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h u g h k e a r n ey
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For my wife, Kate
In this Ocean there happen to be two very large islands which are called
Britannic, Albion and Ierna, bigger than any we have mentioned.
Aristotle, De Mundo c.iv
Contents
Introduction 1
1 The Celtic societies of the British Isles 13
2 The impact of Rome on the British Isles 27
3 The post-Roman centuries 41
4 The Vikings and the fall of the Old Order 60
5 The Norman and post-Norman ascendancy 92
6 The decline of the post-Norman empire 132
7 The making of an English empire 157
8 The remaking of an empire 189
9 The Britannic melting pot 219
10 The rise of ethnic politics 251
11 Between the wars 280
12 Withdrawal from empire 294
13 Post-imperial Britain: post-nationalist Ireland 304
Afterword 322
Selected reading list 325
Index 341
vii
Illustrations
viii
List of illustrations ix
xi
xii List of maps
In the course of writing this book I came to owe a great deal to vari-
ous friends and colleagues. In particular I wish to thank Rees Davies of
University College, Aberystwyth, David Dumville of Cambridge
University and Harry Dickinson of the University of Edinburgh for the
time they gave to reading various portions of the typescript. I am espe-
cially grateful to the Master and Fellows of Peterhouse, Cambridge, and
to the Governing Body of the University of Wales, who awarded me vis-
iting fellowships in 1985. My stay in Aberystwyth was made particu-
larly enjoyable thanks to the hospitality of Rees Davies, Gareth Williams,
John Davidson, Martin Fitzpatrick and their wives. I wish also to express
my gratitude to the University of Pittsburgh for granting me leave of
absence during the Fall Term, 1985. At various times, I benefited from
the encouragement of Janelle Greenberg of the University of Pittsburgh,
John Pocock of Johns Hopkins University, Joseph Lee of University Col-
lege, Cork, James Shiel of the University of Sussex and Lord Dacre of
Glanton, erstwhile Master of Peterhouse. Brian Wormald, my friend and
old supervisor at Peterhouse (1942–3), gave me many hours of his time
forty years later. James Shiel provided the epigraph. Like many others I
have incurred a debt to Linda Randall, Hazel Dunn and Maureen Ashby.
Mr William Davies of Cambridge University Press has displayed patience
and sympathy beyond the call of duty. My deepest debt, however, is to
Kate, my wife for over thirty years, who encouraged me to persevere in
an enterprise which underwent several strange metamorphoses.
Bury St Edmunds h u g h k e a r n ey
xiii
Preface to the second edition
xv
xvi Preface to the second edition
the impact of the French Revolution was much greater in Ireland than
elsewhere in the archipelago. Thus a ‘British Isles’ approach should not
be taken as ruling out a European emphasis as the basis of alternative
interpretations. At the time of writing, for example, it looks as if the
Republic of Ireland is moving towards a more European future than that
of a United Kingdom which is still coping with the challenges of its post-
imperial past.
In preparing this new edition, I should like to record my thanks for their
help to John Morrison, Proinsias O Drisceoil, Rees Davies and Gareth
Williams as well as to Michael Watson, Isabelle Dambricourt and Carrie
Cheek of Cambridge University Press, and to my keen-eyed copy-
editor, Sue Dickinson. As before my wife, Kate, made an indispensable
contribution.
Bardwell, 2005 h u g h k e a r n ey
Introduction
This is not a piece of national history, though it owes a great deal to the
work of more nationally minded historians. It is an attempt to examine,
within short compass, the interaction of the various major cultures of the
British Isles from the Roman period onwards. The emphasis through-
out is upon the British Isles, in the belief that it is only by adopting a
‘Britannic’ approach that historians can make sense of the particular seg-
ment in which they may be primarily interested, whether it be ‘England’,
‘Ireland’, ‘Scotland’, ‘Wales’, Cornwall or the Isle of Man.
To concentrate upon a single ‘national’ history, which is based upon the
political arrangements of the present, is to run the risk of being impris-
oned within a cage of partial assumptions which lead to the perpetuation
of nationalist myths and ideologies. Herbert Butterfield, in his essay, The
Whig Interpretation of History (London, 1931), stressed the importance of
trying to see all sides of past conflicts. The modern world in his view arose
from both Protestant and Catholic, not from one or the other. In the same
way, no single ‘national’ interpretation, whether English, Irish, Scottish
or Welsh, can be treated as self-contained. A ‘Britannic’ framework is
an essential starting point for a fuller understanding of these so-called
‘national’ pasts.
This point might hardly seem worth stressing, were it not for the fact
that, in its continued use of a ‘nation’ paradigm, the historiography of
the British Isles still bears traces of its late nineteenth-century origins.
The professionalisation of history brought with it the acceptance not
only of Leopold von Ranke’s critical methods but also his stress upon
the role of ‘nations’ in history. Ranke believed that the ‘nation’ was the
divinely created unit at work in universal history, with each nation having
its own appointed moment of destiny. So far as England is concerned,
the publication of William Stubbs’ Constitutional History of England (from
1866 onwards) marked the introduction of history on the Rankean model.
Stubbs’ History was acceptably ‘modern’ in its critical use of primary
sources. There was also no doubt that Stubbs saw the ‘nation’ as the
appropriate unit for a historian to concentrate upon.
1
2 Introduction
Nation-based history became the basis around which the new academic
subject of history expanded. The English Historical Review was founded
in 1886 and in due course national history reviews were founded first for
Scotland (1904) and then for Ireland (1938) and Wales (1970). In the
new elementary and secondary schools of the late nineteenth century,
history was taught on national lines as a means of inculcating the virtue
of patriotism. Libraries took ‘nations’ as the appropriate cataloguing divi-
sion for the ‘subject of History’. During the twentieth century, long after
the original impulse from Ranke had been lost sight of, the writing of
history along ‘national’ lines seemed axiomatic.
The extent to which the writing of history was so strongly nation-based
was disguised by the way in which English historians shifted between the
use of ‘British’ and ‘English’ as if the two were somehow equivalent. Three
examples of this tendency may suffice, all taken from major historians.
The historical development of England is based upon the fact that her frontiers
against Europe are drawn by Nature and cannot be the subject of dispute . . . In
short, a great deal of what is peculiar in English history is due to the obvious fact
that Great Britain is an island. (L. B. Namier, England in the Age of the American
Revolution (London, 1930), pp. 6–7)
In the Second World War, the British people came of age . . . The British people
had set out to destroy Hitler . . . No English soldier who rode with the tanks into
liberated Belgium . . . The British were the only people who went through both
world wars from beginning to end . . . The British empire declined . . . Few even
sang ‘England Arise’. England had risen all the same. (A. J. P. Taylor, England
1914–45 (Oxford, 1966), p. 600)
Nevertheless, something can be learned about the British political system . . . The
early attainment of national identity is one of England’s most distinctive fea-
tures . . . To this extent British political development may be plausibly regar-
ded . . . If we are to understand the reasons for the peculiarities of the English
political system . . . Quite apart from all the consequences that have flowed from
Britain’s imperial role. (Keith Thomas, ‘The United Kingdom’, in Raymond
Grew, ed., Crises of Political Development in Europe and the United States (Princeton,
1978), pp. 44–5)
reckoned with during the election campaign of 2005. Where does Ireland
stand in all this? Protestant culture in Northern Ireland still seems more
closely linked to Glasgow and to Dublin than it is to London. As for
the rest of Ireland, cultural influences deriving from southern England
and from the United States, and from Europe, contend for supremacy.
Tourism, the common law, English newspapers, English TV, English-
language books, contact with recent Irish emigrants to London and Birm-
ingham and a close involvement, since 1985, with the affairs of Northern
Ireland all combine to link the Republic and Britain. The new prosperity
of the Republic has also brought drug problems and issues linked with
immigration similar to those of Britain. However, the Republic, despite
its long historical links with Britain and its common interest in North-
ern Ireland, was now linked with the euro. Benefiting from its links with
Europe, it seems to be following its own distinctive path apart from that
of the rest of ‘The British Isles’.
Outside the British Isles the direct influence of the United Kingdom has
waned. In Australia, films such as Breaker Morant and Gallipoli illustrate
a growing Australian nationalism. In both Australia and Canada, a large
influx of European immigrants after 1945 has also helped to weaken
cultural connections with Britain, a tendency accentuated in Canada by
its proximity to the United States and by the growth of French-speaking
nationalism in Quebec. Even in New Zealand strong emotional links with
Britain had begun to weaken in the 1980s. By the 1970s throughout the
former British empire, in India, Pakistan, Africa and the Far East, it
seemed as if British Isles culture would be mediated through the United
States. Within the British Isles itself, American influence in the form of
military bases, fast-food chains, TV programmes and films continued to
grow. To an observer at the end of the twentieth century it might well
seem that the various cultures of the British Isles would be submerged in
a vast transatlantic, indeed global cultural aggregation.
Postscript
As stated above it was clear by the year 2000 that post-imperial Britain was
home to far more than eight cultures. The census of 2001 revealed that
immigrants from the Caribbean, Pakistan, Bangladesh, India and Africa
constitute 8 per cent of the British population today, much larger than
the total population of Wales and nearly as large as Scotland (see Tariq
Modood, ‘Britishness out of Immigration and Anti-racism’, in H. Brock-
lehurst and Robert Philips, eds., History, Nationhood and the Question
of Britain (London, 2000), pp. 85–98). To Modood it seems likely that
non-white ethnic groups will become the majority in several English cities
12 Introduction
in the first quarter of the twenty-first century, including by far the most
populous city of Europe, London (Modood, ibid). The impact of the
influx of the largest group of immigrants – from the Republic of Ireland
during the 1950s and 1960s onwards – also must not be lost sight of.
Post-war immigration has raised crucial questions about identity which
are now being addressed by the government. There is also concern about
the status of traditional cultures within a modern, secular society. For
example, the imposition of unacceptable marriage partners upon young
girls has caused serious problems. As one social worker of Islamic back-
ground puts it, ‘We are talking about domestic violence against women
and in extreme cases murder: the excuse is family honour’ (The Guardian,
9 December 2004). The right to make critical comments about the
Prophet Muhammad is also a highly sensitive issue, as Salman Rushdie
found out to his cost when he published The Satanic Verses in 1988 and
became the object of a ‘fatwah’. More recently, in 2004, the journal-
ist Charles Moore asked whether Muhammed could be regarded as a
paedophile for taking a nine-year-old child as his bride. What appeared
to Moore as the legitimate exercise of free speech was denounced by
the Muslim Association as a ‘clear incitement to religious hatred and
division’ (The Guardian, 14 December 2004). A few days after Charles
Moore’s article appeared, members of the Sikh community in Birming-
ham protested against the performance of a play Bezhti (Dishonour) and
threats of continued violence led to its being abandoned. It was also
reported that the dramatist concerned, Gurpreet Kaur Bhati, a young
Sikh woman, had been forced into hiding because of death threats (The
Guardian, 21 December 2004). Adding to these problems is the fact that
unemployment is markedly higher than the national average among those
of Pakistani or Bangladeshi origin, in part no doubt because of their
lower educational qualifications but seen by them as racial discrimina-
tion. Some of the fundamental questions raised are discussed in Bhikhu
Parekh, Rethinking Multiculturalism: Cultural Diversity and Political The-
ory (Cambridge, MA, 2000), and Brian Barry, Culture and Equality: An
Egalitarian Critique of Multiculturalism (Oxford, 2001).
1 The Celtic societies of the British Isles
13
14 The British Isles
exalted one’, who was patron of poetry, healing and metalwork. In due
course, Brigid the goddess was to be transformed into St Brigid. The
parallels provided by Brigantia, Brent and Brigid clearly point to the exis-
tence of common cultural links throughout the British Isles, not merely
in a ‘Celtic fringe’.
16 The British Isles
In addition, the art and language of these societies indicate that they
shared a common culture with the Celts of continental Europe, groups
of whom crossed the Alps and sacked Rome in 390 bc. The Celts did
not form a race, any more than the ‘English-speaking peoples’ constitute
a race today. Nineteenth-century historians may have looked upon the
Celts as a race with distinct physical features but there is no sound basis for
this view. When discussing the Iron Age societies of the British Isles during
the first century bc the most we can say is that they spoke one or other
of the dialects of a common Celtic language, that their religious beliefs
show a common pattern associated with such attitudes as a reverence for
rivers and wells and the cult of the severed head, that their social ideals
tended to be those of a military aristocracy (though not all the societies
of the British Isles were equally military in their outlook) and their art,
at this date (c. 100 bc), was heavily influenced by the free-flowing ‘La
Tène’ style.
Cult-objects provide a source of evidence for such links. As Anne Ross
has shown in her book Pagan Celtic Britain (1967), similar types of ritual-
artifact are to be found throughout the British Isles. The head was the
Celtic symbol par excellence. The Celts seem to have regarded the human
The Celtic societies of the British Isles 17
head with particular reverence as the seat of the human spirit. It is not
surprising, then, that carvings of heads should be found in northern and
southern Britain as well as in Ireland. The most famous Celtic head is the
Medusa mask in the Roman baths in Bath. Other striking examples are
to be found in Ireland. There is little doubt that the cult of the head was
widespread throughout the British Isles. In modern times, it has survived
at St Winifred’s Well (Holywell, North Wales) where a healing spring is
said to have appeared after St Winifred was beheaded. Second only to
the cult of the head was the devotion paid to the horned fertility god
Cernunnos, who was the ‘horned god’ of the Brigantes. Horned heads
from Gloucestershire, Cumberland, Kent, Norfolk and Ireland all testify
to the widespread character of this cult. Sword-hilts using the head as a
main motif are a further source of evidence.
The most lasting evidence of this cultural affinity is language. Celtic
languages still survive in Wales, the western part of Ireland and Scotland,
the Isle of Man and Brittany (colonised from the Celtic south-west of
Britain under pressure from Anglo-Saxon invaders). These languages,
with the exception of Welsh, are now under pressure. To the historian,
however, they provide an invaluable reminder of the period when Celtic
languages were spoken throughout the British Isles. Before the mid-
nineteenth century, and the onset of literacy in English throughout Ire-
land, Wales and Scotland, the Celtic-speaking section of the population
was far more numerous than is the case today. It is ironical that the aver-
age student of British history is more likely to have an acquaintance with
Latin than to have the faintest glimmering of any Celtic language. The
survival of such river-names in southern England as ‘Ouse’ (from uisce,
water) and ‘Avon’ (from afon, river) is a reminder, as valid in its own way
as more physical evidence, of the earlier presence of Celtic-speaking soci-
eties in what became Anglo-Saxon England. Hill-forts such as Ditchling
Beacon on the Sussex Downs and Maiden Castle in Dorset, which now
bear English names, owe their existence to this Celtic phase in Britan-
nic history. The fact remains, of course, that speakers of P-Celtic and
Q-Celtic could not understand the other, Welsh and Breton being very
different in sound and structure from Irish.
Finally, there is the evidence of art. The influence of the La Tène style,
so widespread throughout the Celtic world, was also powerful throughout
the British Isles. It is to be seen in such objects as the Torrs Pony-cap
(Kirkcudbright), the Turoe Stone (Co. Galway) and the Battersea Shield.
Gold torques, thought to have been worn by chiefs, were to be found in
both Britain and Ireland at this time. The La Tène style, though more
varied in its local manifestation than might appear at first sight, testi-
fies to the influence of a common Celtic culture throughout the British
Isles.
18 The British Isles
To draw attention to this fact is not to say that there was political and
social uniformity throughout the area. The existence of tribal groupings
in both Britain and Ireland is an indication of political differences at the
local level. The Romans, to whom we are indebted for Latin versions of
tribal names in the absence of their original Celtic forms, distinguished
over twenty tribes in Britain south of the Forth. In Ireland, where political
aggregation had not gone as far as it had elsewhere, the number of tribes
seems to have been much larger.
One powerful cause of variety was geography, in particular the con-
trast between Highland and Lowland Zones. It was Sir Cyril Fox who
argued in his book The Personality of Britain (1932) that the Lowlands
would usually be exposed to forces of change before the Highlands. The
Highland/Lowland contrast certainly makes good sense when applied
to Britain, where north and west form a distinctive geographical area,
including a good deal of land over 400 metres above sea-level. Poorer soil
and climatic conditions made agriculture more of a challenge in the High-
land Zone than it was in the south and east. In a British Isles context,
however, the Highland/Lowland contrast is not quite so clear. Ireland,
which has been compared to a saucer in which the rim represents the
hills and the flat base the central plain, is not, geologically speaking, a
Highland Zone. There is no doubt, however, that the narrow seas between
north-west Ireland and south-west Scotland linked rather than divided
them. At this particular period, however, it may be seen as forming part of
a ‘cultural Highland Zone’, cut off, for better or worse, from the influence
of the rising military power of Rome.
Geographical determinism should not be pressed too far, however. It
can also be argued that, under certain conditions, the Irish Sea provided
a channel of communication linking the Highland Zone with Armorica,
Spain and the Mediterranean. This seems to have been what happened
during the neolithic period and the Bronze Age. It also seems to have been
the case during the fifth and sixth centuries ad when Christian commu-
nities on both sides of the Irish Sea retained their links with Christian
Europe at a time when the eastern half of Britain was being overrun by
Germanic settlers. The Irish presence in Scotland in the sixth century ad
and in parts of Wales illustrates the same point. (Scottish Gaelic and Irish
Gaelic are in origin the same language.) The name of the Lleyn peninsula
in North Wales links it with Leinster.
Barry Cunliffe’s wide-ranging study Facing the Ocean: The Atlantic
and Its Peoples (Oxford, 2001) now provides the framework of an alter-
native interpretation in which the Irish Sea may be seen as a maritime
corridor linking the coasts of western Britain and Ireland with Western
Europe (see Map 1). Fox’s model of Highland and Lowland Zones now
The Celtic societies of the British Isles 19
place during this period. Regularly shaped field systems existed in the
areas surrounding hill-forts which suggests that organised schemes of
land clearance were being carried out. The thrust of agriculture lay in
the direction of improved tillage, presumably in response to the needs of
a growing population, though perhaps also with a market in view. Sheep
farming also seems to have been practised on a large scale with the aim
of providing the manure necessary for newly cleared land. Crops too
became more diversified. Demographic growth may have led to land-
hunger and to competition over rights to land. If this were the case, it
would provide a plausible explanation for the building of hill-forts as
the central points of larger political units. Such hill-forts were in effect
urban centres with substantial populations. Thus it has been estimated
that Hod Hill, Dorset had nearly 300 houses within its fortifications and a
population of 500–1,000. In the territory of the Atrebates, Calleva (on the
site of the later Roman town of Silchester) and Venta (later Winchester)
were all substantial urban centres. Clearly even before the coming of the
Belgae the Lowlands of the Iron Age were undergoing change.
During the first century bc the most striking developments occurred
in the Thames valley and its environs. Here there was a shift away from
an earlier concern with settlement on hill-top sites, such as those at
Wheathampstead (Herts.) and Bigbury (Kent), towards larger urban
units on the plains of which Verulamium, Camulodunum and Durover-
num Cantiacorum (Canterbury) were the most important. This was more
than a geographical decision. These towns were in effect the capitals of
powerful new kingdoms, controlling a wider area than the traditional
tribal organisation. Though the details are not clear it would seem that
the Trinovantes and the Catuvellauni formed a confederacy under a single
king, Cunobelinus (the Cymbeline of Shakespeare). The Romans were
able to make good use of the resentment which this monarchy aroused, to
make alliances with the southern Atrebates, the Cantiaci (of Kent), the
Iceni and the Dobunni, when they invaded Britain after Cunobelinus’
death (he died in ad 41).
Other signs testify to the importance of the changes which were taking
place in the south-east at this time. Perhaps the most important of these
was the widespread use of coins. The survival of coins in quantity indicates
the existence of a cash market and a certain level of numeracy and literacy,
at least among some segments of the population. Coins bearing the image
of the king bear witness to settled political conditions. All the signs are
that the societies of the south-east were developing economic ties with
Rome. Indirect Romanisation had already begun.
In sharp contrast with all this, the political organisation of the Highland
Zone (or the Irish Sea Province as we may prefer to call it) remained at
22 The British Isles
a more local level. Hill-forts in this area were both smaller and fewer in
number, less than a hundred as against the several hundreds of south-
east England. The characteristic unit of the area seems to have been the
enclosed family homestead, the so-called ring-fort. In Ireland and else-
where in the Highland Zone, 30,000 of these ring-forts have survived, and
their existence, together with the relative absence of hill-forts, suggests
that it was possible, as a consequence perhaps of a relatively static pop-
ulation, for small-scale political units to enjoy substantial independence.
Warfare was probably a local affair. Tribal kingdoms existed (Irish tuatha)
but the powers of the kings were limited. The large number of kingdoms,
compared with the Lowland Zone, also suggests that they were small in
size. The complete absence of coinage and of urban concentrations is
another pointer in the same direction. What appear to be at first sight
large hill-forts at Tara, Emain Macha (the Armagh of today) and Dun
Ailinne turn out on closer inspection to be ritual sites, built during the
Bronze Age and later probably used for annual assemblies.
There can be little doubt that this broad social and economic contrast
between Lowland and Highland Zones was also reflected in culture. An
obvious next step, therefore, would be to consider the extent to which
such matters as law, religion and general problems of ‘meaning and value’
differed from one Zone to another. The question, however, is easier to
ask than to answer, at least for the Lowland Zone. The Roman Conquest,
later to be followed by large-scale Anglo-Saxon colonisation, obliterated
almost all traces of Celtic cultures in the south and east of England. In
contrast, a great deal survived for Ireland. Thus we are in the paradoxical
position of knowing more about the ‘traditional’ era of the Celtic world
than about its ‘modernising’ sector.
Our knowledge of early Irish society derives largely from the evidence
of the Brehon Laws first committed to writing in the sixth or seventh
century ad but undoubtedly, thanks to the conservatism of the jurists,
casting light upon some social assumptions of pre-Christian times. Pro-
fessor Binchy, the editor of the laws, has characterised this society as
‘tribal, rural, hierarchical and familiar’. Hence, it may be seen as con-
trasting with the monarchical and relatively urbanised societies of the
Lowland Zone (though Binchy’s views are now under challenge).
Within the context of the British Isles, the relatively traditional char-
acter of Celtic societies in Ireland is suggested by several features. They
were, in the first place, oral cultures. The localised and static character
of these societies is also implied in the importance which was attached to
kinship. Power and prestige rested with the kinship group, derbfine (fine
being the term for family). This did not mean that ownership of land was
communal. It seems clear that the actual cultivation and ownership of
the land rested with individual nuclear families.
The Celtic societies of the British Isles 23
has detected the existence of local codes. In the fourth century ad a con-
siderable degree of political change occurred leading to the formation of
several large kingdoms. During this earlier, pre-fourth-century period,
however, there seems little doubt that small-scale societies were typical
of Ireland, and of the Highland Zone generally.
There was, however, some social change. Kinship groups may have
been the norm but the rise of relationships based upon clientage shows
that some form of feudal relationship might exist between individuals.
Thanks to the researches of Professor Binchy, it is possible also to discern
a shift from earlier legal assumptions involving the sanction of taboos to
a social world in which the law was enforced by kinship groups or by a
powerful patron or king. The earliest level of thinking survived in such
practices as troscad in which litigants fasted, possibly unto death, in order
to bring pressure to bear upon the offending party. Such fasting was
probably regarded as a magico-religious activity, capable of transferring
the physical suffering of the faster to the person being ‘fasted against’.
By a later period troscad seems to have become largely obsolete as a legal
remedy though it was still apparently an option open to the weak and
powerless who lacked the backing of patrons or kin. If what we have said
about the localised character of these societies is correct, it may also be
expected that, within Ireland itself, some areas would be more traditional
than others, the practice of troscad being a case in point.
The only other substantial body of ‘Celtic’ law about which some-
thing is known derives from the area now known as ‘Wales’, though there
were presumably analogous legal systems operating throughout the rest
of the British Isles. Welsh ‘tribal’ societies came into direct contact with
Rome and there are good reasons for thinking that the legal practice of
South Wales, within the orbit of the Roman military base at Caerleon
(near Newport, Gwent) was influenced by Roman codes. Elsewhere in
Wales pre-Roman social structures seem to have survived to influence
assumptions about land-holding. In Welsh local cultures, as in Ireland,
specific tracts of land were regarded as belonging to aristocratic kinship
groups and hence inalienable by individuals. These assumptions prevailed
into the sixteenth century and beyond. Welsh society in the pre-Roman
period, as later, was heavily pastoral and, like Ireland, organised around
a transhumance pattern of summer and winter grazing. Elsewhere in the
Highland Zone we may assume the existence of an ‘Irish-Welsh’ style of
social structure reflected in law, religion and general culture.
It is regrettable that no equivalent sources of evidence exist for the
Lowland Zone. Even for tribal names we have only Latinised equivalents.
If such sources had survived, we might expect them to reflect in some
way the central position occupied by agriculture, the growing importance
of trade and the extensive power enjoyed by such kings as Cunobelinus.
The Celtic societies of the British Isles 25
Britain and Ireland. For Lowland Britain, the Roman invasion was the
latest in a series which had subjected that area to violent change over
several centuries. Even before the Romans arrived, the political ambitions
of individual kingdoms had led to shifts in the balance of power in the
south-east. For some hard-pressed groups, such as the Regni (of what is
now West Sussex), the Romans were almost certainly a lesser evil. Perhaps
they anticipated that the invasion of Claudius in ad 43 would be similar to
those made by Julius Caesar in 55 and 54 bc, raids in force leaving Rome’s
allies in possession of the field. If so, they were wrong. On this occasion the
Romans arrived with the intention of staying permanently. So powerful
was their impact that it is only by a great effort of the imagination that
we see the need to go beyond the lasting monuments of Roman rule to
the scattered relics of the Celtic societies which everywhere in Britain
preceded it.
Postscript
This is perhaps the appropriate point to mention the contemporary
debate about the term ‘Celtic’. The most accessible introduction to this
controversial topic is Professor Joep Leersen’s excellent essay in Terence
Brown, ed., Celticism (Amsterdam, 1996), pp. 1–20. Malcolm Chapman’s
The Celts: The Construction of a Myth (Basingstoke, 1992) is essential
reading.
2 The impact of Rome on the British Isles
27
28 The British Isles
Early La Tène
core zone
Marne Moselle
0 200 km
(p. 236). The Romans, another scholar tells us, aimed to unite Britain
with an economy and a culture superior to anything previously known
there. For the first time the whole country was united under one govern-
ment, made possible by a splendid road system. The Roman Conquest is
seen as creating a new situation tending to peace and order which greatly
stimulated rural development.
The problem with such judgements is that they tell the story from
the viewpoint of the coloniser. There were, clearly, other interpreta-
tions of events, even though we may never discover them. The work of
E. M. Forster or Joseph Conrad (or even, in the late twentieth century,
of Thomas Keneally in his sensitive study of the Australian aboriginals,
The Chant of Jimmy Blacksmith) is enough to justify the placing of a
question-mark against one-dimensional accounts of the Roman Con-
quest of Britain. What is clear about the Roman invasion of Britain is
that it imposed one culture upon another. What is unclear is the extent
to which the colonised inhabitants themselves came to welcome this as
‘modernisation’; and how far we ourselves are entitled to make the judge-
ment that the Conquest was ‘all for the best’. The overwhelming weight
of the evidence, in the shape of inscriptions, pottery and buildings predis-
poses us to make a judgement in favour of the Romans. On the other hand,
the survival of such objects as the Battersea Shield and of later Irish works
of art, influenced by La Tène traditions, is a reminder that Roman-style
modernisation involved loss as well as gain. Recent excavations made at
Ferrybridge, Yorkshire suggest that ‘a burial grave venerated for centuries
may have been the last rallying point for Britons facing the prospect of
Roman colonization’ (The Daily Telegraph, 10 March 2005).
As we have seen, the Celtic societies of Britain were by no means wholly
traditional in character on the eve of the Roman Conquest. Social change,
at least in the south, was taking place in the direction of larger politi-
cal units, urbanisation and a wider market economy. The thrust towards
‘modernisation’ was greatly accelerated, however, after the Claudian inva-
sion of ad 43. By the end of the first century ad the tribal monarchies
of southern Britain had given way to one in which power rested with a
literate bureaucracy, ruling according to the standards of a cosmopoli-
tan empire, from urban centres which were linked by a centralised road
system.
The key instrument in bringing about the radical changes which trans-
formed much of Britain was the Roman army. The role played by the
army in the initial phases of the occupation was inevitable. What was
unexpected was the prolonged nature of the military occupation. Con-
trol of the Lowlands proved to be relatively easy. The Highlands, however,
were never completely subdued and even maintaining a Roman presence
30 The British Isles
Faeroe Is
Shetland Is
Orkney Is
s
de
bri
He
Skye
Picts
ARGYLL
Votadini Jutes
Scotti Angles
and
Isle of Saxons
Man
LL
Deisi and
EY
Ui Liathain
N
Irish tribes
Scilly Is Votadini
Picts
Southern British
Jutes
ARMORICA Angles and Saxons
(BRITTANY)
0 100 200 300 km
Map 2. The tribes of North Britain (names from Ptolemy) in the early
Roman period.
marked the opening up of Ireland to the Latin language and to the val-
ues of Rome. During the fourth century ad Christianity had become the
established religion of the empire and as a consequence had organised
itself on the Roman administrative model. The Church was no longer
a network of sects but an organisation made up of dioceses (the secular
term for the imperial administrative unit) ruled by bishops in a monar-
chical system in which the Emperor as well as the Pope exercised a great
deal of power. Latin was the sacred language of the Western Church and
The impact of Rome on the British Isles 35
its centre was Rome. The Christian missionaries to Ireland in the course
of the fifth century were thus agents of Romanisation. The Church which
St Patrick founded was linked with sub-Roman Britain and presumably
run on Roman lines.
The religion of the druids was heavily embedded in an oral culture. If
later practices of the poets (filid) are taken as a guide, candidates for the
individual priesthood had to undertake a prolonged course of memori-
sation extending over many years. Secrecy was all-important and mem-
bership as a consequence seems to have been confined to certain kinship
groups. Christianity, in contrast, was a religion of the book. It brought
literacy in its wake, though no doubt of a restricted kind. The new cul-
ture was Latin in its orientation, though the view that Columbanus, the
Irish pilgrim of the late sixth century, was familiar with the Latin classics
seems to be unfounded.
The Christian Church, which had taken the imperial organisation as
its model, was monarchical in structure. Its laws were seen as deriving
from the authority of duly ordained rulers rather than from the local
communities. In principle at least it aimed at uniformity. In doctrine also
the Church aimed at orthodoxy, defined in as precise a manner as possible
according to Greek philosophy. This too was in contrast with the loose
polytheism of traditional societies within Ireland.
This process of Romanisation was by no means an instant success.
Indeed, historians have tended to exaggerate the speed at which Chris-
tianity made headway in Ireland. The decline of the western empire in
the fifth century also played its part in slowing down the rate of change.
Many traditional aspects of Irish life survived for centuries to come. In
spite of these qualifications, however, there is no doubt that the isola-
tion of Ireland broke down during this period. During the fifth century,
in an episode which is still obscure, Irish colonists from Ulster estab-
lished themselves in Argyll. During the same period links were established
across the Irish Sea between Ireland and Wales. So far as Wales is con-
cerned, the story was to peter out inconclusively. In Scotland, however,
the Irish, known by their Roman nickname of ‘Scotti’, came to exer-
cise lasting influence, since it was from their kingdom of Dalriada that
Christian missionaries eventually came to evangelise the Anglo-Saxons
of Northumbria in the mid-seventh century.
Looked at in broad perspective, the British Isles c. ad 400 present a
contrast between cultural areas. England south of a line from the Thames
estuary to the Bristol Channel was heavily Romanised. Though few
or no written sources have survived, physical testimony in the form of
the remains of towns, forts and villas indicates that this part of Britain
was very much part of the Roman empire. Here was a bureaucratic,
36 The British Isles
Figure 7. Caerwent
Caerwent in what is now South Wales was a key site in the line of Roman
forts stretching north to Chester. The Romans maintained a strong
military presence in Wales, exemplified in the fort at Caernarfon on the
coast, but they did not succeed in fully Romanising Wales as they did
southern Britain.
to the tribal kingdoms of Wales and Ireland. In this area societies were
heavily localised in their outlook. Laws based upon the dominance of
local kinship groups prevailed. The feud and the compensatory fine were
the sanctions on which these local societies relied. We may also assume
that perceptions of the past adopted by these cultures reflected their local
The impact of Rome on the British Isles 39
perspective. We are very far here from the universalist outlook of the
Roman empire. In these cultures, the patronage of local aristocratic elites
still prevailed. As suggested above, the influence of Christian missions
brought these societies in Highland Britain and in Ireland into more
direct contact with the Latin culture of the late Roman empire. For many,
Latin became their sacred language. But the institutions of these societies,
based upon what was seen as immemorial custom, could not be easily
swept aside. Christian teaching, as the evidence of a later period suggests,
probably remained a veneer in societies which still retained their own rites
of passage and attitudes to kinship and, perhaps, human sacrifice.
Over much of the British Isles, the Celtic-speaking world survived the
arrival and the departure of the Roman legions. The vitality of local oral
cultures led to the invention or re-editing of origin legends, legal tracts
and genealogies and narrative histories which were eventually committed
to writing in an acceptable form by the monastic scribes of the early mid-
dle ages. These cultural traditions in due course gave rise to the fables of
Arthur, Fionn MacCumhail and the Mabinogi. Those Celtic perceptions
of the past which survived provided an alternative version of events which
continued to exercise a powerful fascination in Wales, Ireland and Scot-
land and even in Norman England, thanks to the influence of Geoffrey
of Monmouth.
Postscript
Chapter 2 offered a brief ‘revisionist’ interpretation of the impact of the
Roman empire upon the British Isles, stressing the exploitative character
rather than, as is the orthodox view, its role in ‘civilising’ the native inhab-
itants. (As I write, French historians are protesting about the attempt of
the French state to impose a ‘positive’ view of French colonialism in state
schools; The Guardian, 15 April 2005.) In support of my revisionist view,
mention should have been made of the rebellion of Boudica, Queen of
the Iceni, against Roman rule in ad 61. The violence of the rebellion was
matched by the brutality of its suppression when, in the words of Taci-
tus, ‘they (the Romans) made a desert and called it peace (‘solitudinem
faciunt, pacem appellant’, De Agricola).
The Iceni had accepted indirect Roman overlordship after the Clau-
dian conquest of 43 ad but thirty years later turned to open resistance
after the Roman authorities began to impose direct rule. In the course
of this policy the Romans confiscated the estates of the Iceni aristoc-
racy and imposed conscription upon their young men. In an ill-advised
demonstration of their power, Boudicca, widow of the Iceni King, was
flogged and her two daughters raped. Open rebellion against Roman rule
40 The British Isles
followed in which the Iceni were joined by their immediate neighbours the
Trinovantes. The urban centres of Colchester, London and Verulamium
were destroyed with great loss of life, amounting, so Tacitus tells us, to
70,000 people. In return, the repression of the rebellion by the Roman
army led to even greater casualties among the Iceni population.
The Romans did not succeed in conquering the whole of the British
Isles and may well have been deterred from doing so by the revolt of the
Iceni and the Trinovantes. In due course, however, they established a
form of partition eventually marked by Hadrian’s Wall in the north and a
frontier in the west running from Caerleon to Chester. Ireland was spared
conquest by Rome although we know that the east coast of the island was
in contact with the Roman world. Roman artifacts turn up regularly,
most recently at Lambay Island near Dublin. Irish art also, for example,
indicates the influence of Rome. Above all, the coming of Christianity
to Ireland in the fifth century led to the introduction of Latin as the
sacred language of the new faith. Established practices did not disappear
overnight, however, despite later tales of St Patrick confronting the Druids
at Easter. In particular, law tracts survived as part of an oral culture. These
were written down in the seventh century, and throw unique light upon
a non-Roman society, in which divorce and polygamy were established
practices. In addition the epic account of the Cattle Raid of Cooley (Táin
Bó Cuailgne) survived as part of the oldest vernacular literature in Europe.
It is surely not eccentric to suggest that students of ‘Britannia’ should
take such evidence into account when attempting to estimate the impact
of the Roman Conquest upon what are too often dismissed as barbaric
survivals. The writings of Professor Daniel Binchy, who was an expert in
both Roman law and early Irish law, are instructive here.
3 The post-Roman centuries
Within the British Isles the period between the departure of the Romans
(c. 400) and the coming of the Vikings (c. 800) was marked by the inter-
action of four distinct cultures, British, Pictish, Irish and Anglo-Saxon.
At the beginning of the period British culture (the culture of the P-Celtic-
speaking peoples) was dominant over most of the island of Britain south
of the Forth. Much of this culture in what is now southern England and
South Wales was heavily Romanised. Roman towns and general organ-
isation survived well into the fifth century. Further north, for example
in the territory of the Votadini between the Forth and the Tweed, the
extent of Roman influence had been much less. North of the Forth, the
culture of the Picts (originally known to the Romans first as Caledonii
and then from the fourth century as Picti) was dominant. We know less
about the Picts than any of the other three major cultures of the British
Isles but place-names and other evidence indicate that there were two
main groups, the southern Picts south of the Mounth and northern Picts
north of the Mounth and in Shetland and Orkney. During the Roman
centuries the Q-Celtic-speaking cultures of Ireland had been placed in a
position of relative isolation, which was being broken down by the arrival
of Christian missionaries from Britain and the continent. Germanic cul-
ture was the least important of all four since it was largely confined to
eastern and southern Britain where auxiliaries of Teutonic origin had
been introduced to serve as protective garrisons for towns – for exam-
ple, York, Caistor, Cambridge, Leicester, Winchester and Dorchester-on-
Thames.
By the end of the period a dramatic change had taken place. At the
close of the eighth century, Anglo-Saxon colonists controlled an area
stretching from the Forth to the south coast and as far east as a line
stretching from the Dee to the Tamar. In an almost equally remarkable
turn of events Irish culture had become dominant in the Western Isles of
Scotland and in the area of western Scotland north of the Clyde. (The
name of this Irish kingdom, ‘Dalriada’, is derived from the north-east
Ulster homeland of the newcomers.) Irish culture also established itself in
41
42 The British Isles
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the east of what is now Scotland, among the Picts who were introduced to
Christianity by Irish missionaries from Iona led by Colmcille (Columba).
During this period Irish culture also penetrated, though transiently, into
south Wales, where kings with a Gaelic pedigree ruled over Dyfed, and to
the Isle of Man. Perhaps the most surprising development of all was the
influence of Irish culture in the Anglo-Saxon kingdom of Northumbria,
which stretched from the Forth to the Humber. By 800 the cultural map
of the British Isles had been completely transformed in ways that it would
have been difficult to foresee 400 years earlier.
As the Anglo-Saxon and Irish cultures rose in importance during
these centuries, the Pictish and British cultures declined. Pictish cul-
ture remains one of the great unsolved problems of insular history. The
language of the Picts, known only from two dozen inscriptions, has not
been deciphered and their general culture, known only from art and
place-names, remains wrapped in obscurity. The fate of British culture
(P-Celtic) is better known, but even here there are unanswered ques-
tions. By the end of this period British culture survived only in the
kingdom of Strathclyde with its capital at Dumbarton, in the disputed
area of Cumbria (a name which is the same as the Welsh cymry, ‘fellow-
countrymen’ and Cymru, ‘Wales’), in the several kingdoms of what the
English called ‘Wales’ (meaning ‘foreign’) and in Cornwall, which may
once have been part of the British kingdom of Dumnonia (it preserves the
name of the British tribe, the Cornouii). The only area in which British
culture expanded during this period was north-west France where much
of the Armorican peninsula came to be called Brittany (Little Britain)
and ‘Breton’, a variety of P-Celtic, was spoken. It was not until the ninth
century, when ‘Britannia (minor)’ doubled in size, that the peninsula as
a whole became Breton.
Historical interpretation of these centuries has been dominated by the
work of the English monk Bede (673–735) who completed his Eccle-
siastical History of the English People in 731. As a consequence of the
genius of Bede we are well acquainted with the Anglo-Saxon version
of events. There is no rival version from the point of view of any of the
other three cultures, although there are individual sources which go some
way towards making up the deficiency. For the Britons there is the work
of Gildas, The Ruin of Britain, written in the mid-sixth century and the
anonymous History of the Britons written in the early ninth century. For
the Irish, the sources include Adomnán’s ‘Life of Columba’, as well as
less tractable material such as annalistic chronicles, laws, genealogies and
saints’ Lives. For the Picts, there is almost nothing. The accessibility of
Bede’s Ecclesiastical History, available in paperback in English translation,
has added to the influence of his viewpoint in modern times.
44 The British Isles
AREA
III
AREA
AREA II
IV
AREA AREA
III
I
III
EA
AR
IV
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RE
A
Bede’s theme is not the clash of cultures, though we may see this mir-
rored in his general account, but the conversion of the ‘English’ to Chris-
tianity. As a Christian historian of the events of the fifth, sixth and seventh
centuries he was presented with the paradox that his own people, the
Germanic newcomers, were pagan, while their victims, the Britons, were
The post-Roman centuries 45
Saxons is Offa’s Dyke, built during the eighth century and stretching from
the Dee to the Severn estuaries. It was presumably the need to protect
English settlements from British attack which explains the construction
of an earthwork nearly 150 miles long, though other interpretations have
been offered.
Bede provides us with the viewpoint of a historian for whom the cru-
cial events of the seventh century were the conversion of kings and the
miracles of saints. What is lacking in Bede is a sense of the steady process
of colonisation which led to the almost total dominance of Anglo-Saxon
culture in the Lowland Zone of Britain. Military conquest came first. By
the end of the sixth century the Anglo-Saxons had seized the Romano-
British centres of Gloucester, Bath and Cirencester, and had advanced
to the estuary of the Severn. More permanent than military victory was
the persistent advance of agrarian settlements. Modern scholarship has
demonstrated how the progress of the west Saxons into the British ter-
ritories of Devon and Somerset was based upon the creation of nuclear
settlements, and possibly the extermination of the Celtic population. Fur-
ther north, the so-called ‘midlands system’ of villages and open fields
illustrates the same forces at work. The Anglo-Saxon conquest of the
Lowland Zone rested upon the demographic preponderance which the
village and its open-field agriculture made possible. Where this numerical
superiority was lacking, the foundations of Anglo-Saxon society proved
less secure. The kingdom of Northumbria, for example, despite its artis-
tic achievements, failed to survive the onset of the Viking invasions. In
contrast, the kingdom of Essex with a larger population was better placed
to meet the challenge.
Anglo-Saxon society attributed a much greater importance to descent
within the nuclear family and much less to the role of a wider kindred. The
Britons created compound words to indicate second, third or even more
distant cousins whereas the Anglo-Saxons were content with a single
vague term. In Sir Frederick Pollock and F. W. Maitland’s History of
English Law (1898), Maitland commented long ago on the difficulty of
establishing where kinship loyalties lay in Anglo-Saxon society, where
descent in both male and female lines was acceptable, as compared with
the stress upon patrilineal links among Britons and Irish.
The reason for this difference may well be sought in the colonial nature
of Anglo-Saxon society. The colonists were ethnically mixed, from several
Germanic cultures. In this new, mobile society, unlike the situation in
more static societies, the protection afforded by the lord or the king seems
to have been more important than that of the kindred. The ‘right’ to
newly acquired land was more likely to be safeguarded by a king than
by a possibly distant kindred. Not surprisingly, monarchical institutions
The post-Roman centuries 49
Wales’ had more in common with their counterparts on the other side of
the Bristol Channel than with the kingdoms of ‘north Wales’. The alleged
role of Glastonbury as a British holy place in Somerset before it had been
taken over by the west Saxons deserves consideration in this context.
The paradox of Arthur as a figure in Cornish culture also becomes more
intelligible if the Severn is thought of as a unifying factor, linking the
Britons of the south-west with their countrymen (‘cymry’) in what is
now ‘Wales’.
The third of our four cultures is that of Ireland, which enjoyed what is
generally regarded as a ‘Golden Age’ during this period. An expansion
of Irish culture into ‘Scotland’ and ‘south Wales’ took place, which may
be seen as part of a general movement which took Irish missionaries
led by Colmán (Latinised as Columbanus) into Western Europe. During
the fifth century, under the impact of the mission of Patrick and others,
Christianity had made considerable headway in Ireland, though there
was no ‘instant Christianisation’. The druids were eventually replaced
by Christian clergy but other key institutions in Irish society remained
unchanged. The practice of polygamy, for example, did not disappear
for many centuries. Other native customs, such as that of cursing one’s
enemies, seem to have been taken over by Christian holy men. But there is
no doubt that Christian teaching evoked a powerful response among some
sections of the population. The missionaries whom Ireland produced
during these centuries may be compared perhaps with the fundamentalist
sects of our own day. They preached a simple message which we find
embodied in the stone carvings of biblical scenes on the high crosses at
Moone (Co. Kildare) and elsewhere.
In many ways, however, Ireland, though converted by St Patrick and
though it influenced Britain through its own missionaries, remained
remarkably unaffected by changes on the other side of the Irish Sea.
The course of events might have worked out differently if Roman con-
trol of the neighbouring island had remained intact. A century after the
departure of the Romans from Britain, however, the localised character
of Irish society asserted itself. The monastic communities, which became
typical of the Irish Church, were essentially local lineage groups in a reli-
gious setting, in which the abbot as the kinsman of the saint-founder of
the monastery enjoyed the realities of power while the bishop played a
secondary role. This pattern of ‘coarbs’ (i.e. ‘heirs’ of the saint) lasted
in some areas of Ireland until the seventeenth century. It was this sys-
tem, contrasting so sharply with the centralising ecclesiastical structure
of Rome, which the Irish missionaries introduced into parts of Britain. Its
strength lay in the establishment of strong local roots. The rulers of the
new Anglo-Saxon kingdoms, however, expanding into Celtic-speaking
The post-Roman centuries 53
Postscript
In this chapter I attempted an overall view of the history of these islands
during the so-called ‘Dark Ages’. It was an ambitious, perhaps over-
ambitious endeavour but its main point, based on Bede, about broad
differences between what may be seen as four cultures, British, Saxon,
Irish and Pictish, would seem to be acceptable. In discussing the Britons
it is essential to avoid the over-confidence of such works as John Morris,
The Age of Arthur: A History of the British Isles from 350 to 650 (London,
1973). Professor David Dumville, in his devastating article ‘Sub-Roman
Britain: History and Legend’ (History (1977), 72–104), makes it clear
that the sources will not bear the interpretation which Morris placed on
them. Dumville’s comment about Arthur deserves quotation: ‘I think we
can dispose of him quite briefly. He owes his place in our history books
to the “no smoke without fire” school of thought.’ The significance of
Arthur in fact lies in his role of symbolising British hostility towards the
The post-Roman centuries 57
Saxon invaders. Such hostility was also illustrated in the story of ‘The
Treason of the Long Knives’ (Brad y Cyllyll Hirion) which tells how the
Saxon leaders invited their British counterparts to a banquet and then, at
a given signal, slaughtered them with ‘Long Knives’ (Morgan, 1984). On
the English side the memory of Arthur was dismissed by the historian
William of Malmesbury – ‘This Arthur is the hero of many wild tales
among the Britons even in our own day’ (quoted in R.R.Davies, The First
English Empire (Oxford, 2000), p. 1). Only later in the twelfth century,
thanks to the influence of Geoffrey of Monmouth, did Arthur come to
be assimilated into a broader English myth, which provided justification,
or so it was believed, for English overlordship over these islands (Davies,
ibid., p. 1).
On the Saxon side during the fifth and sixth centuries there is a lack of
literary material (hence the value of archaeological evidence such as that
of the seventh-century ship burial at Sutton Hoo). In the absence of such
evidence, Stubbs (1875) was forced to argue by inference from Tacitus’
treatise on the German tribes c. 100ad (De Germania) and as a result his
early chapters have been discredited. But Stubbs does make clear that the
Saxons formed part of a wider pattern of barbarian invasions of Western
Europe. Sutton Hoo is a reminder that eastern England was still largely
pagan territory well after the arrival of St Augustine in 597.
Without Bede, historical pickings would be thin indeed. Fortunately,
however, at least for English history, he was a scholar of remark-
able talent amounting to genius who, in his Ecclesiastical History of
the English People (731), produced a version of events far superior to any
single contemporary work in Irish or British. Thanks to Bede, the English
found themselves provided with a Christian version of their past which
obscured the realities of their barbaric origins and which linked them with
Christian Rome rather than pagan Germany. But Bede’s stress upon the
existence of an English nation may have led us to exaggerate the degree
of unity which existed in pre-Viking England.
Bad relations between the Britons and the Saxons (whom now, follow-
ing Bede, we should call ‘the English’) continued into the eighth century
and beyond. Offa’s Dyke bears witness to this. John Gillingham also tells
us that Bede, writing in 731, called a British king – a fellow Christian –
a barbarian. He also reminds us that early west Saxon law codes treated
Britons (whom they called ‘Welsh’ sc. foreigners) as second-class citizens
(Grant and Stringer, Uniting the Kingdom? (1995, p. 56)). It is not sur-
prising that of our four cultures it was the Irish who helped to convert
the English to Christianity. Thus James Campbell reminds us that the
Irishman Fursey preached the gospel in East Anglia c.635 (Campbell,
2000, p. 114).
58 The British Isles
The Ireland from which such figures as Fursey emerged was not nec-
essarily the island of ‘saints and scholars’ of pious history. The practice
of polygamy, for example, survived the coming of Christianity. Professor
Daniel Binchy, in a brilliant article (Binchy, 1958), has shown how despite
the coming of St Patrick (c.450) the Kingship at Tara remained pagan
for several generations. Binchy was also able to prove that the story of
Patrick confronting King Laoghaire at Tara in the fifth century could not
have been true, although this did not prevent it from being related still as
fact by the Irish bishops to Pope John Paul II when he visited Ireland in
1979.
By the seventh century, however, a rapprochement had taken place
between Christian and secular learning and tribal sagas were incorpo-
rated into a Christian chronological framework. The way was open for
the rise of a national myth, the ‘Book of Invasions’ (Lebor Gabala), in
which the Irish kings traced their descent to Mil (whose sons on leaving
Spain settled in Ireland) and thence back to Gomer son of Noah. The leg-
endary character of this story should not obscure the fact that the sources
for early Irish history are much more plentiful than those available for
Wales or England. It has been estimated, for example, that the Irish
genealogies refer to 20,000 identifiable individuals compared to a few
hundred for Anglo-Saxon genealogies. Work in this difficult terrain by a
gifted generation of scholars has brought rich rewards which are not as
well known outside Ireland as they should be (see O Croı́nı́n, 1995).
In the context of the history of these islands the cultures of the ‘Dark
Ages’ left a lasting impact upon national identities. In the case of Ireland
a figure from prehistory such as Cuchulain remains a potent symbol even
today. The High Kingship of Tara still retains a shadowy aura. Above
all St Patrick, a man of the fifth century, is still a vivid presence in Irish
culture.
The influence of this period was also long felt in Scottish history where
an elective ‘ancient constitution’ was traced back to Fergus, King of
Dalriada, in the fourth century bc. This was, no doubt, a myth but it
rested upon the undoubted fact of a substantial Irish presence in the west
of Scotland. In the sixteenth century the humanist scholars Boéce and
Buchanan continued to stress the significance of the Dalriada monar-
chy and in the late eighteenth century James Macpherson discovered
(or forged) the literary works of ‘Ossian’, a figure who came to be seen
as the northern Homer. In the fifth century, however, ‘Scotland’ in the
modern sense did not exist. Four ethnic groupings, Irish, British, Pictish
and Saxon, still contended for supremacy or survival. It was not until
the ninth century that a political unit resembling ‘Scotland’ began to
emerge.
The post-Roman centuries 59
During the early ninth century, the equilibrium which existed between the
cultures of the British Isles was disturbed by the onset of a new, seaborne
power, the Vikings. The first Viking raids took place in the last decade
of the eighth century when Lindisfarne was sacked (793). From then on
the peoples of the British Isles as a whole were subjected to increasing
pressure. Thanks to their longships, a crucial invention, the Vikings were
able to dominate for long periods much of the Irish Sea and the North Sea.
A completely new situation was created, as a consequence of which Viking
settlements were established along the coasts of Britain and Ireland as well
as neighbouring islands including the Isle of Man, Shetland, Orkney and
the Hebrides. Though their political power eventually declined, partly
as a consequence of political divisions, the communities which they set
up remained ethnically distinctive for centuries. With the coming of the
Vikings a new period may be said to have begun in the history of the
British Isles, one which marked a sharp breach with the past.
The term ‘Viking’ originated in a term for ‘pirate’, but, as with the Sax-
ons earlier, piracy eventually gave way to colonisation. The Irish Sea from
the Hebrides southwards was largely dominated by the Vikings, though
it would be a mistake to assume that there was political unity among the
various groups. (The Irish distinguished ‘dark strangers’ dubhgaill, from
‘fair strangers’ fionngaill, whence came ‘Fingal’.) During the course of the
ninth century, trading posts were established at Dublin, Cork, Waterford
and Limerick. The Isle of Man became an important strategic centre. The
North Sea also fell under Danish influence. The capital of Northumbria,
York, was transformed into a major Viking entrepôt, rivalling Scandina-
vian Dublin in its importance. From the mid-ninth century (856) large-
scale Danish colonisation took place along the east coast. In the English
east midlands, large areas of Mercia were soon controlled from the five
Danish boroughs of Lincoln, Leicester, Derby, Nottingham and Stam-
ford, all of them accessible by river from the North Sea. In the Irish
Sea area, a secondary expansion occurred in Cumbria and the Wirral,
although in this case the settlers came from the Scandinavian colonies in
60
The Vikings and the fall of the Old Order 61
Map 8. The impact of the Vikings, late eighth to early eleventh centuries.
western ‘Scotland’ and the Western Isles. During much of the tenth cen-
tury, struggles for power took place between various groups of Vikings.
Hence came the spectacle in the tenth century of the Norse kings of
Dublin attempting to gain control of the Danish kingdom of York, though
ultimately without success.
62 The British Isles
The military revival of the west Saxon monarchy from the early tenth
century onwards did not restore Anglo-Saxon cultural, political and social
dominance north of the Humber. The royal itineraries of the Wessex
kings, which are a good guide to the extent of their real power as opposed
to a temporary ‘showing of the flag’, were largely confined to an area south
of the Thames. For a long time to come, considerable differences existed
between the Danelaw and the rest of England, not least in language,
law, religion and art. The east was very much a distinctive society whose
autonomy the west Saxon monarchy was forced to respect. The revival of
Viking raids in the later tenth century and the establishment of Danish
supremacy over all England during the reign of Cnut (1016–35) can have
done little to reduce this sense of separateness. Even under the Normans,
the Danelaw was to retain much of its own character.
The Scandinavian invasion of the east coast of Britain brought about
the fall of the Old Order and the creation of a new society in its place. Had
the colonising impetus of the Danes been maintained, ‘England’ might
well have been transformed into a ‘New Denmark’. For various reasons,
including the shifting of interest to other areas and the divisions which
existed among the Scandinavians, the conquest of the Anglo-Saxons was
never completed. Indirectly, however, the challenge presented by the new-
comers led to revolutionary changes in the south, where Wessex had man-
aged to escape the fate of Northumbria and Mercia. Under a succession
of able kings, Alfred (871–99), Edward the Elder (899–924), Aethelstan
(924–39), Edmund (939–46), Eadred (946–55), Eadwig (955–9) and
Edgar (959–75), Wessex achieved a remarkable period of dominance.
The tenth century was very much the ‘Age of Wessex’.
These successes were not achieved without paying a price. Wessex, and
the areas which came under its control, became more centralised and
military in character. For Mercia and East Anglia, indeed, ‘liberation’ by
Wessex meant the exchange of one master for another. It is all too easy to
ignore these internal cultural divisions in an interpretation which stresses
the movement of history towards the making of the ‘English nation’. In
due course, despite the military successes of Wessex against the Danes,
Mercia was to show itself restive under the west Saxon monarchy. During
the earlier eleventh century, indeed, the earldom of Mercia enjoyed a good
deal of autonomy.
The new monarchy, from Aethelstan onwards, represented itself as the
instrument of the Divine Will, and, as a consequence, enjoyed a superior
status over and above any opposition based upon ‘tribal’ considerations.
Edgar in particular seems to have regarded himself as possessing quasi-
priestly status. His well-staged coronation at Bath in 973 marks a new
66 The British Isles
Finally, from 980 onwards, Danish raids were renewed. Aethelred proved
unable to deal with the many problems of his inheritance. In 1002 he
was driven to the desperate but impracticable remedy of ordering the
massacre of all Danes resident in England. His reign saw a prolonged
struggle between the Wessex king and the kings of Denmark for control
of England. In 1016 Aethelred died and was ultimately succeeded by the
Dane Cnut (1016–35). ‘England’, now divided into four provinces, each
ruled by a representative of Cnut, became in effect a colony of Denmark.
Though Edward, Aethelred’s son, returned to the throne in 1042, some
years after Cnut’s death, English links with Denmark remained strong.
The Danelaw was still very much a Danish province with its own law and
culture. Kings of Norway also maintained a claim to the English throne.
In the mid-eleventh century, the period which had begun with the Viking
raids of 793 showed little sign of having come to an end. It still looked
very much as if the future of the English North Sea province would be
linked with Scandinavia.
The events of the late tenth century and the first half of the eleventh
bring out the problem of conceptualising the whole of the period from
c. 500 to 1066 in terms of ‘Anglo-Saxon England’. By the early eleventh
century, it was the Danish colonists who were in control of events, and the
term ‘Anglo-Saxon’ to some extent becomes a hindrance to our under-
standing the realities of the situation. We may therefore continue to think
in terms of several sub-cultures each with its own distinctive traditions,
though not uninfluenced by the rest. In some ways, the art of the period –
with its distinction between the Viking motifs of the east coast and the
Carolingian trends of Wessex – helps to bring this out more clearly than
more conventional forms of historical evidence. There was perhaps no
English ‘nation’ at this time, although such a view was totally unaccept-
able to such experts in the field as the late Patrick Wormald.
Viking influence in the western sea-channels from Orkney southwards
had the effect of creating new links between Ireland and Britain, which
replaced the cultural ties that had developed since the sixth century.
Scandinavian culture now dominated Orkney, Shetland and the Outer
Hebrides. Viking cities – Dublin, Cork, Wexford and Wicklow – domi-
nated the western side of the Irish Sea. The Isle of Man, on which Viking
control had replaced British rule, possessed a strategic importance dur-
ing these centuries which it was not to enjoy again. The Viking kings
of Dublin entered into alliances with native Welsh rulers, with Cornish
princes attempting to resist the spread of Anglo-Saxon colonists and with
the Gaelic rulers of the ‘Kingdom of Scots’. If our attention is confined
to England it is possible to treat the coming of the Vikings as a relatively
short-lived threat which was dealt with effectively by Alfred the Great and
70 The British Isles
his successors. When seen in the context of the British Isles it is clear that
Viking culture added a distinctive element, which remained unassimilated
in many areas until the demographic crises of the fourteenth century.
The impact of the Vikings upon the Celtic-speaking cultures of the
British Isles was in many respects similar to that which they had upon
‘England’. The loose kinship-based structures of the sub-Roman period
gave way to feudal polities which we may see as a response to the Viking
threat. Marc Bloch, in his study of feudal society (La Société féodale (1939;
English transl. 1961)), denied that feudalism spread to Celtic areas. In
his view ‘Celtic’ societies remained non-feudal in character for the simple
reason that kinship groups in these societies were strong enough to meet
the Viking challenge. Modern Irish scholarship (and we know more about
Ireland than about either Wales or Scotland) is less sure. It now seems that
the older political divisions of Ireland gave way to a number of territorial
kingdoms. By the first half of the twelfth century the political realities
of Ireland revolved around new kingships which had arisen on the ruins
of the old. These included the kingdoms of Leinster (much smaller in
size than the modern province), Connacht (more limited in area than the
modern province), Breifne (including modern Cavan and Leitrim) and in
the south the kingdoms of south Munster (Desmond) and north Munster
(Thomond). The ruling dynasties of these kingdoms were the families of
MacMurrough, O Connor, O Rourke, MacCarthy and O Brien. By then
the kingdom of Midhe in the hands of the Uı́ Néill had become ‘the sick
man of Ireland’; but at an earlier date under the aggressive leadership of
Mael Sechlainn I (d. 862) of Clann Cholmaı́n it too may be numbered
among these new-style kingdoms. By 1150, Ireland was very different
from what it had been in the eighth century. Bloch, like many other
historians, exaggerated the unchanging structure of ‘Celtic’ society.
One further fact may also be noted. The Normans did not reach Ireland
until a century after they had overrun England and much of Wales. The
Irish kingdoms, and to some extent those of Scotland, were given time
to develop in the context of an ‘Irish Sea Province’, independently of
Norman pressures.
The process by which these new regional monarchies emerged is still
something of a mystery to historians. It was not part of an inevitable pat-
tern of political evolution but the outcome of a struggle between two con-
cepts as to what constituted an acceptable transfer of power. On the one
hand political power was conceived of as residing within a wide lineage,
distinguished by the possession of royal blood, on the other as belong-
ing to a much narrower dynastic family. On the former pattern, political
power did not descend directly from father to son but to a candidate cho-
sen by the kinship group at large. This was the basis of ‘tanistry’, from
72 The British Isles
which helped them to build on a much larger scale than had hitherto been
possible. The link between the new monarchies and the Vikings is also
indicated by the way in which Scandinavian motifs dominated ‘Irish’ art
in the late eleventh and early twelfth centuries.
The new patterns of monarchy first made their appearance in the south-
ern half of Ireland during the tenth century. A hitherto subject people of
the Eoghanachta, the ‘Dál Cais’, took advantage of the weakness of their
overlords in the face of the Vikings to establish a kingdom of their own.
Their leaders, Brian Boru and his elder brother, were ‘new men’ but it
was not long before an appropriate genealogy had been manufactured,
tracing the descent of the Uı́ Briain, as their successors were to be called,
back to the Sons of Mı́l. Brian died in 1014 at the battle of Clontarf but
his dynasty continued to be the leading force in the south for the next
century and more. Unfortunately we know little about the machinery by
which this kingdom was kept together, since historians have tended to
concentrate their attention upon a largely mythical high kingship. As will
appear later (see pp. 79–81), the O Briens, to give them their more famil-
iar name, behaved not as ‘high kings’ but as regional monarchs of a new
pattern, to be found elsewhere in the British Isles. Where they differed
from the Eoghanachta was in their adoption of hereditary descent (or
where an heir was too young, in granting the right to succeed to a close
relative) and of territorial borders.
The best studied of the new kingdoms is Leinster, the last native king
of which, Diarmaid MacMurrough (d. 1171), invited the Normans into
Ireland. Until the Viking period ‘Leinster’ consisted of a number of
groupings of tuatha (petty kingdoms), most of them under the tutelage of
the Uı́ Néill. In the early eleventh century, Diarmaid MacMail na mBo
(d. 1072), king of a newly powerful branch of the Uı́ Cheinnsellaigh,
gained control of the Liffey valley hitherto ruled by the Uı́ Dúnlainge
from their ‘capital’ at Naas. From then onwards (despite some setbacks)
the dynasty of Diarmaid ruled as kings of an expanding Leinster, some-
times backed by other kingdoms as a client against the Uı́ Néill. In an
elaborate analysis of the regnal succession in this area over several cen-
turies, Professor O Corráin has shown how ‘contest’ forms of succession
between widely diffused kinship groups eventually gave way to a much
more concentrated form of dynastic succession. The prize for the victors
was prestige, power and land. A similar type of development took place in
the several other kingdoms which emerged from, or perhaps more accu-
rately were carved out of, the ‘Old Order’ by leaders of ability, whose
ambitions were to found their own dynasty.
The implications of the new patterns went well beyond regulations
concentrating royal succession within a particular family. Feudal-style
76 The British Isles
power. The O Connors for their part had Tuam, Athlone and Clonmac-
noise. Castles, professional troops to man them and fleets of ships also
made their appearance at this time. The need to finance such a political
and military structure led naturally to taxation on a new scale.
From this period dates the rise of new bardic families who took the
place of the filid, and of the monastic fir teighir, as six centuries earlier
the filid had benefited from the fall of the druids and had become the
custodians of secular traditions. What lay behind this change is still a
matter for research but it would seem that the bards formed the basis of
a new ‘establishment’, many of whose members were drawn from weaker
segments of the major royal kindreds. Such families as the MacBrodys,
historians to the O Briens, are typical of the new intellectual class which,
like many of the humanists of the sixteenth century, produced propaganda
for their patrons. Among the typical literary products of this establishment
culture were the bardic poems.
Ideological backing for the new monarchies took several forms, one
of the most subtle of which was genealogical in character. Under the
influence of royal genealogists the genealogical tracts were ‘ruthlessly
edited’, to use Professor O Corráin’s words. Whereas thirty-one lines
of descent within the ruling house of Ciarraige had been recorded in
750, by 1100 the focus had been narrowed to one line, that of the O
Connors. Such a concentration upon a single royal line indicates more
clearly than any other single fact how far access to political power shrank
during this period. The rise of royal ‘surnames’ at this time also illustrates
the same process at work. Older broad lineages gave way to narrower
family loyalties indicated by the adoption of a ‘surname’. Kinship loyalty
remained strong but it was no longer defined within a clear structure but
survived rather as a vague commitment to the sliocht.
Propaganda of a more obvious kind was provided by such treatises as
Cogadh Gaedhel re Gallaibh (The Struggle of the Gael against the Foreigner)
for the O Briens and Caithréim Chellacháin Chaisil (The Wars of Cellachan
of Cashel) for the MacCarthys. The Cogadh stressed the role of the king as
a dispenser of justice and keeper of the peace, while the Caithréim gave a
picture of the ideal vassal. In an age which was largely illiterate, changes
in ritual perhaps reached a wider audience.
Behind these changes lay a profound transition in attitudes to law.
The evidence of the pre-Viking Age Irish law tracts suggests that in early
Irish society law concerned the settlement of disputes between different
kinship groups on the basis of compensation. From the tenth century
onwards in Ireland, as in other parts of the British Isles, a new emphasis
upon law as the imposition of authority from above makes its appear-
ance. Christian teaching certainly played a significant part in this. An
80 The British Isles
The realities of legal practice which lay behind the smokescreen of the law
tracts are suggested by brief references in the chronicles to royal lawyers.
One of them was called ‘ollam breithemnuis Erenn’ (‘professor of the
jurisprudence of Ireland’) but in practical terms he was a royal judge of
the O Briens. Many of the new study-lawyers were churchmen, a fact
which at this date suggests that they were both literate and sympathetic
to the enforcement of law by royal authority. No doubt kinship groups
imposed great limitations upon the full exercise of royal power, but the
evidence certainly indicates that these developments were making their
mark. The Irish high kingship may have been a ‘will o’ the wisp’ as indeed
was the regal vision of Alfred the Great’s successors in Britain. But the
realities of Irish kingly power in smaller units cannot be denied.
Between the coming of the Vikings and the Norman invasions begin-
ning in 1169 it is clear that Irish society underwent a radical transforma-
tion. The old order of two ruling federations, each resting upon loosely
organised networks of autonomous tuatha and locally based monastic
communities, gave way to new-style territorial kingdoms held together
by quasi-feudal ties and supported by a reformed episcopate, centralised
religious orders and subordinate towns. The impact of the Vikings may
have been partially responsible for this change but internal causes seem to
have been as important. Perhaps because the Vikings did not affect Irish
society as much as they did English, the swing towards monarchy was not
as marked as it might have been. Many aspects of the old order of kinship
The Vikings and the fall of the Old Order 81
and clientage survived, though with reduced status and at a more infor-
mal level. The recognition of permanent feudal ties between lord and
vassal, the introduction of cash relationships and a new emphasis upon
the duty to obey a king or a bishop were new developments in Ireland
but they did not eradicate all traditional ties. Local cults still retained
their force. Local memories remained tenacious about the intrusion of
newcomers even when the official historians told a different story. The
vendetta remained even at the level of kinship. When Diarmaid MacMur-
rough abducted O Rourke’s wife Derbforgaill in 1152 he created a feud
which was still reverberating over a decade later.
England and Ireland provide the most convenient and best-studied
examples of the impact of the Vikings upon the cultures of the British Isles.
Unfortunately we know much less about northern Britain and ‘Wales’.
The problem presented by ignorance is made worse by the manner in
which national historians of ‘Wales’ and ‘Scotland’ (as indeed those of
‘England’ and ‘Ireland’) create a framework which presents the ‘emer-
gence’ of these ‘nations’ as the primary fact in which we should be inter-
ested. Indeed, we deal better with the intricacies of historical development
if we leave ‘national’ categories out of the picture as much as possible.
In both northern and western Britain, we may assume, several distinct
cultures continued to exist with their own sense of identity and their
own view of ‘their’ past. What later generations see as the emergence
of a nation involved the superimposition of one culture upon another.
In what we know as ‘Scotland’, an Irish Q-Celtic culture succeeded in
imposing itself upon Picts, Britons and Anglians. But this occurred only
in the south and east; in the north and west, Viking culture was to achieve
its own dominance. Thus the net result of the Viking invasions was a new
division of northern Britain into distinctive cultural areas. In ‘Wales’, the
Viking presence was less marked than it was elsewhere in the British Isles
but the consequences were severe enough to induce profound changes.
One of the main results of the arrival of the Vikings in the Irish Sea
was probably to make contact more difficult between the various P-Celtic
communities of west Britain though there is no evidence that links with
Brittany and Ireland were cut, rather the reverse. Such links came to be
symbolised in the figures of St Samson of Dol (d. 565), who was believed
to have left south Wales for Brittany, and St Illtyd, the founder of the
monastery in south Wales which came to be known as Llantwit Major
(viz., Llanilltud Fawr, the principal church of Illtud), who was believed to
come from Brittany. The close links of the kingdom of Dyfed with Ireland
are also evident during the sub-Roman period. From the ninth century
onwards, however, Viking control of the Severn Sea (indicated by over
forty Scandinavian place-names in south Wales) and of the Dee estuary
82 The British Isles
divided the P-Celtic cultures of the west more sharply than had been the
case before. Some historians believe that the result of these changes was to
make possible the emergence of ‘Wales’ as a distinct British geographical
area, separated from Cornwall, Brittany and Strathclyde.
But ‘Wales’ still remains an elusive concept. There is a Bismarckian
assumption about much modern Welsh historical writing as if ‘unifica-
tion’ were an end towards which the history of western Britain should
have been moving. Thus the ninth-century king, Rhodri the Great, and
the tenth-century king, Hywel the Good, once earned approval from his-
torians for their attempts to bring unity to the disparate parts of ‘Wales’.
The fact that they did not succeed should give us pause. Clearly they
met with opposition from their fellow-countrymen who, on nationalist
assumptions about the past, should have been the first to welcome their
efforts. The term ‘Wales’ provides a clue as to why such opposition should
exist. ‘Wales’ (‘foreign’) did not exist save in the minds of the Anglo-
Saxons to the east. The P-Celtic-speaking inhabitants of the west saw
themselves primarily as ‘Britons’ belonging to one or other of the var-
ious sub-Roman kingdoms or tribal groupings into which the area was
divided.
To do some degree of justice to the complexity of the situation dur-
ing this period we would do well to think of western Britain as being
divided into at least three sub-cultures, one (Gwynedd) looking north to
Strathclyde and the other ‘Gwyr y Gogledd’ (the ‘Men of the North’),
another (Powys) oriented more towards Mercia in the east but still retain-
ing through its bardic poetry the memory of ties with northern Britain,
and a third (Dyfed, Glamorgan and Gwent) linked southward towards the
Severn Sea, Cornwall and Brittany. There was no sense of unity in ‘Wales’.
Attempts by any of these sub-cultures to assert dominance over the others
were resisted, even to the extent of seeking help from the Anglo-Saxons.
Thus in the ninth century the southern kingdoms of Dyfed, Glywysing
and Gwent sought help from Wessex in an attempt to stave off pressure
from Gwynedd.
The cultural differences between north and south probably went back
to tribal loyalties which the Roman empire had done little to weaken.
There was also a ‘hidden Wales’ in the border counties of Cheshire,
Shropshire and Herefordshire, about which we know little but which
almost certainly continued to haunt memories on the ‘Welsh’ side of the
border. In the tenth century, as the poem Armes Prydein Vawr (Prophecy
of Great Britain) indicates, some Britons at least were hoping, in alliance
with the Vikings, the Scots and Strathclyde, to drive the English into the
sea. Had the battle of Brunanburh (937) turned out differently, some
Welsh border territory might have been recovered. As late as the eleventh
The Vikings and the fall of the Old Order 83
century many English settlements well to the east of Offa’s Dyke bore the
mark of British raids, as Domesday Book itself indicates in references to
‘vills laid waste’.
It was during this period of profound change that an ‘invention of tra-
dition’ took place comparable to that which occurred in England and
Ireland. The History of the Britons lays particular stress upon the role of
the northern kingdom of Gwynedd and was perhaps written as a piece of
‘official history’ to provide backing for the new dynasty of which Rhodri
Mawr (the Great) was to be the main representative. The History of the
Britons also contains references to the sixth-century bards, Aneirin and
Taliesin, presumably as an attempt to provide further ‘historical’ backing.
Aneirin may well have been the author of The Gododdin, the heroic poem
dealing with events in north Britain during the sixth century. The emer-
gence of episcopal sees at St Davids in Dyfed and Bangor in Gwynedd
probably also represents an attempt by the new kings to ‘modernise’ the
Church in their own territories at the expense of the localised monastic
institutions of an earlier period. In these various ways, the new dynas-
ties which the Viking period brought into existence created a sense of
legitimacy for themselves.
As elsewhere in the British Isles, in Wales the coming of the Vikings led
to the downfall of the ‘Old Order’. New men, the Welsh equivalent of the
O Briens, carved out kingdoms for themselves. In the north, during the
ninth century, the new dynasty of Merfyn Frydi (its first king, 826–44)
and Rhodri the Great took over Gwynedd. In the south in the tenth
century a great part of south Wales came to be known as Morganwg
(the ‘Glamorgan’ of a later period) from one of its most successful rulers,
Morgan (c. 930–74). New men also seized the ancient kingdom of Gwent.
In the south-west, Hywel, known to history as Hywel Dda, acquired
control of the kingdom of Dyfed. He also briefly became king of Gwynedd
(942–50). Faced with a choice between Viking and Anglo-Saxon, Hywel
chose the latter, rejecting the policy of resistance which the poet of Armes
Prydein Vawr advocated.
In northern Britain at the end of the eighth century cultural patterns
were more variegated than was the case further south. North of the Hum-
ber, Anglian culture was dominant up to the Firth of Forth; P-Celtic cul-
ture still survived on the Clyde and the Solway Firth; the Q-Celtic Irish of
Dalriada controlled Argyll and the Isles and had extended their influence
north-eastwards; and on the east coast the Pictish kingdom maintained
a precarious independence. Four cultures, four languages and four legal
traditions contended for supremacy with the balance perhaps favouring
the Anglo-Saxons and the Q-Celts. All this was to be radically changed
from the end of the eighth century as a result of the Viking invasions.
The Vikings and the fall of the Old Order 85
In the north, the Vikings seized control of the territory of the northern
Picts in Orkney, Shetland and Caithness. The hill land to the south of the
plain of Ross came to be called ‘Sutherland’ (Southland), a geographical
perspective which reflected the viewpoint of the newcomers. The place-
name ‘Dingwall’ near the Moray Firth is the same as ‘Thingwall’ on the
coast of Lancashire, both names illustrating the influence of the Vikings
in northern Britain.
In the west of ‘Scotland’ the repeated sacking of Iona by Vikings from
793 onwards marked the failure of the rulers of Dalriada to protect their
holy places and increasingly control of the Western Isles was taken over
by the Gall-Gaedhil (‘Foreign Gaels’), raiders of mixed culture, who
spoke a form of Q-Celtic. Viking influence was dominant from the Outer
Hebrides southwards (the place-names of the Isle of Lewis are heavily
Scandinavian). The kingdom of Strathclyde effectively lost its indepen-
dence after the taking of Dumbarton in 870 and became a client state
of the ‘Kingdom of Scots’, whose rulers connived at the murder of the
last of its independent kings. Strathclyde maintained a precarious sepa-
rate existence into the eleventh century but was never again a major local
power.
Change was equally marked in the east where from the mid-ninth
century the kingdoms of the southern Picts fell under the control of
a ‘new man’ of obscure background, Kenneth MacAlpin. MacAlpin’s
career resembles that of other new-style kings in other parts of the British
Isles. A ‘Kingdom of Scots’ now arose based upon the conquest of Pict-
land, Strathclyde and of Anglian Bernicia. The dominant culture of this
kingdom was at first the Irish culture of Dalriada from which Kenneth
came. It is tempting to assert that, as was the case with the new dynasties
of Wales and Ireland, a fictitious genealogy was soon concocted, linking
him with the early rulers of Dalriada, Cenel Gabhrain, but it is not clear
that he belonged in fact to that lineage. Finally, further south, the collapse
of the Anglo-Saxon kingdom of Northumbria in the face of Viking attacks
led to the setting up of a Viking kingdom of York. The ninth century saw
the establishment of a Viking empire in north Britain, which in its heyday
influenced the course of events within the British Isles from ‘capitals’ at
Dublin and York.
There is a general tendency among historians of Scotland (as also
among English and Irish historians) to play down the importance of the
role of the Vikings in the history of northern Britain as if it were his-
torically predetermined that the Scottish nation should emerge under
the leadership of the south-eastern-based ‘Kingdom of Scots’. The fact
that the Vikings came to speak Gaelic and to adopt the kinship-based
framework of Celtic society has tended to obscure the Viking presence in
86 The British Isles
Scandinavian Settlement
in Northern Britain SHET LAND
Scandinavian settlement name Tingwall
In Orkney and Shetland all
settlement was Scandinavian
Jarlshof
0 100 200 km
Birsay
Skaill
O RKNEY
LEWIS
CAITHNESS
Dingwall
S K YE
Dunkeld
ION A
Dumbarton
K INTYRE
and eventually anglicised into ‘Sorley’ in the late sixteenth century. (Sor-
ley Boy MacDonnell, the Ulster chieftain who came into conflict with
Elizabeth, was Somhairle Buidhe – Sorley the Blond.) Indeed, the mili-
tary traditions of the Highlands probably derive from the Vikings rather
than from the so-called ‘wild Irish’. It has even been suggested that the
bitter rivalries between Campbells and MacDonalds derive from the over-
throw of the Christian kingdoms by the pagan Viking newcomers in the
ninth century and a long-lived legacy of hatred which was its result.
A permanent Scandinavian presence in Britain north of the Humber
was one of the main consequences of the invasions of the ninth and
tenth centuries. Another indirect consequence was the establishment of a
Gaelic empire, the ‘Kingdom of Scots’, in what had been the independent
territories of southern Pictland, Strathclyde and (northern) Bernicia. In
effect, this brought about, for a time, the dominance of Gaelic culture in
these areas leaving Pictish, British and Anglian cultures in a subordinate
position. The Welsh Brut y Tywysogion (Chronicle of the Princes) states that
‘the men of Strathclyde . . . had to depart from their country, and to go
to Gwynedd’. In later stories it is stated that Kenneth MacAlpin came to
be king ‘after violent deaths, after violent slaughter’. Thus the ‘Kingdom
of Scots’ did not emerge as part of a providential development in which
‘Scotland’ came to take its place among the nations of the earth but, at
least in the eyes of its sub-cultures, as a process analogous to that by
which the Vikings established themselves elsewhere.
The novelty of these developments in the ‘Kingdom of Scots’ was indi-
cated by the way in which the new dynasty came to cut its links with Iona
and to give its patronage to new holy places at Dunkeld and St Andrews.
The introduction of St Andrew, an apostle without any apparent connec-
tion with Britain, as a cult-figure in eastern Pictland was an important
symbolic change. These changes were not, however, accompanied by a
shift towards episcopacy, a development which in Scotland did not occur
until 1100 at the earliest. Though it was called the ‘Kingdom of Scots’
there were in fact relatively few ‘Scots’ (viz., Gaels) in the new kingdom
save as a ruling elite (the English ascendancy in eighteenth-century Ire-
land offers a possible comparison). Of all the political units of the British
Isles, the ‘Kingdom of Scots’ had the least homogeneous cultural foun-
dations.
On the eve of the Norman Conquest of 1066 the future of the British
Isles seemed to be largely linked to Scandinavia. Seaborne trade in all
areas was in Viking hands. The ports of the east coast of Ireland and of
the eastern and western coasts of Britain were essentially Viking centres.
The Vikings were also solidly entrenched in many areas of the British Isles
from the Shetlands south to Galloway, Lancashire and East Anglia. A new
88 The British Isles
GW
YN
ED
MERCIA
D
MIDDLE
ANGLIA
EAST
ANGLIA
DYFED
Gloucester
Oxford
Wantage Wallingford London
Reading
Bath Rochester
Canterbury Sandwich
WESSEX Winchester KENT
Hamwic
Dorchester
0 100 200 km
Scandinavian Settlement
in Southern Britain
Map 10. The boundary agreed by Alfred and Guthrum, c. 880, between
England and the Danelaw, and the distribution of Scandinavian place-
names.
Postscript
The aim of this chapter was to discuss the impact of the Vikings upon
the British Isles. This was and remains a controversial topic, the key
question being to what extent the Vikings may be seen as making a pos-
itive contribution, in terms of trade, for example, rather than as simply
pirates and raiders, as the established view maintains. Recently this ortho-
doxy has been modified, the most convincing evidence being provided by
Ireland. Professor O Croı́nı́n in his excellent discussion of ‘the Viking
Age’(Chapter 9 of Early Medieval Ireland 400–1200 (London, 1995)) dis-
misses Binchy’s view that the Vikings practised ‘total war’ in which no
holds were barred. ‘On the contrary’, O Croı́nı́n argues, ‘the annals indi-
cate all too clearly that before, during and after the Viking period more
churches were plundered and more clerics killed by the Irish than by
the Norse.’ O Croı́nı́n dismisses the criticisms of the Vikings in the offi-
cial history of the O Briens as a ‘rousing narrative’ which is ‘about as
good a source of information on the Vikings as Star Trek is for the Ameri-
can space programme’. O Croı́nı́n does not let the Vikings entirely off the
hook, however. He admits that initially the raids had a traumatic effect on
their victims but that soon the Vikings came to intermarry with the local
population. This chapter in Early Medieval Ireland should be a required
piece of reading for those interested in the Viking period not least for O
Croı́nı́n’s judgement that
Despite everything that has been said in later Irish histories Dublin in fact survived
the battle of Clontarf unscathed and in the eleventh and twelfth centuries enjoyed
a position of unrivalled importance both as an emporium for the entire Atlantic
trade of the north-western world and also as a base for a powerful fleet which
could be hired out as a mercenary force in England and Wales to contestants on
either side of the political divide. (Early Medieval Ireland (1995), p. 270)
Larne
Ballyholme
Nendrum
Louth Dromiskin
Annagassan
Monasterboice
Eyrephort
Dublin
Wicklow
Killaloe Arklow
Limerick Thurles
Cashel
Waterford Wexford
Smerwick Harbour
Gt. Blasket Is.
Areas of possible
additional settlement
0 50 100 km
Western Europe. Even so, doubts may be raised about the extent to which
the power of the Anglo-Saxon monarchy extended north of the Trent
before and even after 1066.
North of the Tweed, of course, the Vikings were a formidable presence
particularly on the west coast and in the Isle of Man (a point touched
on by O Croı́nı́n). In the historiography of Scotland, the influence of the
The Vikings and the fall of the Old Order 91
92
The Norman and post-Norman ascendancy 93
also Norman penetration further north in Fife and Moray. Such ‘Scottish’
families as Fraser, Haig, Bruce, Wishart (Guiscard) and Stewart (many
of them today complete with tartan and kilt) first made their appearance
in Scotland as a result of this episode.
The various kingdoms of Ireland remained unaffected by Norman
power until 1169, although, as we have seen, they were by no means unaf-
fected by ‘modernising’ tendencies in Church as well as state. The Viking
The Norman and post-Norman ascendancy 97
towns of the east coast were in control of the Irish Sea and in contact with
Scandinavian settlements on its west coast from Galloway southwards.
In 1169–70, this situation changed dramatically when the exiled king
of Leinster, Diarmaid MacMurrough, asked the Norman lords of south
Wales to help him regain his kingdom. In many ways, Diarmaid’s deci-
sion to seek Norman aid resembled that of David of Scotland, earlier
in the century. In Ireland, however, the Normans encountered stronger
opposition. Even so, by the end of the century, they were in control of
much of the country.
The Norman successes created a French-speaking ascendancy
throughout the British Isles. By the end of the twelfth century the various
kingdoms and provinces which had been independent entities were ruled
by an aristocracy, which in its turn was linked by ties of vassalage to a
single monarch. Even the king of Scotland with large estates in mid-
land England (the Honour of Huntingdon) was in a measure incor-
porated within the system. The kings of Gwynedd in the thirteenth
century did homage to Henry III. For a time, in the late twelfth cen-
tury, the British Isles formed part of a wider empire which also included
Aquitaine.
Throughout this period, French culture was a symbol of belonging
to the political and ecclesiastical elite. The result was to downgrade the
status of the various languages and cultures of the North Sea and Irish
Sea Provinces. To speak these languages could be a mark of bondage.
Lanfranc, the Norman archbishop of Canterbury, referred when writ-
ing to Pope Alexander II to his own ignorance of the language of ‘bar-
barous peoples’. In religion, the Normans saw themselves as reformers.
They replaced what they regarded as a superstitious attachment to local
saints with ‘uncouth’ names with the veneration of saints of the uni-
versal Church. Churches dedicated to St Peter, St Thomas, St Andrew
and others replaced saints with possibly dangerous or unfashionable local
attachments. The Normans also left their mark on the language of the
people whom they ruled, as the following selection of French loanwords
in Middle English indicates.
1 a d m i n i s t r at i o n , l aw : Crown, parliament, reign, royal, state, city,
council, court, evidence, fine, fraud, gaol, prison.
2 d r e s s : apron, bonnet, boot, brooch, chain, collar, jacket, jewel,
(boot-)lace, ornament, petticoat.
3 fa m i ly : aunt, cousin, nephew, niece, uncle.
4 f o o d, m e a l s , f r u i t s : bacon, beef, mutton, partridge, pheasant,
pigeon, poultry, sausage, sugar, tripe, veal, dinner, feast, supper, date,
fig, grape, lemon, orange, raisin.
98 The British Isles
There was in fact no ‘English’ history for long after the Conquest.
What is normally spoken of as ‘English’ political history during these
centuries relates almost exclusively to controversy and conflict within
the ascendancy. The Becket tragedy, Magna Carta, the baronial wars
of the mid-thirteenth century were all essentially matters relating to the
French-speaking elite. As Stubbs pointed out, the influence of French
culture increased rather than diminished in the thirteenth century. A
Frenchman, Simon de Montfort, played an active role in ascendancy pol-
itics during the thirteenth century. Edward II took his coronation oath
in French. Henry de Beaumont, to whom Edward II gave the Isle of
Man, was the son of Lewis de Brienne, viscount of Beaumont in Maine.
His brother, the bishop of Durham, is recorded as having said on one
occasion under stress: ‘Par seynt Lewis, il ne fut pas curtays qui est
parole icy escrit’ (‘By Saint Louis, the word written here is discourte-
ous’). Under Henry III, French became the language of written law, and
under Edward I the language of the courts of law. The continued strength
of the ascendancy in spite of its internal division is indicated by the sur-
vival of such names as de Bohun, Bigod and Mortimer, dating from the
Conquest.
The colonial nature of this society needs to be stressed if its true char-
acter is to be understood. The followers of William took great risks in the
enterprise and their rewards were correspondingly great. Settlers contin-
ued to arrive well into the twelfth century, displacing English sub-tenants
who had survived the first generation of conquest. For the younger sons of
Norman families (and ‘Norman’ here must be understood to cover much
of the north-western coastline of the continent, including Flanders) Eng-
land was a ‘frontier’ which offered the chance of social advancement, a
fact of which the historian Orderic Vitalis was well aware when he referred
to those ‘whom Henry had raised from the dust’. It was not uncom-
mon for Norman lords to bring over tenants from their own estates. In
modern terms, England resembled a Texas in which the Anglo-Saxons
came to occupy second-class status. The Yankees in this case were the
Normans.
Such a large-scale process of conquest and colonisation could hardly
be successful without a continuing display of military force. Here lay the
importance of the Norman castles (not ‘English’ castles as they are some-
times referred to). The function of the castle was the same in England,
at least initially, as it was in the marcher lordships and elsewhere in the
British Isles – to overawe a subject population. This may seem to be over-
stressing the obvious, but in most accounts of English history the key
importance of the castle tends to be underplayed. Following the lead of
the great nineteenth-century historians, modern scholars still concentrate
102 The British Isles
the Church. The coming of the Friars in the early thirteenth century
seems to have marked something of a turning point. The Franciscans, in
particular, drew upon lower social groups within the towns, which were
more likely to be English-speaking than French-speaking. However, it
was only with the rise of the Lollard movement in the late fourteenth
century that an unmistakeably English religious movement appeared.
The third element in the colonial structure was the borough. Dur-
ing the years immediately after the Conquest, ‘Norman’ colonists were
introduced into at least six towns, including Nottingham and Shrewsbury.
More significant, however, is the fact that many new towns were estab-
lished during the late eleventh, twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Between
1066 and 1130, forty new towns were founded (not including eighteen
in Wales). During the civil wars of Stephen’s and Matilda’s reign (1135–
54), the rate slowed, but it picked up again in the second half of the
twelfth century. During the period 1191–1230, nearly fifty new towns
were planted. The creation of new towns was thus a remarkable feature
of post-Conquest England and Wales.
In seeking an explanation for this phenomenon, historians have tended
to stress the rise of trade. From this standpoint, the history of towns
forms part of ‘English’ economic history and, as with ‘English’ castles and
‘English’ monasteries, so too there have been studies of ‘English’ towns. If
we look at who founded these towns and why, it is clear that the initiative
came mainly from the Norman colonial elite. Some towns, Newcastle,
for example, were royal foundations but most owed their existence to the
initiative of local lords.
The attraction of such institutions for the lords lay in the fact that towns
were, in effect, controllable markets where the output of estates could be
turned into cash. The rents which burgesses paid in a lord’s town were
another source of cash. Trade conducted within a town paid tolls. Mills
were another source of income. Though the details of boroughs varied
from place to place, the object remained the same, to add to the wealth
of the colonial ascendancy. The earls of Gloucester acquired a quarter
of their total income from the tolls of Bristol. Leicester provided the
earls of Leicester with a third of their income. These were large and
prosperous urban centres which had existed before the Conquest. More
typical were towns of middling importance. The bishops of Worcester
founded Stratford. The earls of Chester founded Stockport and Salford.
Control of the town of Coventry was disputed between the local feudal
and ecclesiastical lords. Under the auspices of the bishop of Norwich,
the town of Lynn expanded (to be known first as Bishop’s Lynn and
then later as King’s Lynn). Hugh de Gonneville founded the town of
Chipping Camden as an outlet for the Cotswolds wool trade. The same
The Norman and post-Norman ascendancy 105
story was repeated many times, sometimes with success, sometimes with
failure.
During this period, the towns of England were not independent mani-
festations of the commercial spirit, but sponsored institutions controlled
by the colonial ascendancy. It was only when this started to decline in the
second half of the fourteenth century that towns began to achieve some
measure of independence. Maitland noted how ‘in some great boroughs,
seigniorial justice was a hardy plant’ (in Sir Frederick Pollock and F. W.
Maitland, History of English Law (1898), p. 646). He was referring to the
situation in the town of Stamford in 1275, where various lords, ecclesi-
astical and secular, claimed rights over their tenants. But Stamford was
typical at this date. At Stockport and Salford, the lord’s steward presided
over the borough assembly. At Tavistock, the abbot closely supervised the
borough which the abbey had founded: the abbot’s steward presided over
the borough court, levied a percentage on corn ground at the town mill,
collected inheritance dues and controlled various services due from ‘his’
burgesses. At Bury St Edmunds, the abbey wielded wide powers over the
economic life of the borough, controlling its court and its market and
collecting tolls. The abbey also enjoyed a considerable privilege, in that
its own produce was exempt from tolls. It also took precedence in making
purchases of grain.
Towns which had existed before the Conquest lost whatever autonomy
they had possessed earlier. This may be seen most clearly in the shift in
the control of urban churches. In such towns as Bristol, Stamford and
Lincoln, churches had been built by local patrons. At Winchester, most
of its fifty-six churches had been built in this way. After the Conquest,
ownership was vested with the Norman bishop or with the local Nor-
manised monastery. Thus at Leicester, the earl transferred six churches
to his new foundation of Augustinian canons. In such an instance we may
see how castle, monastery and borough formed a network of institutions
supporting the colonial ascendancy.
There is, finally, the key institution of the manor, described by Pro-
fessor Postan in The Medieval Economy and Society (1975) as ‘the most
powerful, the most ubiquitous and the most characteristic institution of
medieval economy and society’. The manor may be seen as consisting
of the lord’s demesne, worked by an unfree labour force, which in turn
for its services was allowed to cultivate its own holdings. Over much of
England, it was associated with the so-called open fields in which the
peasantry cultivated ‘strips’. The economic arrangements of the manor,
however, varied widely from place to place and from time to time. In
‘Wessex’, the tenants were more likely to be unfree than in East Anglia.
The same person could pay rent for one holding and be required to pay
106 The British Isles
possible. With the coming of the Normans, however, a new period began,
marked by military control and large-scale colonisation.
The full impact of the Normans was not felt immediately. William
seems to have been content to establish control of the Welsh border-
lands, with the probable aim of containing unrest in Mercia. At this date,
the three great Norman earldoms of Chester, Shrewsbury and Hereford
may be seen as largely defensive in character. In the last decades of the
eleventh century, however, with the opportunity offered by the death of
Rhys ap Tewdwr, king of Deheubarth (d. 1093), a more forward policy
of conquest and colonisation began. The coast of south Wales with its
easy access by sea from Devon was an inviting target for those younger
sons who had missed earlier opportunities in England. In the north, an
approach from the Dee estuary offered similar possibilities, though it was
to be much less successful. Not until the campaigns of Edward I in the
late thirteenth century was the kingdom of Gwynedd in the north finally
brought under control.
The Norman Conquest of Wales is a dramatic story. What was less
dramatic but equally significant was the process of colonisation which
accompanied it. The first plantation of Flemish colonists took place in
Pembrokeshire in the early twelfth century but the really decisive fac-
tor in the Norman success was the supply of English colonists. Much
of Wales was mountainous but there were many substantial pockets of
fertile land along the south coast and in the valleys of the Severn, the Usk
and the Wye. In the north, the vale of Clwyd and the Isle of Anglesey
were similar areas. Herefordshire, today a part of England, was another
attractive target for the colonist. All these lands were to fall to English
colonists during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. The demographic
upsurge which was so marked a feature of English society in the twelfth
and thirteenth centuries provided the impetus behind the colonisation
of Wales. Without the numerical backing of English tenants, it would
have been impossible for the Normans to make the inroads which they
did. By the early fourteenth century much of the best land in Wales
was occupied by the Normans and their tenants. Each lordship had
its ‘Englishry’ of good land, and its ‘Welshry’ of poorer land. In the
one, the Norman law operated, in the other Welsh. A colonial society
was delineated in Wales more clearly than anywhere else in the British
Isles.
As in England, the combination of castle, borough and Church
provided the framework around which Norman control was organised.
Several hundred castles were built, mostly of the motte-and-bailey type.
Castles, as at Chepstow, provided the nuclei towards which smaller cas-
tles could look for support. It was a sign of the hostile environment within
The Norman and post-Norman ascendancy 109
which the colonists operated that castles were much thicker on the ground
in Wales than was the case in English counties, such as Somerset. Another
sign was the de facto independence which the Crown permitted the lord-
ships to enjoy. Royal law did not operate in the marcher lordships, which
numbered about forty during the heyday of the colony.
Boroughs were also created to meet the needs of the castle and the
settlers. Some of them, such as Cardiff and Monmouth, developed into
fully fledged towns. Others, such as Whittington and Chirk, remained
scarcely more than villages. In the later thirteenth century, Edward I
established Flint and other boroughs as part of a conscious policy of
colonisation. Though at a later period such towns became indubitably
‘Welsh’ in their outlook, to live in a town during the Norman period was
a sign of belonging to the English colony. The Welsh were in fact excluded
from them. The square towers of many urban churches were intended to
serve a defensive function, and no new town was established far from the
protection of a castle. The towns existed primarily to serve the needs of
the ‘Englishry’.
The Norman Conquest had a particularly marked effect upon the
Welsh Church. In Wales there had been no equivalent of the English
‘Tenth-Century Reformation’ with its policies of centralisation. As in
other areas of the Irish Sea Province, earlier patterns of local control
based upon kinship groups had prevailed against a system based upon
government by bishops. There were four Welsh bishoprics (St Davids,
Llandaff, St Asaph and Bangor) but in the countryside episcopal surveil-
lance counted for little against the entrenched traditions of abbeys with
strong local roots, symbolised by an attachment to a local saint. In
the Church, as in secular society, the kinship group was an enduring
institution.
Wherever they established themselves, the Normans almost immedi-
ately ‘reformed’ this system out of existence. At Brecon, where he estab-
lished a castle, Bernard of Neufmarche established a monastic cell linked
to Battle Abbey (Sussex). West of Cardiff, Richard of Granville set up a
monastery of Neath linked with the French order of Savigny. Other lords
became patrons of monastic houses linked with Le Mans and Saumur.
Another maintained ties with Glastonbury. (In parts of Wales less affected
by Norman pressure, local kings established Cistercian monasteries with
similar ‘reforms’ in mind.) In Norman-controlled Wales, the Church
became closely identified with the ‘Englishry’. This was as true of the
bishoprics as of the monasteries. The see of Glamorgan had been ‘angli-
cised’ for some time before the Conquest, but the see of St David had
been completely Welsh. After the Conquest, both bishoprics were reor-
ganised on lines acceptable to the newcomers.
110 The British Isles
There was, finally, the manor, with the accompanying nucleated set-
tlements and open-field system. Within the ‘Englishry’ of the various
lordships, the presence of the new colonists was marked by agrarian
arrangements characteristic of England not Wales. The main difference
lay in the fact that such land was held from a lord in return for ser-
vices rendered, and not by virtue of membership of a kinship group in
return for reciprocal services. Enjoying better land, thanks to the back-
ing of their lords, the Englishry could regard itself as superior to the
Welshry. Outside the immediate circle of the lord’s control, however,
Welsh custom based upon partible inheritance continued to be prac-
tised. Also, customary law relating to the feud (galanas) and the principle
of compensation to relatives for a crime committed against one of the
kindred’s members survived in many areas. Marcher lords themselves
were willing to enforce the law of galanas in the Welshries in return for a
fee.
A distinction may be drawn between the early colonisation of Wales
in the immediate post-Conquest period and the later, more centralised
attempt to colonise Gwynedd during the reign of Edward I. Gwynedd had
succeeded in maintaining its autonomy during the twelfth century and
much of the thirteenth, though at the cost of its rulers formally accepting
the overlordship of the English king. A period of relative independence
during the baronial wars of the mid-thirteenth century was followed even-
tually by defeat at the hands of Edward I. In 1282 Llywelyn of Gwynedd
died in battle and his brother David was executed a year later. In 1284
Edward held a ‘parliament’, as a result of which the Norman criminal law
enforced by Norman-style sheriffs was introduced into the three shires
which now constituted the former kingdom of Gwynedd.
As in the south, the classical combination of castle, borough and
Church was relied upon to provide the framework of the colony. Edward’s
castles at each end of the Menai Straits and down the coast at Harlech still
stand as a monument to his policy. More effective, at least at first, were the
newly founded boroughs of Flint, Denbigh, Holt, Rhuddlan and Ruthin.
These are thoroughly Welsh today but they were originally intended to
be islands of colonial privilege in the Welsh countryside. Welshmen were
forbidden to live within them and were excluded from taking an active
part in their trading activities. A policy of plantation was also adopted in
connection with these boroughs and as a consequence good land in the
vale of Clwyd was confiscated for the benefit of new settlers while the
Welsh were ‘compensated’ with poorer land on the hillsides. The Greys
of Ruthin were one of the families who benefited from their part in this
colonisation.
The Norman and post-Norman ascendancy 111
controlled Shetland, Orkney, the islands of Lewis and Skye and the Isle of
Man. The Inner Hebrides had in the early twelfth century been formed
into a kingdom by Somerled (d. 1164) and his descendants continued
to rule the area. Galloway, closely tied to the north of Ireland, was ruled
by Gaelic-Scandinavians, whose power south of the Solway had given
way before the expanding Canmore monarchy. It is difficult to be certain
about the political and social arrangements of the Gaelic-speaking lord-
ships but it would seem that a kinship system still survived, modified by
feudal ties between lord and vassal. The Vikings who colonised Argyll and
the Isles became gaelicised, and took over Gaelic forms of legitimation.
Donald and Dougall, the sons of Somerled, used the Gaelic patronymic
‘Mac’ (son of) which came to be the basis of the MacDonald and Mac-
Dougall clans. But the stone castles, which were built at key anchorages
in this seaborne society, pointed to the influence of ideas which were not
very far removed from those of the Normans.
The Irish Sea province looked towards the western seas and for some
time after the Norman Conquest of England was to be left to its own
devices. It was the North Sea province of ‘Scotland’ which was drawn
first into the Norman sphere of influence. The reigns of David I (1124–
53) and of William IV (the Lion, 1165–1214) were decisive here. Where
Malcolm Canmore had been largely concerned with extending his influ-
ence into what had been Bernicia and was now northern Northumbria,
his sons and grandson moved north into Gaelic-speaking Moray and
Buchan and south-west into Galloway. This could hardly have been suc-
cessful without the support of the Normans. The kings of the twelfth
and thirteenth centuries were, all in their different ways, dependent upon
the Norman kings. Without this support the rise of Edinburgh to polit-
ical importance is difficult to explain. A Norman ascendancy was thus
established in Scotland but more indirectly than was the case in Wales or
Ireland.
The instruments of Normanisation were the same as those employed
elsewhere in the British Isles – castle, borough and reformed Church. It
has been estimated that there were twenty-eight mottes in Annandale,
twenty-six between the Nith and the Cree and eleven to the west of the
Cree – well over fifty in the south-west alone. Some of these mottes, like
the motte of Urr, were major undertakings. In addition to these baronial
castles, there were royal castles, such as those at Stirling and Inverness.
The building of castles in such numbers makes clear what may not be
apparent at first sight, that the establishment of the Canmore dynasty
rested upon the fact of conquest; however, traditionally, historians have
preferred to see it in terms of ‘the making of a kingdom’ according to the
‘best European models’.
114 The British Isles
also refuse. Edward’s response was to make war in the Scottish Lowlands
and to treat with unusual severity any of his opponents who might be
captured. William Wallace (whose name with its ‘Welsh’ overtones recalls
the old British kingdom of Strathclyde) rose in the name of King John
and enjoyed some success before being captured and executed in 1304.
Comyn and Bruce already had made peace with Edward in 1301. When in
1306 Robert Bruce quarrelled with John Comyn in the Greyfriars church
at Dumfries and stabbed him to death, it looked as if Edward had little
to fear in the future, despite the fact that Bruce had himself crowned
at Scone. Edward’s death in 1307, however, and the weakness of his
successor in the face of baronial opposition, made it possible for Bruce to
survive and eventually, in 1314, to defeat his enemies at Bannockburn,
near Stirling.
Confusion is often caused by the use of the concepts ‘English’ and
‘Scottish’ in dealing with these events. In fact, issues of national iden-
tity have little place in a situation which at the highest political level
was dominated by ideas of lordship and vassalage. What occurred in the
years following 1294 was not a conflict between ‘England’ and ‘Scot-
land’ (though it became so later) but a struggle for power within the
Norman ascendancy. As such, it was little different from the civil wars of
the mid-century. The contenders in the struggle, with the exception of
Wallace, were all of ‘Norman’ extraction. Balliol and Bruce (the elder)
had been taken prisoner at the battle of Lewes in 1264, fighting for Henry
III against Simon de Montfort. Comyn had taken the side of Simon and
Llywelyn of Wales. A structure of politics which allowed this to occur took
little account of national aspirations. When Bruce was proclaimed king at
Scone, the three areas which took sides against him, Buchan, Galloway
and Argyll (with their distinctive cultures), were precisely those in which
the Canmore dynasty had had most difficulty in establishing its author-
ity. Bruce’s support came from his fellow-Normans, and not all of them.
Those who gave him their support took their stand against a king who
seemed to have shifted his position from that of feudal overlord to one of
imperial dominance. Edward I was the revolutionary. They were the tra-
ditionalists, defending the local autonomy to which they felt themselves
entitled.
Concentration upon the political activity of the Normans tends to dis-
tract attention from the fate of the various sub-cultures which co-existed
in Scotland in the eleventh century. By the beginning of the fourteenth
century, Gaelic was clearly in retreat, except in the west. Its place had
been taken by English in the form of the Lothian dialect. The elite spoke
French but, below that level, English took over. Why this should be so is
not very clear. It may be due to a number of factors, including sponsored
The Norman and post-Norman ascendancy 117
in the power struggle which occurred in the 1160s he came off worst.
Forced into exile in 1166, Diarmaid’s request for help from the Normans
was something of a gambler’s throw. Henry II himself had enough on
his hands with the problems of his own Angevin empire in France and
England and showed little enthusiasm for the prospect. It was among the
Norman feudatories of south Wales that Diarmaid found support. And
the fact that they acted to some extent in defiance of the Crown was to
have long-term consequences. The Norman conquistadores always felt
that they were independent of royal control. Indeed it was not until the
reign of Henry VIII that the title ‘king of Ireland’ was officially adopted
by the Crown. Throughout the medieval period the kings of England
were merely ‘lords’ of Ireland. Nonetheless, royal authority, at least in
the thirteenth century, was very much a reality.
Diarmaid also gave an additional cover of legality to the enterprise by
arranging for the marriage of Strongbow to his daughter Aoife, though
such an arrangement carried little weight in traditional Irish law. In their
own eyes, however, the Normans now had a claim to the kingdoms of
Leinster and Midhe. Religious reform added a further card to play. Diar-
maid was a ‘reforming’ king who had founded monasteries and had been
in contact by letter with the great St Bernard himself. The Norman epis-
copate in England could be relied upon to support their king. The Pope,
Alexander III, also looked upon the newcomers as agents of reform. But,
in essentials, the coming of the Normans to Ireland involved a conquest,
with consequences as unmistakeable as that by the Teutonic knights in
east Prussia.
What were the consequences of the coming of the Normans? This is
an issue which still deeply divides Irish historians. Eoin MacNeill (in
Phases of Irish History (1919)) looked upon the invasion as a wholly neg-
ative episode as a result of which the development of Irish nationhood
was set back for centuries. More recently, Professor Binchy (in Proceed-
ings of the Dublin Congress of Celtic Studies (1962)) has argued strongly in
favour of regarding the Viking invasions rather than the Norman Con-
quest as the crucial turning point in Irish history. There is also a ‘revi-
sionist’ school of Irish historians which stresses the positive contribution
made by the Normans in some areas. Professor F. X. Martin, for example,
has argued that the Normans made possible the introduction of parlia-
mentary institutions into Ireland. Professors Aubrey Gwynn and John A.
Watt have seen the Normans as completing the movement of reform in
the Irish Church. H. G. Richardson stressed the role of the Normans in
bringing Ireland into the mainstream of European culture and though,
as we have seen earlier, the Romanesque architecture of the early and
mid-twelfth century indicates that pre-Norman Ireland was not isolated,
The Norman and post-Norman ascendancy 119
Simon de Rochfort, centralised his diocese upon the new fortified town
of Trim. In the process, the older centres of Clonard and Fore, with
their cults of the early Irish saints Finnian and Fechin, were down-
graded. It may well be that Bishop Simon’s motives were mixed and that
he saw himself as undertaking genuine religious reform, but the result
was to place the Church in Meath firmly behind the new order. Within
the Norman-controlled areas, Irish hereditary learned families ceased
to have an economic base. Bards and brehons also lost their elite sta-
tus in this part of Ireland although they probably survived at a popular
level. Clearly, Irish culture in these areas received as profound a shock
as Anglo-Saxon culture did in England after the Norman Conquest of
1066.
It was as much by colonisation as by conquest, however, that the
Normans revolutionised eastern Ireland. Marc Bloch (in Feudal Society
(1961)) looked upon colonial settlement as one of the features which dis-
tinguished the second phase of feudalism from the first. In this the Irish
experience formed part of a general European pattern, which derived
from population pressures and land-hunger. The same forces, indeed,
which led the Germans to establish colonies beyond the Elbe led the
‘Franks’ into south Wales, the Scottish Lowlands and the east of Ireland.
How many colonists came in the late twelfth and thirteenth centuries will
never be known, but the incidence in east Leinster of such surnames as
‘Walsh’ (viz., Welsh), ‘English’, ‘French’ and ‘Fleming’ provides some
indication of their numbers. We have a better sense as to why they came.
Some at least were drawn to a strange land by the prospect of holding
land by free tenure. A number of place-names incorporating ‘burgage’ or
‘borris’ provide evidence of this phenomenon (for example, Borris, Co.
Carlow). Burgage tenure was in fact free tenure. Direct pressure from
Norman lords in England probably also played a part in ‘encouraging’
emigration. The Norfolk manors of Roger Bigod, who was lord of Carlow
as well as earl-marshal of England, show high rates of emigration during
this period.
Once the initial military successes were over, the story was that of
painstaking colonisation, particularly of the river valleys of Cos. Wex-
ford, Waterford and Meath. In Wexford, settlers moved up the valley of
the Slaney. In Waterford, they colonised the valley of the Barrow from
New Ross to Carlow, the Nore valley up to Kilkenny and beyond, and
the Suir valley from Carrick to Clonmel and Cahir. In Meath, they fol-
lowed the course of the Boyne from Drogheda through Navan and Trim
to Edenderry. Each stage of the advance was marked by the building of
mottes and baileys, walled towns, stone castles and monasteries. His-
torians and archaeologists have still to examine the chronology of this
The Norman and post-Norman ascendancy 121
process, but it seems likely that the valleys of the Boyne, the Barrow and
the Nore were the first areas of colonisation followed later by the less
accessible valleys of the Slaney and Suir.
Cultivation and clearance of land on this scale was something new in
Irish history. The three-field system, with its division into strips cultivated
with the heavy plough, probably made its first appearance in Ireland at this
time. There was thus an important new economic aspect to the Norman
Conquest. The tillage of the heavy soil of the river valleys could not
have taken place without a new expertise. Overall, however, the military
aspect seems to have been dominant. Great stone castles at Trim, Carlow,
Kilkenny, Cahir and elsewhere were the key centres of the new order.
The garrisons of these castles provided protection for the settlers and in
return received their agricultural surplus. Towns also had an important
military function. The Norman settlements at Trim, Thomastown and
elsewhere resembled similar Norman foundations at Flint, Denbigh and
Rhuddlan in north Wales. In Wales, the natives were (at least in theory)
excluded from these towns. In Ireland, the same rule seems to have been
applied. In Wales such towns became the target for attack from a resentful
countryside. So, too, in Ireland, such towns as Carlow suffered a similar
fate at the hands of the MacMurroughs, when these erstwhile allies of
the Normans turned against them.
The Church itself played an active military role in some areas. Medieval
historians have largely ignored the part played by the military order of
the Templars and the Knights Hospitallers of St John in the Conquest
of Ireland. Most numerous among the religious orders during the post-
Conquest period were the Augustinian canons with well over a hundred
houses. Between them, the Templars and the Hospitallers accounted
for at least twenty and possibly as many as sixty. Their role was by no
means negligible. The military-style architecture of the monastery at Kells
(Co. Kilkenny) speaks far more eloquently about the role of the Church
in this area than any written sources. Other monastic houses such as
the Cistercian monastery at Dunbrody (Co. Wexford) served the needs
of the colonists. The archbishopric of Dublin was also very much a part
of the military establishment, with castles at Swords and Tallaght. Stat-
ues of knights in the cloisters of Jerpoint abbey (Co. Kilkenny) make the
same point about the place of the Church in colonial Ireland.
From the beginning, indeed, the Church was committed to the support
of the Conquest, though ecclesiastical historians often lose sight of this
fact by isolating Church history from history at large. Bishops were now
royal tenants in chief with military obligations. The bishop of Limerick,
for example, was responsible for maintaining the king’s peace as a secular
judge. Reorganisation of cathedral chapters in the name of reform enabled
122 The British Isles
who might conceivably ignore any claims upon his property. In Norman-
controlled areas those assumptions tended to prevail, since they had the
backing of the Crown and the common-law courts. Thus the FitzGeralds
consistently adhered to primogeniture. In Irish-controlled areas the clash
between old and new continued for several centuries. The chronicles reg-
ularly refer to conflicts over succession which often seem to originate in
a clash between these two approaches.
126 The British Isles
That Mary was of the age of twenty-three years on the vigil of St Mary Magdalen
last. He knows this by common fame current in this country which was that
Mary was born to Philip, of his wife then being in Fyngal, on the day when Art
McMurth was slain who was slain on the said vigil. And it is known in the whole
country that twenty-three years are passed since Art McMurth was slain.
SCOTLAND
IRELAND
WALES ENGLAND
Normandy
Paris
Brittany
Maine
Aquitaine
Gascony
0 200 400 km
on kinship or on the market, took a second place during this period. The
Normans were not interested in trade for its own sake. The dominant
ideology of the regime was based upon the notion of the three estates,
warriors, priests and peasants, each with its own function. Merchants
had no obvious place in this scheme of things. In this society the highest
The Norman and post-Norman ascendancy 129
prestige was reserved for the military class with its tournaments and its
cult of chivalry. The highest loyalty was reserved for lord or king, not for
the kinship group. In religion the same assumptions may be seen at work.
The cathedrals of the colonial regime stressed the importance of author-
ity, divine and episcopal. Some historians have detected a shift, from a
concern with offences against one’s neighbour or kindred to a preoc-
cupation with sin against divine authority, as having taken place during
the Counter-Reformation. Something of the same kind, though possi-
bly on a more limited scale, seems to have occurred during this period
also.
The use of the term ‘Norman’ for the whole of this period, from the
mid-eleventh to the mid-fourteenth centuries, is, of course, very much
an oversimplification. The followers of William the Conqueror were not
exclusively Norman. Many were Breton, Flemish and Picard by back-
ground. From the mid-twelfth century the line of Norman kings was
replaced by that of Henry II Plantagenet and the Angevins. The early
settlers of Wales, Scotland and Ireland included many Flemings. But
such qualifications, while necessary, do not change the essential fact that
a French-orientated ascendancy introduced by the Normans came to
dominate most of the British Isles, so much so that the historian loses
sight of the varied cultures over which the ‘Normans’ ruled. It is only by
a conscious effort that the historian reminds himself that the newcom-
ers were very much in a minority. The history of the various cultures
of the British Isles during this period still remains to be written, for the
localities of England as well as for north and south Wales, Highland and
Lowland Scotland and Ireland, east and west of the Shannon. These
cultures survived, but few if any of them escaped the influence of the
Norman ascendancy.
Postscript
Students of ‘British Isles History’ now have to hand a master work, The
First English Empire: Power and Identities in the British Isles 1093–1343
(Oxford, 2000) by Professor Rees Davies (now Sir Rees Davies). Pro-
fessor Robin Frame has also made a notable contribution in his The
Political Development of the British Isles (Oxford, 1990) and Ireland and
Britain (London, 1998). To these may now be added a number of bril-
liant articles by Professor John Gillingham. In one of these he refers to
‘the English empire established in the tenth century – a thousand year
Reich in the making’ (in A. Grant and Keith J. Stringer, eds., 1995).
The key difference of emphasis between these approaches and that are
put forward here in Chapter 5 is their stress upon ‘the English’. Where
then are the Normans in this new ‘English’ interpretation? The question
130 The British Isles
the Scottish Nation (1998) together with Edward J. Cowan, For Freedom
Alone: The Declaration of Arbroath (2003).
Amid this rise in interest in the so-called ‘Celtic Fringe’ it is easy to lose
sight of the fact that England in wealth, resources and power gained in
dominance during these centuries. It is thus important to draw attention
to such works as Magna Carta by Professor James Holt (revised edition,
1992) with its detailed analysis of what became a key symbol for the ‘whig
interpretation of history’.
6 The decline of the post-Norman empire
The end of the thirteenth century saw the greatest extent of the post-
Norman Edwardian empire of the British Isles. In Wales, Edward I’s
castles symbolised the establishment of royal authority over the last
autonomous Welsh kingdom. Wales was now divided between marcher
lordships in the south and west and a principality in the north-west
where royal castles dominated the coastline from Harlech northwards. In
Ireland, the royal justiciar John Wogan, sitting at Ardfert in Kerry, heard
a plea concerning land at Dunquin. Royal power was not confined to
Dublin and the east coast but extended to remote areas in the south-
west. In Scotland, Edward, acting as overlord, had appointed guardians
to decide upon the succession to the Scottish Crown. In England, the
king seemed well able to cope with any opposition. The main problems
seemed likely to arise in Gascony which Edward held as the vassal of the
king of France.
As we now know, none of this proved to be permanent. Wogan’s court
in 1307 was the last royal assize to be held in Kerry for three centuries.
In Scotland, Robert Bruce, whose father had fought with Henry III at
the battle of Lewes, defeated the forces of Edward II at Bannockburn
(1314). The conquest of Wales seemed to have succeeded but even here,
at the end of the fourteenth century, Owain Glyndwr exposed the shallow
foundations of Edward I’s success.
With the benefit of hindsight we may decide that the break-up of the
Edwardian empire into four ‘national’ units was inevitable. But this may
be to take too narrow a view. In the context of the British Isles, the supe-
riority of the south-east in men and resources was clear. The building of
Edward’s Welsh castles was a remarkable technical achievement, which
depended for its success upon the mobilisation of skilled labour from all
over England. The royal administrative system made it possible to levy
taxes on a national scale. Given the political will, the assertion of royal
authority throughout the British Isles seemed to be an eminently practi-
cable proposition. Twenty years after the defeat at Bannockburn, Edward
III gave his support to Edward Balliol’s attempt to gain the Scottish
132
The decline of the post-Norman empire 133
throne. Robert Bruce had died in 1329, succeeded by his son David, who
was only five years old. There was thus a golden opportunity to avenge
Bannockburn and to reverse the terms of the Treaty of Northampton,
by which the independence of Scotland had been recognised. In 1333,
Balliol gained a decisive victory at Halidon Hill, and in 1334 ceded much
of the area south of the Forth to Edward III. Edinburgh was occupied by
Edward and remained in his possession until 1340.
What made the conquest of ‘Scotland’ difficult was the support which
the young David Bruce began to receive from the French. In effect, France
presented Edward with the option of choosing between Gascony and
Scotland. Edward’s reply, in 1337, was to claim the Crown of France, a
claim which he might well have put forward in 1328 after the death of
Charles IV, last of the Capetian kings of France. From 1337 onwards,
Edward was committed to a gigantic gamble on the European continent.
It was to this that royal resources were to be devoted. Scotland for the
time being became an object of secondary importance.
The French wars, as we now know, proved to be a long-term com-
mitment. For over a hundred years, the French enterprise required the
expenditure of resources and manpower on the grandest scale. Historians
differ about the profitability of the wars, much as they do about whether
the British empire of a later date showed a profit or loss at the end of the
day. What concerns us here are the political consequences of the wars in
the context of the British Isles. There can be little doubt that the prime
importance which was given to the dream of an empire in France dis-
tracted attention away from what now seemed to be the lesser vision of
an empire in the British Isles.
As a consequence, at least in part, of Edward III’s involvement in
France, the Norman ascendancy dissolved into several constituent parts.
The sense of difference was most marked in the Scottish Lowlands where
the struggle for independence was prolonged. In Ireland, it arose as the
result of the Norman lords being left to enjoy a de facto independence
over a long period. In Wales, the marcher lords were allowed to retain
their privileges as the price of defending the Welsh march. In northern
England, a new class of marcher lordships came into existence to defend
the border with Scotland. During the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries,
a pattern may be seen emerging in the British Isles which was nearer
to that of the Iberian peninsula than to France, in the sense that local
autonomies prevailed over a wider monarchy.
The future of the Norman ascendancy was also influenced by fac-
tors over which Edward III had little control. In 1349, the Black Death
reduced the population of England by one third. The result of this and
succeeding attacks of plague was to reduce the population pressures which
134 The British Isles
retainers. John of Gaunt, one of the sons of Edward III, indentured well
over a hundred esquires at a peacetime salary of up to 20 marks a year,
provided that they also recruited a man-at-arms. While it may be going
too far to regard the Hundred Years War as a gigantic system of outdoor
relief for the English feudal elite, there is no doubt that service with the
military nobility during the war provided an attractive and appropriate
career for many hard-pressed younger sons of minor landlords. The war
in France was a long-term imperial venture, which was the counterpart
in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries of the empire in the British Isles
which had drawn the Normans in 1066.
War to such men as Sir John Chandos and Sir John Fastolf was a
money-making enterprise. The Hundred Years War, however, was not
exclusively justified in financial terms by its participants. In an earlier
period, the idea of the Crusade had provided the reason for undertaking
military expeditions in eastern Europe, the Holy Land and even in parts
of western Europe. The ideological backing for the Hundred Years War
was supplied by the cult of chivalry. Edward III consciously cultivated the
notion that the war was a romantic enterprise. The torchlight-procession
of knights at Bristol in 1358 was not an isolated event but part of a
programme of tournaments and other activities intended to convey the
chivalric message. In 1348 Edward III founded the Order of the Garter as
a community of knights modelled upon the fellowship of King Arthur and
the Round Table. The knight was encouraged to see himself as following
a higher calling, marked off by the code of chivalry from those who made
fortunes by the base method of trade. Presumably those who suffered at
the hands of Edward’s captains did not share these assumptions.
This romantic approach to war (or pseudo-romantic depending upon
one’s point of view) was incorporated in the architecture of the castles
which were built in southern England. The new-style castles of the four-
teenth and fifteenth centuries provided a military façade for what were
in fact palatial living quarters. The most spectacular example of such
conspicuous consumption was the castle which Edward built at his birth-
place, Windsor, between 1350 and 1377. The cost of the whole enterprise
was, by contemporary standards, prodigious. John of Gaunt built a simi-
larly elaborate castle at Kenilworth. Sir John Fastolf, a lesser figure, built
in the same vein but on a smaller scale at Caistor, near Norwich. Other
examples of the ‘chivalric castle’ include castles at Raglan, Crew and
Tattersall. All were monuments to a particular ideology.
The attractions of a military career may well have seemed greatest to
lords and their families who were hard hit by the crisis in agriculture.
During the two centuries which followed the Conquest the feudal elite
controlled resources through the related institutions of castle, borough
and Church. In the fourteenth century, this situation changed radically.
138 The British Isles
century some London guilds were able to buy town-houses from the
nobility and convert them to their own purposes. These economic
changes were also responsible for a cultural change of great significance –
the emergence of the English language as a socially acceptable medium.
English was the language of the trading community and the rise of Lon-
don, Norwich, Bristol and other towns brought about the elevated social
status of English.
The constitutional link between the military and market sectors of
English society was provided in parliament. The balance between the
two was far from equal, however. For all the wealth of the market soci-
ety, the exercise of political power was heavily weighted in favour of the
landed aristocracy. It might have been better for the towns had a system
of estates developed different from that of the English parliament. As it
was, the landed interest dominated the House of Lords in the persons of
the great magnates and the House of Commons in the representatives of
the knights of the shires. It is not surprising that parliaments should have
consistently thrown their weight on the side of ‘military society’. From
the mid-fourteenth century onwards parliament passed a series of sump-
tuary laws, designed to prevent the ‘lower’ classes wearing clothes which
were more appropriate to the gentry. It was parliament which in 1351
passed the Statute of Labourers in a vain attempt to control wages in the
interests of rural landlords. It was parliament which attempted to forbid
towns from harbouring villeins who had fled from their masters. In 1413
the Statute of Additions was passed requiring persons involved in lawsuits
to give more precise descriptions of themselves, another measure aimed
at restricting social mobility. In 1429, in an attempt to restrict the num-
ber of voters in county elections, the vote was confined to forty-shilling
freeholders.
The most dramatic example of the control of parliament by military
society was the ‘Merciless’ parliament of 1388, when the five magnates,
Gloucester, Arundel, Warwick, Bolingbroke (the son of John of Gaunt)
and Nottingham brought about the downfall of Richard II’s government.
One of the royal counsellors was Nicholas Brembre, mayor of London,
who supported the anti-war policies of the Crown. The king was forced to
give way and Brembre, along with some others, was executed. A similar
crisis occurred a decade later, when Richard II was forced to abdicate
by Henry of Lancaster. Richard was committed to a policy of peace with
France and had he remained in power the likelihood is that the Hundred
Years War would not have been resumed. The political power of the
magnates ensured that England was again involved in a long imperial
venture under Henry V and his successor which may be said not to have
ended until the loss of Calais in 1558.
140 The British Isles
offered. In south Wales, numerous small ports traded with Bristol and
Devon. The wool of the Welsh uplands became an important source of
raw material for the growing English cloth industry. Welsh cattle supplied
meat for the markets of south-eastern England. South and east Wales, in
particular, were drawn into a close relationship with the English economy.
The particularism which had been so marked a feature of the economic
life of the marcher lordships gave way to a more open system.
The result by the early sixteenth century was considerable social
change. The military society, dominated by the castle and its associated
institutions, gave way to one in which the squire’s manor house, the mar-
ket town and the individual farmer were typical. The egalitarianism of
the kinship group (gwely) gave way increasingly to a society stratified by
wealth. The bondmen, whose task from early days had been to supply
the courts of the Welsh princes with food, disappeared from Welsh life,
perhaps to become labourers. In the ‘Englishries’, the manorial structure
gave way to farms and villages.
All these changes preceded the formal incorporation of Wales into the
English political, legal and administrative system in the Acts of Union
1536 and 1543 which in effect ratified the social revolution of the pre-
ceding century. Differences between English and Welsh codes of law were
now abolished. Marcher lordships were incorporated within English-style
shires. The Welsh language survived these changes but the culture which
came into existence in most parts of Wales was something new, an amal-
gam of Norman, English and Welsh. The new Welsh squirearchy in many
ways resembled its English counterpart. Soon gwely and galanas were to
be forgotten and castles to fall into ruins. Broad differences of outlook
between north and south Wales continued to exist, however.
In Scotland, Bruce’s victory in 1314 at Bannockburn and the Treaty of
Northampton some fourteen years later, recognising Scottish indepen-
dence, did not bring peace. The border between England and Scotland
became in effect a subsidiary theatre in the Hundred Years War. The
French alliance, which was the guarantee of independence, by its very
nature required the Scots to engage in military operations on the border.
Hence what might have been a peaceful frontier turned into an area of
continual war. The high points of this were the battles of Neville’s Cross
in 1346, Homildon Hill in 1402, Flodden in 1513 and Pinkie in 1547.
But these were merely the major events in a series of conflicts which went
on for over two hundred years.
We have already glanced at the effects which this state of affairs had
upon the northern counties of England. The effect was equally far-
reaching upon the Scottish Lowlands, and indirectly upon the Highlands
as well. The frontier war brought into existence a society which was even
The decline of the post-Norman empire 143
more organised for war than that which had existed in the twelfth and
thirteenth centuries. In this situation the Scottish Crown was heavily
dependent upon a nobility able to put large numbers of retainers into
the field at short notice. The most powerful of these was the house of
Douglas, rulers of Galloway (the Black Douglases) and, through another
branch of the family, of the east coast (the Red Douglases of Angus).
The Douglases also had allies in the north upon whose support they
could count.
The power of William, eighth earl of Douglas (1425?–52) was seen
most dramatically in his treatment of a certain MacLellan, who refused
to serve as a Douglas retainer. MacLellan was imprisoned. A kinsman
who came to ask for his deliverance was told, after being served dinner,
that ‘[he had] come a litill to leit; bot zondar is zour sistir sone lyand;
bot he wantis the heid; take his bodie and do with it quhat ze will’. This
incident well illustrates how the Black Douglas regarded himself as to
all intents and purposes an independent ruler with the power of life and
death. It also helps to explain how the king with the aid of the enemies
made by the Black Douglas was able to bring about the downfall of the
family in 1455.
In this military society the castle was the centre of lordship. The Dou-
glas castle at Threave in Galloway, built in the late fourteenth century,
had its counterparts in other lordships throughout Scotland. Not until
the coming of artillery in the mid-fifteenth century did the balance shift
against the castle. With its base in local society the nobility controlled
access to higher appointments in the Church and the major abbeys. Even
more than in England parliament was dominated by the earls and nobles.
In any one parliament it was usual for only a few boroughs (not always
the same) to be represented. Boroughs, indeed, despite their theoretical
independence were very much exposed to pressures from the local nobil-
ity. The baronial courts were the legal reality in the face of the continued
weakness of the royal courts. Sheriffs, in theory royal servants, commonly
belonged to the dominant nobility of the region. War, far from uniting
society, was a major factor in creating disunity.
One consequence of the overwhelming importance of the defence of the
southern borders was the decline of Lowland influence in the west. Dur-
ing the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, while the attention of the Low-
landers was diverted southwards, the west was able to enjoy a prolonged
period of independence. During this period the MacDonalds, Lords of
the Isles, were able to extend their influence into Ulster, where a branch
of the family became the MacDonnells of Antrim. The military innova-
tion on which this rise in their power rested was the gallowglasses (gal-
loglaich = foreign soldiers), highly disciplined companies of swordsmen
The decline of the post-Norman empire 145
and axemen who dominated the tactical scene in this area until the
sixteenth century. Gallowglasses from the Isles became the indentured
retainers of the O Donnells and of the earl of Desmond. The importance
of the Lords of the Isles in a British Isles context was illustrated in 1388
when Richard II sent a mission to establish good relations with them. For
their part, the Scottish kings were always willing to accept overtures from
disgruntled Ulster chiefs.
Royal influence had not entirely ceased to exist in the west, but here
as elsewhere the Crown was dependent upon a military nobility which
had its own interests in mind as much as those of the Crown. In Argyll,
the Campbells had been brought in by Bruce as a replacement for the
MacDougalls, the allies of his rivals, the Comyns. In due course the
Campbells, who became earls of Argyll in 1458, were to be uncrowned
kings of the west. Further north, the Huntleys and the MacKenzies served
as the channels of Lowland influence.
It is possibly a mistake to overstress the difference between the ‘two
cultures’ of Highlands and Lowlands at this date. Such Lowland mag-
nates as the Black Douglases, with their indentured retainers and their
power to enforce acceptance of service (‘bond of manrent’) over a wide
area, in many ways resembled Highland chiefs. The inner core of their
followers, enjoying the same name as their leader, were bound by ties of
kinship as close as any Highland clan. In the absence of a central authority
the ‘feud’ may indeed have been the main sanction behind local law. The
clan, for its part, was by this date very much a feudal institution in which
military service was rendered to the chief in return for his protection. The
galloglaich, who served in Ireland, were the Gaelic equivalent of inden-
tured retainers. Feudalism in its late medieval form was no stranger to
the Highlands. Many of the customs of the Highlands seemed strange to
Lowland eyes, but the political behaviour of the chiefs conformed to the
assumptions of the time. John MacDonald of the Isles when he became
the ally of the Douglases saw nothing strange in making a treaty with
Edward IV of England. The survival of lordship rested upon a shrewd
appraisal of the realities of the balance of power. In the long run, however,
this was to tilt against the MacDonalds.
The Lowlands proper consisted of a relatively narrow belt stretching
east–west between Glasgow and Edinburgh and a coastal strip running
north–south from Coldingham to Brechin, and taking in the river valleys
of the Forth and the Tay. It was the culture of this area which contrasted
most sharply with that of the Highlands. Here English was now dominant
even among the nobility. The earl of March, writing to Henry IV, his
patron, in 1400, spoke of his preference for English rather than French.
The majority of burghs, churches and monasteries were concentrated in
146 The British Isles
the Lowlands. There is little doubt that the level of literacy was higher
than in the rest of Scotland. Above all, market relations based on cash
were becoming more common in the south-east than in the feudalised
west where services in kind remained usual for a long time to come. The
shift to a cash economy was to be seen in the commutation of labour
service into money rents, a process which occurred during the fifteenth
century on the ecclesiastical estates which covered much of the region.
The practice of feuing (leasing out land for a fixed annual sum), which
guaranteed inheritance in perpetuity provided the sum was duly paid,
was a feature of the Lowlands. It was unknown in the Highlands where
security of tenure was still associated with membership of a kinship group
under the chief’s protection.
Signs that the autonomy of the Isles might be in danger have been read
into the fall of the house of Douglas in the 1450s. It was not until 1476,
however, that James III (1460–88) turned his attention to the west. In
1476, John MacDonald, earl of Ross and Lord of the Isles, surrendered
his earldom to the Crown after being accused of treasonable relations
with Edward IV in the preceding decade. He was soon to be overthrown
by his illegitimate son Angus Og (‘The Young’), who in turn was to be
assassinated (1490). In 1494 a royal naval base was created at Tarbet on
the Clyde, once a castle of Bruce. Early in the sixteenth century several
castles in the Isles were bombarded from the sea. Royal artillery, which
had proved so effective against Douglas, had been mounted on ships and
used against the MacDonalds.
As in Wales and Scotland, the high-water mark of imperial power was
reached in Ireland c. 1300. In 1245 the old kingdom of Leinster had been
divided into five feudal lordships, Carlow, Kildare, Kilkenny, Leix and
Wexford. The magnates who held these fiefs – Bigod, de Vesci, de Clare,
Mortimer and de Valence – were all members of the ruling elite and their
‘presence’ in Ireland indicated the strength of the imperial connection.
Assizes were held regularly at Dublin, Cork and Limerick in the second
half of the thirteenth century. As mentioned earlier, the peak of imperial
power may be seen in 1307 when the king’s justiciar John Wogan tried
a case at Ardfert (Co. Kerry) concerning land in Dunquin, at the tip of
the Dingle peninsula. The imperial connection could go no further in the
south-west of Ireland. It was a brief moment, however, and three more
centuries were to elapse before it reoccurred.
The immediate causes which led to the decline of imperial influence in
Scotland also affected Ireland. In 1315 Edward Bruce, brother of Robert
Bruce, was invited to campaign in Ulster by an alliance of Ulster chiefs
and discontented Norman barons. For a time there was a real possibil-
ity that Ireland might follow the example of Scotland and become an
148 The British Isles
subject’. The O Neills for their part looked to the English monarchy for
support. This situation persisted until the beginning of the seventeenth
century, when, in a fundamental political shift, James VI of Scotland
became also king of England, and the raison d’être of these marcher lord-
ships disappeared.
The symbolism of these Gaelic regimes was ‘traditional’ in character,
though the tradition may have been recent in origin. The Gaelic lords
were careful to legitimise their behaviour by surrounding themselves with
the cultural trappings of an earlier age. Thus learned families from south
and west Ireland were able to find employment with the northern chiefs.
Few episodes are more revealing, however, than the installation of a new
MacWilliam under the auspices of Hugh Roe O Donnell in 1595. O
Donnell summoned the eight claimants to the chiefry to meet him at
Tyrawley. The rath where the ‘election’ took place was surrounded by
four lines of troops, O Donnell’s own personal guard, the troops of Tir
Connell, the gallowglasses of the MacSweeneys and ‘the men of Con-
nacht’. O Donnell’s own nominee was selected and three of the seven
defeated candidates were placed in bonds. O Donnell seems to have cho-
sen other chiefs in similar fashion, on other occasions.
As in Scotland, there were significant differences between north and
south. The north was the Irish equivalent of Highland society and it was
here that the main clusters of Irish hereditary learned families were to
be found in the later middle ages. Each of the Gaelic elite families, like
the MacDonalds of the Isles, had its own bards, senachies and brehons.
Thus the O Cleirigh family, one of whose members was to take his part
in producing the Annals of the Four Masters, were historians to the O
Donnells. It was Luigh O Cleirigh who produced an official life of Hugh
Roe O Donnell in the early seventeenth century. One of the last families
to survive the Cromwellian debacle were the MacFirbisigh, bards to the
O Dowds. The last representative of this culture was Roderick O Flaherty
in the remote parts of west Galway during the early eighteenth century.
In the southern half of Ireland there was a different situation thanks
largely to the dominance of the powerful Norman lordships of Kildare,
Desmond and Ormond. In certain areas, there was indeed an ‘Irish resur-
gence’ in the sense that local Gaelic-speaking elites gained control of terri-
tory once occupied by the Normans. But the concepts both of ‘Irish’ and
of ‘resurgence’ are misleading if they are taken to imply either nationality
or the regaining of land by the original holders. Much of the best land
remained in the possession of the Normans. Relatively poor areas, though
large in acreage, were now controlled by such families as MacCarthys,
MacMurroughs, O Mores and MacGiolla Padraig. There was a marked
contrast, for example, between the MacCarthy territory of Duhallow in
152 The British Isles
the narrow upper valley of the Blackwater and the attractive Norman land
of Mallow and Charleville in the lower valley. A similar contrast existed
between the MacCarthy land of Muscraige in the upper Lee valley and
the good land further down. In the Barrow valley, further north, the bleak
moorland of Fassadinin offered shelter for the O Brenans, while the fer-
tile valley remained in the hands of the colonists. The ‘Celtic Rally’ was
more of a ‘Celtic Survival’.
At the end of the thirteenth century, the political future of the British
Isles seemed to be directed towards a unified Norman ascendancy. In
the event, the ascendancy dissolved into a number of independent or
semi-independent units. The ‘Norman Scots’ declared for a kingdom of
Scotland. In Ireland, their equivalents settled for a real autonomy beneath
a vague royal overlordship. In Wales, the great marcher lords, after meet-
ing the challenge of Edward I, survived for another century or more. All
this was made possible by the decision of ‘England’ to seek an impe-
rial future in France, a venture which turned into the Hundred Years
War.
The characteristic unit of society during this period was the ‘Norman’
feudal lordship, or, in the west of Scotland and over much of Ireland,
feudal lordship in its Gaelic guise. Though it is tempting, and perhaps
unavoidable, to refer to ‘Ireland’, ‘Scotland’ and ‘Wales’, each of these
‘polities’ was in fact remarkably fragmented. Even England, with its
marcher areas in the north and west, was far from unified. The ‘paradigm’
which governed political attitudes is best characterised as ‘feudal’ in the
sense that security was felt to lie not in allegiance to a distant and perhaps
ineffective Crown but in the service of a local magnate or those linked to
him.
Change in the direction of a new set of political assumptions came
first in south-east England, with its great trading metropolis of London.
‘Progress’, associated with literacy and with the growth of market rela-
tions, seemed to lie with a more powerful monarchy. The same phe-
nomenon was also to be observed in south-east Scotland. By the early
sixteenth century few areas of the British Isles can be said to be entirely
immune to the influence of such agencies of change, though felt least in
the west of Scotland and the north of Ireland. Such factors as the growth
of population, the increased use of artillery and warships made further
change possible.
The shift which was taking place has been characterised by sociologists
and historians in various ways, though usually with some implication
of ‘modernisation’. Clearly, profound changes were likely to take place.
What was not clear was the direction. It was by no means inevitable, for
example, that Scotland should fall under English dominance. Nor was it
The decline of the post-Norman empire 153
Postscript
Chapter 6 dealt with what is often termed somewhat vaguely ‘the Later
Medieval Ages’. In the context of ‘British Isles History’ the two centuries
c.1314 to c. 1530 may be seen constituting a period in which pressure
of the south-eastern ‘core’ upon the rest of the archipelago was for vari-
ous reasons reduced. Shakespeare’s ‘history’ plays, based on Holinshed’s
Chronicles, offered what was in many ways the dominant Tudor interpre-
tation of how this came about. Thus in his interconnected series of plays,
Henry VI, he showed how an overseas adventure went badly wrong and led
to a bitter civil war. In Richard II we are shown how a revolution took place
which led to political instability. A major theme of Henry IV is the uncer-
tainty created by the Lancastrian Revolution of 1399, creating a dilemma
which was solved at least temporarily by Henry V’s decision to invade
France, but which in due course created the unrest which Shakespeare
154 The British Isles
157
158 The British Isles
For the first half of the sixteenth century, Scotland, as a client state of
France, remained largely untouched by these changes. Thirty years after
defeating the Scots at Flodden (1513), the English monarchy still found
it difficult to exercise political influence in the Scottish Lowlands. During
the 1540s in a campaign known as the ‘Rough Wooing’ an English army
invaded Scotland, but at the end of it French power seemed to be as
strong as ever, under the Regent, Marie de Medici. The heir to the Scot-
tish throne, Mary, was sent for her education to France, where she was
betrothed to the Dauphin. What made a Scottish revolution possible was
the outbreak of the wars of religion in France, which weakened the French
monarchy and made it possible for Elizabeth to support a pro-English fac-
tion in Scotland. During the 1560s the balance turned decisively in favour
of the Reformation in the Scottish Lowlands. Henceforth, the future of
Scotland was closely associated with that of England.
The history of England during the sixteenth and seventeenth cen-
turies has been distorted by a tendency among historians to write about
England without relation to other cultures of the British Isles. There has
also been an additional and related tendency to assume that there was a
single, national, ‘English’ culture. Indeed the contemporary rhetoric of
the period has lent itself to Anglo-centric interpretation. At least three
influential currents of political and religious rhetoric were couched in
terms of a single English nation. In Shakespeare’s play Henry V the king’s
speech before Agincourt links the history of the monarchy and the nation
as Henry cries ‘God for England, Harry and St George’. There was, sec-
ondly, the religious rhetoric of John Foxe’s Book of Martyrs which spoke
of ‘England’ as an ‘Elect Nation’ singled out by God as an instrument of
Divine Providence. In the third place there was the rhetoric of the com-
mon lawyers which looked upon the ‘Ancient Constitution’ of ‘England’
as the legacy of the Anglo-Saxons. Monarchy, Reformation and common
law were all powerful symbols of a national unity which was believed to
have existed over many centuries.
As is often the case with nationalist interpretations of the past, however,
such rhetoric concealed a more complex situation. The culture of London
and the south-east, with relatively high rates of literacy, growing numbers
of grammar schools, the expansion of colleges and halls at Oxford and
Cambridge, a growth of industry in the clothing villages of the south and
east and the development of London as a financial and trading centre,
was taking on a character different from that of the north and west.
The growing importance of London and the south-east had been con-
cealed during the Wars of the Roses, which were in effect a civil war
between rival factions of the feudal nobility in the north and west (includ-
ing the border counties of Wales). The reaction which followed upon the
The making of an English empire 163
Wars of the Roses made possible the rise of a monarchy based upon the
power of London and the south-east. The law courts had of course long
been centred upon London. To them were to be added during the early
sixteenth century the courts of Star Chamber, and the court of Wards
and Liveries. Star Chamber, though in theory a court, drew for its mem-
bership upon the privy council. It was indeed the government acting as
a court in matters which were regarded as serious breaches of the peace.
The court of Wards and Liveries was a department of state created for the
financial exploitation of the Crown’s position in the feudal hierarchy by
controlling the disposal of the estates and marriages of tenants in chief.
There were in addition the House of Commons and the House of
Lords. The Commons was far from being a political institution reflecting
the outlook of ‘England’ as a whole. It is true that members were elected
for each of the shires of England but the boroughs which elected the great
majority of members were concentrated largely south of the Trent. The
composition of the Lords also came increasingly to reflect the political
and cultural dominance of the south-east, since after the dissolution of
the larger monasteries, many of them in the north, their abbots ceased to
be members of the House of Lords. After the Reformation the bishops
became, even more than had been the case before, spokesmen for the
south. The role of new laymen in the Lords, such as William Cecil, Lord
Burghley, Robert Dudley, earl of Leicester, Charles Brandon, earl of Suf-
folk, reflected the dominance of London and the south. There was also
the educational preponderance of the south symbolised by the colleges
of Christ Church at Oxford and Trinity College at Cambridge. Other
foundations and grants such as St John’s College at Oxford linked the
universities more closely with London.
The growth in the influence of the south would no doubt have taken
place in any event. Until the growth of an ‘Atlantic economy’ in the
seventeenth century, English trade and industry was focussed upon the
traditional link with the Netherlands. The growth of the cloth trade in
the fifteenth century was accompanied by a rise in importance of
London and the south-east. The prominent place of the East Anglian
city of Norwich as the second city of the kingdom was a further indica-
tion of the important role of England, south of the Humber.
What provided an additional impulse towards the assertion of full cul-
tural dominance by the south over the rest of England and Wales and
in due course Ireland and Scotland was the impact of the Reformation.
The decisive decades were the 1530s, the 1540s and the 1550s, during
which the ideas of Luther, Zwingli and Calvin made rapid headway in the
literate areas of the south and east. It is understandable that this should
be the case, as it was elsewhere in other areas of high literacy throughout
164 The British Isles
its military raison d’être (as did the border counties of northern England).
The way was open for Scottish and English colonisation of the territories
of O Neill and O Donnell after the Flight of the Earls in 1607, the city
of London acting as a source of financing for the plantation of London-
derry. The affairs of the three kingdoms thus became closely intermeshed
in what by early seventeenth-century standards was a major colonising
project. O Neill and O Donnell did not vanish from history, however. In
1641 Sir Phelim O Neill led an insurrection against the Ulster plantation.
It was this ‘popish plot’ plus an apparent massacre of Protestant colonists
which had such a dramatic impact upon the English (and Scottish) polit-
ical scene in 1641. The bitter debate in the House of Commons which
led to the passing of the Grand Remonstrance in December 1641 took
place in the aftermath of the Ulster rebellion and the ‘Irish massacre’.
On several occasions during the 1640s the Irish issue acted as an obstacle
to successful negotiation between Crown and parliament. It seemed that
peace in Ireland was only possible at the cost of concessions on matters
of religion and state which were unacceptable to the parliamentary lead-
ers. Sir John Temple’s highly partisan account of the ‘massacre’ kept the
memory of 1641 fresh in English (and Scottish) minds.
The close involvement of Irish affairs in English politics had already
been a feature of the 1630s when Thomas Wentworth became lord deputy
of Ireland. Wentworth saw himself as a reformer in Ireland, completing
the anglicisation which had been advocated by Edmund Spenser and Sir
John Davies. In the eyes of Puritan leaders such as Pym and Hampden,
with whom Wentworth, though not himself a Puritan, had been asso-
ciated in the 1620s, the autocratic policies of the lord deputy seemed
to foreshadow the setting up of an absolute monarchy in England itself.
Wentworth’s record in Ireland provided much of the basis for his impeach-
ment in 1640 and subsequent attainder and execution. The downfall of
Wentworth indeed was a prime example of the way in which English and
Irish affairs had become closely intertwined.
The same point may also be made about the relationship between Eng-
land and Scotland. From 1560 onwards England replaced France as the
dominant partner in Scottish politics. In 1568 Mary Queen of Scots fled
to England and for the next two decades the Scottish queen became a
centre of political intrigue which was only resolved by her execution in
1587. The close involvement of English political leaders in Scottish affairs
continued during the 1590s as it became clear that James VI was the most
likely candidate to succeed Elizabeth.
James VI tended to keep Scottish and English affairs separate but dur-
ing Charles I’s reign, the English Crown became more closely involved in
the ‘reform’ of the Scottish Kirk on English lines. Archbishop Laud,
168 The British Isles
Rinuccini, in 1645 added further fuel to the propaganda war of the three
kingdoms.
In 1648, it was the expectation of aid from Irish Catholics and Scottish
Presbyterians which led Charles to gamble upon a successful outcome to
a ‘second civil war’. The rise of Cromwell and the extremist faction in
the New Model Army, the exclusion of ‘Moderates’ from parliament in
Pride’s Purge and the subsequent execution of the king thus took place
against a background of the three kingdoms, not merely of England. It
was the expectation of what might happen as a result of Irish and Scottish
invasion as much as the fear of English royalism which led to so violent a
reaction on the Parliamentarian side. The crisis of 1648 in fact brings out
the extent to which Charles saw himself as a king of the three kingdoms,
not just of England, facing the problems created by a purely English
parliament.
The interaction of the three kingdoms was to continue during the rest
of the century. In 1660 it was the attitude of the Parliamentarian General
Monck in Scotland and the Puritan leader Broghill in Ireland which made
possible a peaceful Restoration. During the post-1660 years the Crown
was faced in Ireland with the problem of dealing with a Cromwellian
ascendancy, which was determined to hold on to the estates of former
royalists. In 1685–8 James II’s sympathy for the Irish royalists and his
appointment of Richard Talbot, earl of Tyrconnell, helped to weaken his
position in England and played an important role in his downfall. In
turn the knowledge that he could count on Irish support led James to
land in Ireland in 1689 and to use it as a base from which to regain his
crown. It was no accident that the decisive battle of the English ‘Glorious
Revolution’ should be fought on the river Boyne in 1690.
Scottish affairs also formed one of the strands of post-Restoration pol-
itics in England. Royal attempts to defuse religious bitterness in Scotland
by issuing a Declaration of Indulgence establishing a certain measure of
toleration led to reaction among the king’s ultra-Tory episcopalian sup-
porters.
It is, of course, possible to deal with the history of England during this
period exclusively in English terms. To do so, however, makes it difficult
to explain why the civil wars actually took place. Constitutional conflict
over such matters as Ship Money appeared to have been resolved by the
middle of 1641. What introduced a higher degree of emotion was the
Irish rebellion of 1641 with its accompanying ‘massacre’ of Protestant
settlers. This in its turn can only be explained against a background not
merely of Anglo-Irish affairs but also those of Scotland.
The real ‘English Revolution’ of this period was in fact the English
Reformation, the success of which in England and Wales brought about
170 The British Isles
until the nineteenth century, after industrialisation had wrought its own
revolution.
In Wales, as in Ireland, the Reformation initially made little impact at
the popular level. A Welsh translation of the Bible was produced in 1588
for use in churches and a smaller edition, the little Bible (y Beibl Bach),
in 1630, but in so dispersed and rural a society, with many local dialects,
no single translation sufficed. In some ways, the Counter-Reformation,
thanks to the support of such magnates as the Somerset earls of Worcester,
had more success. From their base at Cwm, on the English border near
Monmouth, a Jesuit mission operated in the early seventeenth century
in conditions comparable to those in the north of England and in Ire-
land. As with the Reformation, so too with the Counter-Reformation,
the challenge proved to be too great for the resources available. As a
consequence, rural Wales remained, like rural Ireland and the Scottish
Highlands, very much a traditional society in which local institutions
such as the ‘wise man’ of the village, the fair, the wake and kinship ties
retained their hold in the face of attempts at ‘anglicisation’ by an English-
orientated gentry and clergy. It was not until the eighteenth century that
these popular cultures finally collapsed in the face of Methodist denunci-
ations. It was then that dancing, harp-playing and fiddling began to give
way to a new popular culture based upon hymn-singing and the Sunday
school.
During the early modern period, it is probable that the impact of the
English food market was as powerful an instrument of social change as
either the Reformation or the administrative revolution. In the Welsh
Lowlands, farmers responded to the English demand for meat, butter,
cheese and wheat. The upland farmers exported thousands of head of
cattle to be fattened up in Shropshire and Herefordshire before being
sold in the markets of London. The vale of Glamorgan was described
as ‘the Garden of Wales and for good cattle of all kinds the nursery of
the West’. It was estimated that twenty-four Wynn farms in north Wales
would sustain nearly 3,000 head of cattle annually. Wales had 245 fairs
a year in 1602, over half of them in the five southern counties. As a
consequence of growth in demand from England, pressures grew for
enclosure on the English model. A class of gentry began to emerge from
the general run of yeoman farmers and as the pressure upon pasture
increased, traditional tenants complained of being deprived of common
grazing, of free access to fuel and of the free use of summer houses for
‘transhumance’. By the early eighteenth century, a class of anglicised
gentry had come into existence. In some areas, such squires, together with
an English-speaking clergy, were largely cut off from their Welsh-speaking
tenants and labourers. English became the language of the law, of politics
174 The British Isles
and polite society. The gentry attended the universities of Oxford and
Cambridge, though the growing dominance of English culture did not
prevent some of the gentry from acting as patrons for Welsh scholarly
works.
In Scotland, radical religious and social change came a generation later
than in Wales. In July 1560 the French garrison in Scotland returned
The making of an English empire 175
home and the political connection which had linked France and the
Scottish Lowlands came to an end. Henceforth English influence was
to be dominant north of the border. Political change coincided with reli-
gious reformation. The Scottish Reformation, indeed, was successful in
its first stages thanks largely to English backing. John Knox, though Scot-
tish born, had taken an active part in the Edwardian Reformation and it
was English arms and money which helped Knox and his allies among
the nobles to overthrow the pro-French party in Scotland. The Bible
in English was to prove to be a formidable instrument of anglicisation.
Puritanism, ultimately defeated in England, had its greatest successes in
Scotland.
Scotland in the mid-sixteenth century was a country of two cultures
(three if Orkney, Shetland and the Norse counties of northern Scotland
are taken into consideration). The cultural and political balance of power
between Highlands and Lowlands still remained. The Gaelic-speaking
west was closer to Ulster than to the English-speaking Lowlands. The
MacDonalds of the Hebrides and the MacDonnells of Antrim saw them-
selves as sharing a common history which went back to the Three Colls
and Niall of the Nine Hostages. ‘Feudal’ culture survived in the High-
lands well into the eighteenth century long after it had been destroyed
in Ireland. With the coming of the Reformation, the cultural differences
between the two areas increased. In the Lowlands the long-term effect of
the Reformation was to replace ‘feudal’ loyalty with commitment to a par-
ticular religious persuasion. In the Highlands, even where the Reforma-
tion did make headway, it was associated with loyalty to a particular chief,
such as the earl of Argyll. The Lowlands, thanks to Puritan emphasis upon
Bible-reading, became a highly literate society. The Highlands remained
an oral culture throughout the early modern period. In the Lowlands,
strict observance of the Sabbath was regarded as a sign of godliness. In
1709, for example, the Kirk Session of Edinburgh, ‘taking into considera-
tion that the Lord’s day is profaned by people standing in the streets . . . as
also by idly gazing out at windows, and children and apprentices playing
in the streets, warn parents and threaten to refer to the civil magistrates for
punishment, also order each session to take its turn in walking the streets
on the sabbath’. In the Highlands, Sabbatarianism was to come much
later.
Within both Highlands and Lowlands, the Reformation intensified
internal differences. In the Highlands, conflict between the MacDonalds
and the Campbells, which had its origins in the later medieval period,
when the Campbells acted as the instrument of an expanding Crown,
at the expense of the MacDonald Lords of the Isles, was exacerbated
by Campbell acceptance of the Reformation. In the early seventeenth
century, the earl of Argyll attempted to plant Kintyre on lines similar to
176 The British Isles
On the tenth instant [March 1746] at four in the morning I landed Lieut. Lindsay
with the detachment of your regiment [the Scots Fusiliers] Captain Campbell
with 20 men . . . a lieutenant and fiftyfive men from my ship with orders to burn
the houses and destroy the effects of all such as were out in the rebellion.
When the land was leased out again, many of the beneficiaries were
Campbells. So far as the Highlands were concerned, the Reformation
led eventually to the victory of the English-backed clans, Campbells,
MacKenzies and MacLeods, over the rest.
In the Lowlands also, existing regional differences seem to have become
more marked as a consequence of the Reformation. In the north-
east, ancestral territory of the Gordon earls of Huntley, episcopalian-
ism flourished in a general atmosphere of social hierarchy. South of
the Tay, where the lairds and towns made common cause, a Presby-
terian form of Church government, giving wider scope to a ‘middle
class’, made headway. In the south-west, for reasons which may go back
to long-held resentment against a Normanised landowning class, the
small farmers became ‘Covenanters’, stressing godliness above inher-
ited status. During the civil wars of the mid-seventeenth century, the
Covenanters supported a theocratic regime which abolished patronage
and forced a sinful nobility publicly to admit its moral failures. During
the Restoration period the south-west was disturbed by peasant revolts,
which in their religious intensity resembled the ‘Camisards’ of southern
France. Throughout the seventeenth century, episcopalians, Presbyte-
rians and Covenanters contended for supremacy. Victory went finally
to the Presbyterians, leaving their rivals with the status of ‘second-class
citizens’.
These internal conflicts, in both Highlands and Lowlands, had their
own Scottish flavour. Throughout the early modern period, however, it
became increasingly difficult to keep the history of ‘Scotland’ distinct
from that of a wider ‘English empire’. In the Lowlands, during the late
sixteenth century, contending political groups of nobles depended for
success in seizing and retaining power upon English support. The flight
of Mary, Queen of Scots, to England in 1568 involved English politicians
The making of an English empire 177
more closely in Scottish affairs than ever before. For a Scottish noble
such as James Douglas, earl of Morton, ‘conformity with England’ was
the key consideration. For James VI, son of Mary, Queen of Scots, the
Union of the Crowns was the main long-term aim of political strategy,
and when it was achieved in 1603 he came to look upon the episcopal
state Church of England as the example to be followed in Scotland. One
of the rewards of the Union of the Crowns was the opening up of Ulster to
Lowland settlement. From the mid-sixteenth century onwards, Scotland,
which had enjoyed independence in the later middle ages, was drawn
increasingly into a Britannic framework.
If there were rewards in this situation, there was also a price to be
paid. In Charles I’s reign, the Crown became a more active instrument of
anglicisation than had been the case under James VI. The Lowland nobil-
ity were disturbed by secret royal plans to recover Church property and
alienated tithes. Presbyterians south of the Tay resented the influence of
the episcopalians of the north-east, who had found a powerful ally in the
English Lord Treasurer, Archbishop William Laud. The new departure
was symbolised in the creation of a bishopric of Edinburgh and the trans-
formation of the kirk of St Giles into a cathedral. In Ireland, Charles
I’s minister Strafford succeeded in uniting Old and New English alike
against him. In Scotland, Charles and Laud brought Kirk and nobility
into common opposition, based upon a Presbyterian National League
and Covenant (1638).
The National League and Covenant did not lead to greater national
independence in the long term, however. One of the consequences of suc-
cessful opposition to the Crown was to draw the Presbyterian leaders into
closer ties with the English Puritans. The reformation of the Church of
England on Presbyterian lines seemed possible and in 1643 Scottish Pres-
byterians and English Puritans joined in a Solemn League and Covenant.
At the same time, in Ireland, a Scots army under Monro fought to defend
the Ulster plantation against the Irish confederate forces of Owen Roe O
Neill. In Scotland, Charles looked for aid to the Highlanders under the
earl of Montrose, who in 1644 was joined by a force of MacDonalds and
MacLeans under Alasdair Coll Ciotach (the ‘left-handed’, anglicised as
‘Colkitto’). These MacDonalds had the backing of the earl of Antrim.
In 1648, Charles in the aftermath of defeat hammered out an unlikely
alliance between his Irish, English and Scottish supporters despite their
religious differences. As we have seen, the so-called English civil war was
essentially a war of the three kingdoms.
During the 1650s, after Cromwell’s victories at Preston, Dunbar
and Worcester, Scotland found itself incorporated within a wider
Figure 25. The Bible in Welsh
Bishop William Morgan’s translation of the Bible into Welsh in 1588
was to leave a lasting impression upon Welsh identity. The Reformation
in Wales became associated with the Welsh language and eventually with
Welshness in general.
The making of an English empire 179
introduce the common law. For a time it seemed that Ulster also would
follow the example of Connacht in submitting to peaceful assimilation.
In 1595, however, Hugh O Neill who had enjoyed Crown support as earl
of Tyrone, took the great gamble of resisting the advance of the English
administration into his territories and rose in revolt, with Spanish support.
The gamble failed. O Neill’s defeat at the battle of Kinsale in 1601 marked
the downfall of feudalism in Ireland.
A social and political revolution had taken place comparable to that
which had occurred in England and Wales during much the same period.
The English common law was soon enforced throughout Ireland, though
in fact the courts took account of ‘brehon law’ where the circumstances
seemed to require it. The traditional order of coarbs, brehons and bards
which had survived in Ulster gradually collapsed. It was now possible for
an Irish parliament to meet which could draw upon representatives of
shires and boroughs from all over Ireland.
What then went wrong? Why should there have been a revolt in 1642
among the very pro-English elements which had acquiesced in the over-
throw of Desmond and O Neill? The plantation of the territories of O
Neill and O Donnell was not in itself a cause of unrest. The Catholic
earl of Westmeath benefited from the plantation of Cavan. The greater
landowners such as the Dillons accepted English titles. Such septs as the
O Hurleys, O Briens and O Dwyers made the transition from Gaelic
chieftain to landed aristocrat. Bishop O Hurley of Emly belonged to a
family which had a record of loyalty to the Crown during the Nine Years
War, and possessed an estate of 8,500 acres. Such landowners had a great
deal to lose. The reasons for unrest may be sought in the list of grievances
which was presented to the Crown in 1628 and is known as the ‘Graces’.
On the basis of this, it seems clear that the expectations aroused by the
victory of the ‘loyal’ groupings had not been fulfilled. Economic power
in both trade and land was overwhelmingly in the hands of the Catholic
‘Old English’ (using that term in the sense of ‘loyalists’, not in any ‘racial’
sense). Political and administrative influence, however, was passing into
the hands of those new Protestant settlers who had arrived in Elizabeth’s
reign. Administrative devices such as the court of Wards and Liveries had
introduced religious criteria as a condition for inheriting land. The plan-
tation of Connacht, attempted during the 1630s by the lord deputy, was
further evidence that the English administration intended to continue its
policy of anglicisation of the ‘Old English’ interest. Religious conformity
was to be the measure of loyalty, as the full implications of the English
Reformation began to work themselves out in Ireland.
In Ulster there was also another source of discontent which arose from
the plantation of the lands of O Neill and O Donnell after the Flight
182 The British Isles
nobility, whose families had been dispossessed. Ulster had its own set
of problems deriving from the large-scale settlement of Scots in Down,
Antrim and Derry. These long-standing differences of mentalité survived
amid the anguish of defeat, and exile, when one side sought to blame the
other for the catastrophe. The historical controversy between the ‘Old
Irish’ Richard O Ferrall and the ‘Old English’ John Lynch reflected this
clash of attitude. Exiled members of the bardic order also took up the
same themes.
The Cromwellian conquest brought about the downfall of the ‘Old
English’ interest in Ireland. The real beneficiaries of the conquest, how-
ever, were not the Cromwellian soldiers but the ‘New English’ planters of
the pre-1641 period who now styled themselves ‘Old Protestants’ to dis-
tinguish themselves from the Baptists and Quakers (‘New Protestants’) of
the Cromwellian army. It has been estimated that of the 36,000 soldiers
who stood to benefit from the original plantation, only 8,000 remained
twenty years later. The Protestant ascendancy was very much an ‘Old
Protestant’ ascendancy. The Cromwellian settlement also left intact the
hold which the Ulster Scots enjoyed in Down and Antrim.
It had originally been planned to transport all Catholics west of the
Shannon. Eventually only landlords suffered this fate, the actual occu-
piers of the soil being retained in the east as an indispensable labour force.
The Catholic urban patriciate also were displaced from the towns, which
henceforth became centres of the new colonial regime. From the eco-
nomic point of view, the effects were catastrophic. Of Galway it was said
in 1655, ‘her merchants were princes among the nations but now the city
which was full of people is solitary and very desolate’. The Cromwellian
plantation thus did not have the consequences which its exponents hoped
for. In the absence of large-scale colonisation from England, neither the
extermination nor the conversion of the Irish took place.
As in England, so in Ireland, the mid-seventeenth century marked the
peak of Reformation fervour. After the Restoration the Protestant interest
was placed on the defensive and even forced into full retreat during the
crisis of 1688–9. The victory of William III at the Boyne in 1690 decided
the future of Ireland for the next two centuries on the basis of a Protestant
landowning ascendancy.
For much of the period that we have been considering, the aim of suc-
cessive governments was to develop unity within different parts of the
English empire on the basis of religious conformity. When the political
and religious map of the British Isles was stabilised in 1690 religious unity
had not in fact been achieved. In England bitter hostility existed between
the Established Church and the dissenting sects, each of which had its
own version of the events of the civil war. In Scotland Presbyterians of
various persuasions contended for control of the Established Church and
184 The British Isles
Postscript
In this chapter I placed considerable emphasis upon the concept of an
‘English empire’ with its base in London and the south-east. So far as
Ireland is concerned, such an imperial model provides a convincing
framework for further analysis, and in fact in recent decades has been at
the ‘cutting edge’ of Irish history. Professor Nicholas Canny, in his mas-
ter work Making Ireland British (Oxford, 2000), has shown how, from
Spenser onwards to Strafford and Cromwell, ‘plantation’ (sc. coloni-
sation) was seen as a favoured solution to the Irish problem. Edmund
Spenser’s View of the Present State of Ireland (1633), though written ear-
lier, and Sir John Davies, Discovery of the True Causes why Ireland was never
subdued (1612) take their places as key treatises which were to be joined
in due course by Sir John Temple’s highly emotional pamphlet, The Irish
Rebellion (1646). The imperial dimension to Spenser’s The Faerie Queen
with its implications for Ireland is now generally accepted as a central
focus for discussion (see, for example, the introduction and bibliographi-
cal discussion in A. Hadfield and W. Maley, eds., Edward Spenser: A View
of the Present State of Ireland (Oxford, 1997), pp. xii–xiv, 177–89).
The English historian Victor Treadwell, in his substantial study Buck-
ingham and Ireland 1616–1628 (Dublin, 1998), has shown how Ireland
was treated as a colony to be exploited at will by royal favourites. The
literary critic Philip Edwards, in his Threshold of a Nation: A Study of
English and Irish Drama (Cambridge, 1979), quoted a description of Sir
Humphrey Gilbert’s ‘colonising’ methods in Elizabethan Ireland. It was
his practice, says Thomas Churchyard, a contemporary commentator,
That the heads of all those . . . which were killed in the day should be cut off from
their bodies and brought to the place where he encamped at night, and should be
laid on the ground by each side of the way leading into his own tent so that none
could come into his tent for any cause but commonly he must pass through a
lane of heads, which he used ad terrorem, the dead feeling nothing more the pains
thereby; and yet did it bring great terror to the people when they saw the heads
of their dead fathers, brothers, children, kinsfolk, and friends lie on the ground
before their faces, as they came to speak with the said colonel.
The making of an English empire 185
name Britain to a certain Brutus whose links were with Troy and to the
Emperor Constantine who was supposedly born in Britain. In the six-
teenth century the main outlines of the Scottish version were put forward
in print by two considerable scholars, Hector Boéce (c.1465–1536) in his
History of the Scots (1527) and George Buchanan (1506–82) in his History
of Scottish Affairs (1582), both books written in Latin. There was thus a
long-standing resistance in Scotland to the idea of an English empire.
The Henrician Reformation, however, brought about crucial changes
and for some time at least was able to provide the English monarchy
with a gloss of religious reform for its long-term ambitions. One striking
example of this was during the campaign known as the ‘Rough Wooing’
of 1544–50 during which the English general Somerset won a substan-
tial victory in 1547 at Pinkie. As Marcus Merriman (Mason, 1994) has
shown, it was during this period that the term ‘Great Britain’ entered the
political vocabulary as part of a policy which it was hoped would lead
to a marriage between Edward VI and Mary, Queen of Scots. Merriman
draws attention to the role of Somerset’s propagandist James Henrisoun
who had no hesitation in developing his defence of English policy upon
the fact that Brutus ‘conquered all this lande’ (Mason, 1994, p. 90). He
also argued on official Henrician lines that the Emperor Constantine pro-
vided a historical basis for the union of two nations based on ‘common
ethnic blood’ proving ‘that as Britayn was under one Emperor then was
Scotland and England but one empire’ (ibid. p. 92). Henrisoun also spoke
as a committed advocate of Reformation.
For how Godly were it that as these two Realms should grow into one, so should
thei also agre in the concorde and centre in one religion of Christ, setting a part
all fonde superstitions, sophisticacioun and other thousands of devileries brought
in by the bishop of Rome and his creatures.
Somerset’s plans for Scotland ended in failure and it was not until
Elizabeth’s reign that the English were again given the opportunity
to intervene, when in 1560 troops were sent to aid the Lords of the
Congregation in a move which led to the withdrawal of the French
from Scotland. In a fine article ‘Two Kingdoms or Three: Ireland in
Anglo-Scottish Relations in the Middle of the Sixteenth Century’
(Mason, 1987) Jane Dawson has shown how Cecil developed a strat-
egy which encompassed the whole of the British Isles. The key fact which
she highlights is the way in which Cecil planned to use the earl of Argyll’s
influence in ‘the north parties of Ireland’ to control the O Neills and
MacDonnells and the O Donnells. But the main thrust of English policy
in later decades was to bring about a union of crowns, an objective which
was finally achieved in 1603.
The making of an English empire 187
Political victory did not come without a price. James VI held strong
views about Anglo-Scottish Union. In his very first speech to parliament
he compared closer union to the consolidation of the seven Kingdoms
under Wessex or the merger of French duchies ‘one after another con-
quered by the sword’. Hitherto it had been England which had the upper
hand in influencing events in Scotland. Now James’ spokesmen Sir John
Hayward, Sir Thomas Craig and Edward Ayscu criticised the idea of an
ancient English constitution (Greenberg, 2002, p. 126). It seems to have
been resistance to what they saw as Scottish innovation that led lawyers
such as Sir Edward Coke to defend repeatedly the idea of the ancient
English constitution.
In this way Arthur once more returned to prominence. For example,
on the basis of a supposedly reliable source The Mirror of Justice, Coke
believed that Arthur held parliaments (Greenberg, p. 144). Thus English
lawyers provided a mythical basis for English identity which paralleled
that of Hector Boéce and George Buchanan in Scotland. It was a mythol-
ogy which lasted well into the seventeenth century and in the case of the
mythical Christian king Lucius into the nineteenth.
The history of the Three Kingdoms may thus be seen as a history of
contending national mythologies. In the case of England, Janelle Green-
berg has shown convincingly how the myth of the ancient constitution was
a key strand in the ideology of parliamentary opposition. In Scotland, as
Roger Mason and others have indicated, there was also an ‘ancient consti-
tution’ which was seen as a buttress of Scottish claims to independence.
In Ireland, Geoffrey Keating in his Foras Feasa ar Eireann (The Foun-
tain of Knowledge about Ireland) traced the ancient Irish constitution to
the High Kingship of Tara, complete with its own parliament. As both
English and Scottish historians had done, Keating traced Irish origins
to pre-Christian times, in the Irish case the arrival of the Sons of Mı́l.
Keating’s version of history came to be seen as having the great merit
of including all groups within a wider inclusive Irish history. The Stuart
kings could also be seen as descendants of the Sons of Mı́l, a fact which
helps to explain the continuing involvement of the Irish in Jacobitism well
into the eighteenth century.
There were also three (or more) contending religious mythologies. The
first, that backed by the English Crown, was that which looked back to the
Emperor Constantine as the model for a reformed monarch. It was a view
of the Church of England which stressed the role of bishops appointed
by the Crown. James VI had adopted this view before becoming King
of England, and after 1603 he continued to defend it in the strongest
terms (‘No Bishop, No King’). Against this view such figures as Andrew
Melville and George Buchanan advocated an elective system of Church
188 The British Isles
government and an elective monarchy which could trace its origins back
to the earliest times. James I dealt with Scotland successfully. His son
Charles I failed to do so and, during the 1640s Scottish problems, formed
part of an intricate political-religious pattern which led to civil war, and
indirectly to the execution of the king. The third mythology was that
which took root in Ireland where the papal nuncio Archbishop Rinuccini
became the spokesman for a resurgent Catholicism in the late 1640s.
An earlier generation of historians dealt with these charges under the
general rubric of ‘the English Revolution’. Today, following the lead of
Jenny Wormald and Conrad Russell, we are more likely to see them as the
problems faced by a ‘multiple Kingdom’ comparable to those confronted
by the Spanish monarchy in Catalonia and Portugal. By the end of the
century after the Glorious Revolution of 1688 and the Battle of the Boyne
the dominance of the English component of this multiple Kingdom was
assured, or seemed to be.
The English colonies in colonial America including the West Indies
were also thus very much part of the English success story. It was a posi-
tion of power which relied upon commercial success, which economic
historians explained as largely due to ‘re-export trade’ in certain enumer-
ated commodities such as sugar and tobacco. Until recently the role of
the slave trade in the rise of such Atlantic ports as Bristol and Liverpool
was ignored. In fact in the first edition of this book, for example, I myself
did not mention the slave trade. In recent years, however, the balance
has shifted. Historians can now turn to such works as David Ellis’ Rise of
African Slavery in the Americas (Cambridge, 2000) for a comparative crit-
ical treatment of the British role in the slave trade during the seventeenth
and eighteenth centuries.
8 The remaking of an empire
189
190 The British Isles
observance. Outside this narrow range, the legacy of the civil wars of
the mid-seventeenth century led to the perpetuation of distrust and hos-
tility between the two cultures of Church and dissent, each with their
own interpretation of the recent past, the churchmen looking back to the
executions of Charles I and of Archbishop Laud, and the dissenters to
their ejection from the Established Church after the Restoration. As Dr
Jonathan Clark has emphasised (in English Society 1688–1832 (1985)),
an Anglican ascendancy retained control of the institutions of power and
influence long after 1688. Episcopalian culture was dominant in the uni-
versities, the major public schools and the army and navy as well as in the
Church itself. Dissenting culture was forced to create its own institutions
of higher education, the dissenting academies in London and the north
and west, where they had some numerical strength.
In Scotland, a similar clash of cultures took place though here it was
the episcopalians who found themselves in a subordinate position. The
Covenanters, now in a position of power, abolished episcopacy as an insti-
tution in the Established Church. In the Highlands, the renewed influ-
ence of the Campbells, which had been in decline since the Restoration,
was signalled by the massacre of the Catholic MacDonalds of Glencoe in
1692. During the first half of the eighteenth century, Jacobitism, drawing
support from bitter feelings of discrimination, remained far more of a
threat than the Whig historians implied. But the dominant culture, rein-
forced by the Act of Union of 1707 and enshrined in the power of the
Kirk, in the universities and the schools, remained Lowland Presbyteri-
anism. This is not to say that it was united. Throughout the eighteenth
century, Covenanting sects broke away from the Establishment because
it was not godly enough for their taste. In their hatred of Popery and of
such historical figures as Claverhouse, however, Presbyterians of all views
were at one.
In Ireland, defeat at the Boyne in 1690 marked the final eclipse of the
culture of the ‘Old English’. James II’s general, Richard Talbot, earl of
Tyrconnell, took his title from the O Donnells, chiefs of Tir Connail,
but his roots lay in the anglicised counties of the Pale. The same may be
said of the defender of Limerick, Patrick Sarsfield, whose estate was at
Lucan, near Dublin. The Cromwellian confiscations had dealt the Old
English a severe blow, from which they had made a partial recovery after
the Restoration. The Williamite confiscations, however, together with
the penal laws passed under William III and Anne, applied the coup de
grâce. Henceforth members of Catholic gentry families sought careers
as ‘Wild Geese’ in the armies of France and Spain. The dominant cul-
ture of eighteenth-century Ireland was to be that of the ‘Protestant’ (sc.
episcopalian) ascendancy. Dublin, Cork and Limerick became largely
Protestant urban centres, round which the great houses of the new elite
The remaking of an empire 191
empire during the period after 1688 was the growth of the American
colonies. The population of the thirteen mainland colonies grew from c.
250,000 in 1700 to c. 2,500,000 by the 1770s. Trade with the colonies
became a new and important feature of the economies of the British
Isles. The prosperity of London was in large measure built upon it. The
rise of Liverpool and Bristol in the course of the eighteenth century was
bound up with colonial trade, including the slave trade. Ireland, though
excluded from full participation in the English mercantile system, enjoyed
a burgeoning trade with the slave-based societies of the West Indies, which
provided a market for Irish salt beef and linens. In Scotland, the rapid
growth of the port of Glasgow was connected with the tobacco trade.
Economically, the American colonies were an integral and increasingly
important part of the English empire; culturally, also they cannot be left
out of account in assessing the relative balance of Church and dissent.
The various cultures of dissent were much more strongly represented
within the thirteen colonies than was the case in England. In New Eng-
land, Puritanism formed the basis of the dominant culture though now
in more variegated forms than those held by the founding fathers of the
early seventeenth century. In the middle colonies of Pennsylvania and
New York, which expanded more rapidly during the eighteenth century
than the colonies to the north and south, the emigration of Scotch-Irish
Presbyterians from Ulster reinforced non-Anglican elements. Through-
out the colonies, the impact of various evangelical movements, known
collectively as the ‘Great Awakening’, found a ready response among
those opposed to a religious establishment. Taking the English empire
as a whole the rise of dissent in the colonies during this period led to a
shift in the balance of the cultures of Church and dissent. In England
itself there was no doubt about the dominance of the Anglican estab-
lishment, but beyond England dissenters could look westward across the
Atlantic for moral reinforcement in time of crisis. From this point of
view, the American revolution of the 1770s takes shape as a renewal of
the seventeenth-century conflict between the two cultures of Church and
dissent.
As suggested above, England during the eighteenth century was a soci-
ety deeply divided on religious grounds. The divisions created by the civil
war were still far from healed and the unity created by the fear of James
II’s Catholicism proved to be only temporary. During Anne’s reign suc-
cessful attempts were made by the High Church interest to reduce the
role of dissent in public life. The Occasional Conformity Act (1711) was
intended to prevent dissenters from complying with the letter of the law
by taking the Anglican sacrament once a year in order to qualify for office.
By the terms of the Schism Act (1714) dissenters were to be deprived of
their schools and academies. The fact that these two acts were repealed
The remaking of an empire 193
after the accession of the Hanoverians cannot conceal the fact that the
rift between the two cultures of Church and dissent remained deep
for many decades to come. The dissenting deputies, drawn from each
Presbyterian, Independent and Baptist congregation within ten miles of
London, reported regularly upon the pressures of various kinds to which
the dissenters were exposed. In 1743 attacks by a riotous mob in Angle-
sey attracted their attention; in 1748 the refusal of burial to children of
dissenters in a Suffolk village; in 1767 the exaction of tolls upon chapel-
goers using a turnpike road. Perhaps the main factor tending to keep
these tensions under control during the first half of the century was the
fear of the return of Popery in the person of the Pretender.
The mutual animosity which existed between churchmen and dis-
senters derived in large measure from doctrinal and political differences
and from rival interpretations of the recent past. Cultural differences of
a less intellectual kind also played their part. The dominant Anglican
culture embodied attitudes towards leisure which were criticised in dis-
senting circles. Racing, gambling, theatre-going, card-playing, dancing
were all activities tolerated and often encouraged within the dominant
culture. At a popular level, the village alehouse was the secular counter-
part of the parish church.
The growth of a consumer society provides an indication of the strength
of the dominant culture. It was ‘at church’ that a commentator noted how:
in a populous city in the north, the macebearer cleared the way for Mrs May-
oress who came sidling after him in an enormous fan hoop of a pattern that had
never been seen in those parts. At another church [he] saw several negligees with
furbelowed aprons . . . but these were woefully eclipsed by a burgess’ daughter
just come from London who appeared in a Trolloppee of Slammerkin with treble
ruffles to the cuffs, pinked and gymped and the sides of the petticoats drawn up
on festoons.
million at the end of the century. This market also influenced the
economies of the Scottish Lowlands, the Welsh border counties and
the counties of eastern Ireland. London also became the centre of a
rapidly growing re-export trade, most notably in sugar and tobacco, two
of the ‘enumerated commodities’ which by the terms of the Navigation
Acts could not be exported directly from the colonies to Europe. Trade
brought in its wake a demand for warehouses, docks and ancillary labour,
as well as for credit facilities and insurance services supplied by the ‘City’.
As mentioned earlier, the slave trade also played a key role in the rise of
Bristol and Liverpool.
London, already an administrative, political and legal centre and now
a commercial entrepôt on the grand scale, also became a centre of
consumption. Shops, theatres, clubs, coffee houses, drinking houses all
came to provide facilities for enjoyment. Dissent may well have been
over-represented in circles of trade and finance, though this often-made
assumption is by no means beyond challenge, but the values of the city
as represented by its architecture and day-to-day activities were an urban
extension of a broad-based ‘Church’ culture. Over much of the metropoli-
tan area the tone was set by the town-houses of the aristocracy in the newly
built squares near to the palace of St James. It was this life-style which
the dissenter Richard Price presumably had in mind in denouncing ‘an
abandoned venality, the inseparable companion of dissipation and extrav-
agance [which] has poisoned the springs of public virtue among us’.
During the reigns of George I and George II (1714–60), the balance
between Church and dissent was held by the Whig administrations of Sir
Robert Walpole and his successor, Henry Pelham, relying upon a system
of political ‘influence’ which their opponents denounced as ‘corruption’.
Several factors made possible this long-term success of the Whigs in the
face of what may well have been a Tory majority in the country as a
whole. The ‘Low Church’ Anglican episcopate, appointed under govern-
ment patronage, could be relied upon to support the government in the
House of Lords (at the local parish level, where the parsons were gen-
erally Tory, the situation was very different). The long period of war, or
fear of war, from 1688 to 1815, sometimes termed the ‘Second Hundred
Years War’, led to the growth of a patronage system linked to wartime
requirements. The army and the navy were a source of useful government
patronage. Government influence could be brought to bear upon dock-
yard towns such as Chatham, Gravesend, Deptford and Greenwich. The
Whigs were also able to control many small boroughs in the south-west.
Dissenters tolerated a government which was much better from their
point of view than a possible Tory alternative with High Church affili-
ations. In counties such as Cheshire and Lancashire in the north-west
196 The British Isles
This was a note that was to be repeated throughout the nineteenth century
and which derived unmistakeably from the culture of dissent.
Though some individual states retained an established church (e.g.
Massachusetts) there was no national establishment. The sect was the
characteristic form of religious organisation and it was this which pro-
vided the basis of what Tocqueville later analysed in his Democracy in
America. In its lack of deference, in the absence of a formal hierarchical
structure in Church and State, in its egalitarian emphasis, the United
States developed along lines which derived from the dissenting tradition.
In the American view of history John Milton and Algernon Sidney enjoyed
a place which they were denied in the established English interpretation.
Not surprisingly Mrs Catherine Macaulay, critic of Hume’s ‘Tory’ his-
tory of England, came to visit George Washington in the years after the
revolution. The lack of an establishment in America, however, may well
have led to a certain anti-intellectualism and scorn for high culture.
Henry James, looking back to the earlier years of the infant republic,
was less enthusiastic than Jonathan Edwards when he commented:
No Sovereign, no court, no personal loyalty, no aristocracy, no church, no clergy,
no army, no diplomatic service, no country gentlemen, no palaces, no castles, nor
manors, nor old country houses, nor parsonages, nor thatched cottages, nor ivied
ruins; no cathedrals, nor abbeys, nor little Norman churches; no great Universities
nor public schools – no Oxford, nor Eton, nor Harrow; no literature, no novels,
no museums, no pictures, no political society, no sporting class – no Epsom, nor
Ascot.
It is worth noting how much James was here offering the viewpoint of the
southern English ‘core’ culture.
In England itself the result of defeat in America was to weaken the cul-
ture of dissent and to intensify the defensive attitude of the establishment.
In 1787 Pitt and North spoke out against the repeal of the Corporation
and Test Acts on the grounds that they were ‘the corner stone of the
The remaking of an empire 199
During the course of the century, the situation was transformed, thanks
largely to the zeal of churchmen working within the establishment. Mis-
sionary activity came from within the Anglican Church, often with the
direct support of English clergy. The Society for the Propagation of
Christian Knowledge, founded in 1699, took Wales as one of its targets
and sponsored the foundation of a number of English-speaking charity
schools, most of them in south Wales. The real turning point came, how-
ever, when Griffiths Jones, an Anglican parson at Llandowror, turned
his attention to Welsh-speaking areas. Jones set up a system of scrip-
tural education, in Welsh where it seemed appropriate, using itinerant
(sc. ‘circulating’) teachers who taught Bible-reading to rural labourers
during quiet months of the agricultural year. Hundreds of these schools
introduced a primitive form of literacy based upon the Old and New Tes-
taments and the Book of Common Prayer to the rural world of Wales. At
much the same time, from the 1730s onwards, an evangelical movement,
comparable to the ‘Great Awakening’ in colonial America, led to the cre-
ation of ‘Methodist’ societies within the Established Church. The leader
of the movement was Howell Harris, whose views like those of Jonathan
Edwards in New England and George Whitefield were strongly Calvinist.
Welsh Methodism thus took on a different colouring from that of English
Methodism, which followed the Arminianism of John Wesley.
Much may be attributed to the charismatic gifts of the evangelists but
more is needed to account for their long-term success in transforming the
mentalité of rural Wales. In social terms it would seem that the Methodists
managed to adapt for their own purposes some of the institutions of
rural society. Methodist societies overcame the challenge of a dispersed
rural setting as the formal parochial structure could not. The evangelists
remained within the structure of the Established Church until a decisive
break came in 1810–11 but, well before this, Methodist institutions were
not truly part of the parochial structure. In the face of clerical hostility, the
Methodists were often forced to build their own chapels, which became
dissenting chapels after the final breach.
Throughout the eighteenth century tensions within the Welsh Church
were as bitter as those between the Church and the Old Dissenting bodies.
Churchmen complained that the Methodists asserted ‘that they and none
others are the elect and damn all others in order to terrify the illiterate
into their faction. They assure them that their fathers and grandfathers
are in hell; and that they see visible marks of damnation in the faces of
such as will not become Methodists.’ Others protested about ‘itinerant
preachers who alienated the affections of weak people still further from
the Established Church . . . [maintaining] that our most excellent liturgy
is a dead letter, a heap of Popish rubbish composed by devils’. To the more
The remaking of an empire 201
Movement. Overall, however, it was the two forms of dissent which came
to exercise dominance. A broad distinction may be made between south
Wales, commercialised (albeit with some industry), anglicised and cos-
mopolitan, and the north, heavily Welsh-speaking and rural. In the south,
Anglicanism contended with a wide variety of dissenting sects which had
roots going back to the civil war period and among which demands for
political reform found a ready response. In the north, it was Calvinistic
Methodism, still at this date within the Established Church, which took
root among the rural population. Though both were ‘Welsh’, it is not too
much to say that north and south were in essence different sub-cultures.
It was from the cosmopolitan south that Richard Price and Iolo Mor-
ganwg came. Both men were heavily involved in the radical politics of the
day, especially the issues raised by the American and French revolutions.
As freemasons, they were both sympathetic to the ideas of the Enlighten-
ment. Pockets of similar radicalism existed further north but in general
it was the south, exposed to the influence of Bristol, which was most
sympathetic to opposition causes. Rural north Wales, by contrast, was
a more localised culture in which traditional elements were still strong
despite the activities of the Methodists. The contrast between the two
areas was to increase even more from the end of the eighteenth century
with the onset of industrialisation in south Wales.
The changes which took place in Wales during the eighteenth century
made little impact upon the other societies of the British Isles. However,
the rise of Wales as a factor in wider British politics during the nineteenth
century, when Welshmen became involved in the fortunes of the Liberal
party, is explicable only against the background of the eighteenth century.
In Ireland, the formative period of the Reformation ended with the
population divided into three distinct cultures: the episcopalians of east-
ern Ireland; the Presbyterians of Ulster; and the Catholic majority to be
found in all four provinces. Among the Catholics the reforms begun dur-
ing the Counter-Reformation had not progressed very far. The survival
of such popular rites of passage as the ‘wake’ suggests that in the west,
particularly, traditional patterns still survived. In times of active perse-
cution, informal religious gatherings such as the ‘patron’ (the festival of
local saints) were one of the few means by which religious identity could
be maintained.
The episcopalians, though probably the smallest in numbers, enjoyed
the greatest political power at the local and national level, since most of
the landowners belonged to the Established Church. The Presbyterians
were socially dominant in Antrim and Down but not well represented else-
where. The Catholics, largely deprived of leadership, had least influence
of all. Each of these groups constituted its own self-contained world. The
Presbyterians enjoyed close links with Scotland where issues involving the
The remaking of an empire 203
Covenant and lay patronage loomed large in the early eighteenth century.
Ideological divisions in Scotland inevitably came to influence the various
branches of Presbyterianism in Ulster. Episcopalians in contrast were
closely involved with affairs in England, as the career of Jonathan Swift
suggests. Increasingly, however, the Protestant (episcopalian) ascendancy
became a society with its own distinctive outlook. Trinity College, Dublin,
for example, which had drawn its provosts from Oxford and Cambridge
during the seventeenth century, appointed men from its own ranks in
the eighteenth. There was, thirdly, the Catholic majority, whose leaders,
though deprived of prospects at home, sought military, ecclesiastical or
commercial careers on the continent. The outlook of most Irish-speaking
Catholics, it is safe to say, was largely bounded by their locality. A letter
written by a Cork landlord in 1702 describes how
The practice has been to let a great deal of land to some Irish gentleman who
has nothing of his own so that he may bring in his followers, and while he makes
them pay double the rent, he lives idly on the overplus himself. Besides, while all
these depend on his protection, they follow his bagpipe, whenever disturbances
happen.
have seen the new villages as a danger. Whatever the reasons, sectarian
violence was a feature of the 1780s in these newly industrialised areas.
The antagonisms of the Reformation had returned, this time in a ‘mod-
ern’ environment.
The most serious crisis which the ascendancy had to face came in
the 1790s when the United Irishmen, after pressing unsuccessfully for
political change, rose in revolt in 1798. Fortunately for the landlords, the
rebels failed. The rebellion, however, did prove to be more widespread
than the country-wide outbreaks of rural protest which had taken place
from the 1760s onwards. In the north, the Presbyterian farmers of Antrim
and Down, or some of them, were ‘out’ (i.e. in rebellion) in 1798. South
of Dublin, in Wicklow, Wexford and Carlow, small farmers also rose in
revolt. But most of Ireland, especially the west, where a small French
force landed in 1798, was uninvolved.
Tom Paine’s Rights of Man circulated in the cities of the east coast
(Wolfe Tone called it the ‘Koran of Belfast’), but sectarian hostility proved
to be more powerful than ideals of universal brotherhood. In Co. Armagh,
sectarian conflict had already broken out in the 1780s. It became more
intense after the outbreak of the French Revolution and the rise of the
United Irishmen. In 1795, after a violent clash between Catholic and
Protestant at the Diamond (Co. Armagh), landlords placed themselves
at the head of a ‘Church and King’ organisation known as the Orange
Order. On the strongly episcopalian estates of the north, Protestant land-
lords and tenants were enabled to unite under the banner of ‘No Popery’.
Not all landlords followed this course. The Whig earl of Gosford was a
notable exception, but it was the general tendency among more conser-
vative landlords.
In the counties south of Ulster, where Catholics were in a majority, the
situation was different. Here a Protestant presence was looked upon as
an indication that landlords were attempting a policy of ‘colonisation’.
In Co. Louth, John Foster, former speaker of the Irish House of Com-
mons, openly advertised for Protestant tenants. In Wicklow, villages like
Newtown Mount Kennedy were newly established Protestant centres in
a largely Catholic countryside. Thus the south became a reverse image
of the north. In Armagh, a Protestant declared, ‘Sir, I hate a Papist as I
do a toad and none of my neighbours has gone further in their extirpa-
tion than I have.’ In Cavan, a group of Catholic Defenders stated their
intention to ‘destroy every Scotchman or Presbyterian they could find’.
The worst excesses, however, were reserved for Wexford in 1798. Nearly
one hundred Protestants were executed in Wexford town and a number
of others were burned alive in a barn at Scullabogue, near New Ross. The
shadow of 1798 lay heavily over nineteenth-century Irish history, both in
The remaking of an empire 207
the north, where Scullabogue was remembered, and in the south where
the counter-atrocities perpetrated by the militia passed into popular con-
sciousness.
The rebellion of 1798 led Pitt to conclude that a union of Ireland with
Britain was a political necessity, in spite of the opposition of the ascen-
dancy. The result of two years of pressure upon the Irish parliament was
the Act of Union of 1800 which provided for Irish representation in the
House of Commons (100 members) as well as for the election of 25 repre-
sentative peers to the House of Lords. It was intended that the Act would
win Catholic support thanks to an additional measure admitting Irish
Catholic MPs, but George III refused to give way on what he regarded as
an essential element of the constitution. For some time, therefore, the full
implications of the Act of Union were concealed. Of the three cultures
of Ireland, it was only one, the Anglo-Irish episcopalian interest, which
was represented at Westminster. The Irish Catholic bishops gave their
support to the measure but reaped no reward. In Ireland, at least for the
moment, the ascendancy was victorious.
In Scotland, in the years following the Glorious Revolution, there were
three distinctive cultures: the Presbyterianism of much of the Lowlands
and those parts of the Highlands under Campbell influence; the episco-
palianism of the east coast, north of the Tay; and the residual Catholicism
of a few scattered areas, especially those under MacDonald control in
the Isles. Of these, Catholicism, despite Presbyterian obsessions with the
growth of ‘Popery’, was the least important. The real struggle in Scot-
land lay between the cultures of Presbyterianism and episcopalianism,
each with their own interpretation of the recent past. The episcopalians
who had been royalist in the civil war looked back to the memory of Mon-
trose, whose remains, scattered after his execution, had been recovered
and buried with due solemnity at the Restoration. (The Montrose legend,
however, was complicated by his Covenanting past.) The Presbyterian
version of recent history singled out the ‘Killing Time’ after the Restora-
tion, when their most zealous members had been persecuted. During the
rebellion of 1715, Jacobite commanders asked strangers, whose sympa-
thies were unknown, whether they attended the meeting house (episco-
pal) or the church (Presbyterian), a clear indication of how the battle lines
were drawn.
The Glorious Revolution replaced an episcopalian ascendancy with a
Presbyterian ascendancy. In 1690 the victors abolished lay patronage and
placed the presentation of ministers in the hands of the presbytery and
the heritor (chief landowner) of the parish. The Kirk Session, made up of
ministers and elders, became the chosen instrument for the enforcement
of Presbyterian views on private and public morality. With the backing
208 The British Isles
Considering that the great abuse that is commeted at wedding dinners and in
particular by promiscuous dancing betwixt young men and young women which
is most abominable, not to be practised in a land of light, and condemned in
former time of Presbytery as not only unnecessary but sensuall, being only an
inlet of lust and provocation to uncleanness of men and women in this loose and
degenerate age, wherein the devil seems to be raging by a spirit of uncleanness
and profanity.
culture, and it was from this end of the Presbyterian spectrum that the
Scottish Enlightenment, or much of it, emerged.
The first open conflict between the two cultures came after the acces-
sion of the Hanoverian George I in 1714. In 1715 the episcopalians rose
in revolt in the name of James VIII, counting upon widespread resent-
ment against the Act of Union to bring the uncommitted over to their
side. For a year, the future of Scotland, and perhaps of the British Isles,
was in the balance, much as it had been during ‘the troubles’ of the pre-
vious century. In the event, however, the Presbyterian regime survived,
though the gap between the two cultures remained as wide as ever.
The rebellion of 1745, though more celebrated in romantic legend
than the ’15, was much less of a threat to the government. The Young
Pretender found support only among a minority of Highland clans and
among a fringe of discontented episcopalian gentry. The initiative for the
rebellion seems to have come largely from France as a means of cre-
ating trouble in northern Britain. The great magnates and substantial
gentry stayed aloof from what they saw as an ill-conceived venture. One
of the MacDonald chiefs urged Charles to go back home. However lim-
ited the support which Charles received among the episcopalians, one
of the consequences of the rebellion was to widen the rift between them
and the Presbyterian establishment. The penalties levied on unqualified
clergymen were increased in 1746 and again in 1748. Clergymen found
breaking the law by preaching to more than four people were made liable
to six months’ imprisonment for the first offence and to banishment for
life after the second. Meeting houses were plundered or burned down. It
was not until 1792, four years after the death of Charles, that these penal
laws were repealed.
The tensions between Presbyterian and episcopalian culture were well
exemplified in the life of Sir Walter Scott (1771–1832). There were epis-
copalians in Scott’s background but he was brought up by a father who
was a strict Presbyterian. Scott recalled how his father observed the Sab-
bath by preaching three sermons to the household, cross-questioning his
audience at the end to see how well they had listened. When one of the
family praised the Sunday broth as ‘good’, Scott’s father poured a cup
of cold water into his plate, saying ‘Aye, too good’. Scott himself reacted
against this upbringing. He married an episcopalian and his children were
christened by episcopalian ministers. His novels Waverley and Old Mor-
tality indicate how Scott looked upon the recent history of Scotland as a
clash between two cultures.
The battle of Culloden in 1746 was the Scottish equivalent of the battle
of the Boyne. Victory gave the Presbyterians a new confidence in their
own future, creating conditions which made possible the rise of open
divisions within the Established Church, between the ‘Moderate’ and
The remaking of an empire 211
of the Septennial Act in 1716, extending the life of parliament from three
to seven years, was made possible by the fear of Jacobitism. Scotland
influenced the course of English history in the seventeenth century; it
did so equally, if less dramatically, during the eighteenth.
Under the influence of Sir Lewis Namier, historians of the eighteenth
century have been particularly prone to see the history of England in nar-
rowly English terms. If the approach adopted here is correct, however,
this is a self-defeating procedure. England, as a consequence of deci-
sions made during the Reformation period, had become the centre of an
empire, the various cultures of which interacted with those of the mother
country as well as with each other. The culture of the English establish-
ment undoubtedly became more powerful than it had been earlier but
the fact remains that the cultures of the ‘periphery’, especially those of
Scotland and colonial America, influenced the course of events in Eng-
land itself. Ireland was more isolated, but even here, as we have seen,
the Scotch-Irish came to form part of the story of 1776. In England,
the names of Swift, Burke, Goldsmith and Sheridan indicate that the
Anglo-Irish element in the culture of the metropolis cannot be ignored.
In addition, though the ‘Irish Question’ did not assume the proportions
which it reached during the nineteenth century, unrest in Ireland during
the crisis years of 1796–1800 became an object of great concern for Pitt’s
administration. Pitt was willing to risk alienating Protestant opinion by
granting concessions to Irish Catholics in order to make Ireland more
secure. The Irish rebellion of 1798 also made possible an Act of Union
between Great Britain and Ireland. This was an enactment which proved
to have profound consequences for the history of the British Isles during
the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
Over much of the history of the English empire during the eighteenth
century there looms the shadow of the Reformation rather than the
Enlightenment. In order to understand the outlook of the various cul-
tures which went to make up the empire, it is the events of the century
earlier rather than those of the eighteenth century itself which provide
the key. In England, the execution of Charles I was still a live issue, in
Ireland, the massacre of 1641, in Scotland, Montrose and Claverhouse,
in colonial America, the memory of Hampden and Sidney. The Glorious
Revolution of 1688 was merely one of a number of events which gave
meaning to particular pasts.
Postscript
Since this book was first published a spate of scholarly studies have
appeared concerned with what we may now call the ‘British’ empire,
The remaking of an empire 215
a political reality from 1707 when the Act of Union made it possible for
the Scots to take full advantage of the opportunities of imperial expan-
sion. Mention may first be made of An Imperial State at War: Britain from
1689–1815 (Stone, ed., 1994) which, building upon John Brewer’s The
Sinews of Power (1989), stresses the importance of the imperial dimen-
sion to the British State and by implication highlights the deficiencies of
the narrowly Anglo-centric approach of the Namier school. As already
mentioned, this new interest in empire also raised awareness of the role of
the slave trade in the development of ports such as Bristol and Liverpool.
As mentioned above, David Ellis, in The Rise of African Slavery in the
Americas (Cambridge, 2000), showed how Britain took a leading role in
developing this highly profitable trade in human beings. Historians were
always aware of the slave trade but it is only in recent years that it has
come to be a central topic for research. Professor N.A.M. Rodger’s fine
study The Command of the Ocean: A Naval History of Britain, 1649–1815
(London, 2004) is essential reading.
In many ways, however, the most influential piece of history concerned
with the eighteenth century has been Professor Linda Colley’s recent
study Britons: Forging the Nation 1707–1837. In this book she argues that
the period from the passing of the Anglo-Scottish Union in 1707 wit-
nessed the creation of a new British identity based in large measure upon
a shared Protestantism, a deep hatred of Britain’s chief enemy and rival,
France, and a newly developed respect for the British monarch. James
I (VI) had hoped that the Union of the Crowns in 1603 would lead
to a common British identity in his newly named Kingdom of Great
Britain but in the face of English political opposition this did not come
about. In 1707, however, the government itself took the lead in promot-
ing the Anglo-Scottish Union amid the fears of French invasion, and in
due course after 1714, the Hanoverian monarchs came to symbolise a
common Protestantism opposed to the Catholic Stuarts.
This new sense of British identity, which is the central theme of Colley’s
book, was symbolised most dramatically in the building of Edinburgh’s
‘New Town’ after 1760 with its George Street, Hanover Street, and Char-
lotte Square. ‘Britishness’ was an identity sponsored and encouraged
from the ‘top down’, ‘officially constructed’ in Colley’s words (p. 145)
but also calling upon popular support. The key period in her view was
after 1783.
In the half century after the American War, there would emerge in Great Britain a
far more consciously and officially constructed patriotism which stressed attach-
ment to the monarchy, the value of military and naval achievement and the desir-
ability of strong, stable government by a virtuous, able and authentically British
elite. (L. Colley, Britons: Forging the Nations 1707–1837 (Yale, 1992), p. 145)
216 The British Isles
Colley here uses the term ‘patriotism’. Elsewhere she refers to the ‘evo-
lution of what must be called British nationalism’ and to the creation
of Great Britain as an ‘invented’ nation (p. 5). Colley is in effect pro-
viding a case study in nationalism and it is in this, I believe, that much
of her originality lies. Colley’s ‘Britain’ is not a special case. Indeed, as
she herself comments, her approach is a landmark in the sense that it
enables us to compare British nationalism with other European nation-
alisms. Colley’s ‘Britain’ is not a special case. Indeed, as she herself com-
ments, her approach resembles that which Eugene Weber took in his
study of French nationalism, Peasants into Frenchmen (Stanford, 1976),
but whereas Weber was concerned with the impact of ‘modernisation’ in
the form of railways and mass education, Colley’s emphasis falls upon
religion and national hostility towards the French in what amounted to
xenophobia. It should also be added that the dominant French national
identity from 1870 was civic and secular in contrast to the ethno-religious
element in British nationalism.
A critical discussion of the implications of Britons lies beyond the scope
of this ‘postscript’. Two points may be made, however. The first is that
by stressing the creation of national unity Colley invites us to re-evaluate
what had been seen in the standard interpretation of the 1790s and later
decades as a period of ‘reaction’. In this sense she has provided a Tory ver-
sion of this period which challenges that offered by Edward Thompson in
his The Making of the English Working Class (London, 1967). Colley plays
down the role of class conflict and takes a more positive view of religion
than does Thompson, but in order to do justice to the complexities of this
period, however, we perhaps need to read each historian in relation to the
other, testing their contrasting but not mutually exclusive hypotheses.
Our second point relates to Colley’s treatment of the Act of Union of
1801 which created a United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland. In
my view, she fails to make her readers aware of the full impact of this
upon the British (sc. Anglo-Scottish) State which had been in existence
since 1707. In 1821 the population of Ireland amounted to 6.8 million
compared to 0.7 million for Wales, 2.0 million for Scotland and 11.2 mil-
lion for England (see L. Stone, ed., An Imperial State at War (1994), p.
73). Thus the incorporation of Ireland had immense implications for the
United Kingdom, especially as 4 million of its inhabitants were Catholic.
Had the political identity of this British state been ‘civic’, the problems of
assimilating its new members would still have been considerable. As Col-
ley has demonstrated, however, the predominant national identity was
Protestant. Catholic Emancipation had been refused in Ireland in 1793
and was still being refused in 1801 partly as a consequence of George III’s
belief that his coronation oath required him to stand by ‘the Protestant
Constitution’. As if to emphasise the point that the religious situation
The remaking of an empire 217
During the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries the balance
of cultures within the British Isles once more shifted radically. In Eng-
land, the social, demographic and economic changes, which are usually
subsumed under the portmanteau concept ‘Industrial Revolution’, led
to the creation of a new urban culture in ‘the north’, a term which may
be used to include the industrial areas of the west midlands as well as
the areas north of the Trent. ‘The north’ in this sense comprised the
large cities of Birmingham, Liverpool, Manchester, Sheffield, Leeds and
Newcastle, the factory towns of Lancashire and Yorkshire and the min-
ing villages of the counties north of Nottinghamshire. Historians have
tended to treat ‘the midlands’ as if it were different from ‘the north’.
In fact, however, there seems to be no good reason why we should
not look upon ‘the midlands’ as a sub-culture within the north. From
this point of view, the midlands, Merseyside, Manchester and its hinter-
land, the West Riding, Tyneside and Teesside all constituted sub-cultures
within an overwhelmingly industrial ‘northern’ culture. (An exception
to this general northern pattern was Cornwall with its tin and copper
mining.)
The new economic importance of ‘the north’ appeared all the more
striking when contrasted with the decline of London as an industrial cen-
tre. Industries, such as shipbuilding and silk weaving, unable to compete
with northern competition, sank into insignificance. Other skilled trades
such as coopering and watch manufacture declined, especially after 1850.
In 1870, Sir Charles Trevelyan described the metropolis as ‘a gigantic
engine for depraving and degrading our population’ and ‘a common sink
of everything that is worst in the United Kingdom’. In some London-
based occupations, such as dock labour, brewing and transport, wages
were driven down by the importation of cheap labour from the depressed
agricultural counties of the south-west, from Wales and from Ireland. The
immigration of many thousands of east European Jews in the 1880s led
to fierce competition in the tailoring and shoemaking industries, already
hard-pressed by provincial competition. London retained its importance
219
Figure 29. The Palace of Westminster
After the fire of 1834, the palace at Westminster was rebuilt on lines which followed the traditional
constitution of king, lords and commons together with the four nations of the 1801 Act of Union.
Since then much has changed. Scotland has its own parliament, Wales its assembly and there is now
a Republic of Ireland. The British monarchy and the House of Lords still have a prime place in the
ritual of opening parliament but constitutionally the House of Commons is dominant. The art and
architecture of the Palace of Westminster repay study. It is noticeable, for example, that images of
the mythical King Arthur are prominent, whereas such figures as Jeremy Bentham or the Chartists
are absent.
The Britannic melting pot 221
nineteenth century was the Anglo-Irish ascendancy, which, like its equiv-
alent in Wales, gradually lost its political grip, outside the province of
Ulster.
The Great Famine of 1845–9, however, was a key event or series of
events, which over a century later has lost none of its power to shock. It has
The Britannic melting pot 223
been estimated that over a million died of starvation or disease, the west of
Ireland being the hardest hit. Massive emigration followed, often under
conditions of severe deprivation. Irish immigration had massive social
consequences for the English north-west and for the west of Scotland. It
is the impact of the Famine on the United States which has attracted most
attention, in the process creating parallels with the Jewish Holocaust.
The famine provides a necessary background for the history of immi-
gration into the British Isles during the nineteenth century. It was not
the only factor, however. Historians once argued that the rapid growth of
British industrial cities was made possible by a shift of population from
the rural south to the industrial north. Their emphasis now is upon the
influx into the cities from local areas. Looked at in the context of the
British Isles, however, it is clear that there was a good deal of population
movement from one cultural zone to another. The result was to create
in cities such as Glasgow, Liverpool, Belfast and Cardiff a ‘melting pot’
effect, marked by inter-ethnic hostility. Football teams such as Celtic
and Rangers in Glasgow, Hearts and Hibernian in Edinburgh, Dundee
United and Dundee FC in Dundee, Belfast Celtic and Linfield in Belfast,
and Everton and Liverpool on Merseyside drew their support from dif-
ferent ethnic communities. In Wales, internal migrants from the rural
north faced the hostility of the southerners who denounced the ‘Cardies’
from Cardiganshire.
In northern England, Jack Lawson looking back from 1932 described
the way in which ‘the county of Durham has become a sort of social
melting pot owing to the rapid development of the coalfield during the
nineteenth century’.
t h e q u e e n o r t h e po pe
which will you have to reign over you – will you suffer Mr Gladstone to destroy the
supremacy of your sovereign and substitute the supremacy of the Pope? Sidebot-
tom calls to English freemen to assert their rights. (Neville Kirk, ‘Ethnicity, Class
and Popular Toryism 1850–1870’, in K. Lunn, Hosts, Immigrants and Minorities
(London, 1980))
There is, finally, the additional complication that the various cultures of
the British Isles were an immense source of emigrants to North America,
the United States as well as Canada, and to Australia, New Zealand and
South Africa. This nineteenth-century migration was much less exclu-
sively English than that of the seventeenth century. The Catholic Irish
who had avoided emigration in earlier periods now came to accept emi-
gration as an unavoidable, if unwelcome, necessity. The Scots also emi-
grated in large numbers from both Highlands and Lowlands. Only the
Welsh who had the mines of south Wales as their ‘New World’ were not
represented in proportion to their numbers. The new empire of the nine-
teenth century was very much the creation of the British Isles as a whole
and as a consequence reflected the tensions of the cultural complex from
which it originated.
From the late eighteenth century onwards the structure of English
society changed radically under the impact of rapid industrialisation and
urbanisation. By the early twentieth century over four-fifths of a vastly
increased population lived in towns, compared with one third in the mid-
eighteenth century. The proportion of the population engaged in agricul-
ture dropped to 5 per cent from well over 33 per cent earlier. In broad
terms the continuing ‘Industrial Revolution’ is the most important fact
with which the historian has to deal. It is not the only fact, however. The
Act of Union with Ireland (1800) brought the complexities of Irish poli-
tics and society into the heart of the Westminster parliament, where they
could not be ignored. Irish immigration into England also introduced eth-
nic problems, which were aggravated by a ‘nativist’ reaction in particular
areas. ‘Ireland’ during this period became a new feature of the English
political landscape at both the national and local level. There was also the
fact of religious revival among all the Christian denominations. Though
half the population remained uninterested in organised religion, the pro-
portion of religious activists rose dramatically in the course of the century.
The most noteworthy change was the rise of dissent from the position of
a minority to numerical equality with the Established Church. Class feel-
ing, religious consciousness and ethnic rivalries were interrelated poles
around which much of English life revolved.
At the end of the Napoleonic wars the dominant culture was still that
of the Anglican establishment, encompassing a wide variety of opinion
and life-style. It was agreed by such influential spokesmen as Blackstone,
Burke and Paley that an Established Church was essential for the preser-
vation of social order. In the early nineteenth century, as in the eighteenth,
membership of the Established Church was needed for full participation
in politics, in the army and the learned professions. Anglican control
of the universities and the great public schools led almost inevitably to
this consequence. At Oxford, acceptance of the thirty-nine articles of the
226 The British Isles
At Newark the parson ordered the fire engine to be wheeled out to hose a
dissenting preacher. Dissenting chapels continued to seek the obscurity
of the back streets in some towns. In Cambridgeshire, dissenters were
unacceptable as tenants on the estates of strongly Tory squires. There is no
doubt that as England became more religious in the nineteenth century,
in the sense that the power of organised religion grew, a sharper awareness
of rivalry developed between the cultures of Church and dissent.
The Lancashire towns of Blackburn and Ashton may be taken as illus-
trating what the contrast between the cultures of Church and dissent
meant in practice. It was said of Blackburn by a critic that
it is a thoroughgoing Tory community. Strong drink is the secret of its own and
Britain’s greatness; after that its heart has been given for long years to the Church
and cockfighting. Be sober, lead a decent and respectable life and your genuine
Blackburner will wax red at the mention of your name and dismiss you as ‘a ∗∗∗
Dissenter’.
There are 100 school children, [he wrote] as many farmers with their wives and
all the county families for ten miles around – Sir George and Lady Dashwood,
Colonel and Mrs. Fane, Sir Anthony and Lady Rothschild and a great assemblage
of squires and clergymen. Lord Tredegar who never forgets that I made him a
peer sent me a buck. They feasted in the open air and danced until sunset amid
trees that were planted in the reign of Queen Anne and when Bolingbroke was
Secretary of State.
particular came to occupy a more central place than had hitherto been
the case. After the Act of Union there was direct Irish representation at
Westminster. The fact that Irish Catholics were excluded from member-
ship of the House of Commons despite Catholic forty-shilling freeholders
being able to vote fuelled the flame of constitutional agitation during
the 1820s. Catholic Emancipation was looked upon as the first step in
the overthrow of the constitution. During the 1830s Whig proposals to
reform the Church of Ireland led to cries of ‘the Church in Danger’
within England itself. During the 1840s, the crisis over the Maynooth
Grant question and the challenge presented by the Irish Famine led to
serious divisions within the governing Conservative party. The long-term
effect of the Act of Union was to thrust Irish issues upon the atten-
tion of successive Westminster governments, which found it difficult to
treat them on their own merits, irrespective of their implications for
England.
In April 1848, the following appeared in The Economist:
Thank God we are Saxons! Flanked by the savage Celt on the one side and the
flighty Gaul on the other – the one a slave to his passions, the other a victim to
the theories of the hour – we feel deeply grateful from our inmost hearts that we
belong to a race, which if it cannot boast the flowing fancy of one of its neighbours,
nor the brilliant esprit of the other has an ample compensation in [a] social, slow,
reflective phlegmatic temperament.
they made up one third of all merchants. In 1861, the first year that
statistics are available, Catholics formed roughly a third of the medical
and legal professions. They also formed a high proportion of ‘strong farm-
ers’. Finally, but not least importantly, the Catholic clergy seem to have
been drawn in large measure from the middle class. In 1826 a student at
Maynooth declared: ‘I conceive my parents to belong to that state of life
which we call the middle class of society; and with regard to the general-
ity of students at Maynooth it is my opinion that their parents belong to
the same order of persons.’ By ‘the middle class’ he went on to explain
that he meant those persons in commerce or agriculture ‘who can live
independently and who, perhaps, could provide for their children a situ-
ation that could be more lucrative than the priesthood’. The president of
Maynooth also stated in 1826 that ‘our students are generally the sons of
farmers who must be comfortable in order to meet the expenses I have
already mentioned: of tradesmen, shopkeepers: and not a very small pro-
portion of them are the children of opulent merchants and rich farmers
and graziers’. The rise in status of the Catholic clergy during the nine-
teenth century was symptomatic of the general rise of a Catholic middle
class.
Though denied the right to sit in parliament in 1795, the Catholic
middle class had held aloof from the rebellion of 1798. Archbishop Troy
of Dublin declared in 1793 that ‘society implies different classes and
orders of men, necessarily subordinate and dependent’. In 1793, Bishop
Coppinger of Cloyne and Ross asked, ‘How can there be cultivation
where there are no tillers? And where shall you find tillers if all become
gentlemen?’
Rank and property must go hand in hand, the inequality of both in every civilised
country must be as various as the talents of men. Were every individual in the
land possessed at this day of an equal share of property, a lapse of twelve months
would exhibit numerous gradations. The industrious, the thrifty, the honest, the
temperate would soon surpass the idle, the squanderers, and the licentious.
It was anticipated that loyalty would be rewarded after the passing of the
Act of Union which the Catholic bishops supported on the understand-
ing that Catholics would be eligible to sit in the House of Commons. In
the event, it took two more decades before O Connell, who himself had
opposed the 1798 rebellion, was able to force the issue after a good deal of
agitation. In 1828, O Connell defeated a popular Protestant landowner
in a Clare by-election and the British government finally gave way on
the issue of Catholic Emancipation, in the teeth of opposition from the
ascendancy. ‘Catholic Emancipation’ was a success for the Catholic mid-
dle class in Ireland comparable to that which the dissenters obtained in
The Britannic melting pot 237
[it] is an institution so evil and so odious under the circumstances of your country
that it makes one almost hopeless of Irish freedom that Irishmen have borne it
so long. The whole Liberal Party in Great Britain will, doubtless, join with you
in demanding the removal of a wrong which has no equal in the character of a
national insult in any other civilised and Christian country in the world.
the hands of the ascendancy and the survival of the Test and Corpora-
tion Acts on the statute book until 1828 served as a reminder that the
dissenting majority was excluded from full participation in national life.
Given these political and social circumstances, it is not surprising that
there should have been some reaction in Wales to the revolutions in
America and France. Two of the most prominent individuals involved
were Richard Price, the Welsh-born minister of a congregation at Stoke
Newington, and David Williams, a friend of Benjamin Franklin. Price’s
pamphlet Observations on the Nature of Civil Liberty (1776) was an attempt
to place American resistance in a wide context of political rights and it
was his sermon in 1789, praising the French revolution, which provoked
Edmund Burke’s Reflections. David Williams was closely involved with the
Girondins during the French revolution and after their fall he returned to
England. Radical ideas were also put forward by the London-Welsh soci-
ety Gwyneddigion, whose most prolific member was Edward Williams
(‘Iolo Morganwg’). In Wales itself, however, there was no equivalent of
the United Irishmen. When a French landing took place at Fishguard in
1797 it aroused confusion and consternation rather than enthusiasm. To
some Welsh Baptists the French revolution presaged the coming of Anti-
Christ. There were food riots during the war years as well as anti-militia
and anti-press gang riots but these were local demonstrations rather than
an indication of widespread revolutionary sympathies. The hatred of the
crowd was directed against farmers and corn dealers rather than the
landowning classes.
The attitude of dissenting ministers in Wales towards the French revo-
lution was similar to that of most of the Catholic clergy in Ireland. Other
parallels may also be drawn. Both groups looked upon popular oral cul-
ture as the enemy of Christian morality. In 1791 the great Methodist
reformer, Thomas Charles of Bala, wrote to a friend: ‘No harps but the
golden harps of which St John speaks, have been played in this neigh-
bourhood for several months past. The craft is not only in danger but
entirely destroyed and abolished.’ In another letter he wrote: ‘The revival
of religion has put an end to all the merry meetings for dancing, singing
with the harp, and every kind of sinful mirth, which used to be so preva-
lent amongst young people here’ (quoted in Eric Hobsbawm and Ter-
ence Ranger, eds., The Invention of Tradition (Cambridge, 1983), p. 55).
Such statements recall episcopal denunciations in Ireland of ‘all unbe-
coming, disorderly and irreligious assemblages of people at Patrons’ from
the 1780s onwards.
Another resemblance between Wales and Ireland lay in the resent-
ment felt over the payment of tithes to support what was regarded as the
Church of a minority. In Ireland, the expectations aroused by Catholic
240 The British Isles
Emancipation in 1829 had not been fulfilled. The result was the Tithe
War of the 1830s in which the Catholic clergy of some areas took a promi-
nent part. In Wales, discontent was aroused by an act of 1836, which in
the name of tithe commutation seemed to be raising the obligations of
the tithe payers. An unpopular issue was made less tolerable by eco-
nomic distress. The ‘Rebecca Riots’ which broke out in 1839 may be
seen as the Welsh equivalent of the Irish Tithe War though what finally
put the match to the fire of rural discontent was not payment of tithes
but the exaction of tolls upon parish roads. (The title ‘Rebecca’ was said
to derive from the scriptural passage declaring that ‘Rebecca should pos-
sess the gates of her enemies.’) Tolls levied at a growing number of toll
gates acted as an internal tax system which lay heaviest upon hard-pressed
small farmers taking their produce to market. The area originally affected
was on the Carmarthen–Pembroke border but it spread in 1842 to other
counties. The New Poor Law workhouses were also an object of attack.
The Rebecca Riots were firmly put down by the government, but major
concessions over the turnpike system removed this particular source of
discontent. Tithes still remained a major grievance, as was to be shown
in the ‘Tithe Wars’ of 1886–91.
The course of the rural history of Wales thus clearly offers some par-
allels with that of rural Ireland during the late eighteenth and early nine-
teenth centuries. In south Wales, however, from the 1760s, changes were
already in train which were to make the counties of Monmouth and Glam-
organ one of the most heavily industrialised areas of the British Isles. The
booming market for iron during the Seven Years War provided the take-
off for the exploitation of Welsh coal and iron at Wrexham in the north
as well as Merthyr in the south. The American and French wars and the
growing demand for steam power led to further expansion. By 1815 the
south Wales iron industry was producing one third of the total of British
iron production. Barry and Swansea began to grow as ports during this
period, though Cardiff and Newport were still undeveloped. In 1801, the
population of the counties of Glamorgan and Monmouth amounted to a
little over 100,000 in a population of over half a million. By 1901, the two
counties accounted for over half the total population of 2 million. The
north-east of Ireland underwent considerable industrialisation during the
nineteenth century but the proportion of the Irish population involved
was never more than a quarter of the total.
The consequences of industrialisation were very important for Wales
since it saved the country from the massive emigration which took place
in Ireland. South Wales became a melting pot in which Welsh, English
and Irish were intermingled, though the great majority was Welsh. There
was no equivalent of the Irish Famine, no mass emigration to America
The Britannic melting pot 241
trade unions, payment in truck and strikes, were the issues on which
Welsh Liberalism was to be based.
The influence of the landlords had survived the 1832 Reform Act in
most Welsh counties and with them the privileges of the Established
Church. In Denbighshire and Merioneth, the Wynn family retained the
political power which it had enjoyed since the eighteenth century. Anti-
ascendancy feeling had been expressed in 1859 in Merioneth, where an
attempt to unseat a Wynn had been followed by a number of politically
motivated evictions. The 1868 election, in which a wider franchise based
upon the 1867 Reform Act was in operation, made possible another
attack. In Denbighshire, Sir Watkin Wynn retained his seat but the Whig
candidate, with whom he had agreed to ‘share’ the county, was defeated.
The 1868 election marked the beginning of a trend which left the Liberals
totally dominant in Wales. In 1885, there were thirty Welsh Liberals in
the Commons and only four Welsh Conservatives.
The political pressures which led to this change came largely from the
dissenting Churches, which in 1851 numbered nearly 400,000 compared
with just over 100,000 attending the Established Church. Dissent, like
Catholicism in Ireland, was the religion of the great majority. Hence,
grievances such as Church control of education in rural areas were felt
to be particularly galling. New fervour was added by the religious revival
of 1859 which was a ‘Year of Grace’ in Wales as it was in Ulster. The
growth of Tractarianism within the Established Church also made ‘No
Popery’ an issue. The most significant change, however, was the attempt
to bring temperance into politics. The advocates of temperance reform
looked upon alcohol as the main cause of social problems and they aimed
to control its use by legislative action instead of moral persuasion, as had
been the case earlier in the century. It was during the middle decades
of the century that temperance together with Sabbatarianism and dis-
establishment came to be seen by many Welsh Liberals as expressing a
particularly ‘Welsh’ outlook on life.
Though it is tempting to speak of nineteenth-century Scotland as a
single unit, there were at least three ‘Scotlands’ during this period, each
with their own distinctive characteristics. The Highlands (including the
Hebrides) still retained their own individuality. The other two regions
were the eastern and western Lowlands, which, as industrialisation gath-
ered pace in the west, became divided into a largely rural east and a
largely industrial west. For most of the century, the east maintained its
traditional political, legal and cultural dominance. Edinburgh the capital
was on the east coast. Three of the four Scottish universities, Edinburgh,
St Andrews and Aberdeen were in the east. The best land, which was
now being ‘improved’ under the impact of the ‘Agricultural Revolution’,
The Britannic melting pot 243
was also in the east. Edinburgh was very much the centre of the Scottish
Enlightenment and though Adam Smith was a professor at Glasgow for
a time he soon settled at Kirkcaldy, within reach of Edinburgh and his
friends. The Edinburgh Review, drawing much of its inspiration from the
Enlightenment, provided intellectual leadership for the reform movement
before and after 1832. (Thomas Babington Macaulay was a member for
Edinburgh from 1839 to 1847 and 1851 to 1856.) It was not until the
1880s, after the Reform Acts of 1884 and 1885, that the west was in a posi-
tion to exert the political power to which its economic and demographic
growth entitled it. It was then that Glasgow showed itself to be a centre of
Chamberlainite radicalism, aiming to assert itself against the ‘Whiggish’
east. If the history of England can be seen as a struggle between north
and south, that of Scotland during this period revolves around the rivalry
between west and east.
The division between the Gaelic-speaking Highlands and the English-
speaking Lowlands continued to be a major cultural divide. In the course
of the nineteenth century, however, the significance of the Highlands
within a general Scottish context began to decline. In 1801 the Highland
counties contained nearly a fifth of the population. By 1901, even though
some counties grew in population, this had dropped to 8 per cent and
by 1939 to 6.5 per cent. The balance shifted inexorably in favour of the
urbanised and industrialised Lowlands. By 1901 the population of the
western Lowlands, with the Glasgow conurbation as their centre, rose
from one fifth to just under half the total population of 4.5 million.
The history of the Highlands during this period closely resembled that
of the west of Ireland, in so far as it was marked by a rapid growth of
population, famine and heavy emigration. Like Ireland, Highland society
became heavily dependent on the potato, a change in diet which made it
possible to feed a larger population. In some parts of the Highlands the
production of kelp, an alkaline ash made from burnt seaweed, became
a major local industry and a source of temporary prosperity. With the
coming of peace in 1815, however, the linen, glass and soap industries
were able to turn to cheaper Spanish alkalis. The economic and demo-
graphic problems of the Highlands were now intensified and whereas at
an earlier period landlords had opposed emigration they now began to
encourage it. Estates were turned over to the more profitable activity of
sheep farming. It was during these years that the notorious ‘Highland
Clearances’ took place on the Sutherland estate where Patrick Sellar was
the agent from 1810 to 1819. Sellar also acquired an estate of his own
in Morvern, when the spendthrift sixth duke of Argyll was forced to sell
part of his property. Emigration now became a way of life in the High-
lands, whether as the result of conscious decision or as a consequence
244 The British Isles
representing some two-fifths of the total, left the Established Church, tak-
ing with them a similar proportion of elders and laity. It was an extraordi-
nary event, which to some extent was an expression of Scottish national-
ism against the control of Westminster symbolised by Sir Robert Peel. It
was also a protest against the power of ecclesiastical patronage exercised
by landlords. Perhaps also it was something of a middle-class movement
drawing support from shopkeepers and skilled artisans. Certainly the
speed with which the Free Church was able to organise and finance a
rival organisation to the Church of Scotland indicates that it was able
to draw upon local resources of wealth and expertise. Above all it drew
upon the evangelical revival of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth
centuries.
Resentment against state control and patronage was of long standing
and had already led to secessions from the Established Church during the
eighteenth century. The Covenanting tradition with belief in a ‘gathered’
Church as opposed to an all-embracing establishment was still strong in
the west, where memories of Claverhouse and Drumclog were kept alive.
But the ‘Disruption’ in numbers and organisation represented a division
of much greater proportions. It had its origins in the rivalry between
‘moderates’ and ‘evangelicals’ from the late eighteenth century onwards,
which grew in intensity in the 1830s. A trial of strength took place in the
courts over such issues as the control of the ‘quoad sacra’ chapels which
had been built largely by the evangelicals to supplement the parish church
in some areas. The right of patrons to present ministers to a living over
the wishes of the presbytery was another key question.
The verdict of the courts went against the evangelicals and the ‘Dis-
ruption’ took place led by Thomas Chalmers, whose views were Tory and
who still believed in the desirability of an establishment. Chalmers him-
self may have believed this, but increasingly the logic of events took over
and the Free Church, after Chalmers’ death in 1847, moved towards
the position of the dissenting churches on disestablishment. The Free
Church had found itself in conflict with the state. After the ‘Disrup-
tion’, it also met with active opposition from many of the landlords, who
refused sites for churches and schools. Tenants without written leases
found themselves threatened with eviction. Shopkeepers were told that
‘they would forfeit the custom and countenance of the wealthy and influ-
ential in the country’. It was said about Cromarty that ‘the spirit in
this part of the country is bitterness itself. Servants dismissed, labour-
ers thrown out of employment, angry interviews between landlord and
tenant – we hear of little else in this corner.’ Chalmers complained that
‘the upper classes looked on us [the Free Church] as so many Radicals or
revolutionaries’.
The Britannic melting pot 249
During the first half of the nineteenth century, what we may call the
‘peripheral’ cultures of the British Isles were exposed to forces of change,
emanating, in the main, from the ‘centre’. The onset of industrialism in
south Wales, the north of Ireland and the south of Scotland occurred
largely in response to the demands of the English market or as a conse-
quence of English investment. Hence, during this period, the individual
histories of Wales, Ireland and Scotland can only be understood in rela-
tion to a wider British Isles context in which England, by virtue of its
demographic and economic superiority, took a leading role.
Ireland, newly incorporated within the United Kingdom, experienced
government intervention most during these years. During the 1830s, in
particular, the Whig government introduced a series of reforms in educa-
tion (the National Schools), poor relief, the abolition of tithes, municipal
government and policing. In the 1880s Gladstone was to look back to
these years, when Thomas Drummond had been Under-Secretary for
Ireland (1835–40), as a model to follow.
In general, it may be said that the ‘periphery’ played a restricted role
during these years. Resistance to pressures which were perceived as com-
ing from England was sporadic and localised. In Wales, serious unrest was
confined to the Merthyr Rising of 1831, the Chartist attack on Newport
in 1839 and the local outbreaks of ‘Rebecca’. In Ireland, the agrarian
violence of the Ribbonmen, though endemic, was of a local character.
In Scotland, the troubles of the 1820s were confined to the Glasgow
area. For much of the time the pattern of government within the United
Kingdom rested upon tacit alliances between Westminster and the local
ascendancies of Wales, Ireland and Scotland. This situation began to
change in mid-century when Irish Catholicism, Welsh nonconformity
and the Free Churches of Scotland formed an alliance with English dis-
sent to bring pressure to bear upon the English establishment. It was this
working entente, whose basis lay in a common antagonism to the English
establishment and its local allies, which led to the formation of the Liberal
party towards the end of the 1850s. The ‘centre’ was now to be exposed
to political pressures from the ‘periphery’.
Postcript
This chapter takes the concept of ‘melting pot’ as its organising theme.
This has certain advantages from the standpoint of ‘four nations’ history,
of highlighting the significance of ethnicity. With the advantage of hind-
sight, however, I now see that it is open to criticism for playing down
the role of class-based politics and in particular for ignoring the Chartist
Movement of the 1830s. There has been something of a reaction against
250 The British Isles
E.P. Thompson’s classic The Making of the English Working Class. This
work, despite all its emotionalism, did have the merit, in my view, of
stressing the role of class conflict. His title perhaps would have been
more appropriate to the Chartist Movement itself. The traditional work-
ing class with which Thompson was concerned in his book was that of
handloom weavers and of workers adversely affected by the Industrial
Revolution. In contrast the Chartist Movement, aiming at Universal Suf-
frage and the Ballot among other reforms, drew its support from the
new industrial working class. Thus the banners of a Chartist procession
in Manchester in August 1840, representing dyers, dressers and boiler-
makers among others, called for ‘the Prosperity of the Working Classes’.
Their targets included ‘Aristocracy, Shopocracy, White slavery and State
Paupers’. Flags carrying the Irish Shamrock and the Scots Thistle as well
as the English Rose were carried, indicating a multi-ethnic dimension,
going beyond the ‘Englishness’ of which Thompson was so passionate
an advocate. The Irishman Fergus O Connor played a key role in the
movement during these years, providing a more class-based British Isles
approach to Irish problems than that of the nationalist Daniel O Connell.
The clash between the two men over what they meant by reform may be
seen to symbolise the radical difference between class-based and ethnic
approaches.
At the end of the 1840s the Chartist Movement resulted in failure.
Indeed Thompson’s book might have been better entitled ‘The Breaking
of the English Working Class’. In Ireland the Great Famine was the end
of a period, marked also by the death of O Connell in 1847 and the col-
lapse of the Young Irelanders in 1848. The 1850s saw English radicalism
collapse in the face of English nationalism led by Palmerston.
10 The rise of ethnic politics
251
252 The British Isles
the Liberal party. The issues which led to the creation of the party from an
alliance of Whig landlords and radicals were in large measure English in
character. In particular, the social divide separating Church and Chapel
helps to explain the dominance of nonconformity in the new party. As
Augustine Birrell put it, the cultural split between Anglicans and dis-
senters was like ‘Offa’s Dyke – broad, deep and practically impassable,
cutting clear through social life’. Montagu remarked to Asquith about
the Liberal party: ‘There is no getting away from the fact that ours is a
Nonconformist Party with Nonconformist susceptibilities and Noncon-
formist prejudices.’ Such issues as the disestablishment of the Church of
England, the removal of educational grievances and the pressure for con-
trol of the drink trade derived from the English nonconformist heritage
of the Liberal party. The English past, especially from the seventeenth
century, looked very different from a nonconformist vantage point than
it did from an Anglican one.
But the Liberal party was something more than an English political
party. The reform of the franchise in England, Wales and Scotland in 1867
and in Ireland in 1868 made possible a more effective popular approach
to British Isles politics than had been the case hitherto. Irish Catholic
grievances in particular came to occupy a central position in Liberal pol-
icy. Under Palmerston the Whigs had been the party of the Protestant
ascendancy. Lord Palmerston was an Anglo-Irish landlord descended
from the Sir John Temple whose work on the 1641 massacre became
the standard Protestant account. Under Gladstone, however, the Liberal
party made an Irish Catholic issue, the disestablishment of the Church
of Ireland, the main plank of its platform during the 1868 election. Glad-
stone’s Land Act of 1870 was a first attempt to deal with the problems
of tenant right in Ireland. Another Irish issue, university education for
Irish Catholics, brought the government down. These years were also
marked by the execution of the ‘Manchester Martyrs’, Allen, Larkin and
O Brien, in the last public hanging in Britain. Fenianism, the demand for
an Irish Republic, did not decline but was fuelled by what was seen as
the unjust execution of three innocent men. Irish-American nationalism
also became increasingly important and in due course a factor in politics.
For the next fifty years Irish issues were to influence the course of
English politics. Irish ‘reforms’ were not seen by the political elite as
of localised significance: they were considered to have serious implica-
tions for the rest of the British Isles and for the British empire at large.
This had already been the case during Gladstone’s first administration
when the disestablishment of the Church of Ireland and the 1870 Land
Act were looked upon as the Irish end of a large wedge. Gladstone’s Irish
Land Act of 1881, which was designed to undermine the basis of political
254 The British Isles
a system which will exclude . . . more than a million protestants . . . [all those]
opposed to Home Rule . . . the owners of landed property and the great majority
of capitalists, manufacturers, merchants, men of business and professional men
in Ireland – and will not only exclude them but will misrepresent them by a
body . . . hostile to every interest they possess and every opinion they hold.
Home Rule in the eyes of many Liberals and most Conservatives was
an imperial issue as much as an Irish one. During the second half of the
nineteenth century England became the centre of a world-wide empire
of which the centrepieces were the settlement colonies of Canada, Aus-
tralia and New Zealand, and the Indian empire together with a number
of colonies in East, West and South Africa. For a mixture of strategic
and economic reasons this imperial commitment led to an extension of
responsibilities in the Near East where the Suez Canal became an indis-
pensable link between the Indian Ocean and Britain. Alongside the formal
empire lay a wide commercial network in Central and South America and
the United States.
It was the new significance of empire, with England at its centre, which
made Irish Home Rule much more than a matter of administrative reor-
ganisation. Gladstone’s decision in December 1885 to take up the cause of
Home Rule raised issues of ‘empire’ and ‘race’. Within the confines of the
Liberal party, Gladstone’s conversion to Home Rule was seen by some as
a means of continuing his personal dominance of the party, and no doubt
256 The British Isles
to abandon the landowners of Ireland to the tender mercies of the people who
for eleven years carried on an unscrupulous private war against their rights of
property – rights which those of us who supported the Land Bill of 1881 morally
pledged ourselves to secure to them – this is a national crime and deep moral
disgrace in which I can have no part. (Quoted in J. Roach, ‘Liberalism and the
Victorian Intelligentsia’, Cambridge Historical Journal, xiii (1957), 83, 80)
Lord Salisbury [he said] constitutes himself the spokesman of a class – of the class
to which he himself belongs who toil not neither do they spin; whose fortunes –
as in his case – have originated in grants in times gone by for the services which
courtiers have rendered kings, and have since grown and increased while they
have slept, by levying an increased share on all that other men have done by toil
and labour to add to the general wealth and prosperity of the country.
The Liberal party which won the election of 1906 was different in some
striking ways from the party of Gladstone. Of course, the nonconformist
north still remained the heartland of the party. In the Methodist mining
villages of the north-east, temperance was a live issue in 1906. As one Sun-
day school teacher commented: ‘After the Wilderness the Promised Land.
And we have entered Canaan at last.’ The Sunday School Journal declared,
‘No Christian patriot can, on reflection, afford to stand idly by in supine
indifference or pharisaic cynicism while the Drink Scourge, which com-
bines in itself the evils of war, famine and pestilence put together, rolls
its fiery tide of destruction o’er the land.’ Among the leadership of the
party, however, the balance of power was shifting towards those who
argued that fundamental social reforms involving the intervention of the
state were the answer to social evils and not individual regeneration on
the lines advocated by Samuel Smiles. In the eyes of the ‘Progressives’,
the politics of ‘class’ was the answer to the politics of ‘empire’.
When the new Liberal government was formed, traditional issues such
as Welsh disestablishment, Irish Home Rule and licensing reform were
very much part of its agenda. Increasingly, however, the initiative was
seized by the Progressives. Social reforms such as old age pensions, unem-
ployment and health insurance, the reform of the Poor Law and the intro-
duction of labour exchanges now came to the fore under pressure from
Asquith, who became Prime Minister in 1908, and Lloyd George who
was Chancellor of the Exchequer from 1908 to 1915. There was no indi-
vidual item in this programme of reform to which the Unionists could
object. Indeed, it could be argued that the Liberals, once the party of
laissez-faire, had taken over the mantle of Tory Paternalism. What was at
stake, however, was the means by which the changes were to be financed.
The rise of ethnic politics 259
Chamberlain had seen indirect taxation as the main source of new rev-
enue. The New Liberals, from the 1907 budget onwards, proposed to
tax the wealthy, especially those who had benefited from the huge rise in
urban land values. As Churchill put it, the Chancellor wanted to know
‘How much have you got? and how did you get it?’
The voice of the Progressives was the Manchester Guardian, which,
under the editorship of C. P. Scott (1846–1932), achieved a national
importance. The success of the Guardian indicated that the Liberals were
still very much a northern party; Scott himself was a Manchester man.
Other writers for the paper such as C. E. Montague and J. A. Hobson
were also from the north. But ‘Progressivism’ was more than a northern
movement even though most of its leaders came to write for the Guardian.
Though some of its members such as R. H. Tawney remained Christian,
others were influenced by the wave of agnosticism which swept the intel-
ligentsia in post-Darwinian England. The ‘New Liberals’, as the Progres-
sives were also termed, were in many ways nearer to Socialism than to the
old-style Liberalism of Gladstone. As L. T. Hobhouse declared, ‘The Old
Liberalism, we thought, had done its work . . . What was needed was to
build a social democracy on the basis so prepared and for that we needed
new formulas, new inspirations. The old individualism was standing in
our way and we were for cutting it down’ (quoted in S. Collini, Liberalism
and Sociology (Cambridge, 1979), pp. 60–1).
The Unionists, now in a minority in the Commons, turned to the
House of Lords as their main line of defence. The battle was joined over
Lloyd George’s ‘People’s budget’ of 1909 in which he sought to raise extra
revenue by such measures as ‘super tax’ on incomes over £5,000, higher
rates for death duties and a levy on land values. The constitutional crisis
which followed in 1910 was marked by two general elections fought on
the issue of the right of the Lords to veto the budget. What was at stake,
however, was the social policy of the ‘New Liberalism’.
Victory went to the New Liberals in 1910. The future seemed to lie
with the politics of class. The social cleavage, in Hobson’s view, lay with
‘organised labour against the possessing and educated classes on the one
hand and against the public house and unorganised labour on the other’.
He argued that the contrast between north and south was between a Pro-
ducer’s England, which was Liberal, and a Consumer’s England, which
was Conservative.
The actual facts of the political situation proved to be more complex.
Religion and ethnicity returned once more in the shape of Irish Home
Rule, as they had done in 1886. Liberal leaders had turned lukewarm
on Home Rule after Gladstone’s death. Asquith had argued in 1905 that
a Home Rule Bill ‘would wreck the fortunes of the party for another
260 The British Isles
20 years’. Haldane believed that ‘it was vital that there should be a Lib-
eral party that was completely independent of the Irish’. The election
results of 1910, however, made the Liberals dependent upon the Irish
parliamentary party.
The United Kingdom in 1914 may well have been on the brink of civil
war on the key issue of the Union with Ireland. Other questions, the
violent strikes of 1911 and the challenge offered by women suffragettes,
took second place to the Home Rule issue. From 1911 onwards, Unionist
party leaders encouraged the Ulster Unionists to make a show of force.
Bonar Law, the leader of the party, declared his support in unambiguous
terms. In 1914 the army entered on the political scene, when, in the
so-called ‘Mutiny on the Curragh’, officers stationed in Ireland made
clear their unwillingness to be used in operations against Ulster. What
changed the whole situation was the outbreak of war in August 1914.
When hostilities ended in November 1918 a new set of factors had come
into play which may be said to mark the beginning of a new period in the
history of England, and of the British Isles.
The Ireland whose grievances this legislation was intended to redress
was virtually an unknown country to most English politicians (and, it
must be said, to most English historians). As Professor Vincent has
pointed out (in Gladstone and Ireland (London, 1977)), Gladstone went
to Ireland only once on a short visit and while there stayed largely in the
company of Anglo-Irish landlords. From the vantage point of Westmin-
ster, Ireland appeared to be a simpler society than it was in fact. Political
issues in Ireland were presumed to be essentially religious in character.
Religious issues were, of course, important. In the 1852 election in
Ireland, the anti-Catholic riots in Stockport became a key electoral ques-
tion in Co. Mayo and an electoral placard read
Massacre and Sacrilege at Stockport!
Irish Catholics murdered in their beds!
Twenty-four houses wrecked and plundered!
The priest’s house burnt!
The Chapel sacked and pillaged!
Catholics of Ireland! Whoever votes for a supporter of Lord Derby’s
government votes for a massacre of his countrymen!
The violation of the House of god; and
The pollution of the b o dy and b lo o d o f h i s r e d e e m e r !!!
Down with Derby and McAlpine!
of Ireland and though the intentions of its backers were, no doubt, laud-
able, the effect was to create religious tensions between themselves and
the Catholic bishops, led by the nationalist John MacHale. In the north
itself the preaching of the Reverend Thomas Drew about the menace of
‘Popery’ led to several days of rioting in Belfast in 1857.
The real Protestant equivalent of the Devotional Revolution was the
Second Great Awakening in 1859. That year, the ‘Year of Grace’, was
marked by an extraordinary religious revival which began at the village
of Kells near Ballymena (Co. Antrim), and spread throughout Ulster.
The Presbyterian Church in Ulster reported an accession of 10,000 new
members in the first three months of the revival, which later spread to
Wales, Scotland and part of England. Unusual physical manifestations
were seen by its participants as a sign of divine grace, though critics
maintained it was religious hysteria. There were obvious links between
this movement and the American Great Awakening of 1858. Professor
William Gibson, soon to be moderator of the General Assembly of the
Presbyterian Church of Ireland, visited the United States and wrote about
his experiences under the title Pentecost or the Work of God in Philadelphia.
The effect of the religious revivals in both north and south was to
accentuate already existing cultural and economic differences. More and
more in the south the distinguishing feature of Irish identity was seen
to lie in Catholicism. Father Tom Burke, a Dominican preacher, said in
1872:
Take an average Irishman – I don’t care where you find him – and you will find
that the very first principle in his mind is ‘I am not an Englishman because I am
a Catholic.’ Take an Irishman wherever he is found all over the earth and any
casual observer will at once come to the conclusion ‘Oh he is an Irishman, he is
a Catholic.’ The two go together.
Attitudes like this, though not universal, seem to have become more
common, no doubt in part because they corresponded to the experience
of emigrants in the United States, where segregation took place between
the Catholic Irish and the Protestant ‘Scotch-Irish’. The financial con-
tribution of Irish-Americans was directed inevitably towards the cause of
Catholic nationalism. Protestant Ulster could count upon the sympathy
and active help of Orange groups in Canada, especially Toronto.
The difference between the two cultures was also revealed in contrast-
ing attitudes towards the past. A ‘Catholic’ interpretation was likely to
single out Hugh O Neill, Owen Roe O Neill, the penal laws and Daniel O
Connell for emphasis. ‘Protestant’ interpretations of Irish history would
almost certainly centre upon the massacre of 1641, the battle of the Boyne
in 1690 and the foundation of the Orange Order, while ignoring the role
The rise of ethnic politics 265
All the accounts that I have seen represent America to be in a bad state, particu-
larly the working class Irish. Well, when America is getting bad, Ireland is getting
good. The last two years were the best perhaps that were in Ireland for the last
twenty years. The price of every description of agricultural produce was very high
and the crops were pretty good, so that farmers and indeed everyone recovered
from the shock they received since 45. I believe old times are returning to us again.
In the late 1870s, however, again as in Britain, Irish farmers were hard
hit by a combination of bad harvests, competition from American wheat
and a drop in demand in England. The worst year was 1879/80 especially
among the smallholdings of the west, where Michael Davitt and a group
of local Fenians organised what was in effect a rural trade union, known as
the Irish National Land League. The movement might well have remained
of largely western significance but it was brought into the mainstream of
national politics by Charles Stewart Parnell. Parnell, a Protestant landlord
from Co. Wicklow, was a member of the loosely organised group of ‘Home
Rule’ members of parliament but not yet its leader. The land question,
together with a policy of parliamentary obstruction, provided him with a
platform which eventually gave him the leadership in 1880.
Parnell spoke at Westport in June 1879 and told his audience of small
farmers ‘You must show the landlords that you intend to hold a firm
grip on your homesteads and lands. You must not allow yourselves to
be dispossessed as you were dispossessed in 1847.’ During the same
year he also managed to win the support of influential Irish-American
groups, including the Fenians. However, the ‘Parnellites’ in the House
of Commons after the 1880 general election numbered only twenty-four.
The Church was still at this date suspicious of those who had a whiff of
Fenianism about them. Sometime between 1880 and 1885, however, the
Catholic bishops, or most of them, came down on Parnell’s side. The
results were to be seen in the election of 1885 when Parnell’s Home Rule
party, now much more of a ‘machine’ than it had been in 1880, won
eighty-five seats, putting it in a position to hold a balance between the
Liberal and Conservative parties in the House of Commons.
Parnell’s success is normally seen, and rightly, as a major change in
the history of Irish nationalism. Of not less significance, however, was
the reaction which it evoked in the north, as well as among southern
landlords. If Parnell united the disparate elements in the south, he also
made possible a counter-coalition in the north. Northern Protestants
were divided by class, ethnicity and religion. There was little in com-
mon between the Orange Lodges drawing their membership from rural
and urban labourers and the Presbyterian tenant farmers. Fear of Home
Rule, however, drew these varied social and religious groups together in
a political alliance which lasted well into the twentieth century.
The rise of ethnic politics 267
The Home Rule populist coalition had in fact called into existence a
populist coalition against it. The extension of the parliamentary franchise
in 1884 which made possible Parnell’s victory also gave the vote to the
Orange Lodges of the north. Serious divisions still remained between
Liberal Unionists and Conservatives and, within the Conservative party,
between the official leadership and the Orange Lodges, but the threat of
Home Rule in 1886 led to the creation of the Ulster Loyalist Anti-Repeal
Union. Unionists controlled the north-east as completely as the Home
Rulers controlled the south.
Class conflict, between tenant and landlord, provided much of the
impetus behind Home Rule in the south. It was countered in the north
by an appeal to religion and ethnicity. Clerical leaders in Ulster made
contact with the Scottish Protestant Alliance and the Protestant Institute
of Great Britain. As James Henderson, owner of the Belfast News Letter,
put it: ‘It is greatly to be desired that we should stir up the feeling of
Scotland in favour of this movement . . . I believe that if we can stir up
religious feeling in Scotland we have won the battle.’ On a visit to Belfast
in February 1886, Lord Randolph Churchill assured the Unionists of
the support which they enjoyed in England and a little later coined the
phrase ‘Ulster will fight and Ulster will be right.’ Here was the equivalent
of Parnell’s equally stirring sentence ‘No man has the right to fix the
boundary of the march of a nation.’
In the 1860s Gladstone and Bright had planned to unite Irish Catholics
and Irish Presbyterians. The disestablishment of the Church of Ireland
in 1869 was calculated to please both groups and the Land Act of 1870,
though unsatisfying in many respects, was intended to appeal to ten-
ant farmers of each denomination. As a consequence the Liberals who
had lacked support in Ulster began to build up a base there as the anti-
landlord party. In the nine Ulster counties, the number of Liberal seats
rose from two in 1868 to fourteen in 1880. Gladstone must also have
hoped that he would do even better in the 1885 election after the extension
of the franchise. In the event, however, the Conservatives won twenty-
one seats in the counties compared to nine for the Liberals. The results
were even worse in 1886 when Gladstonian Liberals won only three seats
in the counties. Elsewhere in Ireland the Home Rule party took every
seat. Outside the north-east the political power of the ascendancy had
been wiped out. The 1880s thus brought into the open a polarisation
which had existed for many decades. In the south, a largely Catholic
middle class now held power, a shift which had been first revealed deci-
sively in the elections to the Poor Law Boards in the late 1870s. It
remained now to see what the long-term consequences of this division
would be.
268 The British Isles
The years since 1879 had been full of incident. In 1879 there had been
the spectacular murder of Lord Leitrim. In 1880 the ‘Boycott’ had been
invoked against Captain Boycott, the agent of the earl of Erne, and an
expedition of fifty Orangemen left the Farnham estate to give him aid.
The year 1880 had been marked by hundreds of rural outrages in the
west. In 1882, the Phoenix Park murders took place. Gladstone’s Land
Act had been passed in 1881 with the intention of detaching land agitation
from general political issues. It had enjoyed some success. But agitation
among leaseholders, who were not covered by the Act, continued. There
was further radical development with the so-called ‘Plan of Campaign’,
from 1885 onwards, which directed hostile attention towards particular
estates. Gladstone’s decision to bring a Home Rule Bill before the House
of Commons should be seen against this background. What seemed like
statesmanship in the eyes of the south appeared more like capitulation to
anarchy in the view of northerners, Liberal and Conservative alike.
As suggested above, though there may not have been two nations in
Ireland, there are clear grounds for believing that there were two politico-
religious cultures. Home Rule did not come about in 1886 but the cultural
gap continued to exist and even to widen. The 1880s saw the growth of
the Gaelic Athletic Association in the south while association football
spread in the north. With the foundation of the Gaelic League in 1893
an interest in the Irish language became one of the symbols of south-
ern Irish identity, though only a minority were involved. Not least, the
Church came to favour Home Rule on moral grounds. If Home Rule
meant Rome Rule for the Ulster Unionist, the Union came to stand for
a type of modernity which the Catholic clergy found equally threatening
from its own standpoint. For some Irish clergy, the Irish mind which had
once been ‘chaste, idealistic, mystical’ had been sullied by ‘an invading
tide of English ideas’. The young Fr Lethaby in Canon Sheehan’s novel
My New Curate warned his rural parishioners against the perils of infi-
delity, from which Jews and freemasons benefited. The old parish priest
of My New Curate also mocked the dangerous doctrines of religious mod-
ernism which the Higher Criticism was bringing in its wake. Home Rule
promised moral as well as economic regeneration.
The elections of 1910 which left Redmond’s Irish parliamentary party
holding the balance in the House of Commons once more raised the
spectre of Home Rule before the eyes of the northern Unionists. Threats
of violence had been made in 1886. They were now renewed under the
leadership of the Dubliner Edward Carson and with the backing of the
Conservative party under Bonar Law, whose father had been an Ulster
Presbyterian minister. The importation of arms into Ulster and the
drilling of Ulster Volunteers were answered by similar demonstrations
The rise of ethnic politics 269
in the south, though Redmond who had everything to gain from con-
stitutionality kept matters under control. The Home Rule Bill in fact
became law in September 1914 with the proviso that Ulster should be
allowed to opt out for six years. Early in 1916 the British administration
in Dublin fully expected to be handing over power to Redmond in the
near future. Though there was still rural unrest in certain western coun-
ties against encroachment by large graziers, the passing of Wyndham’s
Land Act in 1903 had made possible the creation of a ‘peasant proprietor-
ship’ and, with it, agrarian peace. ‘Landlordism’ had been undermined
in the south though cynics suggested ‘gombeenism’ (from the Irish word
gamba, ‘a little portion’ – of interest) had replaced it. With the land ques-
tion solved and Home Rule on the statute book, it seemed not unlikely
that the post-war years in Ireland would be peaceful.
After the outbreak of war most of the Ulster Volunteers and the Irish
National Volunteers joined the British army and went off to fight on
the Western Front or at the Dardanelles. Elsewhere in the British Isles,
the common experience of the war seems to have reduced the intensity
of religious and ethnic divisions. In Ireland, a similar development was
ruled out by the Rising of Easter 1916. The extent of Irish-American
involvement in the decision to attempt a rebellion with German aid is
still unclear but it was certainly the Fenian-linked organisation, the Irish
Republican Brotherhood, which took the decision to rise in 1916, against
the wishes of the Volunteer commander, Eoin MacNeill. The surge of
sympathy for the rebels after the executions of 1916 made possible the
success of the Sinn Fein party in 1918. But ‘1916’ also made partition,
already a possibility in 1914, far more likely. Unionists were in key posts
in Lloyd George’s coalition government when the Home Rule Act was
repealed in 1920 and the Government of Ireland Act substituted. Six of
the nine counties of Ulster were partitioned from the rest and given the
equivalent of Home Rule, with their own parliament under Westminster
sovereignty. It was a ‘solution’ which the Treaty of 1922 with the Sinn
Fein forces left unaltered.
It was during these years (1850–1914) that Welsh politicians came to
the forefront of British Isles politics, so much so that historians have been
tempted to speak of the ‘Rebirth of a Nation’. In fact, however, Wales
remained almost as deeply divided between two cultures as did Ireland.
The prominence of Welsh nonconformity within the Liberal party tended
to conceal the extent of these divisions. Thus, in 1881, the temperance
lobby achieved their first real victory with the passing of the Welsh Sun-
day Closing Act. But this success revealed the extent of the rift which was
growing between rural Wales and the industrial south-eastern counties
of east Carmarthen, Glamorgan and Monmouth. A Merthyr workman
270 The British Isles
wrote a letter to the Merthyr Express in which he put forward a very dif-
ferent point of view from that of the temperance reformers.
How would these very good people like to live days, weeks and months under-
ground without a sight of the pub and then on a wet Sunday to keep within doors
all the sunless hours, except while attending divine worship? Oh, these very gen-
erous people have their nice cosy clubs or homes which they enjoy every day. But
the collier has to live in discomfort in a small home, and for nearly six months in
every year never sees the sun, except on the first day of the week.
There were other signs that temperance was not seen in the same light in
the south as it was in the north. Between mid-1882 and mid-1883 over
3,000 working men became members of clubs in Cardiff, an increase of
90 per cent over the year before. In 1889 there were nearly 500 shebeens
in Cardiff. By the 1890s drunkenness was much more common in Glam-
organ, Monmouthshire and Pembrokeshire than it was in Merioneth,
Radnorshire and the rural counties. There were also indications that the
number of supposedly ‘bona fide’ travellers markedly increased, since a
journey of three miles entitled the thirsty wayfarer to be served a drink.
The second half of the nineteenth century had seen the great expansion
of the south Wales coal fields, in particular those of the Rhondda valley.
This was a ‘boom’ period during which the population of Cardiff rose
from 18,000 in 1851 to 164,000 in 1901. By 1911, two-thirds of the pop-
ulation of Wales lived in Glamorgan and Monmouth and the industrial
area of east Carmarthen. During the same period, there was a net loss of
400,000 from the rural counties. The vast modern pubs of the Rhondda
valley were one indication that this was a very different world from that
of the rural counties. The distinction was not as sharp in all areas of the
south. In the Welsh-speaking valleys of the anthracite-mining area, con-
ditions were more settled. It was not uncommon for miners to ‘set out’
potatoes on the land of a nearby farmer in return for help at harvest time.
In general, however, the contrast between rural and industrial cultures
was clear-cut. A miner from these areas commented that
Life to us in the Rhondda was exceedingly artificial . . . There is not a farm to be
seen anywhere . . . The tink of the damn pit, the tink of the tramcars on the road,
that’s all you would hear. Rhondda people are acclimatised to what I would say is
a very uncouth proletarian life . . . in the sense that there is nothing natural about
it. (Quoted in D. Smith, A People and a Proletariat (London, 1980), p. 175)
The social problems which the miners faced could hardly be alleviated
by exhortation to temperance and self-help.
Despite the growing imbalance in favour of the south, the political
leadership of the Welsh Liberals remained with the rural counties, where
Welsh-speaking dissent was strong. To the small farmers, the example of
The rise of ethnic politics 271
This was the language of faith. The great majority of Welsh MPs were
still Liberal. Indeed, the 1906 general election brought an overwhelm-
ing victory for the very forces which Mrs Snowden condemned. Lloyd
George’s ‘People’s budget’ of 1909 brought him great popularity in Wales
and the social democracy of the ‘New Liberalism’ was clearly directed to
the problems of an industrial society. Labour candidates were defeated by
Liberals in mid-Glamorgan and east Glamorgan in 1910 despite the bitter
strikes of 1909 and the violence at Tonypandy in 1910, when a miner had
been killed. The signals coming from south Wales were ambiguous. At
Swansea the dockers’ candidates came bottom of the poll. At Merthyr,
the Scot Keir Hardie, though duly elected, polled fewer miners’ votes
than Edgar Jones, a Welsh-speaking Baptist. Syndicalism with its empha-
sis on direct industrial action was making some headway in the eastern
valleys but there were few signs of the ‘Strange Death of Liberal Wales’.
In Wales, as in Ireland, it was the war years which produced a decisive
shift of direction, but the direction in which the two societies moved was
very different. In southern Ireland, popular reaction to the 1916 Rising
set in motion the rise of ‘Sinn Fein’ which in turn evoked the counter-
nationalism of the Protestant north-east. At the end of the war Ireland was
divided not by class but by culture. In Wales, by contrast, class became
increasingly important and the ethnic and religious issues of the past
moved into relative insignificance. Mounting tension in the coal fields
in 1917 evoked pessimistic comments from the Commission of Enquiry
set up to look into the problem. The success of the Russian revolution
inspired enthusiasm among those whom critics termed the ‘Bolsheviks
of the south’. In the general election of 1918, however, Lloyd George’s
Liberals with twenty-one seats still enjoyed a comfortable majority over
Labour which won ten seats. But the old Liberal issues had lost their hold.
In 1919 a Welsh Disestablishment Act was passed which took this once
emotional question out of politics. The tithe problem was solved at much
the same time. The break-up of the great estates, which paralleled similar
changes in England, removed one of the main targets of traditional Welsh
Liberalism. The war also seems to have reduced the power of organised
dissent and along with it the emotive power of the cause of temperance.
The issues which had enabled the rural west to maintain its political
dominance had lost their potency.
To all this must be added the sharp decline in the influence of Lloyd
George. In 1918 as the architect of victory his position seemed almost
unchallengeable, but his political power in south Wales was soon to be
undermined by his handling of the problems of the coal fields. During
the war the mines had been under government control and the miners
hoped that this would lead to nationalisation. The Sankey Commission
The rise of ethnic politics 273
which was set up in 1919 to discuss the matter did not reach a clear-cut
decision and in March 1921 the Lloyd George government decided to
hand back the mines to the owners. By this time the post-war boom was
over. Unemployment had doubled between December 1920 and March
1921. The government decision not to nationalise the mines marked the
end of Lloyd George’s personal influence in south Wales. The miners went
on strike and, though they were defeated, the Labour party reaped the
benefits of Liberal decline in the elections of the 1920s. By 1929 Labour
held twenty-five seats in Wales. After the war, the politics of class proved to
be more important than the politics of religion and ethnicity. The balance
shifted away from rural, Welsh-speaking counties to the industrial areas
where English was strong and which looked to the Socialism of the Labour
party. The nationalism of the south was to be expressed in the symbolism
of sport, especially rugby football. National sentiment was satisfied in the
south with the ritual ‘slaughter’ of English teams at Cardiff Arms Park.
In Scotland, up to the late eighteenth century the most significant cul-
tural divide was that between Highlands and Lowlands. With the coming
of the Industrial Revolution and the consequent growth of population
in the Lowlands, however, the Highlands dropped into relative insignif-
icance, although in the south the kilt and the tartan became symbols
of Scottish cultural identity. Within the Lowlands itself the main split
was between the heavily industrialised west centred upon Glasgow and
its satellite towns, and the largely rural east, in which Edinburgh and
Aberdeen were the ‘capitals’ and Dundee and the mining areas of the
east coast were industrial outposts.
Though the contrast must not be pressed too far, ‘east’ and ‘west’ also
enjoyed different political outlooks. In the industrial west, the Chamber-
lainite programme of disestablishment, free education and land reform
carried a greater appeal than in the Whiggish east where the Liberal party
was led by such landowners as Rosebery and Elgin. In the industrial
cities of the west, the Free Church and the Voluntaries had coped more
successfully than the ‘Moderates’ with the challenge of industrialisation.
Liberalism, though dominant throughout Scotland for the period after
1832, was more radical in the ‘west’ than in the ‘east’, more ‘Whiggish’
in Edinburgh than in Glasgow.
As a corollary to this, ‘No Popery’ was stronger in the west where
Irish immigration had been heaviest. The Maynooth Grant issue of 1845
carried as much resonance north of the border and especially in the
west as it did in England. There was thus always the possibility later
in the century that the ‘No Popery’ card could cause the Liberal party
to become polarised along the west/east divide. Issues of class kept the
Liberal party in existence in the sense that it was the anti-landlord and
274 The British Isles
I have been spending the last few weeks in a part of Scotland whence we can look
down on the hills of Antrim. We can see the colour of their fields and in the sunset
we can see the glancing of the light upon the windows of their cabins. This is the
country, I thought the other day, which the greatest English statesman tells us
must be governed as we govern the Antipodes. Was there ever such folly?
In this and other speeches Argyll played the card of ethnicity. ‘Mr Glad-
stone says we are foreigners to the Irish. I say we are flesh of their flesh
The rise of ethnic politics 275
and blood of their bone. We are responsible for their liberties and will not
betray them . . . Above all remember your duty to your fellow countrymen
across the Channel.’
Ethnic issues remained important in certain areas of industrial Scotland
such as Greenock where the Orange Order was closely linked with the
Conservatives. Increasingly, however, class issues came to the fore. In
1906 the number of Unionist seats fell from thirty-six to ten. In 1911
it was declared that ‘Scotland has stood by the Liberal Government so
solidly because it hates the House of Lords and the landlords.’ With
the advantage of hindsight, however, it is possible to see that given the
right circumstances, the radical Liberalism of the west and the Whiggish
Liberalism of the east might divide.
Many thousands of miles away from Scotland and Ireland, the cultural
tensions of the British Isles were reproduced in parts of the empire. As we
have seen, the English empire in North America achieved independence
from the mother country, leaving only Canada and the West Indies tied
formally to the United Kingdom. During the course of the nineteenth
century, however, emigration from the British Isles took place on a grand
scale. The United States was the most popular destination for British Isles
emigrants but Canada, Australia, New Zealand and the South African
colonies of Cape Province, Natal and, eventually, parts of the Transvaal
also came to attract many thousands of settlers. In the early twentieth
century, Rhodesia and Kenya also became colonies controlled by white
settlers from the British Isles. India and West Africa drew only civil ser-
vants or missionaries, and the direct impact of the cultures of the British
Isles as distinct from government policy was correspondingly much less.
Nonetheless, it could be a matter of some significance for the future
whether the missionaries were Irish Catholics, Scottish Presbyterians or
Anglicans from England.
In Canada the cultures of the British Isles were all strongly represented,
from the Gaelic-speaking Highlanders of Prince Edward and Cape Breton
islands to the Waterford fishermen of St Johns, Newfoundland. Ontario,
which was exposed to the threat of Fenian invasion in the 1860s, became a
centre of ‘Orangeism’ and anti-Gladstone feeling. Such figures as Bonar
Law, leader of the Conservative party from 1911 to 1923, and Lord
Beaverbrook, who was born in New Brunswick, were products of this
Canadian Unionist tradition. J. K. Galbraith, in his autobiography The
Scotch (1963), has described the outlook of a rural Ontario culture which
had its roots in Ulster. Tension between English-speaking Ontario and
French-speaking Quebec provides a major theme of Canadian history but
political and religious differences deriving from the cultural history of the
British Isles also formed an essential element in the ‘Canadian Mosaic’.
276 The British Isles
Postscript
As I revise Chapter 10 for a new edition, I am conscious that England
needs much more emphasis than I provided. George Dangerfield, in his
book The Strange Death of Liberal England, drew attention to the impor-
tance not merely of Ireland but also of labour unrest and feminist agitation
in the years before the First World War. These questions clearly require far
The rise of ethnic politics 279
more analysis than was given here. I also tend to ignore the significance
of the First World War for English politics. The split between Asquith
and Lloyd George in 1916 led to a permanent divide in the Liberal party,
making possible the return of the Conservatives to power after the war
and the rise of Labour. The Irish Question was not the whole story.
I am also conscious, however, that more attention should have been
given to the ‘advanced nationalism’ of Sinn Fein and other groups. Recent
work by Irish historians has now made this possible. Patrick Maume
has brought out the significance of the ‘Irish-Ireland’ movement led by
D. P. Moran. His study of Daniel Corkery in Life that is Exile: Daniel
Corkery and the Search for Irish Ireland (Belfast, 1993) is also very
illuminating. Senia Paseta, in her brilliant study Before the Revolution:
Nationalism, Social Change and Ireland’s Catholic Elite (Cork, 1999), pro-
vides an invaluable guide to the various currents of thought among the
emerging Catholic elite. Tom Garvin, in Nationalist Revolutionaries in Ire-
land, 1858–1928 (Oxford, 1987), also makes an important contribution,
as does Michael Laffan in The Resurrection of Ireland: The Sinn Fein Party
1916–1923 (Cambridge, 1999). A ‘revisionist’ study of Patrick Pearse by
Ruth Dudley Edwards in Patrick Pearse: The Triumph of Failure (London,
1977) has given rise to a fierce debate which may be followed in Ciaran
Brady, ed., Interpreting Irish History: The Debate on Historical Revisionism
(Dublin, 1994) and D. George Boyce and Alan O Day, eds., The Making
of Modern Irish History: Revisionism and the Revisionist Controversy (Lon-
don, 1996).
So far as Wales and Scotland are concerned I have found Dai Smith’s
Wales! Wales? (London, 1984) and Tom Devine’s The Scottish Nation
1700–2000 (London, 1999) most illuminating.
11 Between the wars
280
Between the wars 281
of W.B. Yeats, ‘All was changed, changed utterly, A terrible beauty was
born.’ In Protestant Ireland, and especially in Ulster, the date ‘1916’
referred to the heroism of the Ulster division in 1916. Thus, within the
United Kingdom, a bitter division opened up which was the British and
Irish equivalent of the changes which took place within central and east-
ern Europe. An Irish nation-state took shape, claiming roots in the past,
but in fact the equivalent of other ‘imagined communities’, which gained
their independence after 1918. Within most of the United Kingdom a
sense of common Britishness developed more deeply, symbolised by the
Cenotaph on Whitehall or the tomb of the Unknown Warrior in West-
minister Abbey. In England this was increasingly a non-sectarian identity.
In Scotland and Northern Ireland, however, being ‘British’ still implied
a strongly Protestant dimension. The newly established Irish Free State
in contrast moved rapidly towards a Catholic, Gaelic identity.
In Ireland, the election of 1918 had seen the destruction of John Red-
mond’s Irish parliamentary party with its policy of Home Rule. It was
replaced (in the south) by the more ‘advanced’ nationalist party of Sinn
Fein whose members refused to take up its seats in the Westminster par-
liament. By 1919, there was open violence which led to atrocities on both
British and Irish sides, culminating in the events of ‘Bloody Sunday’
(21 November 1920). There was, however, no outright victory for either
side and by the end of 1921 both were glad to accept a compromise.
The result of three years of guerrilla warfare was the partition of Ireland
into the Irish Free State consisting of twenty-six counties including three
belonging to the traditional province of Ulster (Monaghan, Cavan and
Donegal) and six counties of ‘Northern Ireland’, which were given a mea-
sure of ‘Home Rule’. For some nationalists, however, the Treaty of 1921
seemed like a betrayal of the ideals of 1916 and a bitter division devel-
oped between a pro-Treaty party of Michael Collins and an anti-Treaty
party led by Eamonn De Valera. The civil war which followed created
profound divisions which had a lasting effect, one of which was to ensure
the survival of the six-county unit of Northern Ireland.
The Irish crisis of 1919–22 rarely receives its due from English his-
torians. In fact, however, the prolonged and bitter struggle between the
British government and the forces of Sinn Fein had wide repercussions
not merely within the British Commonwealth but also in the United
States.
Within the Conservative party a split developed between the official
leadership headed by F. E. Smith and Austen Chamberlain who came
to accept, reluctantly, the need for compromise with Sinn Fein, and the
‘Die-hards’ who regarded the Treaty as a ‘Scuttle’. In June 1922, Field
Marshal Sir Henry Wilson, an Anglo-Irishman who in 1914 had been
282 The British Isles
The power of managing our own affairs in our own way is the greatest gift of
Englishmen.
Nowhere was the village community so real and so enduring a thing as it was
in England for at least three centuries of its history . . . to these twelve centuries
of discipline we owe the peculiar English capacity for self-government.
But though Baldwin spoke in the name of England the strength of the
Unionist party lay in the south of England. When it came to the point
of a trial of strength between south and north, as it did in the General
Strike of 1926, Baldwin acted in the interests of the south.
The rhetoric of the Conservative party during these years was based
upon a threefold appeal – to English nationalism, to the fear of Socialism
and to pride in the British empire. Labour was portrayed by Baldwin as
a party dominated by foreign ideas. ‘Many of those [he declared] who
have been eager for the progress of our country have only succeeded in
befogging themselves and their fellow countrymen, by filling their bellies
with the east wind of German Socialism and Russian Communism and
French Syndicalism.’
Within the Labour party itself there was a struggle for dominance
between its leader Ramsay MacDonald, who favoured a ‘gradualist’
approach to social change, and the ‘Clydesiders’ led by Maxton and
Wheatley, who pressed for radical socialist solutions to the problem of
unemployment. During the months leading up to the 1929 election Mac-
Donald came off best. In drawing up the party manifesto he was helped
by R. H. Tawney, Professor of Economic History at the London School
of Economics and a former member of the progressive wing of the Liberal
party in the pre-war period.
In Tawney’s approach to English history, there was a clear contrast with
that of Stanley Baldwin (and of Baldwin’s friend G.M. Trevelyan). In a
series of studies of which the most notable were The Acquisitive Society
(1921), Religion and the Rise of Capitalism (1926) and Equality (1931) he
produced an interpretation of history in which exploitation rather than
freedom was seen as the chief characteristic of English history. Of the
Church of England he wrote: ‘Deprived of its vitality, it had allowed its
officers to become by the eighteenth century the servile clients of a half-
pagan aristocracy, to whose contemptuous indulgence they looked for
preferment. It ceased for some 200 years to speak its mind and, as a nat-
ural consequence, it ceased to have a mind to speak.’ About nonconfor-
mity he was equally dismissive: ‘The personal piety of the Nonconformist
could stem that creed – (“a persuasive self-confident and militant Gospel
proclaiming the absolute value of economic success”) – [but] with a few
individual exceptions they did not try to stem it, for they had lost the
spiritual independence needed to appraise its true moral significance.’
286 The British Isles
This outlook did not survive the post-war depression when unemploy-
ment in the cotton industry became endemic, rising to over 40 per cent
in 1930. What happened to cotton happened also in shipbuilding, towns
such as Barrow and Jarrow being particularly hard hit.
Culturally, Walter Greenwood’s novel Love on the Dole (1933) reflects
the mood of depression in northern England. The songs of Gracie Fields
in Sing as We Go (1934) were an attempt to raise morale in the north, but
observers such as George Orwell and J. B. Priestley on their visits to the
northern cities found a deep-seated malaise. The hunger marches made
by the Jarrow unemployed in 1936 were one way of attempting to cope
with the situation. Another was to emigrate to the prosperous industrial
areas of the south.
The politics of the inter-war period revolved around the contrast
between the south-east and the depressed areas of the north and west.
The north (and its associated areas) had been the product of an age of
coal and iron, industries which were hit by the new technology of oil,
electrical power and chemical engineering. During the First World War
these new industries found a home in the south, where they were nearer
to the Channel ports and the Western Front. As a consequence, it was
southern towns such as Bristol, Gloucester, Oxford, Luton and Slough
Between the wars 287
which became centres of the automobile and aircraft industries and the
new light industries. Coventry became part of the ‘new south’. Statis-
tics relating to unemployment during the 1920s and 1930s indicate that
rates were much higher for the older industries of the north than the new
industries of the south. In the coal-mining areas unemployment was well
over 30 per cent in 1932 and 1933 and over 20 per cent for much of the
time. In 1939 it was still over 12 per cent. In the shipbuilding industry,
there was 62 per cent unemployment in 1932 and it was still at the rate
of 20 per cent in 1939. Similar rates applied to dock-workers, and to
workers in linen and cotton textiles. The new southern industries were
more fortunate. For much of the period unemployment among the elec-
trical engineers was under 10 per cent. From 1936 it was under 5 per
cent. The same was true of the industries involving the construction and
repair of cars, aircraft and cycles. Service industries also did well in the
south. Statistics relating to unemployment in individual towns tell the
same story.
Economically the period after the First World War was marked by sub-
stantial change, when what had once been ‘boom’ areas were affected by
economic depression. Politically also the post-war scene was markedly
different from what it had been before 1914. After the signing of the
Anglo-Irish Treaty in 1922, the Irish dimension in British politics ceased
to occupy its once central position. Religious issues also became of
marginal importance. In particular, nonconformity, for so long a major
force in the Liberal politics of northern England and Wales, increasingly
lost ground. The bitter split within the Liberal party between the followers
of Asquith and Lloyd George left many nonconformists without obvious
political allegiance. For some, Conservatism became increasingly attrac-
tive in the face of the growth of Socialism, and Stanley Baldwin, in his
speeches, went to some pains to stress his nonconformist background.
In 1924 he spoke to the National Free Church Conference, stating that
‘I owe a great deal of my public and private life to my Nonconformist
ancestry.’ ‘No less than half my great grandfathers’, he declared ‘were
288 The British Isles
Wales, the north remained aloof from the strike, while the south, in con-
trast, was largely in favour. In south Wales, however, there were clashes
in the coastal cities of Cardiff, Swansea and Newport between pro- and
anti-strike groups.
The General Strike collapsed after a week, leaving bitter memories,
especially among the miners, who continued their resistance long after
the other unions had capitulated. Within the Labour party the fail-
ure of the strike helped the cause of the ‘gradualists’ led by MacDon-
ald. The General Strike may also be seen as highlighting in dramatic
fashion the tensions which existed within Britain between an increas-
ingly prosperous and powerful south-east and a depressed north and
east. It was a pattern which was temporarily reversed during the Sec-
ond World War when Britain depended for its survival upon its Atlantic
ports and its traditional industries, especially shipbuilding and min-
ing. After the war the victory of Labour restored the influence of the
periphery, in the persons of such cabinet ministers as Emmanuel Shin-
well (of Glasgow Jewish background), Aneurin Bevan (from Tredegar
in south Wales) and Harold Wilson (of Yorkshire nonconformist back-
ground). After the victory of the Conservatives in 1951, however, the
drift to the south-east once more picked up momentum, accentuated by
the decision to apply to enter the European Economic Community in
1962.
For much of the inter-war period Ireland, both north and south,
remained largely insulated from the course of events on the other side of
the Irish Sea. Economically, Ireland, north and south, was as depressed
as Wales, Scotland and northern England. In Belfast, employment in the
shipbuilding yards, heavily dominated by a Protestant labour force, fell
from 20,000 in 1924 to 2,000 in 1933. The linen industry enjoyed some
degree of prosperity in the early 1920s as a result of American demand
but after 1927 it also declined. In 1937 there were only 15,000 linen
workers in Belfast, less than one third of the numbers in 1927. The Irish
Free State was also badly hit during the depression though the extent
of unemployment was partially concealed by underemployment in the
rural areas, where the great majority of the population lived. When De
Valera came to power in 1932 a tariff war broke out with Britain over
the payment of annuities due under the Land Acts of an earlier period.
The decision of the Irish Free State to remain neutral during the Second
World War acted as an obstacle to economic development.
Culturally also both the Free State and Northern Ireland remained iso-
lated. Within the Free State, Church and State were in general agreement
about the need to keep Ireland uncontaminated from the pressures of
‘modernity’. Divorce and contraception were prohibited and a stringent
290 The British Isles
their appeal. Chapel membership declined. In effect the Welsh had been
granted a large measure of ‘Home Rule’ under the aegis of a Welsh-
speaking, temperance-minded, nonconformist middle class, with which
power and status now rested.
There was little support during these years for the Welsh Nationalist
party (Plaid Cymru) which had emerged during the 1920s. Its leader
Saunders Lewis became a Roman Catholic in 1932, hardly a sure recipe
for political success in nonconformist Wales. The party itself admired
the conservative French group Action Française and looked back to an
idealised medieval social order as a model for Wales to follow. In some
ways, Saunders Lewis indeed was the Welsh equivalent of Eamonn De
Valera.
If Wales enjoyed a considerable degree of ‘Home Rule’ during this
period so also did Scotland. The Scottish legal and educational systems
retained their traditional distinctiveness. The Church of Scotland also
292 The British Isles
Winston Churchill once declared that he had not become the King’s chief
minister to preside over the dissolution of the British empire. In fact,
however, the process of decolonisation which had begun before 1939
with the Statute of Westminster (1931), and perhaps even earlier with
the Anglo-Irish Treaty of 1921, gathered momentum after 1945. The
granting of independence to India, Pakistan, Ceylon and Burma in the
late 1940s was accompanied by withdrawal from Palestine in 1948 and in
1954 from the Suez Canal Zone. An attempt to restore British influence
in the Middle East with the Suez expedition of 1956 broke down in the
face of American opposition.
During the 1960s, withdrawal from empire continued apace under
Harold Macmillan and his colonial secretary Iain MacLeod. It was
accompanied by a policy of drawing closer to the European Economic
Community. Macmillan made the first application to enter Europe in
1962 but it was not until 1973 that Britain, together with the Republic of
Ireland, was finally admitted to membership. Looked at in retrospect, this
apparently inexorable process of moving from overseas empire to Euro-
pean community would seem to be the most significant trend of post-war
Britain.
Within Britain the long-term impact of commitment to Europe was
to intensify the drift to the south-east. The economic decline of the
north and west which had been halted during the Second World War was
resumed. As they had been during the 1920s and 1930s, rates of unem-
ployment were much higher in ‘Outer Britain’. The core prospered, the
periphery languished. A. J. P. Taylor concluded his study England 1914–
45 with the reflection ‘Few even sang “England Arise”. England had risen
all the same.’ His point was wrongheaded in relation to England, but may
be allowed to stand in relation to the south-east.
Alongside the currents of change there were elements of continuity.
The key to Welsh attitudes as so often before lay in the division between
the largely rural north (in which the industrial area of Flintshire was an
exception) and the largely industrial south. The attempt of Plaid Cymru
294
Withdrawal from empire 295
1970, the discovery of a series of important oil fields off the east coast of
Scotland provided an issue on which the SNP capitalised. The demand
that ‘Scottish Oil’ should be used for the benefit of the Scottish people
gave new life to Scottish nationalism. In the first general election of 1974,
the SNP gained seven seats with 22 per cent of the Scottish vote. In the
second general election of that year they gained eleven seats with 30 per
cent of the vote. Devolution became an issue which the Labour govern-
ment could not ignore and in 1979, in Wales as well as Scotland, it was
put to a referendum. In Wales, to the consternation of Plaid Cymru, devo-
lution was decisively rejected with less than 12 per cent of the votes cast.
In Scotland it attracted 52 per cent of the votes cast but this amounted
to only 33 per cent of the total electorate, short of the 40 per cent which
the government had laid down as an essential prerequisite. In the 1979
election, there was a decisive swing against the SNP, which was left with
only two seats. Labour, though losing the general election in the United
Kingdom as a whole, retained its position as the main party of protest in
Scotland.
Despite the importance of class and of nationalism, religious issues still
remained very much alive in some areas of Scottish life. In this respect the
central Lowlands and especially the Clydeside area resembled Northern
Ireland. As J. G. Kellas stated in his study Modern Scotland (1968), it is
still possible to see graffiti urging passers-by to ‘F—k the Pope’ (an anti-
Irish sentiment rather than an anti-papal one). Ulster Unionists found a
more sympathetic audience on Clydeside than they found elsewhere in
the British Isles.
In Ireland, as in Wales and Scotland, long-standing historical patterns
continued to reveal themselves. The Republic of Ireland was an indepen-
dent state. Culturally, politically and economically, however, its affairs
remained inextricably intertwined with those of the United Kingdom.
The relationship of Ireland and Britain was full of paradoxes. Many of
the leading figures in ‘English’ literature during the twentieth century,
Yeats, Joyce, Synge, O Casey, Heaney, were Irishmen. In certain sports,
such as golf and rugby, the difference between the Republic and North-
ern Ireland was virtually ignored and ‘Ireland’, a non-existent political
entity, fielded a united team. In horse-racing also there were the closest
of ties between English and Irish communities. Irish actors such as Cyril
Cusack and T. P. MacKenna were familiar figures on the London stage.
Profound tensions remained, however, in the relationship between the
Republic and the United Kingdom. Each had different interpretations of
the recent past. The Sinn Fein rebellion of 1916 was heroic in nationalist
eyes, but an act of treachery to Unionists. Irish neutrality in the Second
World War continued to be a source of resentment in Britain long after
Withdrawal from empire 297
The Northern Ireland crisis of 1969 and the years following illustrate
once again the difficulty of treating the different national units of the
British Isles in isolation. The influence of history, since the plantation
of Ulster in the early seventeenth century and the battle of the Boyne in
1690, was too powerful to be ignored. Historians of Britain since 1922
have dealt with the problem of the ‘Irish dimension’ by ignoring it. To
resort to this solution, however, leads inevitably to oversimplification. The
cultural influence of Ireland is still strong in Glasgow and Liverpool and
in the new Irish communities of London and Birmingham. The politics of
Northern Ireland itself cannot be understood in a specifically six-county
context. The IRA itself adopts an interpretation of Irish history which
takes it back at least to Wolfe Tone and the rebellion of 1798 and its
allied party Sinn Fein began to take an active role in politics south of the
border. There is, in addition, the British Isles dimension of the former
dominions, particularly in Australia, where there is a strong Irish presence
in the Labour party.
Withdrawal from empire 299
the different immigrant groups. One West Indian stated that ‘We are not
immigrants in the true technical sense: after all we are members of the
Realm. We are British.’ A prominent Trinidadian observed, ‘Like every
West Indian, I am part Englishman. I mean this, of course, in the sense
that, having acquired the English language, the traditions and institutions
of this country, it is natural for me to want to be here. The West Indian
is essentially what British culture and influences have made him.’
We may conclude this brief survey of post-war trends by stressing
once again the continuing dominance of the south-east. In the field of
higher education, many of the new universities founded in the 1960s in
Sussex, East Anglia, Essex, Kent, Surrey and elsewhere, were situated
in the southern and eastern counties in an arc with Greater London as
its centre. The public schools, also heavily concentrated in the south
and east, were attacked during the first Labour government but suc-
cessfully beat off the challenge. The ‘Media’ in broadcasting, publishing
and the press remained based upon London. The ‘City’ continued to
grow in importance. It was thus not surprising that the finest sight in the
north, as in Scotland and Wales, continued to be the High Road to the
south. Even Ireland was not immune to the cultural influence of Lon-
don. One of the most striking sights of the Dublin area during the 1960s
was the forest of high-rising TV aerials, constructed to receive British
television programmes from across the Irish Sea. ‘Sinn Fein’ had bro-
ken down with a vengeance in the newly urbanised Ireland. In the early
years of the twenty-first century, however, the success of the Celtic Tiger
and the prominence of the Irish Republic in Europe led to ‘the Irish
model’ being viewed in nationalist circles as appropriate for Wales and
Scotland.
South Wales drew closer to south-eastern England during the post-war
period, as new high-speed trains and motorways made communication
easier. North Wales became a culture under pressure, partly as a conse-
quence of unemployment, partly owing to the influence of tourism.
In western Scotland, Clydeside was particularly hard hit by unemploy-
ment in shipbuilding and mining. The shipbuilding industry in particular
found it difficult to compete with competition from Japan, South Korea
and Germany. Eastern Scotland, after the discovery of North Sea oil,
enjoyed something of a ‘boom’ period. Of all the peripheral areas of the
United Kingdom, Scotland may well have retained its autonomy more
successfully than any other.
However, the drift to southern England continues, with a seventy-mile
area around London linked to the metropolis by high-speed trains for the
benefit of daily commuters. The balance between ‘core’ and ‘periphery’
has shifted unmistakeably in favour of the core.
302 The British Isles
within the British Isles (a term which should include the Isle of Man, the
Channel Islands, Shetland and Orkney, as well as the larger islands of
Britain and Ireland). It would, no doubt, have simplified the historian’s
task had England, Ireland, Scotland and Wales been distinctive, stable
historical units over long periods of time. In fact, however, the history of
the British Isles, for at least a thousand years, resembles that of the Italian
peninsula, the Iberian peninsula or the Swiss Confederation more than
is generally supposed. In modern times English culture has achieved a
general dominance much as German culture did within the dominions
of the Habsburgs. The advance of the English language has squeezed the
Celtic languages to the periphery of the British Isles.
The fact remains, however, that during the past two millennia, ‘Eng-
land’, ‘Ireland’, ‘Scotland’ and ‘Wales’ have not lived in mutual isolation.
Since the Viking invasions, and even earlier, the cultures of the British
Isles have reacted to each other. In 1973 a new historical page was turned
when the United Kingdom and the Irish Republic entered the Common
Market. Clearly this was a new beginning, the implications of which are
being worked out. Clearly also, Britain and Ireland are exposed to pow-
erful cultural influences from across the Atlantic. When all this is said,
however, the influence of history itself cannot be left out of account. The
conflict between Celtic and Germanic cultures, the Norman Conquests,
the impact of Reformation and Counter-Reformation, the effect of migra-
tion within the British Isles, the consequences of imperial expansion – all
these have left a lasting mark upon cultural and political relationships
within these islands.
The story did not end in 1973 with British and Irish entry into the Com-
mon Market, nor can it be confined merely to the relationship between
Britain and Ireland. The impact of new ethnic groups began to be felt in
1989 after the publication of Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses, which
was publicly burned in Bradford by Islamic fundamentalists. The possible
entry into Britain of Hongkong Chinese after the return of Hong Kong
to China in 1997 also showed signs of becoming an important political
issue in 1990. The debate about what constituted ‘British identity’ con-
tinued in 1990 against the background of governmental involvement in a
national history curriculum. Scottish and Welsh nationalism simmered.
The Northern Ireland issue, which involved Dublin as well as London,
Belfast and Washington, DC, refused to go away. Class issues were still
dominant in British politics but ethnicity remained as a factor of great
political significance for the future.
13 Post-Imperial Britain: Post-Nationalist
Ireland
304
Post-imperial Britain: post-nationalist Ireland 305
a conflict which lasted for almost a year and which led to victory for the
government.
The implementation of the Thatcherite programme had unpleasant
implications for northern England, the Midlands, south Wales and the
industrial areas of Scotland. The Butskellite consensus had made indus-
trial and social peace a major objective and the general effect of such poli-
cies had been to subsidise areas dominated by traditional ‘smokestack’
industries in which established trade union practices impeded rises in
productivity. A notorious example was the newspaper printing industry
where unions opposed all attempts to modernise and persisted in the
practice of over-manning. In the age of the computer, however, their
resistance proved futile and their bluff was called by Rupert Murdoch in
1985. By 1990 the only nationalised industry to survive was British Rail
and even this was soon to be privatised under John Major, Mrs Thatcher’s
successor.
One of the consequences of the Thatcherite revolution was to re-
emphasise the dominance of London and the south-east in the United
Kingdom, as the heartland of the Conservative party. In contrast, the
recent leadership of the Labour party was drawn from northern England
(Harold Wilson), Wales (James Callaghan) and Scotland (John Smith).
The so-called ‘dream ticket’ of Neil Kinnock and Roy Hattersley in the
election of 1992 brought together a Welshman and a Yorkshireman.
The trade unions also were institutions which represented the inter-
ests of northern England, Wales and Scotland. The impact of succes-
sive Thatcherite governments was thus to reduce the political and eco-
nomic influence of “the North” (together with Scotland and Wales) in the
interests of what came to be known as “Middle England” (in effect the
south-east).1 There was also a marked class element in Mrs Thatcher’s
victories. Indeed she saw herself as a representative of the industrious
middle class, opposed to a largely idle upper-middle class as she saw it,
and a self-centred working class, symbolised for her by the unions.
Another feature of Thatcherism during the 1980s was a powerful cur-
rent of nationalism reinforced both by the Falklands conflict and by her
struggle with the European Community over the level of British contribu-
tions to its budget. In Northern Ireland she was strongly pro-Unionist.
Mrs Thatcher was also suspicious of the effects of overseas immigra-
tion, an outlook shared by one of her ministers Norman Tebbitt, who
1 By 1986 the rate of unemployment in Scotland was 11.1 per cent, over double the figure
of 5.7 per cent in 1979. In Wales it rose from 5.5 per cent in 1979 to 13.2 per cent in
1986. In the United Kingdom as a whole there were over 3 million unemployed in 1986
(11.8 per cent of the workforce); see E. Powell, Patriots, p. 586.
Post-imperial Britain: post-nationalist Ireland 309
We have not successfully rolled back the frontiers of the State in Britain, only to
see them re-imposed at a European level with a European superstate exercising a
new dominance from Brussels. (J. Campbell, Margaret Thatcher, vol. II, The Iron
Lady (London, 2003), p. 605)
that her brand of Conservatism was unpopular. Labour was now much
the largest party with fifty of the seventy-two Scottish seats, whereas the
Conservatives had lost eleven of their twenty-one seats (Devine, The Scot-
tish Nation (1999), p. 605).
The effect of Mrs Thatcher’s ‘sermon on the Mound’ was intensified
when a year later, in 1989, her government decided to introduce the
unpopular ‘Poll Tax’ into Scotland, a year ahead of England and Wales.
It was a decision which took no account of Scottish sensitivities and pre-
dictably led to civil disobedience on a wide scale. As Professor Devine
points out, the leaders of the three largest Scottish Churches condemned
the tax as ‘undemocratic, unjust, socially divisive and destructive of com-
munity and family life’ (Devine, The Scottish Nation (1999), p. 604). Not
surprisingly the Scottish nationalism which Mrs Thatcher thought she
Post-imperial Britain: post-nationalist Ireland 311
I had absolutely no prior sense of the scale of the deprivation and discrimination
suffered by the Catholic population. But the poverty proved undiscriminating:
the squalor and sense of hopelessness on the catholic Falls Road were matched
on the working class Protestant streets around the Shankill Road . . . I could not
believe that my own country had sustained and encouraged such a grossly unjust
state of affairs.
Broadly speaking this was the situation that Mrs Thatcher inherited
in 1979. It seems clear that she saw the military defeat of the Provisional
IRA as her main priority, especially after the assassination in 1979 of Airey
Neave, her intended candidate as secretary of Northern Ireland. It was
thus unsurprising that she opposed any compromise over the status of
IRA prisoners in connection with the so-called ‘dirty protest’ which had
become a trial of wills between the British government and IRA prisoners
from 1979 onwards over the wearing of prison uniform. In 1981 a num-
ber of IRA prisoners went on hunger strike, the most prominent being
Bobby Sands who was elected MP for Fermanagh and South Tyrone in
April 1981, just before he died. Despite the urging of John Hume, leader
of the largely Catholic Social and Democratic Party, that she should avoid
creating ‘martyrs’, Mrs Thatcher refused to seek a compromise. But her
victory proved to be a pyrrhic one. The IRA did not disappear and in
fact the publicity it received over the ‘martyrdom’ of Bobby Sands led
to a surge of sympathy among many Irish-Americans. The bombing of
the Grand Hotel in Brighton in 1984 during the Conservative party con-
ference was perhaps the most dramatic indication that the problem of
Northern Ireland was not likely to wither away.
Post-imperial Britain: post-nationalist Ireland 313
In Wales, the influence of the Free Churches, linked with the causes of
temperance and the Welsh language, once provided a general framework
of a Welsh national identity which was ethnic rather than civic. The prob-
lems which arose were illustrated by Richard Llewellyn in his best-selling
novel How Green Was My Valley (1939), in which ethnic tension within a
small village provides the theme of an important chapter.
Around each public house and all round the three rows of houses, where the
half breed Welsh, Irish and English were living . . . These people did the jobs
that colliers would never do, and they were allowed to live and breed because
the owners would not spend money on plant when their services were to be had
so much the cheaper. For a pittance they carried slag and muck, they acted as
scavengers, and as they worked so they lived. Even their children were put to work
at eight or nine years of age so that more money could come into the home. They
lived most of them only to drink. (Quoted in Dai Smith, Wales! Wales? (London,
1984, p. 114)
Clearly, it was not easy for newcomers to assimilate into a Welsh society.
318 The British Isles
By the end of the twentieth century, the Free Churches and their allied
cause, temperance, had lost ground. The cultural space was filled by a
general revival of the Welsh language, which, since the passing of the
Welsh Language Act of 1993, is taught in schools throughout Wales and
is now generally accepted by all parties as the main civic symbol of nation-
hood. There has also been growing support for Plaid Cymru, the Welsh
nationalist party which in 1997 achieved a swing of 35 per cent in the
Rhondda Valley, an area once regarded as an impregnable Labour seat.
In terms of national politics the great majority of votes in Wales was pro-
Labour but Plaid Cymru now offered more of a challenge than it once
did. Before the 1990s, Plaid Cymru’s commitment to the Welsh language
restricted its appeal to the Welsh-speaking heartland of north and west
Wales. What changed the situation was the party’s decision to move
beyond its commitment to the language to more bread-and-butter issues.
It was this ‘new departure’which brought it success in the 1999 election
for the newly created Welsh Assembly. The Rhondda Valley, hitherto a
Labour stronghold, fell to Plaid Cymru along with other Labour seats,
although in the general election of 2005 the seat was captured by an inde-
pendent. Plaid Cymru, despite its advances, still remains a minority party
in the Welsh Assembly and has only a handful of seats at Westminster.
In the Republic of Ireland, as we have seen, there has been a shift away
from the ethno-religious nationalism of De Valera’s day. In particular the
decline of the influence of the Catholic hierarchy has led to the acceptance
of a more ‘liberal’ approach to such matters as contraception and divorce.
The prosperity of the Republic, however, has led to immigration from
Europe and beyond, a phenomenon hitherto unknown. The result has
been a degree of racialism but in general a civic-minded nationalism
is in the ascendant within the Irish Republic. In contrast, the political
and social scene in Northern Ireland is dominated by two rival ethno-
cultural nationalisms, the Democratic Unionist party led by Ian Paisley
and Sinn Fein led by Gerry Adams. Civic nationalism, represented by
the Social Democratic and Labour party and the Alliance party, has now
lost ground. At the present moment the only possible future for Northern
Ireland lies in the hope of an agreement between the DUP and Sinn Fein,
which in 2005 was unlikely. A ‘civic’ future for Northern Ireland seems
only a remote possibility.
Of the nations making up the United Kingdom, England is of course
by far the most important in terms of wealth and population (51 million
compared to 5 million in Ireland, north and south, 5 million in Scotland
and 3 million in Wales). Here the most significant development since
the 1990s has been the rise of New Labour, which seems to draw more
upon the secular liberalism of Lloyd George than the socialism of R. H.
Post-imperial Britain: post-nationalist Ireland 319
in Scotland the SNP was able to gain only one, to bring its total to four
of the fifty-nine seats available. For the moment at least New Labour’s
policy of granting devolution seemed to have been successful in drawing
the teeth of Welsh and Scottish nationalism. It was a different story in
Northern Ireland, where two ethnic nationalist groupings, Sinn Fein and
the Democratic Unionists, made headway at the expense of the centre,
leaving the Good Friday Agreement in limbo. English nationalism was
largely silent, voiced only by the United Kingdom Independence party
(UKIP) and by the British National party (BNP). The question of UK
membership of the European Union remained largely in abeyance during
the election. Since public opinion in Wales and Scotland is pro-Europe
it remains to be seen whether some future referendum on the European
Constitution will be a crucial issue for an English- , as opposed to a
British-wide, nationalism.
Englishness, as opposed to Britishness, remains very much a key issue
in some Conservative circles. Calls for a return to narrative history are
regularly made in the press, most recently in the conservative newspaper
The Daily Telegraph (June 2005) which advocated the reprinting, a century
after its first appearance, of a once-familiar volume Our Island Story. But
the framework of such narratives is invariably Anglo-centric, linked to a
succession of English monarchs, as the spoof history 1066 and All That
showed. What is not made clear is that England is merely part, albeit the
wealthiest and most populous part, of a multi-national state – the United
Kingdom. As is the case with Spain, the history of such a state must
make room for multiple narratives, if it is to move beyond the purveying
of myths – a comment which applies of course to all four nations, as well
as to what is now perhaps a ‘fifth nation’, Islam.
Afterword
Some nations have had a broken and tragic past. Others are new or have only
recently arisen after a long submergence. Some have been torn by a terrible breach
between past and present – a breach which, though it happened long ago, they
have never been able to heal and overcome. We in England have been fortunate
and we must remember our good fortune, for we have actually drawn strength
from the continuity of our history. (Butterfield, The Englishman and His History
(Cambridge, 1944), p. vi)
322
Afterword 323
In view of this it is all the more surprising that modern scholars have
shown an extraordinary reluctance to consider the possibility that English
nationalism existed. Thus Kenneth Morgan, an expert in the field, stated
that England is a nation that had ‘relatively little nationalist experience’.
Anthony Smith, another authority on nationalism, argued that England
experienced no fully developed nationalist movement.
The Whig interpretation, with its assumption of a peaceful progression
in the spread of freedom from generation to generation, was not the
only example of a nationalist view of English history. Throughout the
nineteenth century belief in the importance of defending the Protestant
constitution provided the basis of a rival interpretation, linked with the
Tory party and the Church of England, and equally nationalist. As D.G.
Paz has shown, Anglican Evangelicals believed, as against the Tractarians,
that Protestantism has been the basis of the constitution since the reign
of Edward VI and had been reaffirmed by the Glorious Revolution of
1688. According to this view Roman Catholicism was a prime enemy,
‘subversive of order and of English institutions’. Not surprisingly the
historical teaching at Oxford and Cambridge, both strongholds of the
Established Church, provided support for this interpretation of English
history.
English nationalism also informed the writing and teaching of such
influential historians as James Anthony Froude and Edward A. Freeman,
each of whom held the regius chair of history at Oxford. Froude regretted
that the English and the Germans, ‘the two great streams of the Teutonic
race, though separated by but a narrow range of difference were unable to
reach a common ground’ (Hugh A. MacDougall, Racial Myth in English
History (London, 1982), p. 98). Freeman wrote that Englishmen could
boast that their nation was ‘the one among the great nations of modern
Europe . . . can claim for its potential institutions the most unbroken
descent from the primitive Teutonic stock’ (ibid., p. 101). Sir John Seeley,
in his book The Expansion of England, which remained in print well into the
twentieth century, struck a somewhat different note but he too stressed
the significance of ‘blood and religion’.
However, as The British Isles has been at pains to point out, England
itself was not a state but part of a multi-national conglomerate, from 1801
the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland (from 1921 Northern
Ireland). Butterfield throughout his book refers to ‘we’, to ‘our history’
and to ‘England’, but as we have seen England by itself cannot supply
an appropriate framework for English. Celtic, Roman, Scandinavian and
Norman-French influences also played their part and, as the work of Rees
Davies, Nicolas Canny and others has shown, colonisation forms a key
aspect of the intermingling history of these islands. Butterfield’s ‘we’ is
324 Afterword
G E N E R A L WO R K S W I T H A B R I T I S H I S L E S A P P R OAC H
ov e rv i e ws
Brocklehurst, H. and Phillips, R., eds., History, Nationhood and the Question of
Britain, Basingstoke 2004.
Grant, A., and Stringer, J., eds., Uniting the Kingdom. The Making of British His-
tory, London 1995.
Parekh, B., Rethinking Multiculturalism: Cultural Diversity and Political Theory,
Cambridge, MA: 2000.
Pittock, M. G. H., Celtic Identity and the British Image, Manchester 1999.
Pocock, J. G. A., ‘The Limits and Divisions of British History: In Search of an
Unknown Subject’, American Historical Review, 87 (1982), 311–36.
Pocock, J. G. A., The Discovery of Islands: Essays in British History, Cambridge
2005.
Ross, A., Pagan Celtic Britain, London 1967.
Samuel, R., ‘In Search of Britain’, New Statesman and Society (25 Aug. 1989),
21–4.
ed., Patriotism: The Making and Unmaking of British National Identity, 3 vols.,
London and New York 1989.
Samuel, Raphael, Island Stories: Unravelling Britain, London 1998.
Weight, R., Patriots: National Identity in Britain 1940–2000, London 2002.
p r e - ro m a n
Childe, V. G., The Prehistoric Communities of the British Isles, Edinburgh
1947.
Dillon, M. and Chadwick, N. K., The Celtic Realms, 2nd edn rev. by D. A. Binchy,
Dublin 1972.
Laing, L., The Archaeology of Late Celtic Britain and Ireland, London 1975.
Moore, D., The Irish Sea Province in Archaeology and History, Cardiff 1970.
Piggott, S., Early Celtic Art, Edinburgh 1970.
ro m a n
Barley, M. W. and Hanson, R. P. C., eds., Christianity in Britain 300–700, Leicester
1968.
325
326 Selected reading list
po s t - ro m a n
Dumville, David N., Histories and Pseudo-histories of the Insular Middle Ages,
Aldershot 1990.
Dumville, David, ‘Ireland and North Britain in the Earlier Middle Ages: Contests
for Minuigud Senchasa Fher na nAlban’ in Rannsachadh na Gáidhlig 2000,
Aberdeen 2002.
Morris, J., The Age of Arthur: A History of the British Isles from 350 to 650, London
1973.
Thomas, C., Britain and Ireland in Early Christian Times AD 400–800, London
1972.
t h e n o r m a n co n q u e s t
Davies, R. R., Lordship and Society in the March of Wales 1282–1400, Oxford 1978.
Davies, R. R., ed., Domination and Conquest: The Experience of Ireland, Scotland
and Wales 1100–1300, Cambridge 1990.
Davies, R. R., ed., The British Isles 1100–1500: Comparisons, Contrasts and Con-
nections, Edinburgh 1988.
Davies, R. R., The First English Empire: Power and Identities in the British Isles
1093–1343, Oxford 2000.
Le Patourel, J., The Norman Empire, Oxford 1976.
Warren, W. L., Henry II, Berkeley, Calif. 1973.
t h e r e f o r m at i o n a n d i t s a f t e r m at h
Bradshaw, B. and Morrill, J., eds., The British Problem, c. 1534–1707: State For-
mation in the Atlantic Archipelago, London 1996
Bradshaw, B. and Roberts, P., British Consciousness and Identity: The Making of
Britain, 1533–1707, Cambridge 1998.
Clark, J. C. D., ‘English History’s Forgotten Context: Scotland, Ireland, Wales’,
Historical Journal, 32 (1989), 211–28.
Colley, Linda, Britons: Forging the Nation 1707–1837, Yale 1992.
Karsten, P., Patriot Heroes in England and America: Political Symbols and Changing
Values over Three Centuries, Madison and, London 1978.
Kearney, H. F., Scholars and Gentlemen: Universities and Society in Pre-Industrial
Britain, London 1970.
Kidd, C., Subverting Scotland’s Past: Scottish Whig Historians and the Creation of
an Anglo-British Identity, Cambridge 1993.
Kidd, C., British Identities before Nationalism: Ethnicity and Nationhood in the
Atlantic World 1600–1800, Cambridge 1999.
Lecky, W. E. H., A History of England in the Eighteenth Century, 8 vols., London
1878–90.
Selected reading list 327
t h e i n d u s t r i a l r evo lu t i o n
Curtis, L. P., Jr, Anglo-Saxons and Celts, New York 1968.
Durkacz, V. E., The Decline of the Celtic Languages: A Study of Linguistic and
Cultural Conflict in Scotland, Wales and Ireland from the Reformation to the
Twentieth Century, Edinburgh 1983.
Flanagan, T., The Irish Novelists 1800–1850, New York 1958.
Gash, N., Politics in the Age of Peel, London 1953.
Halévy, E., A History of the English People in the Nineteenth Century, 6 vols., London
1924–34.
Hanham, H. L., Elections and Party Management: Politics in the Time of Disraeli and
Gladstone, London 1959.
Hechter, M., Internal Colonialism: The Celtic Fringe in British National Development,
Berkeley 1975.
Lunn, K., Hosts, Immigrants and Minorities: Historical Responses to Newcomers in
British Society 1870–1914, London 1980.
Pelling, H., Social Geography of British Elections 1885–1910, London 1967.
Robbins, K., Nineteenth Century Britain – England, Scotland and Wales – the Making
of a Nation, Oxford 1988.
Vincent, J., The Formation of the Liberal Party 1857–68, London 1966.
g e o g r a ph i c a l
Baker, A. R. H. and Butlin, R. A., Studies of Field Systems in the British Isles,
Cambridge 1973.
Roberts, B. K., Rural Settlement in Britain, London 1977, repr. 1979.
328 Selected reading list
N AT I O N - B A S E D H I S TO R I E S
general
Briggs, A., A Social History of England, London 1983.
Devine, T. M., The Scottish Nation 1700–2000, London 1999.
ed., Scotland’s Shame? Bigotry and Sectarianism in Modern Scotland, Edinburgh
2000.
Ferguson, W., The Identity of the Scottish Nation: An Historic Quest, Edinburgh
1998.
Ferriter, D., The Transformation of Ireland, Dublin 2004.
Foster, R. F., Modern Ireland 1600–1972, London 1988.
Haigh, C., The Cambridge Historical Encyclopedia of Great Britain and Ireland,
Cambridge 1985.
Mitchison, R., A History of Scotland, London 1982.
Morgan, K. O., The Oxford Illustrated History of Britain, Oxford 1984.
Stubbs, W., The Constitutional History of England, 3 vols., Library edn, Oxford
1880.
Whittington, G. and Whyte, I. D., An Historical Geography of Scotland, London
1983.
Williams, D., A History of Modern Wales, London 1950, repr. 1977.
PRE-ROMAN
Binchy, D. A., ‘The Linguistic and Historical Value of the Irish Law Tracts’,
Proceedings of the British Academy, 29 (1943), 195–227.
Binchy, D. A., ‘The Fair of Tailtiu and the Feast of Tara’, Eriu, 17 (1918), 113–38.
ed., Crith Gablach, Dublin 1941.
Byrne, F. J., ‘Tribes and Tribalism in Early Ireland’, Eriu, 27 (1971), 128–66.
Irish Kings and High Kings, London 1973.
Cunliffe, B., Iron Age Communities in Britain: An Account of England, Scotland and
Wales from the Seventh Century BC until the Roman Conquest, London 1974.
Dillon, M., ed., Early Irish Society, Dublin 1954.
Greene, D., The Irish Language, Dublin 1966.
MacCana, P., Celtic Mythology, London 1970.
Rivet, A. L. F., The Iron Age in North Britain, Edinburgh 1966.
Taylor, J. A., Culture and Environment in Prehistoric Wales, Oxford 1980.
ROMAN
Breeze, D. J. and Dobson, B., Hadrian’s Wall, London 1976.
Collingwood, R. G. and Myres, J. N. L., Roman Britain and the English Settlements,
Oxford 1937.
Dudley, D. R. and Webster G., The Roman Conquest of Britain AD 43–57, London
1965.
Frere, S. S., Britannia, London 1967.
Johnson, S., Later Roman Britain, London 1980.
Nash-Williams, V. E., The Roman Frontier in Wales, 2nd edn, Cardiff 1969.
Selected reading list 329
POST-ROMAN
england
Bassett, S., The Origins of the Anglo-Saxon Kingdoms, Leicester 1989.
Bonser, W., Anglo-Saxon and Celtic Bibliography 450–1087, Oxford 1957.
Bruce-Mitford, R. L. S., The Sutton Hoo Ship Burial: A Handbook, London 1979.
Campbell, J., ed., The Anglo-Saxons, London 1982.
Campbell, James 2000, The Anglo-Saxon State, London 2000.
Finberg, H. P. R., Lucerna, London 1964.
ed., Agrarian History of England and Wales, vol. i, Cambridge 1972.
Hill, D., An Atlas of Anglo-Saxon England, Toronto 1981.
Hunter Blair, D., An Introduction to Anglo-Saxon England, Cambridge 1956.
John, E., Orbis Britanniae, Leicester 1966.
Loyn, H. R., Anglo-Saxon England and the Norman Conquest, London 1962.
Mayr-Harting, H., The Coming of Christianity to Anglo-Saxon England, London
1972.
Myres, J. N. L., ‘The Teutonic Settlement of Northern England’, History, 20
(1935), 250–62.
Sherley-Price, L., Bede – A History of the English Church and People, Har-
mondsworth 1955.
Stenton, F. M., Anglo-Saxon England, 2nd edn, Oxford 1947.
Taylor, H. M. and J., Anglo-Saxon Architecture, 2 vols., Cambridge 1965.
Whitelock, D., ed., English Historical Documents, c. 500–1042, vol. i, London 1955.
Wilson, D. M., The Anglo-Saxons, London 1960.
The Archaeology of Anglo-Saxon England, London 1976, repr. Cambridge 1981.
ireland
Binchy, D. A., ‘The Background of Early Irish Literature’, Studia Hibernica, i
(1961), 7–18.
‘St. Patrick and his Biographers: Ancient and Modern’, Studia Hibernica, ii
(1962), 7–173.
Binchy, D. A., ‘Irish History and Irish Law’ in Studia Hibernica, xv, 7–36; xvi,
7–45 (1975–6).
Binchy, D. A., ‘The Fair of Telteann and the Feast of Tara’, Eriu, 18 (1958),
113–18.
Celtic and Anglo-Saxon Kingship, O Donnell Lectures 1967–8, Oxford 1970.
Campbell, James 2000, The Anglo-Saxon State, London 2000.
DePaor, M. and L., Early Christian Ireland, London 1958.
Flower, R., The Irish Tradition, Oxford 1947.
Greene, D., ‘The Celtic Languages’, in The Celts, Thomas Davis Lectures 1960,
ed. J. Raftery, Cork 1964, pp. 9–22.
330 Selected reading list
Henry, F., Irish Art in the Early Christian Period to AD 800, London 1965.
Hughes, K., The Church in Early Irish Society, London 1966.
Kenney, J. F., The Sources for the Early History of Ireland, vol. i: Ecclesiastical, New
York 1929.
O Corráin, D., Ireland before the Normans, The Gill History of Ireland, vol. ii,
Dublin 1972.
O Corráin, Donnchadh, ‘Irish Origin Legends and Genealogy: Recurrent Aeti-
ologies’ in T. Nyberg et al. eds., History and Heroic Tale, Odense 1983.
O Croı́nı́n, Daibhı́, Early Medieval Ireland 400–1200, London 1995.
s cot l a n d
Anderson, A. D. and Ogilvie, M., Adomnan’s Life of Columba, London and New
York 1961.
Anderson, M. O., Kings and Kingship in Early Scotland, Edinburgh and London
1980.
Jackson, K. H., ‘The Britons in Southern Scotland’, Antiquity, 29 (1955), 77–88.
Ritchie, J. N. G., Scotland, Archaeology and Early History, London 1981.
wa l e s
Davies, W., Wales in the Early Middle Ages, Leicester 1982.
Dumville, D. N., ‘Sub-Roman Britain: History and Legend’, History, n.s., 62
(1977), 72–104.
Grant, A. and Stringer, Keith, Uniting the Kingdom: The Making of British History,
London 1995.
Rees, W., An Historical Atlas of Wales, from Early to Modern Times, London 1959.
T H E N O R M A N C O N QU E S T
england
Ashley, W., An Introduction to English Economic History, London 1909.
Beresford, M. W. and St Joseph, J. K. S., Medieval England: An Aerial Survey,
Cambridge 1979.
Brown, R. A., English Castles, London 1976.
Clanchy, M. T., England and its Rulers 1066–1272, London 1983.
Selected reading list 331
DuBoulay, F. R. H., An Age of Ambition: English Society in the Late Middle Ages,
London 1970.
Goldstein, R. J., The Matter of Scotland, Nebraska 1993.
Hallam, H. E., Rural England, London 1981.
Homans, G. C., English Villagers of the Thirteenth Century, Cambridge, Mass.,
1941.
Hoskins, W. G., ‘The Domesday Book in the Highland Zone’, in Provincial Eng-
land, London 1963.
Kapelle, W. E., The Norman Conquest of the North: The Region and its Transforma-
tion, 1000–1135, Chapel Hill 1979.
Keen, M. H., England in the Later Middle Ages, London 1973.
Kirby, D. P., The Making of Early England, London 1967.
Knowles, M. D., The Monastic Order in England, 2nd edn, Cambridge 1949.
Lander, J. R., Conflict and Stability in Fifteenth Century England, London 1969.
Lennard, R., Rural England, Oxford 1959.
Le Patourel, J., The Norman Empire, Oxford 1976.
Platt, C., The English Medieval Town, London 1976.
Medieval England: A Social History and Archeology from the Conquest to 1600 AD,
New York 1978.
Pollock, F. and Maitland, F. W., The History of English Law, 2 vols., 2nd edn,
Cambridge 1898.
Postan, M. M., The Medieval Economy and Society, London 1975.
Reynolds, S., An Introduction to the History of English Medieval Towns, Oxford
1977.
Thrupp, S. L., The Merchant Class of Medieval London, Ann Arbor 1948.
Vinogradoff, P., Villeinage in England, Oxford 1892.
ireland
Frame, R., Colonial Ireland, Dublin 1981.
Lydon, J., ed., The English in Medieval Ireland, Dublin 1984.
Nicholls, K., Gaelic and Gaelicised Ireland in the Middle Ages, Dublin 1972.
Orpen, G. H., Ireland under the Normans, Oxford 1911, repr. 1968.
Watt, J. A., The Church and the Two Nations in Medieval Ireland, Cambridge 1970.
s cot l a n d
Barrow, G. W. S., The Kingdom of the Scots: Government, Church and Society from
the Eleventh to the Fourteenth Century, London 1973.
The Anglo-Norman Era in Scottish History, Oxford 1980.
Kingship and Unity: Scotland 1000–1306, London 1981.
Brown, J. M., Scottish Society in the Fifteenth Century, New York 1977.
Dodgshon, R. A., Land and Society in Early Scotland, Oxford 1981.
Duncan, A. A. M., Scotland: The Making of a Kingdom, Edinburgh 1975.
Nicholson, R., Scotland: The Later Middle Ages, London 1974.
Wormald, J., Lords and Men in Scotland: Bonds of Manrent 1442–1603, Edinburgh
1985.
332 Selected reading list
wa l e s
Davies, R. R., ‘Colonial Wales’, Past and Present, 55 (1974), 3–23.
‘Kings, Lords and Liberties in the March of Wales’, Transactions of the Royal
Historical Society, 5th series, 29 (1979), 41–61.
Conquest, Co-existence and Change: Wales 1063–1415, Oxford 1987.
ed., The British Isles: 1100–1500 Comparisons, Contrasts and Connections, Edin-
burgh 1988.
Jones, Pierce T., Medieval Welsh Society, ed. J. Beverly Smith, Cardiff 1972.
Lloyd, Sir John Edward, A History of Wales from the Earliest Times to the Edwardian
Conquest, London 1939.
Richter, M., ‘The Political and Institutional Background to National Conscious-
ness in Medieval Wales’, in Nationality, ed. T. W. Moody, Belfast 1978, pp.
37–55.
Williams, G., The Welsh Church from Conquest to Reformation, Cardiff 1962.
Religion, Language and Nationality in Wales, Cardiff 1979.
T H E R E F O R M AT I O N A N D I T S A F T E R M AT H
england
Bossy, J., The English Catholic Community 1570–1850, London 1975.
Clark, J. C. D., English Society 1688–1832: Ideology, Social Structure and Political
Practice during the Ancien Regime, Cambridge 1985.
Collinson, P., The Religion of Protestants: The Church in English Society 1559–1625,
Oxford 1982.
Dickens, A. G., The English Reformation, London 1964.
Elton, G. R., Reform and Reformation, London 1977.
Hill, C., The World Turned Upside Down, London 1981.
James, M. E., Family, Lineage and Civil Society: A Study of Society, Politics and
Mentality in the Durham Region 1500–1640, Oxford 1974.
Levack, B., The Formation of the British State, Oxford 1987.
MacDougall, H. A., Racial Myth in English History: Trojans, Teutons and Anglo-
Saxons, Montreal 1982.
Malcolmson, R. W., Life and Labour in England 1700–80, London 1981.
Stone, L., The Crisis of the Aristocracy 1558–1641, Oxford 1965.
Tawney, R. H., The Agrarian Problem in the Sixteenth Century, London 1912, repr.
1967.
Thirsk, J., ed., Agrarian History of England and Wales, vol. iv, Cambridge 1967.
Thomas, K., Religion and the Decline of Magic, London 1971.
Wrightson, K., English Society 1580–1680, London 1982.
ireland
Bradshaw, B., The Irish Constitutional Revolution of the Sixteenth Century, Cam-
bridge 1979.
Bradshaw, B., Hadfield, A., Maley, W., eds., Representing Ireland: Literature and
the Origins of Conflict, 1534–1660 Cambridge 1993.
Selected reading list 333
Brady, C. and Gillespie, R., Natives and Newcomers: Essays on the Making of Irish
Colonial Society 1534–1681, Dublin 1986.
Reformation to Restoration: Ireland 1534–1660, Dublin 1987.
Canny, N., The Elizabethan Conquest of Ireland, Hassocks 1976.
Connolly, S. J., ed., Conflict, Identity and Economic Development: Ireland and Scot-
land, 1600–1939. Edinburgh 1992.
Religion, Law and Power: The Making of Protestant Ireland, Oxford 1992.
Cullen, L. M., An Economic History of Ireland since 1660, Dublin 1972.
Ellis, S., Tudor Ireland 1470–1603, London 1985.
Ford, G. A., The Protestant Reformation in Ireland, 1590–1641, Frankfurt
1985.
Kearney, H. F., Strafford in Ireland 1633–41, Manchester 1959, repr. 1989.
Leerssen, Joseph Th., Mere Irish and Fior-Ghael: Studies in the Idea of Irish Nation-
ality, its Development and Literary Expression Prior to the Nineteenth Century,
Amsterdam 1986.
s cot l a n d
Campbell, R. H. and Skinner, A. S., The Origins and Nature of the Scottish Enlight-
enment, Edinburgh 1982.
Chitnis, A. C., The Scottish Enlightenment: A Social History, London 1976.
Cowan, I. B., The Scottish Covenanters 1660–1688, London 1976. Regional Aspects
of the Scottish Reformation, London 1978.
Cullen, L. M. and Smout, T. C., Comparative Aspects of Scottish and Irish Economic
and Social History 1600–1800, Edinburgh 1977.
Davie, G. E., The Democratic Intellect, Edinburgh 1961.
The Scottish Enlightenment, London 1981.
Devine, T. M. and Dickson, D., Ireland and Scotland 1600–1850: Parallels and
Contrasts in Economic and Social Development, Edinburgh 1983.
Donaldson, G., The Scottish Reformation, Cambridge 1960.
Donaldson, W., The Jacobite Song: Political Myth and National Identity, Aberdeen
1988.
Scotland James V–James VII, Edinburgh 1965.
All the Queen’s Men: Power and Politics in Mary Stewart’s Scotland, New York
1983.
Donovan, R. K., No Popery and Radicalism: Opposition to Roman Catholic Relief in
Scotland 1778–1782, New York 1987.
Dwyer, J., Mason, T. A. and Murdoch, A., New Perspectives in the Politics and
Culture of Early Modern Scotland, Edinburgh 1981.
Graham, H. G., The Social Life of Scotland in the Eighteenth Century, 2, vols.,
London 1899.
Hont, I. and Ignatieff, M., Wealth and Virtue: The Shaping of the Political Economy
in the Scottish Enlightenment, Cambridge 1983.
Makey, W., The Church of the Covenant 1637–1651: Revolution and Social Change
in Scotland, Edinburgh 1979.
Mason, R. A., Scotland and England 1286–1815, Edinburgh 1987.
334 Selected reading list
Mason, R., ed., Scots and Britons: Scottish Political Thought after the Union of 1603,
Cambridge 1994.
Morrill, J., ed., The Scottish Covenant in its British Context 1638–51, Edinburgh
1990.
Philipson, N. T. and Mitchison, R., eds., Scotland in the Age of Improvement,
Edinburgh 1970.
Smout, T. C., A History of the Scottish People 1560–1830, Edinburgh 1969.
Stevenson, D., Alisdair MacColla and the Highland Problem in the Seventeenth Cen-
tury, Edinburgh 1980.
Scottish Covenanters and Irish Confederates: Scottish-Irish Relations in the Mid-
Seventeenth Century, Belfast 1981.
Trevor-Roper, H. R., George Buchanan and the Ancient Scottish Constitution, Lon-
don 1966.
Whyte, I., Agriculture and Society in Seventeenth Century Scotland, Edinburgh
1979.
Williamson, A. H., Scottish National Consciousness in the Age of James VI: The
Apocalypse, the Union and the Shaping of Scotland’s Public Culture, Edinburgh
1979.
Wormald, J., Court, Kirk and Community: Scotland 1470–1625, London 1981.
Youngson, A. J., After the Forty-Five, Edinburgh 1973.
wa l e s
Jenkins, G. H., Literature, Religion and Society in Wales, 1660–1730, Cardiff
1978.
Jones, G. J., The Gentry and the Elizabethan State, Swansea 1977.
Lloyd, H. A., The Gentry of South-West Wales, 1540–1640, Cardiff 1968.
Morgan, P., The Eighteenth Century Renaissance, Llandybie, Dyfed, 1981.
Roberts, P. R., ‘The Union with England and the Identity of “Anglican” Wales’,
Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 5th series, 22 (1972), 49–70.
t h e at l a n t i c e m pi r e
Bailyn, B., The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution, Cambridge, Mass.,
1967.
The Origins of American Politics, New York 1968.
Clark, J. C. D., The Language of Liberty 1660–1832: Political Discourse and Social
Dynamics in the Anglo-American World, Cambridge 1994.
Greene, J. P., The Reinterpretation of the American Revolution, New York 1968.
Greene, J. P. and Pole, J. R., Colonial British America: Essays in the New History of
the Early Modern Era, Baltimore 1984.
Henretta, James A., The Evolution of American Society, London 1973.
Marshall, P. and Williams, G., The British Atlantic Empire before the American
Revolution, London 1980.
Pocock, J. G. A., ed., Three British Revolutions 1641, 1688, 1776, Princeton 1980.
Rich, P. B., Race and Empire in British Politics, Cambridge 1986; rev. edn 1990.
Selected reading list 335
Westerkamp, M. J., Triumph of the Laity: Scots-Irish Piety and the Great Awakening,
1625–1760, New York 1988.
T H E I N D U S T R I A L R E VO L U T I O N A N D I T S I M PAC T
england
Blake, R., Disraeli, London 1966.
Briggs, A., Victorian People, London 1954.
The Age of Improvement 1783–1867, London 1959.
ed., Chartist Studies, London 1959.
Cahill, G. A., ‘Irish Catholicism and English Toryism’, Review of Politics, 19
(1957), 62–76.
Chambers, J. D. and Mingay, G. E., The Agricultural Revolution 1750–1880, Lon-
don 1966.
Crouzet, F., The Victorian Economy, trans. A. S. Forster, London 1982.
Ensor, R. C. K., England 1870–1914, Oxford 1936.
Finn, Margot C., After Chartism: Class and Nation in English Radical Politics, 1848–
1874, Cambridge 1993.
Johnson, M. D., The Dissolution of Dissent 1850–1918, New York 1987.
Jones, Maldwyn A., ‘The Background to Emigration from Great Britain in the
Nineteenth Century’, in Perspectives in American History, vol. vii, D. Fleming
and B. Bailyn, eds., Cambridge, Mass. 1973.
Joyce, P., Work, Society and Politics: Culture of the Factory in Later Victorian England,
Hassocks 1980.
Joyce, P., Visions of the People: Industrial England and the Question of Class, 1848–
1914, Cambridge 1991.
Lubenow, W. C., Parliamentary Politics and the Home Rule Crisis: The British House
of Commons in 1886, Oxford 1988.
MacDonagh, O., States of Mind: A Study of Anglo-Irish Conflict 1780–1980,
London 1983.
McKenzie, R. and Silver, A., Angels in Marble: Working Class Conservatives in
Urban England, Chicago and London 1968.
Mathias, P., The First Industrial Nation: An Economic History of Britain, London
1969.
Neal, F., Sectarian Violence: The Liverpool Experience 1819–1914, Manchester
1988.
Norman, E. R., ed., Anti-Catholicism in Victorian England, London 1968.
Phillips, P. T., The Sectarian Spirit: Sectarianism, Society and Politics in Victorian
Cotton Towns, Toronto 1982.
Smith, D., North and South: Britain’s Economic, Social and Political Divide, London
1989.
Thomas, B., Migration and Economic Growth: A Study of Great Britain and the
Atlantic Economy, Cambridge 1954.
Thomas, B., ed., The Welsh Economy: Studies in Expansion, Cardiff 1962.
Thompson, F. M. L., English Landed Society in the Nineteenth Century, London
1963.
Webb, R. K., Modern England, 2nd edn, New York 1980.
336 Selected reading list
ireland
Beckett, J. C. and Glasscock, R. E., eds., Belfast: The Origin and Growth of an
Industrial City, London 1967.
Boyce, D. George, Nationalism in Ireland, 2nd edn, London 1991.
Callanan, F., The Parnell Split 1890–91, Cork 1992.
Clark, S. and Donnelly, J. S., eds., Irish Peasants: Violence and Unrest, 1780–1914,
Madison, Wis., 1983.
Connell, K. H., Irish Peasant Society, Oxford 1968.
Connolly, S. J., Priests and People in Pre-Famine Ireland 1780–1845, Dublin 1982.
Cruise O Brien, C., Parnell and His Party, Oxford 1957.
Cullen, L. M., The Emergence of Modern Ireland 1600–1900, New York 1981.
Gallagher, T., Glasgow; The Uneasy Peace: Religious Tension in Modern Scotland,
1819–1914, Manchester 1987.
Garvin, T., Nationalist Revolutionaries in Ireland, Oxford 1987.
Hoppen, K. T., Elections, Politics and Society in Ireland 1832–1885, Oxford 1984.
Jordan, D. E., Jr, Land and Popular Politics in Ireland: County Mayo from the Plan-
tation to the Land War, Cambridge 1994.
Kennedy, R. E. Jr, The Irish: Emigration, Marriage and Fertility, University of
California Press 1973.
Kennedy, L., Ell, P. S., Crawford, E. M., and Clarkson, L.A., Mapping the Great
Irish Famine, Dublin 1999.
Larkin, E., ‘The Devotional Revolution in Ireland, 1850–75’, American Historical
Review, 27 (1972), 625–52.
Lee, J., The Modernisation of Irish Society 1848–1918, Dublin 1973.
McDowell, R. B., Public Opinion and Government Policy in Ireland, 1801–1846,
London 1952.
O Tuathaigh, G., Ireland before the Famine 1798–1848, Dublin 1972.
s cot l a n d
Bumsted, J. M., The People’s Clearance: Highland Emigration to British North Amer-
ica, Edinburgh 1982.
Campbell, R. H., Scotland since 1707: The Rise of an Industrial Society, New York
1965.
Davie, G. E., The Democratic Intellect: Scotland and her Universities in the Nineteenth
Century, Edinburgh 1962.
Devine, T., The Great Highland Famine: Hunger, Emigration and the Scottish High-
lands in the Nineteenth Century, Edinburgh 1988.
Donnachie, I. and Whateley, C., The Manufacture of Scottish History, Edinburgh
1992.
Drummond, A. L. and Bulloch, J., The Church in Victorian Scotland 1843–74,
Edinburgh 1975.
Ferguson, W., Scotland: 1689 to the Present, Edinburgh 1968.
Flinn, M., ed., Scottish Population History, Cambridge 1977.
Gray, M., ‘Scottish Emigration: The Social Impact of Agrarian Change in the
Rural Lowlands, 1775–1875’, in Perspectives in American History, vol. vii,
D. Fleming and B. Bailyn, eds., Cambridge, Mass. 1973.
Selected reading list 337
wa l e s
Conway, A., ‘Welsh Emigration to the United States’, in Perspectives in American
History, vol. vii, D. Fleming and B. Bailyn, eds., Cambridge, Mass. 1973.
Davies, E. T., Religion and Society in the Nineteenth Century, Llandybie, Dyfed,
1981.
Dodd, A. H., The Industrial Revolution in North Wales, Cardiff 1971 (repr.)
Howell, D. W., Land and People in Nineteenth Century Wales, London 1977.
John, A. H., The Industrial Revolution of South Wales, Cardiff 1950.
Jones, D., Before Rebecca: Popular Protest in Wales 1793–1835, London 1973.
Jones, I. G., Explorations and Explanations, Gomer 1981.
Jones, I. G., Mid-Victorian Wales: The Observer and the Observed, Cardiff 1992.
Lambert, W. R., Drink and Sobriety in Victorian Wales c.1820–1895, Oxford 1983.
Morgan, K. O., Re-birth of a Nation: Wales 1880–1980, Oxford 1981. ed., Wales
in British Politics 1868–1922, Cardiff 1963, rev. edn 1970.
Morgan, Prys, ‘From Long Knives to Blue Books’ in R.R. Davies et al., Welsh
Society and Nationhood: Historical Essays Presented to Glanmoor Williams,
Cardiff 1984.
Smith, D., ed., A People and a Proletariat: Essays in the History of Wales 1780–1980,
London 1980.
Thomas, B., ed., The Welsh Economy: Studies in Expansion, Cardiff 1962.
Williams, D., The Rebecca Riots, Cardiff 1955.
Williams, G., Valleys of Song: Music and Society in Wales 1840–1914, Cardiff 1998.
W I T H D R AWA L F R O M E M P I R E
england
Marwick, A., Britain in the Century of Total War: War, Peace, and Social Change
1900–1967, Boston 1968.
Neal, F., Sectarian Violence: The Liverpool Experience 1819–1914, Manchester
1988.
Rose, E. J. B., Colour and Citizenship: A Report on British Race Relations, Oxford
1969.
Taylor, A. J. P., English History 1914–1945, Oxford 1965.
Townsend, P., Poverty in the United Kingdom: A Survey of Household Resources and
Standards of Living, London 1978.
ireland
Brown, T., Ireland: A Social and Cultural History 1922–79, London 1981.
Brown, T. N., Irish-American Nationalism, New York 1966.
338 Selected reading list
s cot l a n d
Campbell, R. H., The Rise and Fall of Scottish Industry 1707–1939, Edinburgh
1980.
Devine, T. M., ed., Scotland’s Shame? Bigotry and Sectarianism in Modern Scotland,
Edinburgh 2000.
Gallagher, Tom, Glasgow: The Uneasy Peace: Religious Tension in Modern Scotland,
Manchester 1988.
Edinburgh Divided: John Cormack and No Popery in the 1930s, Edinburgh
1988.
Gunnin, G. C., John Wheatley, Catholic Socialism and Irish Labour in the West of
Scotland 1906–1924, New York 1987.
Harvie, C., No Gods and Precious Few Heroes: Scotland 1914–80, Toronto 1981.
Henderson, R. A., The Location of Immigrant Industry within a UK Assisted Area:
The Scottish Experience, Oxford 1980.
Lenman, B., An Economic History of Modern Scotland 1660–1976, Hamden, Conn.
1977.
Lewis, T. M. and McNicoll, I. H., North Sea Oil and Scotland’s Economic Prospects,
London 1978.
McCrone, D., Understanding Scotland: The Sociology of a Stateless Nation, London
1992.
wa l e s
Cooke, P., Department Development in the United Kingdom Regions with Particular
Reference to Wales, Oxford 1980.
Dunkerly, D. and Thompson, A., Wales Today, Cardiff 1999.
Jones, G. Elwyn, The People of Wales, Llandysul, Cardigan 1999.
Smith, D., Wales! Wales? London 1984.
Smith, David B. and Williams, Gareth W., Fields of Praise, Cardiff 1980.
Williams, G., Social and Cultural Change in Contemporary Wales, London 1978.
Selected reading list 339
england
Ashby, M. K., Joseph Ashby of Tysoe 1859–1919, Cambridge 1961.
Blythe, R., Akenfield: Portrait of an English Village, London 1969.
Hoskins, W. G., The Midland Peasant: Economic and Social History of a Leicestershire
Village, London 1957.
Lubenow, W. C., Parliamentary Politics and the Home Rule Crisis: The British House
of Commons in 1886, Oxford 1988.
Roberts, R., The Classic Slum: Salford Life in the first Quarter of the Century, Manch-
ester 1971.
Spufford, M., Contrasting Communities: English Villagers in the Sixteenth and Sev-
enteenth Centuries, Cambridge 1974.
Waller, P. J., Democracy and Sectarianism: A Political and Social History of Liverpool
1868–1939, Liverpool 1981.
ireland
Akenson, D. H., Between Two Revolutions Islandmagee: County Antrim 1798–1920,
Hamden, Conn. 1979.
Arensberg, C. M. and Kimball, S. T., Family and Community in Ireland, Cam-
bridge, Mass. 1940.
Dunne, T., Rebellions: Memoir, Memory and 1798, Dublin 2004.
Fox, R., The Tory Islanders: A People of the Celtic Fringe, Cambridge 1978.
Harris, R., Prejudice and Tolerance in Ulster: A Study of Neighbours and ‘Strangers’
in a Border Community, Manchester 1972.
Hart, P., The IRA and its Enemies: Violence and Community in Cork 1916–1923,
Oxford 1998.
Nolan, W., Fassadinin: Land, Settlement and Society in South-East Ireland, 1600–
1850, Dublin 1979.
Whyte, J., Interpreting Northern Ireland, Oxford 1990.
s cot l a n d
Buchan, D., The Ballad and the Folk, London 1972.
Cregeen, E. R., ‘The Changing Role of the House of Argyll in the Scottish
Highlands’, in History and Social Anthropology, ed. I. M. Lewis, London
1968.
Gaskell, P., Morvern Transformed: A Highland Parish in the Nineteenth Century,
Cambridge 1968.
Walker, G. and Gallagher, T., Sermons and Battle Hymns: Protestant Popular Culture
in Modern Scotland, Edinburgh 1990.
340 Selected reading list
wa l e s
Rees, A. D., Life in a Welsh Countryside, Cardiff 1950.
I M P E R I A L H I S TO RY
au s t r a l i a
Blainey, G., The Tyranny of Distance, Melbourne 1975.
Clark, C. M. H., A History of Australia, vols. i–iv, Melbourne 1962–81.
Day, David, The Great Betrayal: Britain, Australia and the Onset of the Pacific War,
1939–42, London 1988.
Inglis, K. S., The Australian Colonists: An Exploration of their Social History, Mel-
bourne 1974.
Ward, R., The History of Australia: The Twentieth Century, New York 1977.
new zealand
Oliver, W. H., with Williams, B. R., The Oxford History of New Zealand, Oxford
1981.
c a n a da
Brebner, J. B., Canada: A Modern History, new edn, rev. and ed. by D. C. Masters,
Ann Arbor 1970.
Galbraith, J. K., The Scotch, London 1964.
Innis, H. A., The Fur Trade in Canada, rev. edn, Yale 1962.
Senior, H., Orangeism: The Canadian Phase, Toronto 1972.
u n i t e d s tat e s
Thernstrom, S., ed., Harvard Encyclopedia of American Ethnic Groups, Cambridge,
Mass. 1980.
Index
341
342 Index
Isle of Man 17, 43, 54, 60, 69, 90, 95, Kett, Robert (d. 1549) 164
101, 113, 115, 153, 280, 299, 303 Kettle, Tom 280
Isle of May 114 Khan, Amir 316
Islington 300 Kidd, Colin 218
Italy 138, 140, 153 Kilburn 300
Kildare 147, 148
Jackson map (Professor K. J. Jackson) 32 house of 180
Jacobites 207 lordship of 151
rebellion of the 176 Kilkenny 120, 121, 147, 150, 180
Jacobitism 179, 187, 190, 212–14 Confederation of 182
Irish 203 Killaloe 76, 78
James I of England (1566–1625) 188, 215; Killeshin 77
see also James VI of Scotland Killiecrankie, battle of (1689) 179, 189
James II of England (James VII of Kilmallock castle 148
Scotland) (1633–1701) 153, 169, Kilmarnock 246, 247
179, 189, 190, 192 Kilmore 76
James III of Scotland (1451–88) 147, 210 Kincora 78
James IV of Scotland (1473–1513) 150–1 King Lear 154
James VI of Scotland (1566–1625) 151, ‘Kingdom of Scots’ 3, 10
159, 166, 167, 177, 187 Kings Lynn 104
James VIII (Old Pretender) 189 Kinnock, Neil 308
James, Henry (1843–1916) 198 Kinsale, battle of (1601) 157, 181
James, Mervyn 165 Kintyre 175
Japan 299, 301 Kirkcudbright 17
Jarrow 286 Kirk Session of Edinburgh 175
hunger marches 286 Kirk Session of Morton 209
Jedburgh 115 Knighton 95
Jefferson, Thomas 199 Knights Hospitallers of St John 95, 121
Jerpoint abbey (Co. Kilkenny) 121, 122 Knock (Co. Mayo), apparition at 263
Jerusalem 45 Knowles, Professor David 100
Jesuits 173 Knox, John (c. 1505–72) 134, 159, 175
John of Fordun 155 Kufic dirhams 63
John of Gaunt, duke of Lancaster
(1340–99) 137, 139, 140, 154 Labour party 271, 273, 285, 288, 289,
John XXIII, Pope 313 292, 308, 310
John, King (1167–1216) 116 rise of
John Paul II, Pope (1709–84) 58 in Scotland 295–6
Johnson, Dr Samuel (1709–84) 203 in Wales 295
Jones, Edgar 272 Lacey, Hugh de 119, 122
Jones, Griffiths, of Llandowror Lagan valley 221
(1683–1761) 200 La Grande Chartreuse 103
Joyce, James (1882–1941) 296 Laigin 53
Lambay Island 40
Keady 205 Lambeth 300
Keating, Geoffrey 185, 187 Lancashire 73, 85, 87, 195, 219, 229
Kellas, J. G. 296 cotton industry in 286
Kells 77 Irish vote in
Kells (Co. Antrim) 264 Lancaster, house of 170
Kells (Co. Kilkenny) 121 Land Act (1870) 253, 267
Keneally, Thomas 29 Land Act (1881) 244, 253, 256, 257, 268,
Kenilworth castle 137 271
Kennedy, John F. 314 Lanfranc (c.1005–89) 97
Kent 17, 49, 66 Lansdowne, marquess of 235, 254
Kenya 275 Laoghaire, King 58
Kerry, Co. 132 Larkin, Professor Emmet 263
352 Index
MacDonnells of Antrim 144, 175, 179, ‘Manchester Martyrs’ 219, 224, 253, 265
180 Manchester School of Fair Trade 228
MacDonnell, Sorley Boy 87 Manchester, William Montagu, duke of
MacDougall clan 86–87, 113, 115, 145, (1768–1843) 263
150 Mannix, Daniel, archbishop of Melbourne
MacDowell clan 150 (1864–1963) 276
McFarlane, K. B. 130 Mansels 172
MacFirbisigh family 151 Marcán 78
MacGabhráin, Aedhán 45 March, earl of 137
MacGiolla Padraig 151 Margam, lands of 172
MacHale, Archbishop John (1791–1881) Marlowe, Christopher (1564–93) 134
264 Marshall, William, earl of Pembroke
Machiavelli, Nicolò 198 (d. 129) 102
MacKenna, T.P. 296 Martin, Professor F. X. 118
MacKenzie family 145, 176 Martineau, Harriet (1802–76) 224
MacLean family 177 Mary I, Queen of England (1516–58) 164
MacLellan (victim of Black Douglas) 144 Mary, Queen of Scots 162, 167, 176–7,
MacLeod family 176 186
MacLeod, Iain (1913–70) 294 Mason, Roger 155, 185, 187
MacMail na mBo, Diarmaid 75 Massey 277
Macmillan, Maurice Harold, earl of Matilda, Queen (1102–67) 104
Stockton (1894–1986) 294 Maume, Patrick 279
MacMorris 154 Maxton, James (1885–1946) 285
MacMurrough, Aoife 118 Maynooth 150
MacMurrough, Art (d.1283) 127, 149 St Patrick’s College 236
MacMurrough, Diarmaid (c. 1110–71) Maynooth Grant 224, 232, 273
75, 76, 77, 81, 97, 117–18 Mayo 123, 180
MacMurrough family 71, 121, 122, 123, Mazzini 265
126, 127, 151 Meath, Co. 78, 98, 119, 120, 123
MacNamara 149 Medici, Marie de 162
MacNeill, Eoin (1867–1945) 118, 269 Mediterranean 13, 18
Macpherson, James (1736–96) 58, Medusa, mask 17
212–14, 218, 244 Melbourne, Orangeism in 276
MacSheehy family 150, 179 Mellifont 122
MacSweeney family 150, 151, 179 Melville, Andrew 187
MacWilliam family 114, 151 Menai Straits 110, 251
Mael Sechlainn I (d. 862) 71 Mercia 6, 49, 60, 62, 65, 66, 67, 82, 106,
Magna Carta 101, 102, 130, 131, 185 107
Magnus Barefoot 95 Merfyn Frydi 84
Maguire family 124 Merioneth 172
Maic Conmidhe 123 Merryman, Marcus 186
Maiden Castle 17, 19 Merseyside 219
Maid of Norway 115 Merthyr 240
Maitland, Frederick William (1850–1906) rising of 1831 249
48, 64, 105, 324 Merton 115
Major, John 308, 309, 311 Methodism 173, 194, 230
Malachy (c. 1094–1148) 77 Calvinistic 199, 200–2
Malchus of Lismore 77 Wesleyan 232
Malcolm II (c. 950–1034) 72 Miall, Edward (1809–81) 232
Malcolm III (Canmore) (c. 1031–93) 95, Middle English period 106
100, 113 Middlesbrough 229
Mallow 152 Midhe 71, 117, 118, 119
Manchester 219, 257 midlands 219
Chartist procession in 250 Mı́l 58, 75
Manchester Guardian 259 Sons of 185, 187
354 Index