Edward I and his judges delivered some of the most resounding obiter dicta on the nature of law and justice in the medieval period; but on occasion they found themselves at the receiving end of such pontificating practices. One such occasion took place at Oswestry in January 1279. Walter de Hopton and his fellow justices were ambling their way through the interminable dispute between Llywelyn ap Gruffudd, prince of Wales, and Gruffudd ap Gwenwynwyn, lord of Powys and client of die English king. In rotund phrases, at once deeply flattering and profoundlychallenging to Edward I, Llywelyn delivered himself of a grand declaration about the relationship of law, people and political power:

Each province under die empire of the lord King has its own laws and customs according to the habit and usage of the parts in which it is situated—for example, die Gascons in Gascony, the Scots in Scodand, the Irish in Ireland and the English in England. This indeed exalts rather than diminishes the crown of the lord King. The Prince accordingly requests diat he likewise should have his Welsh law and should proceed according to it. He has all the more reason for making diis request since the King, of his own free will, in die recent peace treaty concluded between diem, granted to Llywelyn and all Welshmen die right to have their own law. By natural justice (de jure communi) he ought to have Welsh law and custom, just as other peoples(naciones) under the empire of the lord King have their laws and customs according to their language, or ethnic affiliation (secundum linguam suam).

There are grounds for seeing an increasing sophistication in the development of a self-conscious perception of ‘English’ cultural unique-ness and individuality towards the end of the ninth century, at least in some quarters, and for crediting King Alfred's court circle with its expression. King Alfred was not, as Orderic Vitalis described him, ‘the first king to hold sway over the whole of England’, which tribute might rather be paid to his grandson Æthelstan. He was, however, as his obituary in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle described him, ‘king over the whole English people except for that part which was under Danish rule’. Through his promotion of the term Angelcynn to reflect the common identity of his people in a variety of texts dating from the latter part of his reign, and his efforts in cultivating the shared memory of his West Mercian and West Saxon subjects, King Alfred might be credited with the invention of the English as a political community.

Considering the high personal profile and influence of Isabeau of Bavaria during her time as queen of France between 1385 and 1422, it is extraordinary that she has not been the subject of more sustained serious academic study in the past, and that so little is known about her. The woman at the centre of such a turbulent period of Anglo-French war and internal conflict is far too often dismissed in the space of a few paragraphs; even then, what is written about her is often one-sided, two-dimensional and, in many cases, plain wrong. The history of Isabeau of Bavaria so far has largely been a fabricated mixture of gossip and propaganda which has been absorbed into historical tradition and repeated so often that, to many, legend has become indistinguishable from fact. For a mere two decades it has been accepted that: ‘Isabeau ne mérite point la réputation qui lui fut faite’, and it cannot be a coincidence that the few historians who have devoted any time to research on Isabeau all have come to the conclusion that her infamous legacy is not deserved. Yet, the movement for Isabeau of Bavaria's rehabilitation has not been as prominent as it might have been: Vallet de Viriville only wrote a few articles about her, Marcel Thibault never produced the promised second part of his biography and Yann Grandeau sadly died before his research papers could be developed into a complete work. The very first line that Thibault wrote in 1901 makes the claim that: ‘L'histoire vraie et complète d'Isabeau de Bavière n'a jamais été ecrite’ and, despite recent scholarly work, this still seems to be die case almost a century later.

In Emlyn Williams's play, The Corn is Green (1938), an Englishwoman arriving in Wales is asked an important question: ‘Are you Church or Chapel?’ Since the seventeenth century, when non-Anglican places of worship made their appearance, this question has indeed been important, sometimes momentous. ‘Church’ has had one kind of resonance in religion, politics and society; ‘chapel’ has had another. Even in unreligious households, people may still opt for ‘church’ when the bread is cut (the rounded end) or ‘chapel’ (the oblong part). The distinction is far older than the seventeenth century, however, by at least five hundred years. There were thousands of chapels in medieval England, besides the parish churches, when religion is often thought of as uniformly church-based. Although these chapels differed in some ways from those of Protestant nonconformity, notably in worship, they also foreshadowed them. Locations, architecture, social support and even religious diversity are often comparable between the two eras. Arguably, the creation of chapels by non-Anglicans after the Reformation marked a return to ancient national habits.

I want to plunge into my subject by adopting that practice well known to our medieval predecessors, namely to use an exemplum, because at once it transports us into the heart of the problem to be addressed. The event is recounted by Orderic Vitalis in Book Six of his Ecclesiastical History, and describes the practice of a Norman priest called Gerold who served in the household of the great earl of Chester Hugh of Avranches (1071–1101). Gerold was, apparently, a devoted priest who regularly said the offices for the day and offered Mass, but beyond this he wanted die men of the earl's household to live a better life. That desire he discharged by telling them about how some of their forebears had lived:

To great lords, simple knights, and noble boys alike he gave salutary counsel and he made a great collection of tales of the combats of holy knights, drawn from the Old Testament and more recent records of Christian achievements, for them to imitate. He told them vivid stories of the conflicts of Demetrius and George, of Theodore and Sebastian, of the Theban Legion and Maurice its leader, and of Eustace, supreme commander of the army and his companions, who won die crown of martyrdom in heaven. He also told diem of the holy champion, William, who after long service in war renounced die world and fought gloriously for die Lord under die monastic rule. And many profited from his exhortations, for he brought them from the wide ocean of the world to die safe haven of life under the Rule.

Cobbett remains best known to historians and to a wider audience as one of the two or three major figures in the popular radicalism of the early nineteenth century: one of the leading actors in the agitations which eventually led to the Great Reform Act of 1832 and a persistent tribune of the people at a time of profound economic and social change. Fundamental to his influence and reputation was his career as a popular journalist, in his own time regarded as a phenomenon and capable of almost single-handedly turning the labouring poor from machine-breaking and insurrection into more peaceful and productive paths. Famously, Cobbett was envisaged in Bamford's Passages in the Life of a Radical as the instrument whereby the disturbances of the post-war years were channelled into parliamentary reform. Opening his account of 1816 with a great litany of riot, insurrection and distress, Bamford noted that it was also in 1816 that Cobbett wrote his Address to the Journeymen and Labourers, published in November 1816 as the sole contents of the first cheap edition of the Register, priced at twopence. Cobbett's linking of ‘our present miseries’ to the need for parliamentary reform had an immense circulation, reaching an estimated 200,000 within two months. Its effects were no less dramatic according to Bamford:

… the writings of William Cobbett suddenly became of great authority; they were read on nearly every cottage hearth in the manufacturing districts of ‘South Lancashire, in those of Leicester, Derby and Nottingham; also in many of the Scottish manufacturing towns.

For Hotspur, honour was a thing self-evident—easy to recognise and to defend. As his name suggests, the younger Percy equated honour with battle, with the supposed clarities of spilt blood and martial conquest. We can all agree, I think, that honour was a touchstone for both the fictional and the authentic Percies, as well as for most other early modern people. However, from the distance of three centuries (as well, of course, as from the perspective of other characters in Henry IV) the concept seems considerably more complicated than Hotspur's claims imply.

In 1576 William Cecil, Lord Burghley, was engaged in one of the most painful disputes of his distinguished career: a bitter conflict with the earl of Oxford who had married, and then repudiated, his beloved daughter Anne. Cecil's distress erupted in a series of memoranda enumerating die injuries inflicted by die earl. At the end of the most comprehensive of these documents he briefly resumed his other role, as mentor and Polonius to the young de Vere. Remember, he begged him, who he was and what the world expected of him: above all remember that ‘the gretest possession that any man can have is honor, good name, good will of many and of the best sort’. This appeal to honour as good reputation among the wisest and best was unlikely to move his renegade son-in-law, whose understanding of the honour code, if we may judge by his actions, is that it provided justification for the wilful individualism of the nobleman. But Cecil's choice of language has resonance in the broader context of thinking about reputation in the late sixteenth century. It eschews excessive personal pride in favour of a balanced appeal to the judgment of one's peers, yet it is scarcely an elevated perception of virtuous Protestant honour of the kind associated with another of Cecil's protègès, Philip Sidney.

In the parish churches and cathedrals of England and Wales stand many thousands of early modern funeral monuments. Typically, these are elaborate structures of carved stone, often painted and decorated in bright colours and trimmed with gilding. Their complex programmes of inscribed text, allegorical figures, heraldic emblazons and sculpted effigies are set within architectural frameworks. With a few exceptions, such as the famous memorials to Queen Elizabeth, William Shakespeare or John Donne, these monuments are relatively little studied and little known. However, they were extremely costly to their patrons and prominently displayed in churches in purpose-built family chapels or against the wall of the sanctuary. Contemporary comment reveals that they were accorded high status by both specialist commentators, such as antiquaries and heralds, and by the patrons who invested in them so heavily. All-in-all, they represent what was the most important kind of church art made in the post-Reformation England, a period when there was a great deal of general uncertainty about the status of visual experience and particular worries about the legitimacy of religious imagery.

Notions of honour and reputation were ubiquitous and important in early modern England for a variety of reasons. They were part and parcel of how individuals in this society conceived of the relationship between the personal and the public, and between the projection and the perception of one's character. More particularly, they lay at the heart of two crucial issues: how people thought about social status, and about the differences between men and women.

In seventeenth-century England honour was a concept which had meaning for men in the private or domestic spheres as well as in the public spheres of their lives. Indeed, failure to prove an honourable man at home could exclude men from entering any honour community outside it. Above all else, men from whatever social status were only held worthy of honour if they could demonstrate control over their wives, children and servants. Hence honour was a concept which was vital to the upholding of male power. To achieve that power or control men were encouraged to adopt behaviour which laid emphasis on two key gender characteristics which were thought to distinguish them from women: physical strength and reason. As Sir Thomas Smith explained in 1583, God had intended to give the male ‘great wit, bigger strength, and more courage to compel the woman to obey by reason or force’. Men used their claim to reason to legitimise their authority over women; the first Marquis of Halifax explained to his daughter in a letter of 1688:

That there is Inequality in the Sexes, and that for the better Economy of the World, the Men, who were to be the Law-givers, had the larger share of Reason bestow'd upon them…Your Sex wanteth our Reason for your Conduct, and our Strength for your Protection.

The history of honour in early modern English society has tended of necessity to focus on dishonour. The ways in which women and men were defamed, shamed and dishonoured have seemed to offer a vivid insight into how what we call ‘honour’ worked in early modern society. And yet honour and dishonour were not exactly correspondent points on the same axis of values: what was dishonouring was not necessarily the opposite of what constituted honour. This was especially true where sex was concerned; sexual conduct could be dishonouring in all sorts of ways, but rarely if ever did it confer honour. Sexual dishonour was a concept and a process with a disrupting power of its own, applied most powerfully to women.

Within the historiography of gender and reputation in early modern Europe, female and male honour are usually presented as being incommensurable; yet they are constantly compared. Female honour has been discussed primarily in the context of sexual reputation. Male honour is commonly imagined as ‘more complex’, involving matters of deference, physical prowess, economic and professional competence and die avoidance of public ridicule. Thus the predominant model of gendered honour has been oppositional—female to male, private to public, passive to active, individual to collective and, by extension, chastity to deeds. Such a model, however, is misconceived. Just as the honour of men could be bound up with sexuality and the body, so these constituted merely one—albeit powerful—concomitant of feminine honour. Sexual probity was indeed central to the dominant discourse of early modern gender ideology, and historians have quite properly noted the significance of a social code of female honour ‘which was overwhelmingly seen in sexual terms’. But the potency of this discourse has itself frequently led to the selection of sources in which sexual conduct and reputation are central issues, and in which sexual constructions of female dishonour are immediately visible Because women's honour has effectively been imagined in terms of dishonour, constructions of shame—especially those associated with sexuality and sexual behaviour—have been privileged over, or compounded with, those of affront. Even when it has been noted that sexual insult could be a mundane response ‘in every sort of local and personal conflict’, conceptualisations of women's honour have been defined overwhelmingly by the nature of such responses rather than the conflicts themselves.

Richard Cust connected honour to his work on political culture and the gentry. He introduced the work of Mervyn James on honour as a framework for thinking about behavioural change over time. He suggested that the new historical approach is a multi-layered rather than a teleological one. Certain speakers had emphasised change rather than continuity over time, while others challenged such an approach. Important new themes had been introduced by the conference speakers, such as the importance of lineage, the impact of the companionate marriage, the relationship between public and private notions of honour and the acceptability of violence as a means of defending or challenging honour. He suggested two related ways of thinking about honour that had not been touched on by any of the speakers: the notion of ‘honesty’ to refer to a godly magistrate following his conscience, and the importance of godliness generally, a pious reputation as key means of establishing one's honour.