5 - The English nation: parent of nationalism?

Summary

The birth of the English nation was not the birth of a nation; it was the birth of the nations, the birth of nationalism. England is where the process originated.

Liah Greenfeld (1992: 23)

fluellen Captain MacMorris, I think, look you, under your correction, there is not many of your nation –

macmorris Of my nation? What ish my nation? Ish a villain and abastard and a knave and a rascal? What ish my nation?

Shakespeare, Henry V, Act 3 Scene 3

But here I am in Kent and Christendom.

Thomas Wyatt (1503–42) (in Hammond 1996: 25)

A sixteenth-century nationalism?

The rise of a school of British historians – James Campbell, Susan Reynolds, Patrick Wormald, John Gillingham, Rees Davies and others – proclaiming the existence of medieval English nationalism has been a lively feature of the contemporary scholarly scene. If their arguments do not convince – for reasons advanced in the preceding chapters – this is not to say that the challenge has not been stimulating. It has forced us to reconsider the meaning of nationalism. It has put in front of us a case that, were it to turn out as they present it, would be a remarkable example of precocity – yet another instance of that English tendency to go it alone. They raise again, that is, the whole question of ‘nations before nationalism’; were their strong expressions of national feeling and a real sense of nationhood before the coming of the ideology of nationalism in the nineteenth century?