smith, ‘The British Isles in the Late Middle Ages: Shaping the Regions’,in Smith (ed.), Ireland and the English World, 16–17.



shifted decisively to England, thereby creating serious structuralimbalance.77 In effect, the Irish portion of the Butler lordship fellvictim to its own success. Other composite lordships wereeffectively stillborn. The earldom of Cork, created in 1395 forEdward, earl of Rutland (d. 1415), scarcely survived its first in-cumbent.78 But to judge from an ode, composed by the famousWelsh bard Iolo Goch, to Roger, fourth earl of March and earl ofUlster (d. 1398), the commitment of multiple earls to their mul-tiple holdings could be sincere. The poet displays an astonishingknowledge of Irish topography and the challenges that faced theMortimers in their efforts to exploit their Irish estates, which, inaddition to the earldom of Ulster, included the lordships ofConnacht, Trim and Leix.79 Mortimer’s career was cut shortwhen he was killed in a skirmish with the Irish of Leinster inJuly 1398, while both his father and son died prematurely inIreland. What is striking, however, is the family’s determinationto make good its Irish inheritance and its attempts to do so byintegrating it with their lordships further afield. The Wigmorechronicle reports that c.1380, Edmund Mortimer, third earl ofMarch (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 thecrown, the other on the aristocracy — are intended as aids to

77 See David Beresford, ‘The Butlers in England and Ireland, 1405–1515’ (Univ. ofDublin Ph.D. thesis, 1999), esp. chs. 2–3.

78 G. E. Cokayne, The Complete Peerage of England, Scotland, Ireland, Great Britainand the United Kingdom, 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 aChyd-Destun [Iolo Goch’s Ode to Roger Mortimer: Background and Context]’,Llen Cymru, xxii (1999). (I am very grateful to Gruffydd Williams for furnishing mewith a version of this article in English.) The Mortimers’ spectacular conglomerationof lands is also captured by the Wigmore chronicle, whose account is later used byAdam Usk: Sir William Dugdale, Monasticon Anglicanum, ed. John Caley, Henry Ellisand 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.



thought, and as complements to each other, not alternatives. Thepoint I wish to emphasize is that England’s dominions in the lateMiddle Ages were no Frankenstein’s monster of territorial ap-pendages, but rather constituted an interdependent network, aconcatenation of lands. Consider military operations. The settlercommunity in late medieval Ireland was skilled at picking oppor-tune moments in the war with France to appeal to the king forattention as, for instance, in 1360 when the ink was still wet on theTreaty of Bretigny, and again in 1421.81 The tendency for Englishinterests to swing pendulum-like between archipelago and con-tinent is a commonplace. With a minor shift in perspective we canalso appreciate that it was almost a structural requirement of thelate medieval empire to maintain secondary outlets for aggressiveenergy. Nicholas Canny has recently asked rhetorically withregard to the seventeenth century: ‘what would have been thepolitical and social consequences for Britain if it had not beenable, at the conclusion of each of its major military engagements,to offload many of its officers and fighting men in Ireland?’82 Hisquestion has application to the medieval period. A preliminaryanswer is suggested by juxtaposing two moments in the HundredYears War separated by ninety years. In the aftermath of Bretignyin 1360 both Ireland and Castile became new theatres of war andso served as a safety valve for the surplus manpower of the Englisharmy.83 Contrast the ignominious English withdrawal fromNormandy in 1450, which was followed in England by wide-spread social upheaval in which the returning companies threwin 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 BritishEmpire (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 ofhow to deal with surplus manpower once peace had been made in a major theatre ofwar’.

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 DavidGrummitt (ed.), The English Experience in France, c.1450–1558: War, Diplomacy andCultural Exchange (Aldershot, 2002), 44–5.



II

SERVICE AND COMMUNICATIONS

An empire is, of course, more than a political structure. It is alsoan ‘imagined community’.85 Indeed, the two things are cruciallyinterrelated. The coherence of a devolved and extended politydepends on the propagation of a political culture that serves asa binding agent among provincial elites and counteracts tenden-cies towards assimilation or autonomy.86

One of the things that made England’s empire imaginable amida plethora of languages, laws and local liberties was collectiveexperience, most obviously service in the king’s enterprises.The author of the Gesta Henrici Quinti illustrates the mentalityof the nation-in-arms rather well: ‘Our England [Anglia nostra]’,he wrote after the victory at Agincourt, ‘has reason to rejoice andreason to grieve’.87 Recruitment for the king’s armies took placewith fluctuations in intensity across England’s dominions fromAquitaine to the far north of England, Wales and, intermittently,Ireland88 — and even spilled beyond them into Scotland.89 Someregions had their specialities — for instance, the prized archers of

85 Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread ofNationalism, revised edn (London and New York, 1991).

86 See the remarks, for the early Middle Ages, of Chris Wickham in his Framing theEarly Middle Ages: Europe and the Mediterranean, 400–800 (Oxford, 2005), 59, 61.

87 Gesta Henrici Quinti, ed. and trans. Taylor and Roskell, 98–9. On the propagand-ist purpose of the Gesta, see J. S. Roskell and F. Taylor, ‘The Authorship and Purposeof 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 Armiesin 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 Servingin English Armies in Normandy and the Pays de Conquete, 1415–1450: A PreliminarySurvey’, Reading Medieval Studies, xviii (1992); A. D. Carr, ‘Welshmen and theHundred Years War’, Welsh Hist. Rev., iv (1968); A. D. Carr, ‘A Welsh Knight in theHundred Years War: Sir Gregory Sais’, Trans. Hon. Soc. Cymmrodorion (1977). Theinvolvement of forces from the English colony in Ireland was small but important interms of forging or reaffirming links between the colonial aristocracy and court: seeRobin Frame, English Lordship in Ireland, 1318–1361 (Oxford, 1982), 153–6. For Irishparticipation in the campaigns of Henry V, see Richard Hayes, ‘Irish Soldiers at theSiege of Rouen (1418–19)’, Irish Sword, ii (1954).

89 For the involvement of (normally disaffected) Scots in England’s armies, seeDavid Ditchburn, Scotland and Europe: The Medieval Kingdom and its Contacts withChristendom, 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.



Cheshire, ‘whose standing . . . was analogous to that of men-at-arms raised elsewhere in England’;90 or the light hobby horse ofIreland, which had been a valuable scouting and patrolling animalin Edward I’s wars against Scotland,91 and whose occasional ap-pearance in the fifteenth century was sufficiently novel to attractthe attention of the author of a poem on the siege of Calais in1436:

And euer among an Irissh manOn his hoby that swiftly ran;It was a sportfull sightHow his dartes he did shake.92

Military service, whether on campaign across the Channel or indefence of a local frontier,93 gave the governing classes acrossEngland’s lands a stake in ‘empire’. As a nineteenth-centuryradical 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 inEngland’s wars, it is tempting to set a cat among the pigeonsand ascribe England’s expansionist dynamic in this period tothe 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’, inPeter Crooks (ed.), Government, War and Society in Medieval Ireland: Essays byEdmund 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. RossellHope Robbins (London, 1959), 289, ll. 121–4.

93 For military institutions on the frontiers in Ireland and the north of England, seeRobin Frame, ‘Military Service in the Lordship of Ireland, 1290–1360: Institutionsand Society on the Anglo-Gaelic Frontier’, in his Ireland and Britain; J. A. Tuck, ‘Warand Society in the Medieval North’, Northern Hist., xxi (1985). The Lancastriansettlement in Normandy entrenched the obligation of military service based ontenure: Anne Curry, ‘Le Service feodal en Normandie pendant l’occupation anglaise(1417–1450)’, in La ‘France anglaise’ au Moyen Age: colloque des historiens medievistesfrancais et britanniques (Actes du 111e Congres national des societes savantes, Poitiers,1986, Section d’histoire medievale et de philologie, i, Paris, 1988).

94 Hopkins, ‘Back to the Future’, 210, quoting from John Bright, Speeches onQuestions 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 BritishExpansion 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 BastardFeudalism’, in Natalie Fryde, Pierre Monnet and Otto Gerhard Oexle (eds.), DieGegenwart des Feudalismus (Gottingen, 2002).



that the combatants in the Hundred Years War ‘made no pretenceof fighting for love of king or lord, still less for England or for glory,but for gain’.96 For many, perhaps most, advancement throughmilitary service proved a chimera.97 Nonetheless the idea of socialand material improvement (albeit garbed in loftier language) re-mained a powerful motive for a career in arms,98 and for a luckyfew the windfalls were large, whether in the form of titles, bootyand pensions,99 or the more abiding advantages that stemmedfrom personal contacts made on campaign.100 Edward III’s cre-ation of six new earls in 1337 exemplifies the connection betweenservice, performed or pending, and advancement: the king notonly rewarded a group of favoured associates but also furnishedhimself with a bevy of active soldiers for the French war.101 It isnot at court, however, that we find the most striking testimony toEngland’s success in cultivating an ethic of martial service, but onthe wild colonial frontier. The Gaelic bard Gofraidh Fionn ODalaigh mock-scolded Edward III for taking Maurice fitzMaurice (d. 1358), the future second earl of Desmond, awayon 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 thereofis 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 ofdark wine.

96 K. B. McFarlane, The Nobility of Later Medieval England: The Ford Lectures for1953 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 andW. Mark Ormrod (eds.), A Social History of England, 1200–1500 (Cambridge,2006), 123–4.

98 Maurice Keen, ‘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 Enterpriseof War’, in Horrox and Ormrod (eds.), Social History of England, 81–2, 86–8.

100 Michael J. Bennett, Community, Class and Careerism: Cheshire and LancashireSociety 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 theHundred Years War’, in Matthew Strickland (ed.), Armies, Chivalry and Warfare inMedieval Britain and France (Stamford, 1998), 188–90.



The tidings of France, the knowledge of England — a merry tale — will befound 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 onSir Rhys ap Gruffydd (d. 1356) of Llansadwrn, Carmarthenshire,which recalls his prowess in the service of the English crown inFrance and Scotland.103

If war fostered comradeship in arms, then equally the feats ofthe soldiers caught the attention of those left at home. In theeighteenth century Adam Smith noted how

In great empires the people who live in the capital, and in the provincesremote from the scene of action . . . enjoy, at their ease, the amusement ofreading in the newspapers the exploits of their own fleets and armies . . .They are commonly dissatisfied with the return of peace, which puts anend 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 sparedthe devastation visited upon England’s neighbours.105 Coastalattacks occasionally brought home the harsh reality of war; buthostile incursions were usually the lot of the Anglo-Scottishborder and the shires that marched with Wales.106 In the absenceof face-to-face encounters with ‘otherness’ — doubtless as instru-mental in the shaping of a national identity in this period as during

102 ‘Mor ar bfearg riot a rı Saxan’ [Great Is our Anger against Thee, O King ofEngland], in Osbern Bergin, Irish Bardic Poetry: Texts and Translations, ed. DavidGreene 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,Principality of Wales, 99–102. Sir Rhys ap Gruffydd may also have commissioned IoloGoch’s ode to King Edward III, which describes the king as the ‘hammerer of theScots’ and recalls his victories at Neville’s Cross and Crecy as well as the capture ofCalais 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 theFourteenth 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, ‘Walesand the Marches in the Fifteenth Century’, in his King and Country: England and Walesin the Fifteenth Century (London, 1991); Alastair J. Macdonald, Border Bloodshed:Scotland and England at War, 1369–1403 (Edinburgh, 2000). In English Ireland theomnipresent 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 whenthe extent of the English settlement in Ireland began to contract: Robin Frame, ‘ ‘‘LesEngleys nees en Irlande’’: The English Political Identity in Medieval Ireland’, in hisIreland and Britain, 139–40.



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 orfrom the pulpit;110 but unofficial, improvised news networkswere surely the norm. Rumour, sustained by political songs,111

percolated through the general population, at times shading intosedition, as in 1405 when an unfortunate Norfolk esquire foundhimself in hot water for informing two Lancastrian partisans,rather too effusively, about the high wages Glyn Dwr was offeringto those who joined his company.112 Feelings sometimes randeep, as in 1393 when the commonalty of Cheshire rose in re-sponse to Richard II’s proposals for peace with France, whichthreatened their job security;113 or in 1450, when the collapseof Normandy spawned dark rumours of treachery.114 Nor werethose on the western peripheries of the empire utterly removedfrom the drama in the principal theatre of war. Chroniclers inIreland are found bending the ears of passers-by for scraps ofinformation. The Kilkenny annalist Friar Clyn tells us that hereceived through the reports of messengers the news of Edward

107 Linda Colley, ‘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 inEngland in the Later Middle Ages’, Jl Hist. Sociology, i (1988).

109 Kenneth A. Fowler, ‘News From the Front: Letters and Despatches of theFourteenth Century’, in Philippe Contamine, Charles Giry-Deloison and MauriceH. Keen (eds.), Guerre et societe en France, en Angleterre et en Bourgogne, XIVe–XVe

siecle (Lille, 1991), esp. 76–81, 83–4. The correspondence between Richard II and theEnglish council during his Irish campaign of 1394–5 might also be considered as partof 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 onthe Battles of Crecy and Durham (1346): A Critical Edition’, Traditio, liv (1999), 175.

112 Simon Walker, ‘Rumour, Sedition and Popular Protest in the Reign of HenryIV’, 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 andLancastrian England’, in his Nobles, Knights and Men-at-Arms in the Middle Ages(London, 1996), 239–40.



III’s manoeuvres in the Low Countries in 1337.115 Likewise, thechronicler Henry Marlborough breathlessly reports in 1420 fromhis parish in north county Dublin that rumours were sweepingthrough Ireland to the effect that Thomas, sixth earl of Desmond,had died in France and that Henry V attended his funeral atRouen.116

If an English ‘empire’ was imaginable in part because it broughtthose 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 careersoldier or administrator on a progress through the king’s domin-ions. Well before his adventures in the March of Wales and themud at Agincourt, the future Henry V passed the summer of 1399in Ireland, where he was knighted and then held in honourablecaptivity in Trim castle, county Meath, while his father usurpedRichard II’s crown.117 This is an illustrious example; but Henry’sexperience 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, in1416, he was ensconced in Normandy as treasurer of Harfleur; by1423 he had received an appointment as constable of Bordeauxand he died in Gascony on 28 March 1427.119 Barneby’s move toFrance 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,Crecy, 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 aGaelic annalist in 1450 that ‘we haue heard from pilgrims at Rome’ that ‘All the Kingof Englands Conquest in France was taken from him, but only Calice, 3140 men beingslaine in Roan, and Lord ffurnwell was taken prisoner therin’: see ‘The Annals ofIreland, 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 ArchaeologicalSociety, 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 SirNicholas Goushill, see Andrew Ayton, ‘English Armies in the Fourteenth Century’, inCurry and Hughes (eds.), Arms, Armies and Fortifications, 30–1.

119 R. A. Griffiths, ‘The Glyn Dwr Rebellion in North Wales through the Eyes of anEnglishman’, Bull. Board Celtic Studies, xxii (1967); Anne Curry, ‘Harfleur et lesAnglais, 1415–1422’, in Bouet and Gazeau (eds.), La Normandie et l’Angleterre auMoyen Age, 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.



the native Welsh, and it thus enabled him to keep his career on itsupward trajectory. For others, relocation was forced by exogen-ous factors. The Essex-born Robert Wikeford (d. 1390) servedthe king on diplomatic missions in the Low Countries andAquitaine before being appointed as constable of Bordeaux in1373;120 in 1375, amid the collapse of the Black Prince’s princi-pality of Aquitaine, Wikeford was provided to the archbishopricof Dublin and served two controversial terms as chancellor ofIreland. We glimpse him in transit, c.1376, petitioning thecrown for allowances in his account as constable of Bordeaux ashe wishes to set out to take up his new office in Ireland.121 A laterarchbishop of Dublin jumped ship in a similar manner: MichaelTregury (d. 1471) served as first rector of the university of Caen in1439–40; with the English position in Normandy crumbling in1449, Tregury exchanged new hazards for old when he was pro-vided to the archbishopric of Dublin in succession to RichardTalbot (d. 1449), whose more famous brother, Sir John, earl ofShrewsbury and Waterford, was to be killed in the barrage ofartillery 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 soldiersand functionaries such as these would be extremely revealing oftheir variegated identities and of how it was that ‘culture’ in itswidest sense was transmitted and absorbed. Sometimes culturaltransmission 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 RecordOffice, 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 theDiocese of Dublin in the Time of Archbishops Tregury and Walton, 1457–1483, from theOriginal 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 Historyof England, who cites the case of Tregury at p. 450.

124 See Anderson, Imagined Communities, 55–6.



other colonial outposts.125 Other cultural tourists harboured ex-plicitly imperialist motives. John Hardyng (d. 1465) got his startas a peddler of bogus documents when he was commissionedby Henry V to investigate England’s right to overlordship ofScotland; after three years north of the Tweed, Hardyng travelledto Bois-de-Vincennes in 1422, where he furnished his patron withhis first tranche of evidence.126 Still other itineraries resulted inthe transmission of culture in another sense by encouraging aspecies of ‘reactive acculturation’,127 detectable, for instance, ina Gaelic poet’s satire on a bellicose sheriff of county Limerick inthe late fourteenth century, Sir Thomas Clifford:

After computing the disfigurements of his body from his soles to the topof his grizzled head I will see how many inches are in each left limb ofClifford . . .

The drip of his crooked nose — certainly there is here the very pattern ofUgliness — every secretion from his nostrils is an undrinkable cliffstream.128

Travellers in the other direction also had to contend withdeep-seated prejudice. One man who mostly prevailed oversuch obstacles in the later 1370s was a career soldier of Gaelicorigin identified in record sources as ‘Cornelius de Clone’. Inreward for his service to the English crown Cornelius received aknighthood, the royal manor of Crumlin in county Dublin, and acharter of denizenship for himself and his kin.129 Thus far hecould 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 PiersPlowman’, Yearbook of Langland Studies, xiii (1999); Kathryn Kerby-Fulton andSteven Justice, ‘Langlandian Reading Circles and the Civil Service in London andDublin, 1380–1427’, in Wendy Scase, Rita Copeland and David Lawton (eds.), NewMedieval 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 theTransactions between the Crowns of Scotland and England, Preserved in the Treasury ofHer 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 theMiddle Ages’, in Robert Bartlett and Angus MacKay (eds.), Medieval FrontierSocieties (Oxford, 1989), 326.

128 Ann Dooley, ‘ ‘‘Namha agus cara dar gceird [An Enemy and a Friend to ourArt]’’: A Dan Leathaoire’, Celtica, xviii (1986), 145–6 (stanzas 36, 41). Sir Thomas wasa younger brother of Roger IV Clifford of Westmorland (d. 1389): see Vivienne J. C.Rees, ‘The Clifford Family in the Later Middle Ages, 1259–1461’ (Univ. of LancasterM.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.



the make’; in England, however, he remained something of a‘marginal man’.130 Cornelius was in London in 1382 at theheight of anti-Wycliffite hysteria, where his Gaelic backgroundmay have made him particularly susceptible to accusations ofLollardy. Consequently he found it expedient to expunge suspi-cions about his faith through miraculous intervention. After anelaborate procession of barefooted clergy through the city’sstreets, he attended mass and, when the celebrant broke thebread, Cornelius reportedly saw ‘the name of Jesus written inletters of flesh, raw and bloody, which was wonderful tobehold’.131 His ‘pilgrimage’ demonstrates rather neatly boththe extent and the limits of cultural assimilation.

Cultural exchanges and confrontations of a similar kind wouldhave overtaken the English settlement in Lancastrian Normandyhad it long endured.132 A glimpse of the faltering process of ac-commodation is provided by Rouen’s vibrant book-trade, whoseEnglish patrons preferred books of hours to follow the use ofSarum:133 blunders in a manuscript created for Sir ThomasHoo in 1445 are revealing of a francophone scribe grapplingwith the English language.134 Culture did not have to be ‘high’to allow us to track its transmission; we can also observe whatmight be called the ‘culture of governance’ on the move. RisdeardO hEidigheain (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 HerbertB. 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-CenturyNormandy’, in Bates and Curry (eds.), England and Normandy, esp. 310–11. TheSarum Use — which originated in the diocese of Salisbury (hence ‘Sarum’) in thetwelfth century — was the order of divine service commonly used in the south ofEngland 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 FrenchScribe Copies English’, in his Manuscripts and Ghosts: Essays on the Transmission ofMedieval and Early Renaissance Literature (Dublin, 2006), esp. 206–14. Compare thestruggle a Gaelic scribe had in translating Gerald of Wales’s Expugnatio Hibernica intoIrish around the same period: Whitley Stokes, ‘The Irish Abridgment of the‘‘Expugnatio Hibernica’’ ’, Eng. Hist. Rev., xx (1905), and comment in JamesLydon, ‘The Middle Nation’, in Crooks (ed.), Government, War and Society inMedieval Ireland, 337.



who moved in the orbit of the Butler earls of Ormond, is known tohave 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 fromthe metropole. Innovations in English chancery procedure intro-duced by John Thoresby (d. 1373), chancellor of England from1349 to 1356, may be traced back to Thoresby’s experience aspresident of a ‘chancery’ at Calais during Edward III’s campaignsof the mid 1340s.136 There are also signs of cross-pollination be-tween the king’s dominions: the process of settling the conqueredlands in Normandy and northern France, for instance, mayhave been influenced by the experience of the English colonyin Ireland.137 Military techniques were likewise a transferableskill. Just as England’s set-piece victories at Morlaix, Crecy andPoitiers in the first phase of the Hundred Years War built on therevolutionary combination of dismounted men-at-arms flankedby archers that was first tested in the Anglo-Scottish campaigns atDupplin Moor and Halidon Hill,138 so the English governmentseems 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 thesecond decade of the fifteenth century were, in all probability,actuated by their experience repressing the Glyn Dwr 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 ofWinchelsea’, Archaeol. Jl, xix (1862), 265 [misprinted as 255], 274.

136 W. M. Ormrod, ‘Accountability and Collegiality: The English Royal Secretariatin the Mid-Fourteenth Century’, in Kouky Fianu and DeLloyd J. Guth (eds.), Ecritet pouvoir dans les chancelleries medievales: espace francais, espace anglais (Louvain-la-Neuve, 1997), 65–6.

137 Christopher Allmand, ‘La Normandie devant l’opinion anglaise a la fin de laGuerre de Cent Ans’, Bibliotheque de l’Ecole des Chartes, cxxviii (1970), 355; Keen,‘End of the Hundred Years War’, 250.

138 Matthew Bennett, ‘The Development of Battle Tactics in the Hundred YearsWar’, 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 inMedieval England?’, in Colin Richmond and Isobel Harvey (eds.), Recognitions:Essays Presented to Edmund Fryde (Aberystwyth, 1996), 22–3.

139 The chief governors in question were Sir John Stanley (d. 1414) and Sir JohnTalbot (d. 1453): both men held the office of the king’s lieutenant in Ireland (1413–14and 1414–20 respectively), having earlier served in Wales during the Glyn Dwr 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)


Then there is the related issue, recently raised by Susan Reynolds,of ‘the degree to which a metropolitan society’s own ideologywas changed by having an empire’.140 At times these ‘reverber-ations’ can be seen very clearly.141 Nigel Saul has argued, forinstance, that Richard II’s exalted concept of his own majesty— a distinguishing feature of his final years of ‘tyranny’ — wasfirst unveiled during his expedition to Ireland of 1394–5 in thesubmissions the king took from the Gaelic chiefs.142

III

‘PATTERNS OF DOMINANCE’143

The mention of ideology in the foregoing discussion of culturaltransmission 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. Handin hand with coercive inculcation of cultural norms went a legit-imizing ideology that, in the words of Edward Said, includesthe notion ‘that certain territories and people require and beseechdomination’.144 The ‘island mythologies’ that Rees Davies sobrilliantly deconstructed were by no means cast aside withthe opening of the Hundred Years War.145 Later, during thedual monarchy of Henry VI, a series of justifications for theLancastrian claim to the French crown was put into circulation.

(n. 139 cont.)

attacks on members of the Gaelic bardic classes, see Katharine Simms, ‘Bards andBarons: The Anglo-Irish Aristocracy and the Native Culture’, in Bartlett and MacKay(eds.), Medieval Frontier Societies, 184–5. For the role of historical mythology andMerlinic prophecy in sustaining anti-English sentiment in Wales, see Davies, Revoltof Owain Glyn Dwr, 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 alsoHopkins, ‘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.



In addition to esoteric propaganda in chronicle and verse,146 thetrappings of the dual monarchy were displayed in the pageantryand pomp of royal ceremonial, and disseminated orally in theproclamation of royal instruments (whose protocols includedthe compound royal style) and visually in seals, coinage and her-aldic insignia.147 Thus, for a few decades in the mid fifteenthcentury, the iconography of the dual monarchy was blazonedsimultaneously in Notre Dame de Paris and, more modestly, onthe font of St Patrick’s in Trim, county Meath.148

Propaganda was not, however, a sauce generale to be ladled oversubject territories to mask offensive provincial flavours. Empiresmust cater to local palates. A case in point is the playing of thenational card. When Michael de la Pole, chancellor of England,declared at the opening of parliament in November 1384 thatEngland was ‘entirely surrounded . . . by deadly enemies all inleague with one another’, he enumerated the threats as follows:‘the French who abound greatly in number, the Spanish whoabound greatly in galleys, the Flemish who [abound] with theirmany 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’, JlMedieval Hist., i (1975), esp. 373–4; Antonia Gransden, ‘The Uses Made of His-tory by the Kings of Medieval England’, in Culture et ideologie dans la genese de l’etatmoderne (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 correspondencewith 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 visualpropaganda, 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,‘Ideologie royale, ambitions princieres et rivalites politiques d’apres le temoignage dessceaux (France, 1380–1461)’, in La ‘France anglaise’ au Moyen Age, 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 andits 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 theopening 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.



capable of whipping up national fervour in its own interests; butthe drum had to find a different beat (after 1422, a specificallyValois one) to attract a following in ‘English France’.150 In de-ploying an accumulation of legitimizing myths, the crown oftenseemed to be at odds with itself. But confusion of argument was infact a sign of sophistication — a strategy dubbed ‘‘‘multivocal’’ or‘‘polyvalent’’ signaling’ in the jargon of political science.151 Evenwithin the stronghold of Normandy, Henry V was deliberatelycoy as to the basis for his title to the duchy.152 Likewise, whenHenry IV demanded the homage of Robert III, king of Scots,during his formidable but ineffective campaign in Scotland in1400, he justified his claims on the basis of the traditional his-torical precedents for English overlordship, supplemented byan appeal to the Scottish nobility that he himself was ‘half aScot’.153 Such propaganda could prove counterproductive inthat 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 generallyserved as the basis for a fragile collective consciousness amongEngland’s enemies. Fragile is perhaps the operative word:co-ordinated ‘inter-peripheral’ action was easily undermined bynational and regional chauvinism. So much is clear from theWelsh bard’s satire on the ‘filthy rump-eating Irishman’,155 or

150 See Jean-Philippe Genet, ‘Le Roi de France anglais et la nation francaise au XVe

siecle’, in Rainer Babel and Jean-Marie Moeglin (eds.), Identite regionale et consciencenationale en France et en Allemagne du Moyen Age a l’epoque moderne (Sigmaringen,1997), esp. 52–3.

151 Daniel H. Nexon and Thomas Wright, ‘What’s at Stake in the American EmpireDebate’, Amer. Polit. Science Rev., ci (2007), 254 (quotation), 264.

152 Allmand, Lancastrian Normandy, 122–6; Curry, ‘Lancastrian Normandy: TheJewel in the Crown?’, esp. 241–9. W. M. Ormrod indicates that the same was true ofEdward III: see his ‘England, Normandy and the Beginnings of the Hundred YearsWar, 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’, inChristopher Allmand (ed.), War, Government and Power in Late Medieval France(Liverpool, 2000); Steve Boardman, ‘Late Medieval Scotland and the Matter ofBritain’, in Edward J. Cowan and Richard J. Finlay (eds.), Scottish History: ThePower of the Past (Edinburgh, 2002). On the relative scarcity of officially spon-sored English polemics, see Ormrod, ‘Domestic Response to the Hundred YearsWar’, 97.

155 Iolo Goch: Poems, ed. Johnston, no. 37.



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 wasa fickle arrangement to be sure, but it was one sustained notonly by mutual self-interest but a common fund of Anglophobicimagery, such as the famous Anglicus caudatus — the tailedEnglishman.158

If England’s attempts to assert ideological hegemony over its‘enemies’ were negligible in their results, it may be because muchof the propaganda was intended primarily for the audiencewithin. To borrow the terminology of James Scott, the ‘publictranscript’ of domination may have operated ‘as a kind ofself-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 conclusioncertainly fits the ostentatious display of the twin coronations ofHenry VI at Westminster (1429) and Paris (1431), which came ata point when the English position in France needed ideologicalbuttressing to counter the coronation of Charles VII at Reims (17July 1429).160 As to ‘high moral purpose’, this is nowhere betterillustrated than in what John McKenna memorably characterizedas ‘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 Soldiersand 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 inPhilippe Contamine, ‘Froissart and Scotland’, in Grant G. Simpson (ed.), Scotlandand the Low Countries, 1124–1994 (East Linton, 1996).

157 Philippe Contamine, ‘Scottish Soldiers in France in the Second Half of theFifteenth Century: Mercenaries, Immigrants or Frenchmen in the Making?’, inGrant 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 theScottish version of the myth, see Ditchburn, Scotland and Europe, i, 276. Franco-Welshinteraction is best illustrated by the career of ‘Owen of Wales’ (d. 1378), for whom, seeA. 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 (NewHaven and London, 1990), 67. Note also his comment that ‘the self-dramatisation ofdomination 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 francaise au XVe siecle’, esp.48–53.



aggressive expansion on the Continent’.161 One factor that oper-ated to make internal propaganda necessary was the considerabledomestic opposition to war. If there was an ‘empire of Englishletters’ in late medieval England’s cultural sphere,162 it wasopposed by a counterculture of resistance to war and foreign ex-ploits.163 Opposition on a material level was commonplace, aswas the opinion that the war was too costly in terms of loss oflife.164 But a more radical vein of criticism emerged in the latefourteenth century, associated particularly with the Lollards, thatinveighed against any shedding of Christian blood.165

That the contemporary reportage should have been sensitiveto 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 muchof modern scholarship, on Ireland in particular.166 Studies ofEngland’s continental campaigns increasingly emphasize, how-ever, that scorched earth and other atrocities were not incidentalto the conduct of war, but were routinized and strategic.167

161 John W. McKenna, ‘How God Became an Englishman’, in DeLloyd J. Guth andJohn W. McKenna (eds.), Tudor Rule and Revolution: Essays for G. R. Elton from hisAmerican Friends (Cambridge, 1982), 30. For the trope of ‘peace’ as employed byEnglish royal propagandists, see Genet, ‘La Normandie vue par les historiens et lespolitiques anglais’, esp. 284–5; Nicolas Offenstadt, Faire la paix au Moyen Age: discourset 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 LateMiddle Ages (Minneapolis, 2003), 131.

163 John Barnie, War in Medieval English Society: Social Values in the Hundred YearsWar, 1337–99 (Ithaca, 1974), ch. 5. Cf. the literature of the early modern period,which was often hostile to empire-building: David Armitage, ‘Literature andEmpire’, in Nicholas Canny (ed.), The Oxford History of the British Empire, i, TheOrigins of Empire (Oxford, 1998).

164 See, for example, Chronicle of Adam Usk, ed. Given-Wilson, 271.165 Barnie, War in 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 modernperiod in Ireland: David Edwards, Padraig Lenihan and Clodagh Tait (eds.), Age ofAtrocity: Violence and Political Conflict in Early Modern Ireland (Dublin, 2007). For adiachronic study of empires that places at the centre of its analysis the experience of theoppressed, see Timothy H. Parsons, The Rule of Empires: Those Who Built Them, ThoseWho 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 empiremeant to those who were colonized, it becomes complicit in the history of empireitself ’. 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 theHundred Years’ War’, in Mark Grimsley and Clifford J. Rogers (eds.), Civilians in thePath of War (Lincoln, Nebr., 2002).



For those unprotected by chivalric courtesies (the mass of thepopulation), the suffering inflicted by England’s French cam-paigns was bitter.168 Even in Lancastrian Normandy, whereBedford’s effort to gain legitimacy for the English occupationdepended on ‘winning hearts and minds’, grand notions werebrushed aside when the occupation came under pressure. In1435, Sir John Fastolf advocated ‘a more sharpe and morecrulle werre’ that would involve the ‘brennyng and distruyngealle the lande as thei pas, bothe hous, corne, veignes, and alltreis that beren fruyte for mannys sustenaunce, and all bestailethat may not be dryven, to be distroide’.169 Ireland too witnessedits share of such tactics. A case in point is Richard II, whose Irish‘policy’ in the 1390s has been hailed as an ‘imaginative newframework for relations between the crown and the native Irish’and an ‘unprecedented opportunity to establish peace’ inIreland.170 Novel and imaginative Richard may have been; buthis was no bloodless conquest. The elaborate submissions thatRichard received from the lords of Gaelic Ireland were, asFroissart records, predicated on the application of overwhelmingmilitary force.171 Richard’s initial campaign was focused onLeinster, whose Gaelic king, Art Mor Mac Murchadha, was tobecome Richard’s bete noire. The province was heavily garrisonedand Richard’s forces harried the native non-combatant popula-tion. As one letter reports, the English captains ‘nobly made ittheir utmost endeavour to harass the above-said enemies . . . TheEarl M[arshal] . . . had many fine encounters with them, in oneof 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’, inKenneth Fowler (ed.), The Hundred Years War (London, 1971).

169 Letters and Papers Illustrative of the Wars of the English in France during the Reign ofHenry 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 JohnFastolf’s ‘‘Report’’ of 1435: A New Interpretation Reconsidered’, NottinghamMedieval 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 ofStrategy’, 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 Havenand London, 1997), 290; Dorothy Johnston, ‘Richard II’, in Sean Duffy (ed.),Medieval Ireland: An Encyclopedia (New York, 2005), 411.

171 Froissart’s Chronicles, ed. John Jolliffe (London, 1967), 369.



and burned . . . nine villages, and preyed cattle up to the numberof 8,000’.172

The promiscuous waging of war by ‘fire, sword and famine’173

against England’s many enemies invites us to contemplatewhether the ‘codes of conduct’ governing English use of violencevaried discernibly between the Celtic peripheries and France.174

A difference of attitude is certainly detectable at an elite level. Thesix leaders of the Mic Mhurchadha dynasty of Leinster who wereexecuted by English chief governors or allowed to die in captivityin the later fourteenth century175 seem to have been dispatchedwith fewer qualms than, say, Henry V’s unfortunate prisoners atAgincourt.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 thecrown to treat belligerent Gaelic chiefs as rebels, not enemy com-batants.177 But it would be misleading to generalize from thisabout the extent of violence in Ireland. Warfare on the Irish fron-tier was normally a low-key affair of cattle raids and feuds.178 Itmay well be that, as on the Anglo-Scottish border,179 the habitualabsence of English armies on the scale of those that crossed tofight 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. Micheal O 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, ‘TwoKings in Leinster’, 168. Cf. the treatment of Scottish ‘rebels’ in the latter stages ofEdward I’s attempted subjugation of Scotland: Michael Prestwich, ‘England andScotland 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’, inThomas 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’, JlMedieval Hist., xxviii (2002), esp. 287.



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 sumsexchanged in the French war.181 When Niall Garbh II ODomhnaill, king of Tır Conaill (modern Donegal), died in cap-tivity on Man in 1439 after much temporizing by the Englishgovernment, the lament composed for him is almost unseemlyin its jubilation that his ransom went unpaid:

The money promised for him — what a calamity — was a drain on thewealth of the Ulaidh . . .

Sorry are ye . . . that he died unransomed; your grief, O Foreigners, greatlylessens mine!182

Tır Conaill lay on the penumbra of English power in Ireland. Thelament shows how far ‘informal’ English influence could pene-trate as late as the mid fifteenth century. It also suggests that, forthe king’s ministers in Ireland, the attraction of Gaelic hostageswas not dissimilar to that of the crown’s continental prisoners ofwar: their value was strategic rather than pecuniary, to be assessedby the ‘political and personal leverage’ that accrued to the royalgovernment.183

If coercion underpinned English imperialist ambitions in thisperiod, 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 theones that have no need of words, but only of . . . complicitous

180 Robin Frame, ‘English Officials and Irish Chiefs in the Fourteenth Century’, inhis Ireland and Britain.

181 Michael K. Jones, ‘Ransom Brokerage in the Fifteenth Century’, in Contamine,Giry-Deloison and Keen (eds.), Guerre et societe en France, en Angleterre et en Bourgogne.

182 Aithdioghluim Dana: A Miscellany of Irish Bardic Poetry, ed. and trans. LambertMcKenna, no. 23, verses 23–4, quoted in Katharine Simms, ‘Niall Garbh II ODonnell, king of Tır Conaill, 1422–39’, Donegal Annual, xii (1977), 19.

183 Chris Given-Wilson and Francoise Beriac, ‘Edward III’s Prisoners of War: TheBattle of Poitiers and its Context’, Eng. Hist. Rev., cxvi (2001), 830. It was precisely theloss of such leverage that made Sir John Stanley (d. 1414) the object of fierce criticismwhen, as chief governor of Ireland (1389–91), he released from captivity Niall Oc ONeill, 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 asimilar 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 whicharmed combat was only one’.



silence’.185 This is a matter on which there is evidence of contem-porary concern. The harangue of a Scottish cleric in the 1360sthat his people were threatened with ‘destruction, eradication andtotal extermination’ was prompted not by fears of a Final Solutionto England’s Scottish problem, but rather by the (abortive)negotiations then under way for the transferral of the Scottishsuccession to one of Edward III’s sons.186 A similar process isdetectable in Richard II’s ‘magnanimous’ vision (also ultimatelyabortive) articulated during his Irish expedition of 1394–5 of anIreland in which indigenous and settler populations alike wouldbe his liege subjects. Whether or not the Gaelic chiefs were sincerein their submissions is, in a sense, beside the point.187 The policyof opening up the fountainhead of royal justice to the Gaelic Irishwas 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 earlyseventeenth 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 thatwe should interpret the celebrated story recounted by Froissart’sinformant on matters Irish, ‘Henry Chrystede’, who claimed tohave tutored the Gaelic chiefs in civility.189 As an ‘object lesson incolonial 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 Questionabout the Succession, 1364’, ed. A. A. M. Duncan, in Miscellany of the Scottish HistorySociety, xii (Scot. Hist. Soc., 5th ser., vii, Edinburgh, 1994), x50 (quotation atpp. 52–3). The document is placed in a wider context by Len Scales, ‘Bread,Cheese and Genocide: Imagining the Destruction of Peoples in Medieval WesternEurope’, History, xcii (2007), esp. 290.

187 Cf. Dorothy Johnston, ‘Richard II and the Submissions of Gaelic Ireland’, IrishHist. Studies, xxii (1980), where emphasis is placed on the voluntary nature of thesubmissions to Richard II, which (the author argues) provided the native chiefs with anopportunity to have their grievances redressed by the king, who was obliged to protectthem against the encroachment of members of the English colony. Her interpretationhas proved influential and is followed in Saul, Richard II, 282.

188 Nicholas Canny, ‘Introduction: Spenser and Reform in Ireland’, in PatriciaCoughlan (ed.), Spenser and Ireland: An Interdisciplinary Perspective (Cork, 1989);Hans S. Pawlisch, Sir John Davies and the Conquest of Ireland: A Study in LegalImperialism (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)


bettered. Froissart’s tale may be apocryphal,191 but Richard didindeed confer knighthood on some prominent Gaelic lords, not-ably Niall Oc O Neill192 and Turlough O Conchobhair Donn: thelatter had gilded spurs placed upon his heels while on board theking’s ship docked at Waterford awaiting Richard’s return toEngland in May 1395.193 The strategy underlying this grandspectacle was familiar to the king’s Plantagenet forebears.‘Knighthood’, Rees Davies has written, ‘was one route to socialassimilation and subjection’.194 But it is another Welshman whodescribes the consequences of assimilation best. In a spleneticletter of 1401, Owain Glyn Dwr informed Charles VI of Francethat ‘my nation, for many years now elapsed, has been oppressedby the fury of the barbarous Saxons; whence because they had thegovernment [regimen] over us, and indeed, on account of that factitself, it seemed reasonable with them to trample upon us’.195 It isthe strengthening clause (‘on account of that fact itself ’) thatcommands attention. Too often, scholars overplay the distinctionbetween ‘state-sponsored imperialism, which promoted militaryconquest, plantation, and active colonization’ on the one hand,and ‘reforming assimilationist policies’ on the other.196 Thesewere two edges of the same sword.197

* * *

(n. 190 cont.)

Sponsler, ‘The Captivity of Henry Chrystede: Froissart’s Chroniques, Ireland, andFourteenth-Century Nationalism’, in Kathy Lavezzo (ed.), Imagining a MedievalEnglish 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 Oc O Neill, who describes himself as ‘Vesterhumillimus 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 whenin 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 (Carmarthen, 1910), 83 (Latin text atp. 40).

196 The distinction appears, for instance, in Jane H. Ohlmeyer, ‘A Laboratory forEmpire? Early Modern Ireland and English Imperialism’, in Kenny (ed.), Ireland andthe 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 Virtueof a Viceroy’, Sydney Jl, xx (2002).



‘The tyranny, cruelty and usurpation of the English are notoriousto all the world as manifestly appears in their usurpation againstFrance, Scotland, Wales, Ireland and neighbouring lands’:198 socharged 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 occupationof Normandy had collapsed and Sir John Talbot was on the pointof making his last stand in Gascony.200 Nonetheless, the argu-ment from notoriety,201 coming at so late a date and unfettered byscholarly decorum, usefully reinforces two points at the coreof the present essay. The first is programmatic: like the monksof Dunfermline, we should seek to consider jointly the totality ofEngland’s enterprises, whether continental or archipelagic. Andin doing so in an exploratory fashion, this essay has suggested thatin matters of empire, as in other fields, the late Middle Ages wasnot a period of retrogression; rather, it was possessed of its ownimperialist dynamic. That is the second point. To return to themaritime metaphors of Rees Davies, England’s empire in the lateMiddle Ages may have been in retreat from its high-water mark(at least within Britain and Ireland), but neither in pretension norin 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 Bytracing 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 ofColdingham, ed. J. Raine (Surtees Soc., xii, London, 1841), 247.

199 The context for the remark is a long-running dispute over the priory ofColdingham, for which, see, inter alia, R. B. Dobson, ‘The Last English Monks onScottish Soil’, Scot. Hist. Rev., xlvi (1967). See also Walter Bower’s account of theColdingham 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, deleur droicte nature, veullent touzjours guerreer’’: Evidence for Painting in Paris andNormandy, 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 ‘Questionabout 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).



Consequently, it becomes possible to trace plausible continuitiesbetween England’s medieval and early modern phases ofempire-building, which have otherwise seemed ‘tenuous and ana-logical’.204 English imperialism in the sixteenth century foundmuch ideological nourishment, including its potent convictionin providence,205 in the glories of a recent past. The legend of‘Arthur as Emperor’ persisted and was invested with new globalsignificance,206 while the charisma of Edward III and Henry Vinspired the Tudors, most obviously in that dynasty’s quixotictilting at the French crown.207 With the late sixteenth centurycame the turn of Ireland. Here again the late Middle Agesproved 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 menwho experimented in this ‘laboratory’ of the early modernempire209 were versed in the foundational ethnographic texts ofGerald of Wales,210 and sought to learn from the trial and errorof 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 LiteratureXXV (Woodbridge, 2008).

207 D. A. L. Morgan, ‘The Political After-Life of Edward III: Apotheosis of aWarmonger’, Eng. Hist. Rev., cxii (1997), esp. 874–5; Clifford S. L. Davies, ‘ ‘‘Royde France et roy d’Angleterre’’: The English Claims to France, 1453–1558’, inJean-Marie Cauchies (ed.), L’Angleterre et les pays bourguignons: relations et comparaisons(XV e–XVI e s.) (Publication du Centre Europeen d’Etudes Bourguignonnes, xxxv,Neuchatel, 1995); Clifford S. L. Davies, ‘Henry VIII and Henry V: The Wars inFrance’, in John L. Watts (ed.), The End of the Middle Ages: England in the Fifteenthand Sixteenth Centuries (Stroud, 1998).

208 Cf. Kenny (ed.), Ireland and the British Empire, 6 (editor’s intro.), where heargues: ‘Asserting an unbroken continuity between the Norman colonization ofIreland 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); WillyMaley, Nation, State and Empire in English Renaissance Literature: Shakespeare to Milton(Basingstoke, 2003), esp. ch. 3.

211 A prime example being Sir John Davies in his A Discoverie of the True CausesWhy Ireland Was Never Entirely Subdued, nor Brought under Obedience of the Crowneof England, untill the Beginning of his Maiesties Happie Raigne (London, 1612,STC 6348).



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 theirdidactic purpose: Niall Ferguson, Empire: The Rise and Demise of the British WorldOrder 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 LiberalEmpire’. 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.

