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The Meaning of “Britain” in Medieval and Early Modern England

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  21 December 2012

Alan MacColl
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Journal of British Studies , Volume 45 , Issue 2 , April 2006 , pp. 248 - 269
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Copyright © North American Conference of British Studies 2006

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References

1 Davies, R. R. discusses “Britain” as an idea in the Middle Ages in his The First English Empire: Power and Identities in the British Isles, 1093–1343 (Oxford, 2000), 31–53Google Scholar. He concentrates on the use of the term to denote the whole island, which is only one of the meanings explored in this article. For the equation of Britain with England in the late Middle Ages, see Mason, Roger A., “The Scottish Reformation and Anglo-British Imperialism,” in Scots and Britons: Scottish Political Thought and the Union of 1603, ed. Mason, Roger A. (Cambridge, 1994), 161–86CrossRefGoogle Scholar, at 163–65. Mason comments that “these various usages over time would doubtless repay closer study” (165). In MacColl, Alan, “The Construction of England as a Protestant ‘British’ Nation in the Sixteenth Century,” Renaissance Studies 18 (2004): 582–608CrossRefGoogle Scholar, I explore an influential sixteenth-century conception according to which “British” meant exclusively English and Protestant.

2 This study owes an obvious debt to Hay, Denys's seminal article, “The Use of the Term ‘Great Britain’ in the Middle Ages,” Proceedings of the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland 81 (1958): 55–66Google Scholar, reprinted as an appendix in Hay, Denys, Europe: The Emergence of an Idea, rev. ed. (Edinburgh, 1968), 128–44Google Scholar. References in the present article are to the reprint. See also Bindoff, S. T., “The Stuarts and Their Style,” English Historical Review 60 (1945): 192–216CrossRefGoogle Scholar, upon which Hay's article itself draws.

3 For the treatment of Britain and its geography by medieval writers, see Davies, The First English Empire, 35–36.

4 The beginning of Henry of Huntingdon's Historia Anglorum (ca. 1129) describes these changes of name: “This, the most celebrated of islands, formerly called Albion, later Britain, and now England, is situated in the north-west. It is 800 miles long and 200 broad.” Greenway, Diana, ed. and trans., Henry, Archdeacon of Huntingdon, Historia Anglorum: The History of the English People (Oxford, 1996), 12–13Google Scholar. Writing in the 1180s, Walter Map referred to Henry I as “king of England … , Lord of Scotland, Galloway, and the whole English island.” Map, Walter, De nugis curialium: Courtiers’ Trifles, ed. and trans. James, M. R. (Oxford, 1983), 472–73Google Scholar. The legend to the Corpus Christi version of Matthew Paris's map of Britain (ca. 1250) begins “Anglia habet in longitudine DCCC. [milia]” (England is 800 miles in length). Cited in Mitchell, J. B., “Early Maps of Great Britain: I, The Matthew Paris Maps,” Geographical Journal 81 (1933): 27–34CrossRefGoogle Scholar, at 28. Hugh M. Thomas comments acutely that the tendency of twelfth-century descriptions of Britain “to slide into descriptions of England” is testimony to the power of “England” as a construct. Thomas's whole investigation into the development of English national identity provides a valuable perspective on the topics explored in this study. See Thomas, Hugh M., The English and the Normans: Ethnic Hostility, Assimilation, and Identity, 1066–c. 1220 (Oxford, 2003), 265CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Interesting parallels are suggested by the work of Dauvit Broun on early medieval constructions of Scotland and the Scots. See, e.g., Broun, Dauvit, “Defining Scotland and the Scots before the Wars of Independence,” in Image and Identity: The Making and Remaking of Scotland through the Ages, ed. Broun, Dauvit et al. (Edinburgh, 1998), 4–17Google Scholar.

5 Hay, “Great Britain,” 131. For the earlier claims of Anglo-Saxon rulers to be “king of all Britain,” see Davies, The First English Empire, 36–37.

6 See Williamson, Arthur H., “Scotland, Antichrist and the Invention of Great Britain,” in New Perspectives on the Politics and Culture of Early Modern Scotland, ed. Dwyer, J. et al. (Edinburgh, 1982), 34–58Google Scholar; Mason, Roger A., “Scotching the Brut: Politics, History and National Myth in Sixteenth-Century Britain,” in Scotland and England, 1286–1815, ed. Mason, Roger A. (Edinburgh, 1987), 60–84Google Scholar, and “Scottish Reformation.”

7 Wright, Neil, ed., The Historia regum Britannie of Geoffrey of Monmouth, I: Bern, Burgerbibliothek, MS. 568 (Cambridge, 1984), chap. 115Google Scholar; for a translation, see Geoffrey of Monmouth: The History of the Kings of Britain, trans. Thorpe, Lewis (Harmondsworth, UK, 1966), 175Google Scholar. In subsequent references to the text of Geoffrey's Historia, I have given the chapter number of the Latin text followed by the corresponding page number in Thorpe's translation.

8 Gillingham, John, The English in the Twelfth Century: Imperialism, National Identity and Political Values (Woodbridge, UK, 2000), 19–39Google Scholar.

9 Though the Historia was evidently intended to serve the interests of the crown and nobility, the unusually large number of surviving manuscript copies, and the work's huge influence, show that it came to be widely read by those who were “literate” in the medieval sense of the term. See Crick, Julia, The Historia regum Britannie of Geoffrey of Monmouth, vol. 3, A Summary Catalogue of the Manuscripts (Cambridge, 1989)Google Scholar, and vol. 4, Dissemination and Reception in the Later Middle Ages (Cambridge, 1991)Google Scholar. For Geoffrey's readers, see also Riddy, Felicity, “Reading for England: Arthurian Literature and National Consciousness,” Bibliographical Bulletin of the International Arthurian Society 43 (1991): 314–32Google Scholar, at 317–22. The Historia comes near the top of Bernard Guenée's summary list of the most frequently copied works in the Middle Ages. See Guenée, Bernard, Histoire et culture historique dans l’Occident médiéval (Paris, 1980), 250–52Google Scholar.

10 Dalton, Paul, “The Topical Concerns of Geoffrey of Monmouth's Historia regum Britannie: History, Prophecy, Peacemaking, and English Identity in the Twelfth Century,” Journal of British Studies 44, no. 4 (2005): 688–712CrossRefGoogle Scholar. The editor kindly let me see a copy of this article before publication.

11 There is a fascinating moment in the Historia when Geoffrey himself forgets his conception of Britain as the whole island and refers to “the wall that the emperor Severus had formerly built between Britain and Scotland” (murum quem Seuerus imperator olim inter Britanniam et Scotiam construxerat) (199; 277). This is Hadrian's wall, originally described in Historia, 74 (126–27) as having been constructed by Severus to divide Deira from Albany (Deira being the region stretching north from the Humber to the border with Albany). Though it is conceivable that in the later reference Geoffrey was thinking of the practical limits of Roman Britannia, his mention of “Scotia” (rather than “Albania” or even “Caledonia”) suggests that the habit of identifying “Britain” with the kingdom of England was already beginning to form.

12 Thomas, The English and the Normans, 353. The process by which Britain came to be identified with England in English national historiography is surely analogous to “the tendency of England to butt into and even supersede descriptions of Britain” that Thomas himself notes (265).

13 Gillingham, The English in the Twelfth Century, 39.

14 Geoffrey's ambivalent position may be a distant intimation of the dual nationality that became such an important element in Welsh, Scottish, and Irish culture in later centuries. This essentially imperial concept received its classic formulation in Justinian's distinction between the communis patria (Rome) to which all citizens belonged and an individual's propria patria, his native land. Guenée, Bernard, States and Rulers in Later Medieval Europe, trans. Vale, Juliet (Oxford, 1985), 55Google Scholar. An example from the sixteenth century (written ca. 1545) is SirPrice, John's Historiae Brytannicae defensio (London, 1573)Google Scholar, in which a strong profession of allegiance to the English crown is combined with a fervent sense of Welsh identity, defined in terms of an ancient cultural heritage.

15 Alfred follows whole sections of the Historia virtually word for word. Examples of references to Britannia as the whole island can be seen in his rendering of Geoffrey's chaps. 32 and 39. Hearne, Thomas, ed., Aluredi Beverlacensis annales, sive historia de gestis regum Britanniae (Oxford, 1716), 15, 17Google Scholar.

16 The three earliest surviving Welsh translations date from the thirteenth century. See Roberts, Brynley F., “Geoffrey of Monmouth, Historia regum Britanniae and Brut y Brenhinedd,” in The Arthur of the Welsh: The Arthurian Legend in Early Welsh Literature, ed. Bromwich, Rachel et al. (Cardiff, 1991), 97–116Google Scholar, at 111.

17 The thirteenth-century date of the earliest Welsh translations of Geoffrey of Monmouth suggests the possibility that the French prose Brut, whose original version was produced after the death of Henry III, may have been composed in part as a response to Welsh claims on a British past that the English had come to regard as their own.

18 The differences between the Variant version and Geoffrey's own text, and the literary aims of the former, are summarized by Wright, Neil in The Historia regum Britannie of Geoffrey of Monmouth, vol. 2, The First Variant Version (Cambridge, 1988), lxx–lxxiiiGoogle Scholar. Chapter references are to this edition, the editor having kept the same numbering as the vulgate text. Translations are my own. However, as in the case of Geoffrey's own text, I have given two numbers when citing the Variant, the first referring to the Latin chapter, the second to the corresponding page in Thorpe's translation.

19 Ibid., lxxi–lxxii.

20 There are two references to Britain as an island in his version of the opening description (5; 24): “Insula hec Britones et Pictos et Scottos incolas recepit. Britones autem a quibus nomen accepit in primis a mari usque ad mare totam insulam insederunt” (This island received Britons, Picts and Scots as settlers. However, the Britons from whom it first took its name occupied the whole island from sea to sea).

21 Vulgate, “tocius insule non dominari”; Variant, “tocius regni dominium non habere.” Vulgate, “monarchiam totius insule”; Variant, “monarchiam tocius regni.” The same sort of substitution (or, on occasion, omission) of references to the whole island of Britain occurs in chaps. 34 (89), 37 (92), 39 (93), 47 (101), 53 (106), 70 (124), 77 (130), 80 (133: two references), 86 (141), and 87 (141). A reference to “the British Isles” in Thorpe's version of chap. 77 (130) has no counterpart in the Latin text.

22 Vulgate 186; Variant 186/7; Thorpe 265.

23 “Hinc Angli Saxones uocati sunt qui Loegriam possederunt et ab eis Anglia terra postmodum dicta est.”

24 Geoffrey himself refers to “Anglia” only once, and that is with a contemporary application in his dedication to Stephen as “rex Anglie” (3; not in Thorpe). There are two further examples in the Variant. Chapter 188 has Augustine being sent “in Angliam,” where Geoffrey has him going to Britain to preach to the English (in Britanniam ut Anglis uerbum Dei predicaret). The other reference to “Anglia” in the Variant version, in chap. 207, is less clear: “Degenerati autem a Brittanica nobilitate Gualenses qui in parte boreali Anglie remanserunt numquam postea Loegriam uel ceteras australes partes recuperauerunt” (Having fallen away from their noble British state, the Welsh who remained in the northern part of Anglia never afterwards regained Loegria or the other southern regions). Here “Anglia” seems to be a larger unit of which the former Loegria and “other southern regions” are only a part. One manuscript solves the problem by substituting “in parte boreali insule” (in the northern part of the island). Wright, First Variant, 192.

25 For the medieval topos of the physical dimensions of Britain, see Davies, The First English Empire, 35–36.

26 See Blacker, Jean, “‘Ne vuil sun livre translater’: Wace's Omission of Merlin's Prophecies from the Roman de Brut,” in Anglo-Norman Anniversary Essays, ed. Short, Ian (London, 1993), 49–59Google Scholar. Blacker argues that the omission was “a move made not to avoid politics, but a political move made to avoid the wrong kind of politics,” 52.

27 “Ki cil furent e dunt il vindrent / Ki Engleterre primes tindrent” (Roman de Brut, 3–4; 3). Quotations from the Roman de Brut and their English translation, with line and page numbers, are from Weiss, Judith, ed. and trans., Wace's Roman de Brut: A History of the British, rev. ed. (Exeter, 2002)Google Scholar. Wace's opening lines show that his poem was written for recitation, and the character of the material he added to the basic narrative, for example, the detailed descriptions of battles, suggests a noble and knightly audience.

28 Leckie, R. William, The Passage of Dominion: Geoffrey of Monmouth and the Periodization of History in the Twelfth Century (Toronto, 1981)Google Scholar.

29 Holden, A. J., ed., Le roman de Rou de Wace, 3 vols., Société des Anciens Textes Français (Paris, 1970–73), 1:161Google Scholar.

30 “Brutus … applicuit in quandam insulam tunc Albion vocatam; … eam nomine suo Britanniam sociosque suos Britones appelavit. … Locrino primogenito illam partem Britannie que nunc Anglia dicitur.” Stones, E. L. G., ed. and trans., Anglo-Scottish Relations, 1174–1328 (Oxford, 1970), 194–95Google Scholar. A hundred years later, the same conception of Britain informs an almost identical account of the foundation of Britain and its division into three in the record of the proceedings between commissioners from England and Scotland, meeting to negotiate peace when Henry IV was pressing similar claims (350–51).

31 “Brut entre ses treis filz devisa l’isle jadis appelé Bretaine, ore Engleterre, a l’un dona il Logres, a l’autre Gales, au tiertz Escoce ore nomez.” Ibid., 226–27.

32 This is the title used by Dean, Ruth J. and Boulton, Maureen in Anglo-Norman Literature: A Guide to Texts and Manuscripts (London, 1999), 12Google Scholar. In its most commonly encountered form the work is a composite of two parts, a very brief prose history of the kings of Britain followed by a somewhat longer one of England, beginning with its division into five kingdoms after the coming of the English. Numerous manuscript copies survive of both the composite narrative and the latter part on its own, several dating from the first to the third quarter of the thirteenth century (12–15). The British portion of the text is based on Wace's Roman de Brut, acknowledged and quoted in some MS copies (e.g., Bodleian Library, MSS Tanner 195, fol. 255v, and Douce 115, fol. 67). For a modern edition, see Foltys, Christian, ed., Brutus, li rei de Engleterre, le livere de reis de Engleterre (Berlin, 1962)Google Scholar. The composite work is a significant development, as it is the first attempt to produce a continuous history of England in vernacular prose.

33 Brie, Friedrich W. D., ed., The Brut or the Chronicles of England, 2 vols., Early English Text Society Original Series, vols. 131, 136 (London, 1906, 1908), 1:12Google Scholar. The textual and bibliographical history of the prose Brut is awesomely complicated. For a summary, see Matheson, Lister M., The Prose Brut: The Development of a Middle English Chronicle, University of Arizona Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, vol. 180 (Tempe, AZ, 1998), 4–5, 30–37Google Scholar. Much of Brie's Middle English text is based on a late and corrupted version of the original French. Julia Marvin is producing an edition of the earliest French prose Brut, with an English translation.

34 Davies, The First English Empire, 2.

35 John Taylor argues that the French prose Brut was first addressed to magnates and gentry but that its audience soon widened to include other sections of the community such as the educated clergy and London merchants. See Taylor, John, English Historical Literature in the Fourteenth Century (Oxford, 1987), 111Google Scholar. For the relation of the work to the rise in vernacular lay literacy, see MacColl, Alan, “Rhetoric, Narrative and Conceptions of History in the French Prose Brut,” Medium Ævum 74 (2005): 288–310CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Fifty manuscripts survive of the French versions, 180 of the English translation, and twenty of a Latin one. Even in manuscript, the readership of the English-language version must have gone beyond any sectional interest. The thirteen printed editions of the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries are evidence of the work's continued popularity.

36 British Library, MS Cotton Cleopatra D III, fols. 77v–78.

37 Brie, The Brut, 1:11.

38 Ibid., 1:256.

39 Cited by Carpenter, David A. in The Struggle for Mastery: Britain, 1066–1284 (London, 2003), 526Google Scholar.

40 Ibid., 526.

41 “Duabus gentibus transmarinis uehementer saeuis, Scottorum a circio, Pictorum ab aquilone.” Colgrave, Bertram and Mynors, R. A. B., eds., Bede's Ecclesiastical History of the English People (Oxford, 1969), 1:12Google Scholar.

42 “Transmarinas autem dicimus has gentes non quod extra Britanniam essent positae, sed quia a parte Brettonum erant remotae, duobus sinibus maris interiacentibus, quorum unus ab orientali mari, alter ab occidentali Britanniae terras longe lateque inrumpit, quamuis ad se inuicem pertingere non possint.” Ibid., 1:12.

43 The version in British Library Royal MS 14. C. VII is significantly different, tending to emphasize the separateness of the whole of Scotland north of the Solway. For locations and reproductions, see Gilson, J. P. and Poole, Herbert, Four Maps of Great Britain Designed by Matthew Paris about A.D. 1250 (London, 1928)Google Scholar; and Mitchell, “Matthew Paris Maps.”

44 Quotations in Higden's Latin and John Trevisa's English translation are from Babington, Churchill, ed., Polychronicon Ranulphi Higden monachi Cestrensi, Rolls Series 41, 9 vols. (London, 1865–72)Google Scholar.

45 Higden, Ranulph, Prolicionycion [sic] (London, 1482), fol. xlviiiGoogle Scholar. Philip Schwyzer and Simon Mealor change the meaning of this passage by inserting an ellipsis where Caxton's text has “Scotland is an out stretchyng of the north partye of britayn,” quoting it simply as “Scotland … is departed in the south side from Britain with arms of the sea.” Schwyzer, Philip and Mealor, Simon, eds., Archipelagic Identities: Literature and Identity in the Atlantic Archipelago, 1550–1800 (Aldershot, 2004), 2Google Scholar.

46 “Primitus haec insula vocabatur Albion … ; tandem a Bruto eam acquirente dicta est Britannia. Deinde a Saxonibus sive Anglis eam conquirentibus vocata est Anglia.” The Rolls Series edition is itself a revealing record of Victorian thinking on British and English nationality. The textual apparatus shows that a majority of the manuscripts used in the edition give this chapter the heading “De Britannia,” as does Trevisa, but the editor chooses the one that reads “De Britannia Majori jam Anglia dicta.” In the list of contents in volume 2 he introduces his summaries of successive chapters as “England, continued,” even when the chapters concerned have nothing to do with England and are about matters such as the foundation of Edinburgh or the languages of the Scots and Welsh.

47 “Coepit Britannia post Bruti primi tempora tres habere partes principales, scilicet, Loegriam, Cambriam, Albaniam, quae nunc Scotia dicitur.” Trevisa must have been working from one of the manuscripts, which, like the majority in Babington's textual apparatus, have “Britannia insula” here.

48 John Taylor identifies 118 manuscripts of the Latin text, adding a “selected list” of nine fragments. See Taylor, John, The Universal Chronicle of Ranulf Higden (Oxford, 1966), 152–59Google Scholar. He also lists nine manuscripts of Trevisa's translation and one of the anonymous fifteenth-century translation mentioned later in this article (138–39). In his article on Higden in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Taylor comments that “many cathedral churches and larger religious houses possessed copies,” adding that “in the later middle ages copies were also owned by individual clerics as well as by parish churches, Oxford and Cambridge colleges, members of the nobility, and the wealthier merchants of London” (Taylor, John, “Higden, Ranulf,” in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford, 2004)Google Scholar; http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/13225).

49 Caius College Cambridge, MS 82 (MS B in the Rolls Series ed.). For the dating of this manuscript, see Babington, Polychronicon, 1:xlix.

50 See Kate Chedgzoy, “This Pleasant and Sceptred Isle: Insular Fantasies of National Identity in Anne Dowriche's The French Historie and William Shakespeare's Richard II,” in Schwyzer and Mealor, Archipelagic Identities, 25–42, at 25, 42.

51 The tiny map of an island on the orb above the St. George's cross banner in the Wilton Diptych (National Gallery, London) may be related to this tradition. The scene shows Richard II kneeling, having just offered the banner to the Virgin and Child. The orb itself is only a centimeter in diameter, but under magnification it is possible to make out the image of an island with trees and a castle, set in a sea of now tarnished silver leaf. See the description and photographs in Gordon, Dillian, “A New Discovery in the Wilton Diptych,” Burlington Magazine 134 (1992): 662–67Google Scholar, at 664–65. Though Gordon's explanation of what is going on in the diptych is persuasive, the evidence she presents for her claim that the miniature map “is intended to represent the island of Britain” is less convincing, especially since she goes on to refer to it confusingly as “the symbol of England” (667). The map does not look very like either Britain or England. This feature of the diptych deserves further investigation, as does the wider tradition of iconography that seems to lie behind Shakespeare's image of England as an island.

52 The Chronicles of Fabyan (London, 1516), sig. 6vGoogle Scholar.

53 Schwyzer and Mealor, Archipelagic Identities, 2.

54 “Countres: Regions or Counties,” Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd ed., s.v. “country,” I, 1.a, 2.a.

55 The Chronicles of Fabyan, sig. A2. “But if Britain was no more than England's ‘middle,’ does this mean that Ireland lay somewhere within England as well?” Schwyzer and Mealor, Archipelagic Identities, 2.

56 Hay, “Great Britain,” 131–34, 137–39.

57 Babington, Polychronicon, 1:383.

58 Hay, “Great Britain,” 138.

59 Ibid.

60 “Dico ergo omnes in Britannia natos Britannos.” Mair, John, Historia maioris Britanniae, tam Angliae quam Scotiae (Paris, n.d.), sig. a6Google Scholar.

61 “Quare tota portio insulae quam rex meridionalis insulae possidet, regnum Angliae dicitur, reliqua pars Scotiae regnum, et tamen hi omnes sunt Britanni, quod ex dictis liquere arbitror” (ibid.). It might be tempting to see “meridionalis insulae” as supporting the idea of southern Britain as an island discussed earlier. However, the author clearly means “the southern part of the island.” It is inconceivable that a Scotsman as learned and well traveled as Mair would have thought that Britain was literally divided into two islands.

62 “Britannia omnis, quae hodie Anglia & Scotia duplici nomine appellatur.” Polydori Vergilii Urbinatis Anglicae historiae libri vigintiseptem (Basel, 1555), sig. a3Google Scholar.

63 Malory, Thomas, Le Morte Darthur (London, 1529)Google Scholar, sig. a1. The editions of 1557 and 1582 repeat the passage identifying “grete Brytayne” with England.

64 Bindoff, “The Stuarts and their Style,” 193.

65 An Epistle Exhortatorie, in The Complaynt of Scotlande, ed. Murray, James A. H., Early English Text Society, Extra Series, vols. 17–18 (London, 1872–73), 238–56Google Scholar.

66 Ibid., 239.

67 Ibid., 238, 243.

68 Roger A. Mason notes that in the same year as Somerset's Epistle there appeared a pamphlet, printed cum privilegio by the king's printer, Richard Grafton, and entitled An Epitome of the title that the Kynges Maiestie of Englande hath to the souereigntie of Scotlande. See Mason, “Scotching the Brut,” 68. The pseudonymous author, “Bodrugan,” rebukes the Scots for fighting “against the mother of their awne nacion: I mean this realme now called Englande the onely supreme seat of thempire of greate Briteigne.” Murray, Complaynte of Scotlande, 247–56, at 250.

69 Bindoff, “The Stuarts and their Style,” 199, where he cites the use of the term without exploring its distinctively Protestant signification. The full titles of Bale's works are Illustrium maioris Britanniae scriptorum, hoc est, Angliae, Cambriae, ac Scotiae summarium (Ipswich, 1548)Google Scholar and Scriptorum illustrium maioris Brytanniae, quam nunc Angliam & Scotiam vocant: catalogus, 2 vols. (Basel, 1557, 1559)Google Scholar.

70 See MacColl, “Construction of England,” at 594–95.

71 Foxe, John, Actes and monuments of these latter and perillous dayes (London, 1563)Google Scholar. The Latin edition of 1559 describes itself as “pars prima in qua primum de rebus per Angliam & Scotiam gestis … narratio continetur” (the first part in which is contained first of all an account of events throughout England and Scotland).

72 MacColl, “Construction of England,” 595.

73 All on sig. B1 of The first and second volumes of Chronicles … : by Raphaell Holinshed, William Harrison, and others (London, 1587)Google Scholar.

74 Ibid., sigs. C2–C3.

75 MacColl, “Construction of England,” 601–2.

76 Hadfield, Andrew, Shakespeare, Spenser and the Matter of Britain (Basingstoke, 2004), 114CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Though in another chapter Hadfield warns against assuming that The Faerie Queene is “a poem in favour of a ‘British project,’” there is still the problem of what Spenser meant by “Britain” in the first place and what the British element in the poem might have signified to his readers.

77 McLaren, A. N., Political Culture in the Reign of Elizabeth I: Queen and Commonwealth, 1558–1585 (Cambridge, 1999), 172CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

78 SirCecil, Robert in Proceedings in the Parliaments of Elizabeth I, ed. Hartley, T. E., 3 vols. (London, 1981–95), 3:72–73Google Scholar. For an account of “rumours and reports of plots,” see Wernham, R. B., After the Armada: Elizabethan England and the Struggle for Western Europe, 1588–1595 (Oxford, 1984), 455–60Google Scholar.

79 Henry V, 1.1.169–73 (The Complete Works of William Shakespeare, ed. Peter Alexander [London, 1978]).

80 Kidd, Colin, “Protestantism, Constitutionalism and British Identity under the Later Stuarts,” in British Consciousness and Identity: The Making of Britain, 1533–1707, ed. Bradshaw, Brendan and Roberts, Peter (Cambridge, 1999), 321–42Google Scholar, at 322, 333.

81 Macinnes, Allan I., “The Multiple Kingdoms of Britain and Ireland: The ‘British Problem,’” in A Companion to Stuart Britain, ed. Coward, Barry (Oxford, 2002), 3–25Google Scholar, at 11.

82 See, e.g., Paterson, Lindsay, The Autonomy of Modern Scotland (Edinburgh, 1994)Google Scholar; Kidd, Colin, “Sentiment, Race and Revival: Scottish Identities in the Aftermath of Enlightenment,” in A Union of Multiple Identities: The British Isles, c. 1750–c. 1850, ed. Brockliss, Laurence and Eastwood, David (Manchester, 1997), 110–26Google Scholar; Richard J. Finlay, “Caledonia or North Britain? Scottish Identity in the Eighteenth Century,” in Broun et al., Image and Identity, 143–56; Graeme Morton, “What If? The Significance of Scotland's Missing Nationalism in the Nineteenth Century,” in Broun et al., Image and Identity, 157–76.