What do you think?
The Political Development of the British Isles 1100-1400
All too often British history means English history, and the histories of Wales, Scotland, and Ireland are left to scholars of the "Celtic Fringe." In this clear and authoritative introduction to the medieval history of the British Isles, the four countries are viewed together, revealing the similarities and differences between the regions. Frame traces the expansion of power in the Anglo-Norman aristocracy, church, and monarchy, and their successor, the Plantagenet state, and examines how the Scottish kings alone sustained and extended a rival orbit. Readily accessible to the general reader, the book covers a wide range of topics, including aristocracy, kingship, government, border societies, and the political communities that emerged on both sides of the Irish Sea by the late fourteenth century.
- GenresHistoryMedieval History
266 pages, Hardcover
First published July 26, 1990
About the author
Robin Frame
14 books4 followersProfessor Emeritus at Durham University. His research has specialised in medieval Irish social and political history and relations between England, Wales, Scotland and Ireland in the middle ages.
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 1 of 1 review
Read
February 5, 2012This book takes a look, as the title says, at the political development of the British Isles between about 1100 and 1400, it proceeds roughly chronologically and aims to make clear to reader where and how polities were fuzzy and where and how boundaries were firming up between states and between groups of people.
Frame is making a point about the distortion that our contemporary experience creates for us when looking at the past. It can be easy to assume that our current state structures and boundaries are fixed rather than contingent and as a result that events in the past that move towards or look like what we are familiar with now are positive and too be applauded. As a result the more centralised England which had much stronger stronger state tends to be regarded more favourably than Scotland, let alone the rulers of Wales (largely independent or not entirely dependant, depending on how you want to look at it, until the reign of Edward I) or Ireland.
The point here is that we can see the survival of the Scottish Kingdom, or of traditional chieftains in parts of Ireland, during this period as a measure of their resilience and the strengths of those political societies.
In this world authority was not constant but varied, some areas were ruled more intensely and others loosely there was no consistency within states. Secondly depending on the individual ruler the tide of authority might be flowing outwards with vigour or might be pulsing weakly.
When two neighbouring states were both at high tide the result was not conflict but rather clarity, when the pulse of authority was weak however the edges of the kingdoms grew fuzzier, new centres of authority and potential independent kingdoms might develop on the edges.
The historical starting point is the same point as made by Stafford in Conquest and Unification. History is generally written by the winners, England and Scotland came to exist by swallowing up smaller independent states. In Scotland for instance this included a swathe of the western half of country including Galloway and Strathclyde.
As Strathclyde implies the focus of these medieval kingdoms was different to our modern conceptions. Scotland contested authority with England over much of what is now northern England. Areas that we now think of as intrinsically Scottish like the Western Isles and parts of the northern and western Highlands were formally part of the Kingdom of Norway generally until 1266. One way that Scottish rulers reacted to more vigorous English rule spread north of the Humber was not war but rather to spread their own authority outwards to the north and west, founding towns, drawing in local rulers to their orbit, intervening strategically when possible for instance preventing Galloway from being inherited by the illegitimate son of its last king instead dividing it among his three legitimate daughters and marrying them off with due care and attention to the choice of husbands.
One them that emerges from that story is the culture clash between the mass medieval Latin culture spreading into the traditions current at the edges of Europe. In western Scotland, Wales and Ireland illegitimacy was no bar to succession and inheritance was not necessarily patrilineal. Succession might shift between branches of a family either through agreement or conflict.
An interesting shift is the adoption by the Scots of coronation by bishops who then anointed the king in place of an open air acclamation with the recitation of the king's ancestry by a bard at Scone. By the fourteenth century the traditional way of doing things was not felt to be sufficient to buttress the authority and majesty of the five year old David II. The Scottish nobility had itself changed, influenced by its own wave of Norman-French incomers including the ancestors of the later royal lines of the Bruces and the Stewarts, and were more mindful of ways of doing things in the rest of western Europe than how they used to be done.
Reading this I wondered if geography is destiny. Lowland regions most arable land in England and Scotland were more intensively and closely managed. Uplands areas generally had more pastoral economies larger lordships and were more loosely managed. Traditions of raiding and cattle rustling encouraged lords to maintain armed retinues and as a result lords from those regions had a particular political importance in their countries politics.
In north Wales the princes of Gwynedd really tried to convert their lands into a viable independent state, building castles, levying tolls but Snowdonia and that corner of Wales was too poor a region to support their ambitions.
While in Ireland upland and bog areas where those in which traditional lords survived. Equally geography determined the network of relationships. Northern Ireland and western Scotland were deeply intertwined, as where northern England and southern Scotland, western Wales and eastern Ireland. This changed in the period that Frame considers as some of those relationships broke down.
Finally this had me wondering about the advantages of backwardness. The states and societies which survived on the margins may have been by European mainland standards unsophisticated but their low centres of gravity and general acceptability to the political community gave them strength. The ambitions of the Princes of Gwynedd which required mass penny pinching can be seen as causing resentment among the the people they were trying to rule.
In Ireland this period saw a familiar tripartite division between mostly marginalised traditional leaders, a class of creole settler lords and administrators sent over from England, the fringes of each overlapping despite distrust and suspicion. Yet here also the issue of contingency with Richard II's expedition to Ireland as a potential new form of relationship, but one that never developed on account of Richard II loosing out in a cousin quarrel with the later Henry IV.
The problem of a book like this is that the most interesting sounding parts are the most elusive, the people at the edges, the Lordship of the Isles (apparently archaeology suggests that they were clean shaven and drank French wines with their shell fish) over western Scotland that popped up during a period of weaker Scottish monarchy, all those who didn't record their own histories but who we know about from the margins of others books and reading between the lines try to draw inferences about.
During the Scottish wars of Independence, Robert the Bruce's brother, Edward Bruce launched an expedition to Ireland and wrote letters to Princes in Wales and Lords in Ireland asking of their support and aid in fighting against the King of England and his supporters. Naturally he appealed to their common shared ancestry, not that they were all Celts, but rather that they were all descendants of the sons of Brutus the Trojan who settled Britain after the Trojan war. As you may have noticed Edward Bruce didn't succeed, and shortly after the Scots were to put it to the Pope that they in fact were not the descendants of Brutus, but in fact of the children of Scota, an Egyptian Princess who came to Scotland and settled the settled the country in time immemorial. How contingent are the myths that motivate us and that we use to explain our place in the world.
This is the point that Frame is making. To use a term like 'England' or 'Scotland' is easy and in a sense creates a mythology of unity and uniformity, while the reality of being a subject of the king of England or Scotland is complex. What is was like depended on who, when and where you were.
Frame is making a point about the distortion that our contemporary experience creates for us when looking at the past. It can be easy to assume that our current state structures and boundaries are fixed rather than contingent and as a result that events in the past that move towards or look like what we are familiar with now are positive and too be applauded. As a result the more centralised England which had much stronger stronger state tends to be regarded more favourably than Scotland, let alone the rulers of Wales (largely independent or not entirely dependant, depending on how you want to look at it, until the reign of Edward I) or Ireland.
The point here is that we can see the survival of the Scottish Kingdom, or of traditional chieftains in parts of Ireland, during this period as a measure of their resilience and the strengths of those political societies.
In this world authority was not constant but varied, some areas were ruled more intensely and others loosely there was no consistency within states. Secondly depending on the individual ruler the tide of authority might be flowing outwards with vigour or might be pulsing weakly.
When two neighbouring states were both at high tide the result was not conflict but rather clarity, when the pulse of authority was weak however the edges of the kingdoms grew fuzzier, new centres of authority and potential independent kingdoms might develop on the edges.
The historical starting point is the same point as made by Stafford in Conquest and Unification. History is generally written by the winners, England and Scotland came to exist by swallowing up smaller independent states. In Scotland for instance this included a swathe of the western half of country including Galloway and Strathclyde.
As Strathclyde implies the focus of these medieval kingdoms was different to our modern conceptions. Scotland contested authority with England over much of what is now northern England. Areas that we now think of as intrinsically Scottish like the Western Isles and parts of the northern and western Highlands were formally part of the Kingdom of Norway generally until 1266. One way that Scottish rulers reacted to more vigorous English rule spread north of the Humber was not war but rather to spread their own authority outwards to the north and west, founding towns, drawing in local rulers to their orbit, intervening strategically when possible for instance preventing Galloway from being inherited by the illegitimate son of its last king instead dividing it among his three legitimate daughters and marrying them off with due care and attention to the choice of husbands.
One them that emerges from that story is the culture clash between the mass medieval Latin culture spreading into the traditions current at the edges of Europe. In western Scotland, Wales and Ireland illegitimacy was no bar to succession and inheritance was not necessarily patrilineal. Succession might shift between branches of a family either through agreement or conflict.
An interesting shift is the adoption by the Scots of coronation by bishops who then anointed the king in place of an open air acclamation with the recitation of the king's ancestry by a bard at Scone. By the fourteenth century the traditional way of doing things was not felt to be sufficient to buttress the authority and majesty of the five year old David II. The Scottish nobility had itself changed, influenced by its own wave of Norman-French incomers including the ancestors of the later royal lines of the Bruces and the Stewarts, and were more mindful of ways of doing things in the rest of western Europe than how they used to be done.
Reading this I wondered if geography is destiny. Lowland regions most arable land in England and Scotland were more intensively and closely managed. Uplands areas generally had more pastoral economies larger lordships and were more loosely managed. Traditions of raiding and cattle rustling encouraged lords to maintain armed retinues and as a result lords from those regions had a particular political importance in their countries politics.
In north Wales the princes of Gwynedd really tried to convert their lands into a viable independent state, building castles, levying tolls but Snowdonia and that corner of Wales was too poor a region to support their ambitions.
While in Ireland upland and bog areas where those in which traditional lords survived. Equally geography determined the network of relationships. Northern Ireland and western Scotland were deeply intertwined, as where northern England and southern Scotland, western Wales and eastern Ireland. This changed in the period that Frame considers as some of those relationships broke down.
Finally this had me wondering about the advantages of backwardness. The states and societies which survived on the margins may have been by European mainland standards unsophisticated but their low centres of gravity and general acceptability to the political community gave them strength. The ambitions of the Princes of Gwynedd which required mass penny pinching can be seen as causing resentment among the the people they were trying to rule.
In Ireland this period saw a familiar tripartite division between mostly marginalised traditional leaders, a class of creole settler lords and administrators sent over from England, the fringes of each overlapping despite distrust and suspicion. Yet here also the issue of contingency with Richard II's expedition to Ireland as a potential new form of relationship, but one that never developed on account of Richard II loosing out in a cousin quarrel with the later Henry IV.
The problem of a book like this is that the most interesting sounding parts are the most elusive, the people at the edges, the Lordship of the Isles (apparently archaeology suggests that they were clean shaven and drank French wines with their shell fish) over western Scotland that popped up during a period of weaker Scottish monarchy, all those who didn't record their own histories but who we know about from the margins of others books and reading between the lines try to draw inferences about.
During the Scottish wars of Independence, Robert the Bruce's brother, Edward Bruce launched an expedition to Ireland and wrote letters to Princes in Wales and Lords in Ireland asking of their support and aid in fighting against the King of England and his supporters. Naturally he appealed to their common shared ancestry, not that they were all Celts, but rather that they were all descendants of the sons of Brutus the Trojan who settled Britain after the Trojan war. As you may have noticed Edward Bruce didn't succeed, and shortly after the Scots were to put it to the Pope that they in fact were not the descendants of Brutus, but in fact of the children of Scota, an Egyptian Princess who came to Scotland and settled the settled the country in time immemorial. How contingent are the myths that motivate us and that we use to explain our place in the world.
This is the point that Frame is making. To use a term like 'England' or 'Scotland' is easy and in a sense creates a mythology of unity and uniformity, while the reality of being a subject of the king of England or Scotland is complex. What is was like depended on who, when and where you were.
Displaying 1 - 1 of 1 review