2 - The Political Culture of the Palatinate

Summary

Recent accounts of community, especially the county community, in fourteenth- , fifteenth- , and sixteenth-century England place little emphasis on its cultural and ideological background, concentrating instead on its social, administrative or economic foundations. What attention there has been to the culture of community has been restricted to local histories and the portrayal of arms. Yet there are at least two grounds for suggesting that an exploration of this culture in Cheshire might be informative. Study of Brittany in the later medieval period has shown how a sense of community was deliberately bolstered through literature, inquiries into local rights, saints and the display of arms. It is also recognised that there was a distinctive feature of north-western English culture in the later Middle Ages, the continuing popularity of alliterative poetry. Michael Bennett has shown how works such as Gawain and the Green Knight were produced for circulation among Richard II’s north-western courtiers, and how attachment to this poetry extended from knightly families to relatively minor gentlemen, like Richard Newton. In the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries men like Humphrey Newton and Thomas Chetham continued to compose and collect alliterative verse. But this poetic tradition was not specific to Cheshire, and neither was it directly political. To understand the full significance of the cultural background to autonomy, therefore, we must examine more specifically the way that the palatinate was embedded in the culture of Cheshire. Work on ethnie and nations suggests more subtle means to examine the way a community was created, perpetuated itself and could be shaped. This emphasises common myths

which combine cognitive maps of the community’s history and situation with poetic metaphors of its sense of dignity and identity. The fused and elaborated myths provide an overall framework of meaning for the ethnic community, a mythomoteur, which ‘makes sense’ of its experience and defines its ‘essence’.

Cheshire’s feeling of distinctiveness was founded in a semi-mythical account of the county’s history which can be tested against this model.

Cheshire manuscripts frequently contain local history. Roger Walle (d. 1488), archdeacon of Coventry from 1442 and for a time canon and prebendary of St John’s, Chester, included a paraphrase of the earldom’s history in one of his manuscripts.