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Chapter 5 is the second of the two chapters that focus on the ‘national’ identities of immigrants to later medieval England as evidenced by contemporary governmental records. It identifies five groups: the French (who were often identified and subdivided by region as the Bretons, the Normans, the Gascons, etc.); the ‘Dutch’ (a catch-all term to describe people from the Low Countries and the area covered by modern Germany); Scandinavians and Icelanders; the Italians; the Iberians; and the ‘Greeks’ (a term used to describe a variety of people from the eastern Mediterranean). The French and the ‘Dutch’ appeared in comparatively large numbers in England, while those from the Mediterranean, though much fewer in number, were often socially and economically prominent. The chapter considers the impact of the Hundred Years War on patterns of migration between France and England. It also discusses the consequences of Ottoman advance in the eastern Mediterranean as a contributing factor to the migration of ‘Greeks’ into England in the later fifteenth century.
Europeans in ancient North America while registering mixed emotions and difficult questions concerning race, national identity, and the deep past. Samuel Bellamy Beach’s Escalala has not been studied by other scholars of what Barnes calls ‘Viking America’, but it is the earliest, longest, and most bizarre poem in the subgenre. Beach, a Yale-educated lawyer, apparently wrote his one and only epic while serving a prison term in what was then called Michigan Territory. 7 The poem attempts to answer the then common claim that America had not, and could not, generate
does not impose a didactic framework on texts but imaginatively interweaves instructive threads of ideology within the narrative layout and borrows freely from secular texts and traditions. For the poet of the Scottish Legendary, the proclamation of Scottishness or a sense of national identity does not play a role. The compilation is not a political work. This is all the more remarkable given the politicisation we find elsewhere in Scottish romances. Barbour’s Bruce is the only romance-like text extant prior to the mid fifteenth century, and like its later followers
stability of the hagiographic tales and the overall emphasis on the narratives. Also, the many open questions about the Scottish compilation’s origin and context of use make it impossible to adequately measure its Scottishness against the notion of a superordinate Scottish identity, if we accept the existence of such a concept in the first place. Given the decentralised political situation in late medieval Scotland, with more than two thousand noble families and landowners controlling the land and its population, and a weak central government, ‘any national identity had
, location, and national identity, and the opportunities he provides for imitation.4 These are comprehended in his prologue, where he famously announces his choice, ‘[o]n englyssh tonge to make thys boke’.5 We know from his introduction that Mannyng intended his exempla to entertain as well as instruct and that he wanted to seduce his lay audience away from their accustomed narrative pleasures. He does this by appropriating the most attractive devices of vernacular storytelling, like memorable rhymes, supernatural obstacles, and titillating, slightly scandalous plots.6 He
face of strong royal power in eleventh-century England. England certainly had its medieval solidarities. She has recognised many different forms of collectivity, including what Rees Davies finds the ‘very serviceable notion’ of regnal solidarity, expressed, for example, in Magna Carta. The notion of regnal solidarity raises its own questions about identity, and especially about national identity, which have exercised Davies and Gillingham in other contexts. Gillingham returns to the issue here. He explores a particular instance of the notion of Englishness in the
, ‘Bread, cheese and genocide’. 8 Luu, ‘“Taking the bread out of our mouths”’; Goose, ‘“Xenophobia”’; Birchwood and Dimmock, ‘Popular xenophobia’. 9 Barnie, War in Medieval English Society ; Menache, The Vox Dei , pp. 190–209; Griffiths, ‘The island of England’, pp. 198–200. See also the nuanced comments of Ruddick, English Identity , pp. 130–1; Green, ‘National identities’; Green, Hundred Years War , pp. 230–47. 10 Two Italian Accounts of Tudor England , p. 37.
integration – including the use of marriage. 6 W. R. Jones, ‘England against the Celtic fringe: a study in cultural stereotypes’, Journal of World History , 13 (1971), 155 – 71; J. Gillingham, ‘The beginnings of English imperialism’, Journal of Historical Sociology , 5 (1992), 392 – 409; idem , The English in the Twelfth Century: Imperialism, National Identity and Political Values (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2000); idem , ‘The English invasion of Ireland’, in B. Bradshaw et al. (eds), Representing Ireland: Literature and the Origins of Conflict
translated in T. Turville-Petre, England the Nation. Language, Literature, and National Identity, 1290–1340 (Oxford, 1996), p. 18. 6 The Metrical Chronicle, lines, 7, 538–43, 7, 582–3, 7, 606–11; cited and translated in Turville-Petre, England, pp. 95–6. 7 T. Turville-Petre, ‘Politics and Poetry in the early Fourteenth Century: The Case of Robert of Manning’s Chronicle , Review of English Studies, NS 39 (1988), 17. It is only fair to point out, however, that since 1988 Thorlac Turville-Petre has modified his views, seeing Robert of Gloucester and Manning as
not have been a tool for forging an ideology even though they ultimately became a ‘potent symbol of Welsh national identity’ in the struggles between Edward I and Llywelyn ap Gruffudd. 84 Thus the political nature of the lawbooks has been at the forefront of scholars’ interpretations of them. If the lawbooks were crafted to symbolise Welsh national identity and were an exercise in the construction of a political vision for Wales, then the way that the royal household was portrayed, and within this the role of the queen, is part of that identity. There has been some