The Making of the British Isles

The State of Britain and Ireland, 1450-1660

Steven G. Ellis, Christopher Maginn

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9780582040038
• eBook ISBN: 9781317900498
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

The history of the British Isles is the story of four peoples linked together by a process of state building that was as much about far-sighted planning and vision as coincidence, accident and failure. It is a history of revolts and reversal, familial bonds and enmity, the study of which does much to explain the underlying tension between the nations of modern day Britain.

The Making of the British Islesrecounts the development of the nations of England, Scotland, Wales and Ireland from the time of the Anglo-French dual monarchy under Henry VI through the Wars of the Roses, the Reformation crisis, the reigns of Henry VIII and Elizabeth I, the Anglo-Scottish dynastic union, the British multiple monarchy and the Cromwellian Republic, ending with the acts of British Union and the Restoration of the Monarchy.

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GEOGRAPHY, SOCIETY AND GOVERNMENT

The structures of power

The British Isles in the later middle ages was not much more than a geographic entity, culturally divided and politically fragmented. The most powerful monarchy in the archipelago was the crown of England. To the north of England lay the smaller and less powerful kingdom of the Scots, while in a wide arc from the Scottish highlands and islands to south-west Ireland lay numerous but tiny Gaelic lordships which were in practice more or less independent. In 1450, the concept of a centralised British state could not have been foreseen. The traditional diplomatic alliances of the two major monarchies cut across ties based on geography and instead connected the islands firmly into an emerging west European state system which included the Low Countries and the Iberian peninsula (England's traditional allies) and France (which enjoyed close ties with Scotland). Thus, even the traditional English ambition of political unification under an English monarch was little more than a dream: no one would have imagined that within 150 years unification might be accomplished by a Scottish king. In practice, politics within the archipelago had since 1296 revolved around an Anglo-Scottish rivalry, precipitated initially by English attempts to conquer its northern neighbour. During the ensuing Scottish Wars of Independence these efforts were finally rebuffed. The last two strongholds of the English Pale established in southern Scotland in the fourteenth century were finally recaptured in 1460–1, so restoring the Anglo-Scottish border to the Tweed-Solway line agreed by the treaty of York between the two kingdoms in 1237. Roxburgh held out as an English enclave in Scotland until 1460, when it was razed to the ground, but Berwick-on-Tweed, formerly Scotland's chief port, was recovered by the English in 1482, this time permanently.

State formation: unions and conquests

In many ways the modern British state had its origins in the Anglo-Scottish dynastic union of 1603 and the later parliamentary union of 1707. The acquisition of territory by dynastic inheritance was a common aspect of Renaissance monarchy and the British multiple monarchy was a typical product of the dynastic marriages between Europe's ruling houses. The later medieval English monarchy however, was much more the product of a different process of territorial aggrandisement – by conquest. The kingdom of England was indeed a conquest lordship par excellence; and to the crown of England were later annexed Wales (divided between a western principality finally conquered in 1283, and the Welsh marches in the east), the lordship of Ireland (those parts conquered and brought under English rule from 1169 onwards), and some other smaller scraps of territory like Calais, the Isle of Man, and parts of England's northern borderland with Scotland. The English monarchy was, however, also inextricably linked to the politics of continental Europe. English armies of ‘bills and bows’ had established it as a major European power which, for much of the later middle ages, controlled large stretches of France. English kings indeed claimed to be kings of France and the territories they ruled there, principally the duchies of Normandy and Gascony were held of their crown of France. The constitutional status of the English king's continental possessions varied, but the most recent recension of English claims was contained in the treaty of Troyes (1420). In accordance with its terms, the infant Prince Henry succeeded as Henry VI to the crown of England on the death of his father, Henry V, in August 1422 and to the crown of France on the death of his maternal grandfather, Charles VI, two months later, thus creating an Anglo-French dual monarchy. Subsequently, Henry VI was crowned king of England at Westminster in 1429 and king of France in Paris in 1431.¹

This distinction within the late medieval English monarchy between the conquest lordships held of the English crown and the continental dynastic inheritance held of the French crown was a fundamental one, introducing a further distinction in terms of law and administration which was to have unforeseen consequences after 1603. Broadly, England itself was governed by a comparatively centralised and uniform administrative system, based on counties and sheriffs, with a uniform legal code, English common law, as modified by statute enacted in parliament, all supervised by the king's council and the central law courts at Westminster. The system had been extended to Ireland, Wales and the English far north. Outside the core region of Lowland England, however, the needs of defence ensured that the system was supplemented by a quasi-military system, based on feudal liberties and different systems of march law, and medieval settlement in these conquest territories had introduced English customs and culture alongside the indigenous customs of the surviving native populations. By contrast, the continental territories were more ‘core’ than ‘periphery’: each was governed by its own law and customs, in which English statutes and common law had no place and the English courts no jurisdiction. The years after Normandy's recovery in 1417 had witnessed substantial settlement from England in a bid to underpin the English occupation (or to vindicate the hereditary rights of English kings), but no attempt was made to ‘anglicise’ its administration or centralise royal authority in accordance with English practice. Paradoxically, the inhabitants of these territories were not even English subjects. In 1455, for instance, the Irish parliament enacted that merchants of Bordeaux – subjects of Henry VI as of his crown of France – who had fled to Ireland on the collapse of English Gascony should be made English subjects and pay customs ‘as Englishmen born in England or Ireland’.²

The territories ruled by English kings thus included a wide variety of customs, laws and peoples. It would be a mistake, however, to view this dual monarchy as the artificial creation of English imperialism and ‘dynastic roulette’, despite its sudden collapse. By the standards of the time it had at least as much in common as the later Anglo-Scottish union, let alone such artificial constructs as the unwieldy empire inherited by Charles V in the early sixteenth century. English kings, for instance, were – and long remained – far more interested in their rich and cultivated French inheritance than in the acquisition of remote and barren territories in the north-western periphery. As capital of this medieval monarchy, their chief city, London, was ideally situated – which is more than can be said of its later status as a capital of the British multiple monarchy. And French remained a familiar language of the English court, albeit spoken with an accent which Parisians found hard to understand. Legal proceedings and parliament rolls were still written in an archaic language known as law French. And if the dual monarchy had survived, it would in all probability have been forced to modernise along the same lines as continental monarchies – developing a standing army, a professional bureaucracy, and an effective system of taxation – in order to defend these valuable but vulnerable territories. Conceivably, royal officials and pamphleteers might then have defended the dual monarchy on grounds of common bonds – geographical proximity, language, Anglo-Norman feudalism – in much the same way as they were to do its British successor following Anglo-Scottish union in 1603.

The loss of the French territories – in the longer term, only the Channel Islands remained – was to relieve English kings of one set of problems associated with centralising monarchy. The status of English law and culture within the English territories now became unassailable. In the British Isles as a whole, however, the balance of law and culture was rather different. Most of England and also Scotland south of the Forth was a strongly feudalised region, where dialects of English and Scots were spoken and Anglo-Norman administrative structures and law were strongly entrenched. The archipelago was still predominantly Celtic-speaking – at least when measured in terms of geographical area, although not of population. Much of Ireland, Wales, and the Scottish highlands and Western Isles also had lineage- or clan-based societies and native legal systems which were much less influenced by feudalism. This ‘Celtic fringe’ was itself divided between an area of Gaelic supremacy, the Gaedhealtacht, in Ireland and Scotland and perhaps the Isle of Man; and a region of Brittonic language and custom which included most of Wales, a few adjacent districts of what is now England, and western Cornwall. In 1450 the balance between these regions of English and Celtic culture was finely poised: the anglophone areas were more heavily populated, but particularly in Ireland and Wales English had been in decline for at least a century.

In other respects, however, it was possible to glimpse the beginnings of a greater Britain. The great wave of Anglo-Norman expansion in the two centuries or so down to c. 1300 had seen a comparatively uniform system of administration, law and feudalism extended from England to gain a secure hold in parts of Ireland, Scotland and Wales. Until 1603 this area of ‘writ culture’ was divided politically between the English and Scottish monarchies, but the basic governmental structures for a centralised British state already existed and might serve as a focus for greater unity. And for all its political rivalries, the British Isles was by 1450 increasingly under the control of native dynasties. In 1468 the king of Scots secured possession of the Northern Isles from the king of Denmark and Norway, and also a favourable resolution of a 200-year-old dispute over payment of an annual tribute by the Scots for the Western Isles.³ Thus the boundaries of the kingdom of the Scots had, in theory at least, reached their fullest extent, and the last of those links which since the eighth century had tied the British Isles to the Scandinavian kingdoms was finally broken.

There remained, however, major obstacles to the creation of a united Britain. In the north-west Scottish sovereignty was only intermittently recognised by Clan Donald, whose lordship of the Isles was the most powerful of the Gaelic lordships, and in Ireland the independence of the Gaelic chiefs had long been a reality. The mid-fifteenth century was to mark the peak of the Gaelic Revival which had begun two centuries earlier. Profiting from Anglo-Scottish rivalry, the movement had witnessed a cultural resurgence and political revival within medieval Gaeldom's fragmented, clan-based society. In Scotland this manifested itself by the expansion of the aggressively Gaelic Clan Donald. Indeed the lordship of the Isles, the political manifestation of Clan Donald power, now spanned the North Channel, stretching from the earldom of Ross in the far north to the Glens of Antrim in the south-west. Much later, in 1617, when most of the lordship had since been absorbed into the Scottish kingdom, a celebrated court case was heard to decide to which kingdom Rathlin belonged, since this small island, now part of Ireland, had been part of the lordship. The lordship of the Isles thus offered a potential focus for political unity within the Gaedhealtacht, in the form of a third maritime kingdom in the north-west, building on Gaeldom's cultural unity in opposition to the area of foreign rule, the Galltacht.⁴ In Ireland the Gaelic revival likewise saw the political restoration of provincial overlordships by major chiefs like O'Neill and MacMurrough-Kavanagh and a recovery of land once settled by the English. For all its political fragmentation, moreover, the Gaelic world boasted an apparently uniform legal system, known as Brehon Law. Each chief appointed a professional judge (or brehon, from the Gaelic breitheamh) mainly to try cases affecting himself or matters of public concern. The brehon's decision was an arbitration to which, at least in theory, both parties had given prior consent. There was no criminal law as such, and what common law deemed capital offences were simple torts resolved by payment of compensation, a proportion of the fines going to the chief. The standard eraic (the blood-price for homicide) for a man of good family was 105 cows, half that if the killing were unintended. A thief was obliged to restore twice the value of the goods stolen, and the cost of tracking the stolen goods (the same amounts, interestingly, as on the Anglo-Scottish borders), plus a fine levied by the lord. In accordance with the principle of cinn comhfhocuis (also adopted by common law in its dealings with the Irishry and some English marchers), the corporate family or clan was responsible for the acts of its members, and so for any compensation. The brehons also preserved ancient law texts in connection with their professional activities: these could be consulted and quarried for legal maxims to be quoted in pleadings, but the fact was that this was little more than ‘antiquarian windowdressing’. Even in Ireland, late Gaelic law was in reality strongly influenced by Roman law and by common law concepts and institutions like the jury. In Scotland, moreover, aspects of Gaelic law had long been absorbed into Scots law, and there Brehon law was in any case heavily overlaid by feudalism.⁵

If the 1450s onwards marked a period of expansion for the Scottish monarchy, it also marked a nadir in English monarchical power. Paradoxically, the decisive campaigns for the future of the British Isles were in 1450 being fought on the fields of France, where the Hundred Years War (1337–1453) between England and France had entered its final phase. Although the wars along the Anglo-Scottish border and in Ireland were also going badly for the English, successive English kings were far more concerned about events across the English Channel than the relatively minor threat presented by the Scots and the Irish....

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• British Isles Series
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Series editor's preface (2001)
• Preface
• Introduction: the making of British history
• Acknowledgements
• Maps
• 1 Geography, society and government: the structures of power
• 2 Politics, war and diplomacy, 1450–1502
• 3 The revival of crown government
• 4 Machines built for the battlefield: Renaissance monarchy, 1502–60
• 5 The reformation crisis: the origins of a Protestant state
• 6 The Reformation crisis: reform in the parishes
• 7 State intervention and the problems of society
• 8 The emergence of a British state system, 1560–84
• 9 The testing-time of the protestant state system, 1584–1603
• 10 British multiple monarchy, 1603–37
• 11 The destruction and restoration of multiple monarchy, 1637–60
• Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index