No CrossRef data available.
We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.
We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 12 February 2009
SIR Geoffrey Elton begins his 'essay' on The English in 927, ‘the year in which Æthelstan, king of Wessex and Mercia, took over the Danish and English parts of Northumbria and thereby in effect also accepted the existence of a separate kingdom of Scodand’. It was a characteristic moment to choose. This is the date given by the Handbook of British Chronology, evidendy the consideration foremost in Sir Geoffrey's mind. Ædielstan was the first to declare (in effect) that ‘this realm of England is an empire’, which one might have suspected to be a factor too, had Elton not soon explicitly denied any Anglo-Saxon meaning to ‘such noise’. More pertinently, Ædielstan was actually the first king of about all of what is now England, and the first so to style himself officially. By any standards except his grandfather's he was one of die most gifted and well-counselled rulers in English history, whom only the quirks of surviving evidence and historiographical fashion have denied the status of a William the Conqueror or an Edward I.
page 318 note 1 Elton, G., The English (henceforth English), xi, 1, 20Google Scholar. On the editors' instructions (and by their good grace) I reproduce this sketch almost exactly as delivered at the Eltonfest of March 1996. The annotation now provided is designed only to support what assertions of substance I offer, and to direct interested readers to the best detailed treatment of the early medieval topics I raise. I owe my usual debt to the acuity and encouragement of Dr Jenny Wormald.
page 318 note 2 There is no fully satisfactory treatment of Æthelstan's reign, and probably never can be. Best results to date are to be had from conflating the different but complementary studies of Wood, M., ‘The Making of King Æthelstan's Empire: An English Charlemagne?’, in Ideal and Reality in Franhsh and Anglo-Saxon Society. Studies Presented to J. M. Wallace-Hadrill, ed.Wormald, P., Bullough, D. and Collins, R. (Oxford, 1983), pp. 250–72Google Scholar; and Dumville, D.: ‘Between Alfred the Great and Edgar the Peacemaker: Æthelstan, First King of England’, in his Wessex and England: From Alfred to Edgar (Woodbridge, 1992), pp. 141–71Google Scholar. Æthelstan's mistake, from the point of view of his historiographical fortunes, was to be at odds with the Winchester establishment who were the effective guardians of English historical tradition in the tenth century. However, a forthcoming paper by MrWood, gives better grounds than any yet for taking seriously the (?tenth-century, ??Malmesbury) account of the king that was reproduced by William of Malmesbury: Stubbs, W., ed., Wilklmi Malmesbiriensis … De Gestis Regum Anglorum, 2 vols., Rolls Series 90 (1887–1889), chs. 132–5, I, 144–52Google Scholar.
page 319 note 3 Aylmer, G. E., ‘The Peculiarities of the English State’, Journal of Historical Sociology, 3 (1990), 91–108CrossRefGoogle Scholar: Professor Aylmer wrote from the significant standpoint of an editor in the European Science Foundation project on ‘La genese de l'etat moderne’.
page 320 note 4 English, 229, 224, 70–1, 139, 159.
page 320 note 5 Irish influences have of course been much discussed (and not infrequently mispresented) by specialists; for the particular point made here, compare the important paper by Donahue, C., ‘Beowulf, Ireland and the Naturally Good’, Traditio, 7 (1949–1951), 263–77Google Scholar, with modern views represented by McCone, K., Pagan Past and Christian Present in Early Irish Literature, Maynooth Monographs 3 (Naas, 1990)Google Scholar. Welsh and Breton influences have been generally neglected, but are the subject of DrDumville's, promised England the Celtic World in the Ninth and Tenth Centuries (O'Donnell Lectures, 1978 & 1981)Google Scholar.
page 320 note 6 See, for example, Webster, L. and Backhouse, J., eds., The Making of England, British Museum, London (1991)Google Scholar, especially the sections on manuscripts.
page 321 note 7 Cf. Sawyer, P. H., ed., English Medieval Settlement (revised edn, 1979)Google Scholar; and for a different view of the Anglo-Saxon invasions from that taken above, Hodges, R., The Anglo-Saxon Achievement (1989), ch. 2Google Scholar; or Higham, N., Rome, Britain and the Anglo-Saxons (1992)Google Scholar. I hope to substantiate ray provocative remarks in a future paper on ‘The Anglo-Saxon Adventus: Fact or Figment?’
page 321 note 8 So Davies, R. R., ‘In Praise of British History’, in The British Isles 1100–1500. Comparisons, Contrasts and Connections, ed. Davies, R. R. (Edinburgh, 1988), 9–26Google Scholar.
page 321 note 9 English, 4–5, 8, 10–11, 13, 17, 19–20, 75.
page 321 note 10 English, 229; cf. Elton, G.R., F. W. Maitland (1985), 7–8, 21, 25–6, 97–8Google Scholar.
page 322 note 11 Now magisterially deployed in Charles-Edwards, T. M., Early Irish and Welsh Kinship (Oxford, 1993)Google Scholar; see also Stacey, R. Chapman, The Road to Judgement. From Custom to Court in Medieval Ireland and Wales (Philadelphia, 1994)Google Scholar; and the essays by Davies, W. and Walters, D. B. in Lawyers and Laymen. Studies in the History of Law Presented to Professor Dafydd Jenkins on his Seventy-Fifth Birthday, ed. Charles-Edwards, T. M., Owen, M. E. and Walters, D. B. (Cardiff, 1986)Google Scholar. For the wider anthropological picture, it is only necessary to cite Gluckman, M., Politics, Law and Ritual in Tribal Society (Oxford, 1965)Google Scholar.
page 322 note 12 Wallace-Hedrill, J. M., Early Germanic Kingship in England and on the Continent (Oxford, 1971), 13–16Google Scholar; I return to this issue in my chapter on ‘Kings and Kingship’ for Fouracre, P., ed., The New Cambridge Medieval History, I: c. 500–c. 700 (CambridgeGoogle Scholar, forthcoming).
page 322 note 13 English, 20–1. For the latest statements by the protagonists, see Chaplais, P., ‘The Royal Anglo-Saxon “Chancery” of the Tenth Century Revisited’, in Studies in Medieval History presented to R. H. C. Davis, ed. Moore, R. I. and Mayr-Harting, H. 1985), 41–51Google Scholar; and Keynes, S., ‘Regenbald the Chancellor [sic]’, Anglo-Norman Studies, 10 (1988), 185–222Google Scholar.
page 322 note 14 Among studies of Anglo-Saxon shires (which tend to be studies of society and economy in the area rather than institutional, let alone political, histories of the unit) are Heighway, C., Anglo-Saxon Gloucestershire (Gloucester, 1987)Google Scholar; Blair, J., Early Medieval Surrey. Landholding, Church and Settlement before 1300 (Stroud, 1991)Google Scholar; and Blair, J., Anglo-Saxon Oxfordshire (Oxford, 1994)Google Scholar. The one institutional study is of a lost unit: Whybra, J., A Lost English County. Winchcombeshire in the 10th and 11th Centuries (Woodbridge, 1990)Google Scholar.
page 322 note 15 Wormald, P., ‘A Handlist of Anglo-Saxon Lawsuits’, Anglo-Saxon England, 17 (1988), 279–80Google Scholar; Kennedy, A., ‘Law and Litigation in the Libellus Æthelwoldi episcopi’, Anglo-Saxon England, 24 (1995), 131–83Google Scholar.
page 323 note 16 Most conveniently consulted in Douglas, D., ed. English Historical Documents, II: 1042–1139 (2nd edn, 1980), no. 61Google Scholar. The most important modem study is Hart, C. R., The Hidation of Northamptonshire, Department of English Local History, Occasional Papers 2nd series no. 3 (Leicester, 1970)Google Scholar. See also Campbell, J., ‘The Late Anglo-Saxon State: A Maximum View’, Proceedings of the British Academy, 87 (1994), 40–65Google Scholar (and his forthcoming Ford Lectures on the same theme, especially chs. II–III).
page 323 note 17 English 21, 47, 58.
page 323 note 18 ‘Ethnogenesis’ is now not far short of an obsession in German and French early medieval studies. But see Heather, P., Goths and Romans 332–489 (Oxford, 1991), 322–30Google Scholar.
page 323 note 19 See the crucial, if inevitably isolated, evidence in Blak, E. O. ed., Liber Eliensis, Camden Society, 3rd series XCII (1962), bk II, ch. 25, 98–9Google Scholar.
page 324 note 20 English, 56. I have argued against Maitland's, position (and its Leges Henrici inspiration) in my ‘Maitland and Anglo-Saxon Law: Beyond Domesday Book’, in The History of English Law. Centenary Essays on ‘Pollock and Maitland, ed. Hudson, J., Proceedings of the British Academy 89 (1996), 13–17Google Scholar.
page 324 note 21 Gillingham, J., ‘1066 and the Introduction of Chivalry into England’, in Law and Government in Medieval England and Normandy. Essays in honour of Sir James Holt, ed. Garnet, G. and Hudson, J. (Cambridge, 1994), 31–55Google Scholar.
page 324 note 22 Cf. my ‘Engla Land: The Making of an Allegiance’, Journal of Historical Sociology, 7 (1994), 5–16Google Scholar; and ‘Giving God and King their Due: Conflit and its Regulation in the Early English State’, Settimane di Studio del Cento italiano di Studi sull' alto Medioevo 44 (1997)Google Scholar.
page 325 note 23 English, xii, 193, 210–12.
page 325 note 24 Ibid., 233–4.
page 326 note 1 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, H., The Englishman and his History Cambridge, 1944, vGoogle Scholar.
page 327 note 2 ‘It is regrettable sometimes that we should construe so English a system as ours in terms of continental political theory’, ibid., 116.
page 327 note 3 Perhaps he would have argued that women ought not to figure in a brief survey narrowly focused on presenting die English ‘through their public lives and outward experience’ (xi).
page 327 note 4 ‘unimpeachably English, teutonic and historically rooted, with no taint of abstract cosmopolitan arguments from metaphysical rights of man’—phrases which characterise Elton's sympathies rather well but which are in fact a description of Freeman's, E. A., Burrow, J. W., ‘“The Village Community” and the Uses of History in Late Nineteenth – Century England’, in N. McKendrick, Historical Perspectives, ed. McKendrick, N. (London, 1974), 264–5Google Scholar.
page 327 note 5 ‘the role of the Tudors was an absolute necessity’, ‘Butterfield, The Englishman and his History, 8.
page 327 note 6 The title of the second chapter of MacDougall, Hugh A. The Racial Myth in English History Montreal, 1982Google Scholar.
page 327 note 7 Cf. ‘Let me state a certainty. Late Anglo-Saxon England was a nation state’, Campbell, James, ‘The Late Anglo-Saxon State: A Maximum View’, Proceedings of the British Academy, 87 1995, 47Google Scholar.
page 328 note 8 After the Reformation there was a marked rise in Henry II's reputation thanks to his brush with Rome and his invasion of Ireland.
page 328 note 9 Hyams, P., ‘The Common Law and the French Connection’, Anglo-Norman Studies, 4 1981Google Scholar.
page 329 note 10 Vitalis, Orderic, The Ecclesiastical History, ed. Chibnall, M. Oxford, 1969–1980, VI, 553—5Google Scholar.
page 330 note 11 Short, I., ‘Tam Angli quam Franci: Self-Definition in Anglo-Norman England’, Anglo-Norman Studies, 18 1995, 156Google Scholar.
page 330 note 12 Gillingham, J., ‘The Beginnings of English Imperialism’, Journal of Historical Sociology, 5 1992Google Scholar; and ‘Foundations of a Disunited Kingdom’, in Uniting the Kingdom? The Making of British History, ed. Grant, A. and Stringer, K.J. 1995Google Scholar.
page 330 note 13 Short, I., ‘Patrons and Polyglots: French Literature in Twelfth-Century England’, Anglo-Norman Studies, 14 1991, 246–8Google Scholar. See also Turville-Petre, T., England the Nation. Language, Literature and National Identity, 1290–1340 (Oxford, 1996)Google Scholar, especially chapter 6 ‘Three Languages’.