CHAPTER 10
NATIONAL
IDENTITIES
ST
GEORGE AND LA MÈRE FRANCE
1449
Thus
King Charles of France … had by the Grace of God, and also by the skill and
wisdom of his knights and counsellors and soldiers of all ranks, regained his
duchy of Normandy which had been occupied … by his ancient enemies the English.
He had placed the whole province under his power, and made provision for new
government, and for police and military garrisons … all the while trusting in
the grace and mercy of the King of Kings, who wills that every man should have
his own, as it is written in a passage in Saint Matthew: ‘Render unto Caesar
the things which are Caesar’s; and unto God the things which are God’s’.
Because of this he resolved to march into Guyenne, which had been occupied by
the English since time immemorial … The nobles and people of that land have
always been rebellious against the crown of France … although it forms part of
the kingdom of France.[1]
Enguerrand
de Monstrelet, La Chronique
When
Charles VII invaded Normandy on 31 July 1449, he initiated the final act of the
Hundred Years War. In March he had been provided with an excellent excuse for
the invasion when the English-allied mercenary captain François de Surienne
(known as ‘L’Aragonais’) launched an attack on the Breton bastide (fortified
town) of Fougères, near the Norman border. Charles took the opportunity
willingly, but his main concern at this stage of the war was political not
military, not a concern for a bastide in Brittany but with the
promotion of Valois authority throughout the realm. The king’s main priority by
1449 was with his own people not with the English, and his chief aim to ensure
the loyalty of his greater nobles, especially the Princes of the Blood. In a
letter to the king of Castile and Leon dated 2 April 1451, Charles claimed he
had been forced to take action in 1449 because the English had ‘attempted by
certain means to withdraw and attribute to themselves the subjection and obedience
of our nephew of Brittany and of his lands and duchy, although, in truth, as is
well known, he is our man, vassal and subject’.[2] Such an act, far more
significant than the loss of a mere bastide, could not be
countenanced. The invasion of Normandy, therefore, offered the king a chance to
make a major demonstration of his power within his growing nation, and to offer
decisive evidence of his sovereignty. It was a happy coincidence that the
attack on Fougères also provided Charles with a reason to begin the series of
campaigns that would end the Hundred Years War and see English territorial
holdings in France reduced to nothing more than the port of Calais.
In
many ways it is surprising that hostilities had not resumed before 1449. After
the truce of Tours had been concluded on 28 May 1444, divisions became
increasingly obvious in the English camp as Henry VI actively (and sometimes
independently) pursued a peace policy with France. He agreed to the surrender
of the county of Maine in December 1445, although this did not take place until
1448. English attention thereafter focused on the defence of Normandy, and the
king even suggested that his claim to the French Crown might be traded for
sovereign control of the duchy. At the same time various initiatives were
undertaken to shore up the deteriorating English position. In particular,
support was sought within France; steps were taken to fill the political void
that had been left in December 1435, when Philippe the Good and Charles VII had
made peace and sealed the treaty of Arras. To this end the English courted
François I, duke of Brittany, and his brother, Gilles de Champtacé. Long after
the conclusion of the Blois–Montfort civil war in 1364, dukes of Brittany had
sought to avoid taking sides in the Hundred Years War, and François had
maintained a studied neutrality when possible. Gilles, however, had wider
ambitions, and he had spent the years 1432–34 in Henry VI’s household, becoming
close friends with the king.[3] When François paid
homage to Charles VII in March 1446, divisions, already evident, widened in the
ducal family, bringing about the arrest of Gilles in June – an act that
appalled Henry. The English attack on Fougères, therefore, formed part of an
extensive and intricate plan that aimed to pressurise Brittany into an alliance
with England, free Gilles and force François to distance himself politically
from Charles VII. In the event, it failed disastrously and gave Charles the
opportunity to stamp his authority and re-establish his ‘good lordship’ throughout
the realm.[4] Hence, the final
phase of the Hundred Years War, like the first, would be a struggle for
sovereignty – one to determine the extent and depth of the king of France’s
power within his realm.
Charles
VII secured Brittany’s allegiance swiftly and used the opportunity the English
attack afforded to continue his campaign: Normandy and Gascony capitulated in
short order in the face of bribery, political coercion and military force.
Normandy was overrun within a year by French armies advancing on three fronts:
Rouen surrendered on 10 November 1449; English reinforcements were crushed at
Formigny on 15 April 1450; the capture of Caen (24 June) and Cherbourg (12
August) completed the conquest. In the summer of the following year, Charles
sent an army south to Gascony under the command of Jean de Dunois (the
‘Bastard’ of Orléans, Charles d’Orléans’s half-brother): Bordeaux and Bayonne
submitted on 12 August and 20 August respectively. Henry VI’s response – a
paltry gesture of defiance – was, on 2 September 1452, to appoint John Talbot,
earl of Shrewsbury, his lieutenant in Gascony. The French had expected an
attack on Normandy and with their forces divided, on 23 October Talbot managed
to recapture Bordeaux with the aid of Gascons loyal to England, or at least
those preferring the distant government of London to a claustrophobic Valois
presence. Over the next two months he re-established English control in the
Bordelais, Médoc and Entre-deux-Mers. Talbot had, however, only delayed the
inevitable; despite receiving reinforcements he and his army were destroyed by
Jean Bureau’s artillery at the battle of Castillon (17 July 1453), which marked
the end of the Hundred Years War.[5]
Castillon
was proclaimed a national victory, achieved through a national effort, and
undoubtedly it proved to be a victory that enhanced an already flourishing
sense of national identity. For Enguerrand de Monstrelet (quoted above) Charles
VII triumphed over his ‘ancient enemies’ because he moulded the military
potential of France into a powerful fighting force with the help and advice of
wise representatives of the body politic. His conquests, underpinned in reality
by new political, administrative and governmental initiatives, were seen as
divinely inspired; they brought about the extension of Valois kingship within
France to a point approaching its ‘natural’ geographical frontiers. And yet
when Charles had turned, finally, to Gascony, it was not to liberate but to
(re)conquer a duchy ‘occupied by the English since time immemorial’, whose
people ‘have always been rebellious against the crown of France’. Monstrelet
gives a clear indication of the growth of a sense of French national identity
over the course of the Hundred Years War, while simultaneously recognising some
of the limitations of that identity. Even in 1453, many ‘Frenchmen’ had no wish
to be governed from Paris, and Gascon exiles continued to exercise influence at
the English court.[6]
The
Hundred Years War had, nonetheless, reshaped both France and England
substantially, and created or ‘imagined’ them into a new form – throughout the
kingdom Frenchmen and women could now start to imagine themselves as part of a
single community[7].
Indeed, France (herself) was now personified. The poet and political
writer Alain Chartier, driven from his native Bayeux and then from Paris by the
English invasion of 1417–20, coined the term la mère France (Mother
France) in 1422. In hisQuadrilogue invectifthat same maternal figure
entreats nobility, commons and clergy to unite in their efforts to save her
from invasion and civil war. In a similar fashion St George emerged in the
course of the struggle as England’s patron saint and the very image of the
nation. In 1351 it was said that ‘the English nation … call upon [St George],
as being their special patron, particularly in war’.[8] By the end of the war
men were willing to fight and die for those images and what they represented.
Dying for one’s country became redemptive. For some it was an almost
Christ-like sacrifice, for others service in the name and for the honour of the
nation brought with it a place in heaven, and glory and gratitude on earth.
Furthermore, because the war had reshaped the institutions of government – the
administrative and bureaucratic systems of the state – one could now serve the
nation in many ways, not only on the battlefield. St George and la mère
France also represented those who served the nation in Parliament or
the Estates General, in the Exchequer and the chambre des comptes.
These state institutions, in turn, helped determine the parameters of the
nation. Its borders – geographical, cultural, social and political – were laid
out much more clearly over the course of the war, and this process enshrined
the differences between England and France.
Writing
in various works in the aftermath of the fall of Bordeaux, Sir John Fortescue
(Chief Justice of the King’s Bench since 1442) emphasised what he saw as the
clear constitutional differences between England and France. In particular, he
concentrated on the superiority, as he saw it, of an English limited monarchy (dominum
politicum et regale) over French ‘absolute’ kingship (dominum regale).
English kings, unlike those in France, could not make laws or impose taxes
without the consent of Parliament, but Fortescue argued that their power was at
least the equal of their Valois counterparts because it was augmented with the
support of the community of the realm. Writing, in part, as a response to such
French polemicists as Jean de Montreuil and Jean Juvénal des Ursins, Fortescue
described French justice as tyrannical, an arbitrary tool in the king’s hands,
not subject to the proper English procedures. As a result, he believed that in
France, ‘as soon as a man is adjudged to be guilty according to the king’s
conscience, he is thrust into a sack without any form of trial and is thrown
into a river at night and drowned: a great many more men die in this way than
stand convicted by due process of law.’[9]
Whether
misguided, mischievous or mendacious, Fortescue’s impression of French law, a
defining criterion of French society, is instructive. The Hundred Years War
emphasised and created differences between the two nations that soon became
caricatured and exaggerated. By the end of the conflict both countries faced –
or claimed they faced – a threat not only to their political integrity but also
to a newly fashioned sense of national identity. Frenchmen and Englishmen,
collectively, thought of themselves differently, and as very different from
each other, due to the duration and nature of the Hundred Years War.
The
evidence for such a development is considerable: a welter of propaganda
proclaimed the justice of each side’s cause, some of it the product of an
intense intellectual debate between scholars and churchmen. Cultural slurs were
exchanged with increasing frequency and vehemence; national stereotypes
hardened. Over the previous hundred years the English had killed more
Christians than any other people, according to Jean de Montreuil in about 1411.
They wanted nothing more than to destroy the kingdom for which they had only
abhorrence and hatred.[10] Both sides employed
cartography to represent their national borders; patron saints embodied the
nation on earth (as in heaven); and the church(es) disseminated the message of
the state to the people. The appeal to serve the nation and to act for the
common good became familiar refrains. The lower ranks of society began to
invest in war personally, as taxpayers and as soldiers in national service.[11] The population at
large became investors in a national enterprise.
Because
of this, in 1450 ‘men [in England] began to protest about the sudden and
complete loss of the king’s lands in France’.[12] This politicisation
resulted from the great effort both sides expended to justify new and near
permanent levels of taxation. Those who paid their taxes expected their money
to be used wisely and to good effect. In the phase of the war from 1340 to
1360, English military success had been proclaimed throughout the country,
which ensured that Edward III’s aspirations became those of the English
political ‘class’ as a whole, and this group grew in size and social diversity
as a consequence of the conflict and the national mobilisation of men and
resources. The English population became accustomed to military success in this
period, which meant that later failures could not easily be explained.
Meanwhile in France similar processes were at work, galvanised not by victory
but by devastation and occupation. After a time the sheer length of the
conflict also began to influence attitudes; mutual antipathy became the normal
state of affairs. And a range of other factors also played their part: the
growth of chivalric and military orders, the central role of the monarchy and
the importance of language, especially the increasing use of the vernacular,
contributed a great deal to new and enhanced concepts of nationhood.
Therefore
the Hundred Years War intensified and redefined a sense of national identity in
England and France, but it did not create those identities ex nihilo.
A French identity had been tied closely to the growth of royal authority over a
long period, alongside a developing belief in the people’s status as members of
God’s most favoured nation. The reality and theory of Capetian power had
extended in breadth and depth from, perhaps, the reign of Louis VI, ‘the Fat’
(1108–37), whose deeds and dynasty were praised and commemorated by successive
authors in the abbey of Saint-Denis from the time of Abbot Suger (c.1081–1151)
onwards. Saint-Denis was the wellspring for the mythology of French royal
power: home to the coronation regalia, the place in which the Capetians and
their Valois successors were furnished with a historiographical foundation,
polemical support and, most importantly, a sacral lustre. This spiritual celebrity,
in turn, was conferred upon the members of the French nation – the most
Christian people of the most Christian king. In this way the French came to
view themselves as a Chosen People – a claim ‘confirmed’ by a series of
miraculous events over long years including the conquests of Philippe II,
‘Augustus’ (r.1180–1223), and the extraordinary victory at Bouvines in–1214
that ended the Angevin-Flanders war. The sanctification of Louis IX at the
start of the fourteenth century only served to strengthen this ‘mystique of
nationhood that was tied to the royal blood of the kings’.[13]
In
England a conception of national identity was also bound up with royal status,
although not so tightly. The extension and retraction of English authority
within the British Isles and in France under the Norman, Angevin and
Plantagenet kings had shaped the conceptual as well as the geographical borders
of the nation, and hence its identity. This process may be traced through a
series of phases and events. Prior to the outbreak of the Hundred Years War,
the last major attempt to extend English authority in the British Isles had
been in Edward I’s reign when he sought to subdue his neighbours in Wales and
Scotland. Edward’s policies served to exaggerate the ‘national’ differences (political,
cultural, legal and linguistic) that already existed between the countries of
the British Isles and drove the Scots into the Auld Alliance (1295), which
encouraged the outbreak of the Anglo-French war. Before this, the treaty of
Paris (1259) had done much to redefine relations between England and France: it
forced ‘Englishmen’ (some of whom might not have been resident in England) to
declare their political allegiances more exactly, thus giving a new precision
to a sense of national identity. The treaty was a confirmation that the bulk of
the Angevin Empire had been lost, although this had been evident to many since
Normandy fell to Philippe Augustus in 1204. In turn, the loss of French lands
led to the construction of a new ‘English’ identity, even though a sense of
‘Englishness’, albeit of a different sort, can be discerned far earlier than
this. It had been engendered by various expansionist projects in the British
Isles and Ireland in the twelfth century, and these built upon a nascent, although
not national, identity with roots in the Norman Conquest of 1066 and, indeed,
reaching back to King Alfred’s Wessex in the ninth century.[14]
A
sense of national identity, therefore, was one shaped in part or perhaps
chiefly through conflict with England’s neighbours in the British Isles and
with France. Prior to the outbreak of the Hundred Years War, although in the
midst of Anglo-French hostilities, Parliament had heard accusations that the
French were seeking to destroy both the English nation and the English
language. First claimed by Edward I in 1295, the allegation was reiterated in
1344, 1346, 1376 and 1388. As the Parliament rolls of June 1344 put it, the
king of France ‘firmly intends, as our lord the king and his council fully
comprehend, to destroy the English language and to occupy the land of England’.[15] French invasion
plans discovered at Caen in 1346 suggested an intention ‘to destroy and ruin
the whole English nation and language’.[16]
Why a
threat to a language commonly used only by a minority of the ruling elite at
this time should prove so troubling is intriguing. Yet an association between
identity, nation and language strengthened over the course of the later Middle
Ages, not only in England and France but throughout Europe, much of which saw ‘a
growing intolerance of language diversity’.[17] During the Hundred
Years War the increasing use of the vernacular in England emphasised and was
used to express a growing cultural divide with France. Consequently, at the
start of the fourteenth century the English aristocracy had been predominantly
francophone (and often culturally francophile); however, by the end of the
Hundred Years War its members spoke mainly English. This had begun before the
outbreak of hostilities in 1337, but the war greatly accelerated the process.[18]
Language,
therefore, long recognised as a key ethnic determinant, became an increasingly
politicised subject (and object) in the later Middle Ages: a cause for conflict
and a means by which conflict was described and furthered. At almost exactly
the same time as Edward I addressed the English Parliament on the matter of the
threat to the nation’s political and cultural integrity, Philippe IV’s
officials claimed that individuals in English Gascony could be killed simply
for speaking the lingua Gallica (northern/Parisian French,
the langue d’oeil). In England, as animosity towards France grew,
the vernacular (the ‘mother tongue’) emerged as the language of administration,
popular literature, history and political propaganda, and its use ‘was a
precondition of the process of deepening and consolidating the sense of
national identity by harnessing the emotive energy of the association between
language and nationalism’.[19] This process was
enshrined in legislation: in 1362 the Statute of Pleading established English
as the language to be used in debate in English royal and seigneurial courts
(with some minor exceptions). After 1399 the Lancastrian dynasty made extensive
use of written English in an attempt to win patriotic support for its claim to the
throne. Henry IV and his successors followed the example set by the Capetian
and Valois kings who had worked in such close alliance with the historians and
propagandists of the abbey of Saint-Denis.[20] Consequently, the
first half of the fifteenth century saw a rapid rise in the number of
English-language chronicles as the Lancastrians attempted to appropriate
vernacular historiography for their own ends.[21]
During
the Council of Constance language was again emphasised as the prime
characteristic of a nation. In 1417 the English ambassador, Thomas Polton,
noted:
Whether
a nation be understood as a race, relationship, and habit of unity, separate
from others, or as a difference of language, which by divine and human
law is the greatest and most authentic mark of a nation and the essence of it [my
emphasis] … or whether it be understood, as it should be, as an equality of
territory with, for instance, the Gallic nation – in all these respects the
renowned nation of England or Britain is one of the four or five nations that
compose the papal obedience.[22]
Polton’s
chief concern at the council was to sustain England’s claim to be one of the
‘nations’ (nationes) of the papal obedience, alongside France, Spain,
Germany and Italy. These groupings were not nations in a modern sense but
geographical collectives brought together for the purposes of ecclesiastical
organisation. In order to make his claim, Polton equated England (natio
Anglicana) with Britain (an ecclesiastical grouping comprising England,
Ireland, Wales and Scotland), despite the fact that few of those additional
peoples paid allegiance, willingly at least, to Henry V. The particular
circumstances of the Council of Constance and the form of Polton’s argument are
a reminder that definitions of the ‘nation’ (in Latin variously described
as gens, patria or natio) were not fixed in the
late Middle Ages.[23] Indeed, without the
institutional features of the modern nation state – capitalism, printing,
industrialisation, mass education, and so on – it has been argued that France
and England should not be considered as nations in this period. Or, if France
and England were nations by the end of the Hundred Years War, they were not
necessarily so in quite the same sense as the politico-cultural ‘units’ that
followed.[24]
While
such matters of precise definition are important, there is no question that the
people of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries were subjected to intense
political, social and cultural pressures which both bound them together (as
nations), yet also, at various times, placed enormous pressures on those same
nations, threatening to fracture them. The Hundred Years War dismembered both
countries militarily, governmentally, culturally and/or through disputes
between members of the body politic. France was rent apart not only by English
attacks, occupation and civil war, but by the Capetian-Valois apanage policy.
In the apanages – areas partially divested of sovereign
authority and given over to one of the Princes of the Blood – an already potent
sense of regional identity was often exaggerated to the extent that it could
supersede or undermine national loyalties. Edward III recognised and attempted
to exploit this in the early stages of the war through what has been described
as his ‘provincial strategy’, and the Lancastrian kings sought to manipulate
the divisions of the Armagnac-Burgundian civil war in a similar fashion[25]. Such local
loyalties and divisions inhibited the development of not only a sense of
national identity, but also of the construction of some of the institutions of
government that might provide a focus for such an identity and a means of
communicating it throughout the realm. This is particularly evident in the
regional Estates whose independence prevented governmental centralisation and
Valois exploitation of France’s full military and financial resources until
late in the war.[26]
This
sort of regional particularism was exemplified by and identified with such
ambitious princes as Charles of Navarre, Gaston Fébus of Foix, Jean de Montfort
of Brittany and successive dukes of Burgundy. The Hundred Years War offered
these men the opportunity to assert their independence and that of their
principalities within France. Such political impediments to the construction of
a national identity were strengthened by distinct linguistic and cultural
characteristics in certain regions[27]. Political and
cultural divisions of this sort could and did divide loyalties to a central
authority and so inhibited the development of a sense of national identity,
especially one primarily dependent on the monarch. Nonetheless, although the
war allowed certain principalities to exploit French royal weakness, over a
period of time it also provided French kings with some of the legal,
administrative and military mechanisms to limit that same regional independence
and eventually restore France to its ‘natural’ territorial borders. In the
seventh century, Isidore of Seville (c.560–636) had defined Gaul as a country
bounded by the Alps and the Pyrenees, the (Atlantic) ocean and the Rhine.[28] In part, the Hundred
Years War was fought to justify the Capetian/Valois claim to sovereignty over
that same area in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries.
Conflicting
regional identities and concerns regarding the legitimacy of the Valois
succession ensured that royal claims to overlordship throughout the ‘natural’
geographic area of France were often questioned. After the death in 1328 of the
last Capetian monarch, Charles IV, the Valois kings fought a constant battle to
justify their claim to be the legitimate rulers of a unified France. They
claimed to wield imperial power within the kingdom and argued that this
descended from their Capetian and Carolingian forebears. They declared that
their sovereign writ bound everyone within the realm and that there was nowhere
their authority did not hold. Royal authority was, therefore, bound up with a
concept of the inviolability of the French nation. Because of this, English
counter-claims to territories within France such as Aquitaine and Normandy
were, in some ways, more damaging than the Plantagenet demand for the throne of
France itself. If the nation could be divided, then the myth of universal
Capetian/Carolingian sovereignty within France could be discredited. If the
theoretical foundations of Valois power were undermined, then the very concept
of France could be invalidated. In this sense the French fought the Hundred
Years War to substantiate a mythic concept of nationhood.[29]
The
expansion and contraction of Capetian/Valois authority within France over a
long period prior to and during the Hundred Years War is in striking contrast
to the situation in England. There the geographical frontiers of the country
changed very little throughout the medieval period, which accounts for certain
differences in the process of nation-building between the two countries.[30] This is not to
suggest, however, that England was politically or culturally homogeneous. Its
diversity can be seen in the independent attitudes, distinctive political
priorities and cultural differences of the English palatinates, marches, and in
some counties: the political map of England (and certainly of the British
Isles) revealed a great many regional variations.[31] The Hundred Years
War, however, helped redraw that map, if not completely: England’s internal
frontiers became less apparent, although some political and cultural divisions
remained. The long conflict saw the development of systems of permanent
taxation, of a defined role for Parliament and of increasing control by central
authorities over the localities as the so-called ‘war state’ emerged.[32] The demands of the
Hundred Years War ensured that in England, as in France, albeit at different
times and to varying extents, central authorities began to exploit national
resources more fully. Regional identities diminished in the face of this
assault and were replaced with something bearing a more national stamp. The
gradual reincorporation of various apanages under the direct
rule of the ‘Most Christian King of France’ and the assimilation of the duchy
of Lancaster into the English royal demesne after Richard II’s deposition in
1399 were the most obvious but by no means the only examples of this process.
Clearly,
however, although the Hundred Years War encouraged a general process of
political and cultural homogenisation, the conflict also subjected it to
occasional, violent and potentially fatal punctuations. England and France
suffered regular political divisions, the most spectacular of which led to
depositions and civil wars. Since failures of what might, anachronistically, be
described as ‘foreign policy’ often encouraged such divisions, the war should
not be seen as a force that always engendered a sense of national
consciousness, or national unity. Indeed, the conflict may be seen as a struggle
brought on by differing interpretations of what constituted ‘foreign policy’,
given the corporate or federal nature of the English king’s domains, with
claims to Wales, Scotland, Ireland, France (especially Aquitaine and Normandy),
and the Channel Islands.
The
outbreak of the Hundred Years War shifted England’s political priorities and
relations with those same ‘nations’ in the British Isles and Ireland: it ended
an intense phase of Anglicisation that had begun following England’s own
colonisation (‘Normanisation’) after 1066. In the intervening years England
claimed political sovereignty over the entirety of the British Isles and
demanded, albeit unsuccessfully, the imposition of English legal, social and
cultural norms throughout that area. Celtic laws andpractices were denigrated;
indeed, various Irish practices were described, explicitly, as degenerate by
the Dublin parliament of 1297. In 1294 Peter Langtoft wrote: ‘May Wales be
accursed of God and of St Simon for it has always been full of treason. May Scotland
be accursed of the mother of God! And may Wales be sunk down deep to the Devil.
In neither of them was any truth.’[33] Such attitudes
in Edward I’s reign reflect an intense, unmatched and perhaps unrepresentative
period of English colonial activity. Nonetheless, such activity did a great
deal to shape Anglo-Celtic relations in the period just prior to the outbreak
of the Hundred Years War. It also led to some of the most famous expressions of
nationhood in Britain and Ireland in the Middle Ages: the Remonstrance of the
Irish Princes (1317) and, in Scotland, the Declaration of Arbroath (1320),
which stated ‘for as long as but a hundred of us remain alive, never will we on
any conditions be brought under English rule. It is in truth not for glory, nor
riches, nor honours that we are fighting, but for freedom – for that alone,
which no honest man gives up but with life itself.’[34]
Despite
the fact that Scotland, Ireland and Wales were or were considered potential
staging grounds for a French invasion, with the outbreak of war in 1337 English
attention for the most part turned to France.[35] However, as the
conflict progressed, although resources were employed throughout the British
Isles only intermittently to try and enforce English power (and political and
social norms), attitudes hardened to England’s Celtic neighbours. Given a
growing sense of national identity this is not surprising: ‘the very
Englishness of the [French] enterprise made [English] accommodations with Welsh
and Irish society more difficult than they might otherwise have been’.[36]
The
Hundred Years War, therefore, began with a sense of national and cultural
superiority already evident on both sides of the Channel. This posed certain
problems given the nature of English war aims in France. How could an English
king seek to shape a distinctly francophobe national identity at home in order
to gain the necessary resources to conquer the kingdom of France, while at the
same time proclaiming he would allow France, once conquered, to be ruled
according to those same customs that he described at home as so threatening and
inferior? When Edward III first claimed the French throne in 1340 he swore to
maintain ‘the good laws and customs which existed at the time of [his]
progenitor, St Louis, king of France’[37]. Edward’s successors
maintained the same policy and this required a certain political legerdemain:
to their English subjects they needed to appear increasingly English as the war
progressed; to their potential French subjects they could not appear distinctly
foreign. Such concerns became particularly acute during the negotiations
leading to the treaty of Troyes in 1420 when both sides demanded that the union
of the Crowns should not lead to a closer political union that might compromise
either nation’s cultural integrity.[38]
Such
concerns over national integrity, both political and cultural, were fought out
and debated throughout the war in order to determine what, precisely,
constituted the foreign or the alien. Given the context, it is not surprising
that, in many cases, the chief criterion determining an individual’s identity
was political loyalty. Questions of allegiance lay at the heart of the Hundred
Years War: uncertainties regarding political affiliations, loyalties and
responsibilities had encouraged the increasingly febrile relationship between
the kings of England and France since the treaty of Paris (1259), if not
before. Hostilities developed because political allegiance and duty were
defined differently, while expectations of service and responsibilities varied
widely within and between English and French dominions. The conflict was fought
over these differences, particularly in areas such as Normandy, Gascony and
Burgundy. Because of the centrality of this issue the war may be seen as
comprised of conflicting attempts to reforge a common sense of allegiance. This
struggle to define and enforce political loyalty contributed to a sense of
national identity in two ways: first, a unitary kingship – the typical focus of
allegiance – formed a key element in establishing a nation and a sense of
national identity; and, second, the intellectual debate bound up with the war
and concerning the justice of a national cause revolved around the sovereign
rights of individual monarchs.[39]
This
route to political clarity was not a simple one. Over the duration of the
conflict, kings might fracture national identities as effectively as fashion
them. In England the limitations of Richard II and Henry VI brought about
revolt and deposition, while Henry IV faced armed rebellions in England and
Wales. In France military indignities were heaped on Philippe VI and Jean II,
leading to the latter’s capture at Poitiers in 1356 and his long English
captivity. Charles VI’s madness brought about a different form of ‘absence’,
but both absences emphasised weakness at the centre rather than a strong
foundation on which a national identity might stand. Consequently, even though
kings were an important factor in forming national identities, during the
Hundred Years War the stark contrasts between the strength and fragility of
certain monarchs, accentuated by political divisions in both France and
England, mean they were rarely a stable factor.
In
spite of this, and despite the fact that individual kings failed their people,
during the period of the Hundred Years War the realm and the nation grew
increasingly synonymous. Indeed, there seems little doubt that at least by the
fifteenth century the defence of royal rights – the primary cause of the
Hundred Years War – had become equated with the defence of the nation, and not
only the defence of territorial boundaries but also the defence of language,
customs and a way of life. The emergence of a national sentiment was,
therefore, cemented not always by individual kings but often by the institution
of monarchy.[40] Loyalty
to the nation meant loyalty to the monarchy, which, in England, allowed one to
remove a failing king and not break faith with the nation. In France,
conditions differed somewhat: the reigning monarch became explicitly associated
with the identity of the nation as the head of the body politic, and the
antiquity and sacral character of the monarchy did much to protect individual
kings. The importance of good government and the well-being of the nation were,
however, recognised at various times as distinct from the well-being of the
monarch. As in England, the connection between a (French) national identity and
the ‘common good’ could be used to attack the Crown. Even after the vindication
of the Valois monarchy brought by the final victory at Castillon in July 1453,
the French Crown was not entirely secure, and it is noteworthy that its first
major challenge came in the form of the suggestively titled League of the
Public Weal (1465).[41]
Nonetheless,
when a French victory at Castillon brought the end of the war, however
uncertain contemporaries were of the fact, it provided Valois propagandists
with tremendous ammunition: it indicated divine approval for the dynasty and
confirmed Charles VII’s sovereignty over (much of) France. At Castillon, the
Valois made real the ‘myth’ of French kingship. Charles VII became the true
heir of the Capetians and Carolingians – the successor to Charlemagne and
‘emperor in his kingdom’. In commemoration the king had a special medal struck.
It bore the legend ‘When I was made, everyone in France, without dispute,
obeyed the prudent king, loved by God’ – but it also carried the unfortunate
coda, ‘except at Calais, which is a strong place’[42].
Such
commemoration reflected and helped further construct a sense of national
identity despite the minor embarrassment of English Calais, some Gascon
resistance, Breton recalcitrance and continuing Burgundian aggression. The war
itself, its memory and commemoration, became bound up with rituals of national
identification and formed a key element in drawing individuals together and
giving them a collective identity.[43] Memorials to the war
(if not war memorials in a modern sense) were constructed throughout and after
the conflict in France and England: in the east window at Gloucester Cathedral
(commemorating the English victory at Crécy); through the membership of the
Company of the Star and Order of the Garter; in tomb effigies and monumental
brasses; and through the invocation of Saints Michael and George, those slayers
of the dragons of England and France respectively.
As the
conflict unfolded, such memorials and icons became increasingly associated with
the concept of sacrifice for the nation. In France, especially after defeat at
Agincourt in 1415, it seems to have become important for a death in battle to
be recorded on tombs or in epitaphs. This was certainly true by the end of the
war, as the epitaph of Jean de Bueil (1477) shows:
Pray
for me, good people,
For
the lord of Bueil killed in the great war
Fighting
for France and for you.[44]
In
tone and character it is reminiscent of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century
war memorials that drew on Horace’s maxim Dulce et decorum est pro
patria mori. This was familiar during the period of the Hundred Years War,
when a growing number of treatises and military orders urged knights to sell
their lives dearly on the battlefield. Although authors such as Honoré Bonet
suggested one might imperil one’s soul dying in a war against Christians,[45] others, including
Geoffrey de Charny, argued that death should hold no fear for a soldier who
died in defence of the common good:
[W]hen
lords have wars … their men can and should fight for them and move confidently
and bravely into battle for such causes, for if one performs well there, one is
honoured in life, and if one dies there, one’s soul is saved, if other sins do
not stand in the way of this.[46]
As
Charny strove to galvanise French chivalry in the 1350s, so Thomas Walsingham
despaired of England’s military failures in the 1380s. His language, too, is
indicative of the growth of a sense of national identity, of the need to serve
the nation, and reveals his belief that those unwilling to place their lives at
her disposal were cowards:
Heavens
above! The land which once produced and gave birth to men that demanded the
respect of all men … now spewed out men lacking manly courage, who were a
laughing stock to the enemy … For no one or hardly anyone, was found in the
land who would dedicate himself to the service of the state, who would use his
energies for the state’s citizens[47].
It is
not surprising in this context of national sacrifice that French and English
polemicists adopted certain aspects of crusade ideology leading to the
emergence of a sort of ‘sanctified patriotism’[48]. Crusading rhetoric
began to be employed regularly in national service. The promise of a crusade
had been used repeatedly from the early 1330s as both ‘carrot and stick’ to try
and maintain or secure peace. The enemy’s failure to agree terms for a
settlement was often promoted as a grotesque unwillingness to recognise the
need for a further campaign against the Turk. With the Great Schism and the
devastating defeat at Nicopolis (1396) the prospect of successful international
cooperation became increasingly difficult, despite the extra-ordinarily
diligent efforts of Philippe de Mézières and others. Instead, the Hundred Years
War was recast: it acquired some of the connotations of a crusade, and evolved
from a dynastic struggle into one between chosen peoples[49]. Aspects of this
were already evident and may be seen in Louis I d’Anjou’s Apocalypse tapestries
(c. 1373), which reflect the disasters of war and endemic plague. They provide
a clear (and literal) example of the process by which the enemy was demonised.
The tapestries portray the English, represented by Edward III and his sons, as
monstrous and demonic, riding from the mouth of hell in a riot of devastation
across France, while pitying saints can only look on in anguish. But, like the
forces of the Apocalypse, they would be defeated eventually and with God’s help[50]. Joan of Arc’s
activities and her own ‘Letter to the English’ (22 March 1429) should also be
read in this same ‘crusading’ light. She claimed to have ‘come from God to
reclaim the blood royal’; to ‘have been sent by God, the King of Heaven, to
drive [the English] out of France’; and to assure the duke of Bedford and earl
of Suffolk, to whom the letter was addressed, that they would ‘never hold the
kingdom of France from God, the King of Heaven, son of St Mary; for King Charles
will hold it, because God, the King of Heaven, wishes it.’[51]
Later,
certain French polemicists would depict Joan as a godsend – again, both
literally and metaphorically. During her lifetime, matters were not so clear –
certainly not for the people of Paris, which she assaulted in 1429. Even by the
conclusion of the nullification trial in 1456 the reputation of this
(soon-to-be) national icon remained uncertain. This highlights the regional
divisions and divided loyalties, as well as the sense of sheer war-weariness
that pertained at various times in the course of the struggle and worked
against the construction of a clear, encompassing national identity. For the
Parisian Bourgeois, for example, at several points in his journal, any sort of
peace, any cessation of ‘this war, accursed of God’ was preferable to the
continuance of a national struggle, whether sanctified or not.[52] But as the war
progressed and especially in its later stages, a consensus seems to have
emerged that dying for one’s country was a sacrifice to be accepted willingly
if the nation was at risk of occupation or annihilation, since such a
sacrifice, like one made in a crusade, guaranteed salvation. In France this
became particularly evident after 1415 and the defeat at Agincourt, la
maudite journée (the accursed day). It is no coincidence that around
this time a number of French works began to propound the concept that the very
identification of the nation, the name ‘France’, derived from franc –
meaning free from tribute. Hence to be French was to be free and independent of
any outside influence.[53]
War
between England and France led to a growing sense of nationhood in both
countries. The struggle was chiefly a political one but it was also galvanised
by a series of socio-political and cultural changes that affected much of
Europe in the later Middle Ages. Trans-national institutions began to weaken;
the role of the Church changed and papal authority declined. Cultural ties
frayed as Latin lost its sway. Their replacements were independent and
vernacular. Consequently, the Hundred Years War shaped and, as it concluded,
entrenched new conceptions of national identity on both sides of the Channel.[54] For England, it was
an identity shaped by the shifting tensions between its ‘British’ and ‘French’
ambitions and orientations. In France the growth of royal power in theory and
actuality formed the central core in an identity which, through the war and
subsequently, came to encompass the ‘natural’ extent of the country.
Over
the course of the war a theory of national identity was proposed vigorously
from court and capital in prose, in verse, in material form, in processions and
sermons. In 1370 William of Wykeham wrote to archdeacons in the diocese of
Winchester stating that the French ‘are preparing to attack, invade and crush
the borders of the realm of England … with no small multitude of ships and
armed men’. In response to this he had ‘ordered and caused processions to be
made and celebrated and devout prayers to be said in all monasteries, churches
and other sacred places’.[55] Through the Church
and various other channels a potent message was propounded regarding the common
good, a common enemy, the importance of a common history, and the need for a
national effort to defeat the perfidious enemy who threatens ‘our’ very way of
life. St Denis (later St Michel) or St George would protect the nation. The
English were regicides; the Valois and their Capetian predecessors were
descended from a butcher; David II, the king of their Scottish allies, was an adulterer
who had soiled the font at baptism, and so on. This programme gathered pace
throughout the conflict aided by a process of cultural homogenisation and a
growing awareness of the brutal realities of war.[56] Froissart remarked,
‘since they wished to wage war, both kings found it necessary to make known to
their people and set before them the nature of their dispute, so that they
would be eager to support their lord. And by this means [the people] were
aroused in each kingdom.’[57] But it is still
difficult to know how that central message was received in the localities, on
the frontiers of the kingdom and by the bulk of the population.
The
journal of the Parisian Bourgeois, although produced in the capital, provides
some insights regarding attitudes that may be a little more widely
representative. His opinions changed over the long course of his account
(1405–49) and his attitudes shifted regarding the various parties involved in
the civil war and the nature of the Anglo-Burgundian occupation. As the tide of
war turned in favour of Charles VII, ‘the Victorious’, so too the Bourgeois
came to favour the Valois. Success (and failure) in the war made a final
contribution to a sense of national identity. It shaped a collective memory of
suffering, struggle and eventual victory achieved through a collective
sacrifice. After 1453 there was a slow acceptance among the English that they
were an island nation, no longer a power on the continent of Europe. In France,
the chroniclers and lawyers constructed an ‘official memory’ of the war in
which victory became a victory for the French nation. In the popular
imagination this validated the propaganda, helped erase some of the discord of
civil wars, the divisions caused by the treaty of Troyes and made at least some
of the sacrifices worthwhile.[58]
[1] Thompson, Contemporary
Chronicles of the Hundred Years War, 337–8.
[2] E. Cosneau, Le connétable
de Richemont (Paris, 1886), 620, cited by Vale, Charles VII,
117.
[3] Gilles of Brittany
became a member of the Order of the Garter and in December 1443 he received
various gifts from England including a pension of 1,000 marks: TNA E404/48/333;
60/105; Griffiths, Henry VI, 207, 270 n. 110, 511–13.
[4] M. Keen and M. J.
Daniel, ‘English Diplomacy and the Sack of Fougères in 1449’, History,
59 (1974), 375–91; Vale, Charles VII, 115–19.
[5] CPR, 1452–60,
55; J. Chartier, Chronique de Charles VII, ed. A. Vallet de
Viriville, 3 vols (Paris, 1858), III, 7; Basin, Histoire de Charles VII,
II, 195–6; Contamine, Guerre, état et société, 313–14;
Pollard, John Talbot and the War in France, 137–8; M. G. A. Vale,
‘The Last Years of English Gascony’, TRHS, 5th ser. 19 (1969),
119–38.
[6] R. Harris, Valois
Guyenne: A Study of Politics, Government and Society in Late Medieval France (Woodbridge,
1994), 8–14, 180–7.
[7] For this concept of
nation-building, see B. Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on
the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London and New York, rev. edn,
2006).
[8] Chartier, Le
quadrilogue invectif, esp. 12–19. See also Fifteenth-Century
English Translations of Alain Chartier’s ‘Le traité de l’esperance’ and ‘Le
quadrilogue invectif’, ed. M. S. Blayney, 2 vols (Oxford, 1974–80); S.
Riches, St George: Hero, Martyr and Myth (Stroud, 2002), esp.
101–13, quotation at 21; J. Good, The Cult of St George in Medieval
England (Woodbridge, 2009), 62–86, 95–121.
[9] Fortescue, De
laudibus legum Anglie, ed. and trans. Chrimes, 85; R. W. K. Hinton,
‘English Constitutional Doctrines from the Fifteenth Century to the
Seventeenth, I, English Constitutional Theories from Sir John Fortescue to Sir
John Eliot’, EHR, 75 (1960), 412; J. H. Burns, ‘Fortescue and the
Political Theory of Dominium’, Historical Journal, 28 (1985),
777–97; C. Taylor, ‘Sir John Fortescue and the French Polemical Treatises of
the Hundred Years War’, EHR, 114 (1999), 115.
[10] J. de Montreuil, A
toute la chevalerie de France, cited by P. S. Lewis, ‘War Propaganda and
Historiography in Fifteenth-Century France and England’, TRHS, 5th
ser. 15 (1965), 2–3.
[11] See for example: A. G.
Rigg, ‘Propaganda of the Hundred Years War: Poems on the Battles of Crécy and
Durham (1346): A Critical Edition’, Traditio, 54 (1999), 177; J.
Doig, ‘Political Propaganda and Royal Proclamations in Late Medieval
England’, Historical Research, 71 (1998), 253–80; A. K. McHardy,
‘Some Reflections on Edward III’s Use of Propaganda’, Age of Edward III,
ed. Bothwell, 171–89; R. A. Griffiths, ‘The Island of England in the Fifteenth
Century: Perceptions of the Peoples of the British Isles’, Journal of
Medieval History, 29 (2003), 177–200; Beaune, Birth of an Ideology,
20–69, 152–71; J. Bengtson, ‘Saint George and the Formation of English
Nationalism’,Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies, 27 (1997),
317–40; G. Pépin, ‘Les cris de guerre “Guyenne!” et “Saint Georges!”,
l’expression d’une identité politique du duché d’Aquitaine anglo-gascon’, Moyen
Âge, 112 (2006), 263–82; Curry, ‘War, Peace and National Identity’, 146; P.
Barber, ‘The Evesham World Map: A Late Medieval English View of God and the
World’, Imago Mundi, 47 (1995), 13–33; N. Pons, ed., L’honneur
de la couronne de France: quatre libelles contre les Anglais vers 1418–vers
1429 (Paris, 1990); C. Serchuk, ‘Cest figure contient tout le
royaume de France: Cartography and National Identity at the End of the
Hundred Years War’, Journal of Medieval History, 33 (2007), 320–38.
[12] Incerti Scriptores
Chronicon Angliae de Regnis Henrici IV, Henrici V et Henrici VI, ed. J. A.
Giles (London, 1848), 34–5. See further J. Watts, ‘The Pressure of the Public
on Later Medieval Politics’, Political Culture in Late Medieval Britain,
ed. L. Clarke and C. Carpenter (Woodbridge, 2004), 159–80, esp. 159–62.
[13] Beaune, Birth
of an Ideology, 17–19, 310–13; Krynen, L’empire du roi,
296–338; G. Spiegel, Romancing the Past: The Rise of Vernacular Prose
Historiography in Thirteenth-Century France (Berkeley, CA, 1993); G.
Spiegel, ‘Les débuts français de l’historiographie royale’, Saint-Denis
et la royauté, ed. F. Autrand, C. Gauvard and J.-M. Moeglin (Paris, 1999),
395–404.
[14] Griffiths, ‘English
Realm and Dominions’, 85; J. Gillingham, The English in the Twelfth
Century: Imperialism, National Identity, and Political Values (Woodbridge,
2000), 113–60; S. Foot, ‘The Making of Angelcynn: English Identity before the
Norman Conquest’, TRHS, 6th ser. 6 (1996), 25–49.
[15] W. M. Ormrod, ed.,
‘Edward III: Parliament of 1344, Text and Translation’, PROME, item
6; S. Crane, ‘Social Aspects of Bilingualism in the Thirteenth Century’, Thirteenth-Century
England, VI, ed. Prestwich, Britnell and Frame, 114 and n. 43; J. H.
Fisher, ‘Chancery and the Emergence of Standard Written English in the
Fifteenth Century’,Speculum, 52 (1977), 879.
[16] Ormrod, ed., ‘Edward
III: Parliament of 1346, Text and Translation’, PROME, item 7.
[17] R. R. Davies, ‘The
Peoples of Britain and Ireland, 1100–1400, IV, Language and Historical
Mythology’, TRHS, 6th ser. 7 (1997), 12–14. See also R.
Bartlett, The Making of Europe: Conquest, Colonization, and Cultural
Change, 950–1350(Princeton, NJ, 1993), 198, 201; L. E. Voigts, ‘What’s the
Word? Bilingualism in Late Medieval England’, Speculum, 71 (1996),
813–26.
[18] A. Butterfield, The
Familiar Enemy: Chaucer, Language and Nation in the Hundred Years War (Oxford,
2009), 11–35; J. Wogan-Browne, ‘What’s in a Name: The “French of
England”’, Language and Culture in Medieval Britain: The French of
England, c.1100–c.1500, ed. J. Wogan-Browne et al. (York, 2009), 1–13.
[19] T.
Turville-Petre, England the Nation: Language, Literature and National
Identity, 1290–1340 (Oxford, 1996), 10. See also N. Watson, ‘The
Politics of Middle English Writing’, The Idea of the Vernacular: An
Anthology of Middle English Literary Theory, 1280–1520, ed. J.
Wogan-Browne, N. Watson, A.Taylor and R. Evans (Exeter, 1999), 334–5; M. G. A
Vale, ‘Language, Politics and Society: The Uses of the Vernacular in the Later
Middle Ages’, EHR, 120 (2005), 15, 18.
[20] W. M. Ormrod, ‘The Use
of English: Language, Law and Political Culture in Fourteenth-Century
England’, Speculum, 78 (2003), 750–87, esp. 780 and n. 119. See
also J. Catto, ‘Written English: The Making of the Language 1370–1400’, Past
and Present, 179 (2003), 38, 44–7, 56; J. H. Fisher, ‘A Language Policy for
Lancastrian England’,Publications of the Modern Language Association of
America, 107 (1992), 1,168–80.
[21] Given-Wilson, Chronicles,
142–3.
[22] The Council of
Constance, ed. J. H. Mundy and K. M. Woody, trans. L. R. Loomis (New York,
1961), 344.
[23] J.-P. Genet, ‘English
Nationalism: Thomas Polton at the Council of Constance’, Nottingham
Medieval Studies, 28 (1984), 74; B. Guenée, ‘État et nation en France au
Moyen Âge’, Revue Historique, 237 (1967), 17–30.
[24] E. Gellner, Culture,
Identity and Politics (Cambridge, 1987), 18; idem, Nations
and Nationalism (Oxford, 1983), 57. R. R. Davies argued strongly that
the nations of the medieval period should be discussed as nations: ‘Nations and
National Identities in the Medieval World: An Apologia’, Revue belge
d’histoire contemporaine, 34 (2004), 567–79. Anthony Smith has suggested an
alternative term, ethnies, to describe and categorise medieval
‘nations’: The Ethnic Origins of Nations (Oxford, 1986), esp.
6–18.
[25] Le Patourel, ‘Edward
III and the Kingdom of France’, 247–64, esp. 254, 258, 260–3; M. Keen,
‘Diplomacy’, Henry V: The Practice of Kingship, ed. G. L. Harriss
(Oxford and New York, 1985), 186–9; Allmand, Henry V, 48–9.
[26] Henneman, Royal
Taxation, 1322–1356, esp. 304–29.
[27] P. Contamine, ‘The
Norman “Nation” and the French “Nation” in the Fourteenth and Fifteenth
Centuries’, England and Normandy, ed. Bates and Curry, 216–17, 222;
Curry, ‘Lancastrian Normandy: The Jewel in the Crown?’, ibid.,
235–52; Allmand, Lancastrian Normandy, 211–40; M. C. E. Jones,
‘“Bons Bretons et Bons Francoys”: The Language and Meaning of Treason in Later
Medieval France’, TRHS, 5th ser. 32 (1982), 91, 97, 101–2; M. P.
Holt, ‘Burgundians into Frenchmen: Catholic Identity in Sixteenth-Century
Burgundy’, Changing Identities in Early Modern France, ed. M. Wolfe
(London, 1997), 345–9; Harris, Valois Guyenne, esp. 8–20, 173–90;
Labarge,Gascony, 117–216; 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), 154–215.
[28] Isidori Hispalensis
Episcopi Etymologiarum Sive Originum Libri XX (Oxford, 1911), XIV, iv,
25; Contamine, Guerre, état et société, 277–312.
[29] P. S. Lewis, ‘France
and England: The Growth of the Nation State’, Essays in Later Medieval
French History (London, 1985), 236.
[30] G. E. Aylmer, ‘The
Peculiarities of the English State’, Journal of Historical Sociology,
3 (1990), 93–4.
[31] England in the poem
‘The Battle of Bannockburn’, dated to the reign of Edward III, was referred to
as the matron of many regions (Regionum Anglia plurium matrona):
Wright, Political Songs, I, 262; B. Smith, ‘Lordship in the British
Isles, c.1320–c.1360: The Ebb-Tide of the English
Empire?’, Power and Identity in the Middle Ages: Essays in Memory of
Rees Davies, ed. H. Pryce and J. Watts (Oxford, 2008), 153–63.
[32] R. W. Kaeuper, War,
Justice and Public Order: England and France in the Late Middle Ages (Oxford,
1988), 22–3, 381–4.
[33] Wright, Political
Songs, I, 273–4.
[34] Acts of the
Parliaments of Scotland, ed. T. Thompson and C. Innes (Edinburgh, 1814–75),
I, 474–5; G. W. S. Barrow, ed., The Declaration of Arbroath: History,
Significance, Setting (Edinburgh, 2003).
[35] R. R. Davies has
suggested that by the time of the Hundred Years War the tide of Anglicisation
had ebbed in the British Isles: The First English Empire: Power and
Identities in the British Isles, 1093–1343 (Oxford, 2000), 172–90. See
also A. Ruddick, ‘Ethnic Identity and Political Language in the King of
England’s Dominions: A Fourteenth-Century Perspective’, Identity and
Insurgency in the Late Middle Ages, ed. L. Clarke (Woodbridge, 2006), 17.
[36] Frame, ‘Overlordship
and Reaction’, 183.
[37] Froissart, Oeuvres,
ed. Lettenhove, XVIII, 108.
[38] Allmand, Henry
V, 148; Chaplais, English Medieval Diplomatic Practice, II,
629–36, esp. clauses 7–11.
[39] ‘Nothing brought the
recognition of a common Englishness nearer home … than that of being subjects
of a single king’: R. R. Davies, ‘The Peoples of Britain and Ireland,
1100–1400, II, Names and Regnal Solidarities’, TRHS, 6th ser. 5
(1995), 13; Griffiths, ‘English Realm and Dominions’, 89, 92–5.
[40] Given-Wilson, Chronicles,
157; M. A. Norbye, ‘A Popular Example of “National Literature” in the Hundred
Years War: A tous nobles qui aiment beaux faits et bonnes histoires’, Nottingham
Medieval Studies, 51 (2007), 121, 132, 138; idem, ‘Genealogies
and Domestic Awareness in the Hundred Years War: The Evidence of A tous
nobles qui aiment beaux faits et bonnes histoires’, Journal of
Medieval History, 33 (2007), 307; Curry, ‘War, Peace and National
Identity’, 148.
[41] Lewis, ‘France in the
Fifteenth Century: Society and Sovereignty’, Europe in the Late Middle
Ages, ed. J. Hale, R. Highfield, and B. Smalley (London, 1965), 4–6.
[42] Griffiths, Henry
VI, 533; Lewis, ‘France and England: The Growth of the Nation State’, 236.
On Charlemagne as a royal ancestor and, briefly, as a royal saint, see
Beaune, Birth of an Ideology, 14, 43, 90–1.
[43] T. G. Ashplant, G.
Dawson and M. Roper, ‘Introduction’, The Politics of War Memory and Commemoration,
ed. T. G. Ashplant, G. Dawson and M. Roper (London, 2000), 7.
[44] Beaune, Birth
of an Ideology, 308.
[45] Bonet, Tree of
Battles, ch. 7.
[46] Charny, Book
of Chivalry, 165.
[47] Walsingham, Chronica
Maiora, ed. and trans. Preest, 210.
[48] N. Housley, ‘Pro
deo et patria mori: Sanctified Patriotism in Europe 1400–1600’, War
and Competition between States, ed. Contamine, 221–8, esp. 221–2. See also
N. Housley, ‘France, England, and the “National Crusade”, 1302–1386’, France
and the British Isles, ed. Jondorf and Dumville, 183–98; Tyerman, ‘Philip
VI and the Recovery of the Holy Land’, 52; Guard, Chivalry, Kingship
and Crusade, 194–206.
[49] Harvey, ‘Ecclesia
Anglicana, cui ecclesiastes noster christus vos prefecit: The Power of the
Crown in the English Church during the Great Schism’, Religion and
National Identity, ed. Mews, 230; Curry, ‘War, Peace and National
Identity’, 145.
[50] Caldwell, ‘Hundred
Years War and National Identity’, 238–41.
[51] This was circulated
widely and copied into numerous chronicles: Joan of Arc, ed. and
trans. Taylor, 74–6; Fraoli, Joan of Arc, 58, 71, 74, 119.
[52] Parisian Journal,
191, 240, 337.
[53] Beaune, Birth
of an Ideology, 305; Serchuk, ‘Cartography and National Identity’, 330.
[54] This included the
principle of naturalisation: for examples of letters of denizenship in England,
see CPR, 1385–9, 518; 1388–92, 361.
[55] Wykeham’s Register,
cited by McHardy, ‘Edward III’s use of Patronage’, 184.
[56] Rigg, ‘Propaganda of
the Hundred Years War’, 174–5; P. S. Lewis, ‘Two Pieces of Fifteenth-Century
Political Iconography’, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes,
27 (1964), 319–20; H. S. Offler, ‘Thomas Bradwardine’s “Victory Sermon” in
1346’, Church and Crown in the Fourteenth Century: Studies in European
History and Political Thought, ed. A. I. Doyle (Aldershot, 2000), 6, 11–12,
16; E. Gellner, Nationalism (New York, 1997), 29, 69.
[57] Froissart, Chroniques,
ed. Lettenhove, VII, 341.
[58] E. Renan, ‘Qu’est-ce
qu’une nation?’, Discours et Conferences (Paris, 1887),
277–310, cited by A. D. Smith, ‘The Ernest Gellner Memorial Lecture. Memory and
Modernity: Reflections on Ernest Gellner’s Theory of Nationalism’:
http://members.tripod.com/GellnerPage/SmithLec.html; Bossuat, ‘The
Re-Establishment of Peace’, 60–1; Lewis, ‘War Propaganda and Historiography in
Fifteenth-Century France and England’, 21. See also C. Taylor, Debating
the Hundred Years War: Pour ce que plusieurs (La loi salicque) and A
declaracion of the trew and dewe title of Henrie VIII (London, 2007),
esp. 8, 29.
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