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evidence discussed in chapters 8 , 9 and 10 , is whether this increasingly self-confident and inward-looking nationalism also bred forms of racial and ethnic hatred. Historians of the high and later Middle Ages in Europe have remarked the development of what R. I. Moore famously called a ‘persecuting society’: one in which a previous toleration of difference – whether race, ethnicity, class, gender, sexuality or disability – gave way to growing prejudice, discrimination and hostility. 2 It would be a gross mistake, of course, to suppose that people in England only
texts that depict his life show his roots in the cultural nexus of the Welsh borderlands, presented as a locus of elite military advancement. Guthlac spent a portion of his youth exiled among the British and as the leader of a multi-ethnic war band, and contemporary Welsh and CambroLatin texts also make clear that these were core characteristics of military life in the borderlands. The mixed culture of the Welsh borderlands is also evident in this chapter’s second significant argument: that even in this Anglo-Saxon saint’s life, the politics of land control are much
’s equal rancour towards the pagan Mercians, the Historia Ecclesiastica inadvertently preserves a substantial amount of information about the life of Penda of Mercia, whose entire reign over this borderlands kingdom was defined by consistent political and military unity with the Welsh rulers of Gwynedd and Powys against other Anglo-Saxon kingdoms. Penda’s life provides a window into the mixed Anglo-Welsh culture of the borderlands as a region which stands apart from Bede’s narrative of ethnic division between Anglo-Saxons and Britons. This chapter follows recent
the Princes’, as conceptualised by T. Jones Pierce. 1 The concept embraces the complex developments which occurred within Wales and takes account of the pre-eminence of the political affinities, dynasties and ruling elites within Wales, and the dynamic role of war. While British medieval historiography has developed interesting and new areas of historical enquiry, such as considerations of ethnicity, gender and masculinity, this book is necessary because it fills a significant gap in the historiography of medieval Wales – while women’s power has been one of the
markers of national and/or linguistic difference, such labels may be said, to some degree, to have carried ethnic connotations. It was very rare in late medieval England, however, for persons coming into and residing in the country to be identified by explicitly racial or ethno-religious markers that readily reveal the presence of groups from the Middle or Far East, North Africa or other areas of the known wider world. 1 In the sixteenth century we begin to find clearer references to the presence in England of various racial and religious
the shared values of a warrior elite across an ostensible Anglo/Welsh divide. These riddles, which link the ‘dark Welsh’ to agricultural labour through the cattle they herd, have long been understood to show the Welsh as slaves, reflecting negative Anglo/Welsh relations and Anglo-Saxon awareness of ethnic and social division. However, it makes greater sense to read the ‘captives’ in these riddles polysemically, as both cattle and humans, alluding to the fact that the Welsh were as often slave raiders as they were slaves in the Anglo-Saxon period. In this chapter I
of influence by Ine’s laws, even though they were still valid in the tenth century via their preservation in Alfred’s domboc and the Norðleoda laga.20 Ine’s laws are notorious for an ethnically tiered system of wergilds, in which Britons appear to be valued significantly less than their Anglo-Saxon counterparts in social rank. They are most often interpreted as casting the Britons in an ‘inferior social position’, creating a ‘sense of ethnic superiority on the part of the Saxons’ in which ‘the “otherness” of the Britons’ is emphasised ‘in order to manufacture a
kinship which were not solely based upon patrilineal primogeniture. If anything he seems to have deliberately downplayed the legitimate descent represented by the de Barris, who remain consequently obscure. 31 Gerald’s construction of his family identity with its awareness of mixed racial heritage, and thus ethnicity, added a further, integral element in the construction of family memory. Gerald’s roots lay in Deheubarth, and his portrayal of his homeland reveals an image of a dynamic, frontier society which was multiracial and multicultural. 32 Yet his Welsh heritage
’s attributes in reference to a discreet and stable territorial state. 8 In spite of this emergent isolationism, English notions of ethnicity did not, as so often in medieval and modern societies, result in some assertion of a ring-fenced racial purity. The cultural and political constructions of ethnic identity in the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms of the early Middle Ages may have subscribed quite forcefully to a notion of exclusive ethnogenesis, in which self-identification with continental Germanic ancestors became the means of differentiating the dominant
( 2007 )). These same port towns align with a high incidence of tower houses, although, as described in the preceding chapter, many of these survive as documentary references only. As Ireland's closest geographic neighbours, England, Scotland and Wales always exerted economic influence. This was particularly so in those parts of Ireland closest to these countries and depended on ethnic make-up, with those identifying as Anglo-Irish more likely than the Gaelic-Irish to trade with England rather than the continent. The degree of involvement was