Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-94fs2 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-05T17:14:30.623Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

Early Modern English Borders: Homogeneity and Heterogeneity

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  15 March 2021

Boyi Chen*
Affiliation:
Department of History, Xiamen University, 422 Siming S Road, Xiamen, Fujian, China, 361005. Email: [email protected]

Abstract

This article discusses the process of English border-formation in Wales, Ireland, Scotland and around the Channel Islands, including efforts of the English government in border formation, and the local identities of borderlands. I evaluate political considerations, as well as examining social and cultural resonances to show that the English historical border was formed as part of the consolidation of state and nation in terms of Wales, Scotland, Ireland and the Channel Islands. I argue that border ‘building’ was not always smooth, or to be taken for granted in terms of state-building. The borderlands of the English state have manifested both a homogeneity and heterogeneity in the four regions, each with four particular forms or tendencies in their deep structures: homogeneity, from homogeneity to heterogeneity, from heterogeneity to homogeneity, and heterogeneity. In the article, I use homogeneity to refer to the status of the acculturational tendency, while using heterogeneity to refer to a deviation of the interaction between the English state and other states or nations. This article touches upon a topic not restricted to the British case, but relevant worldwide: the construction of borders in the context of the fundamental conflict between a ‘nation’, which is to say a culturally and often linguistically distinctive entity, and a ‘state’.

Type
Article
Copyright
© The Author(s), 2021. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of Academia Europaea

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Ayton, A (1999) Knights and Warhorses: Military Service and the English Aristocracy Under Edward III. Woodbridge: Boydell and Brewer, Rep.Google Scholar
Braddick, MJ (2000) State Formation in Early Modern England, c.1550–1700. Cambridge & New York: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bradshaw, B (1996) The Tudor reformation and revolution in Wales and Ireland: the origins of the British problem. In Bradshaw, B and Morrill, J (eds), The British Problem, c. 1534–1707: State Formation in the Atlantic Archipelago. London: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 3965.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bush, ML (1995) Tenant right under the Tudors: a revision revised. Bulletin of the John Rylands University Library of Manchester 77, 161188.Google Scholar
Canny, N (1975) The Formation of the Old English Elite in Ireland. Dublin: National University of Ireland.Google Scholar
Canny, N (1979) Why the Reformation failed in Ireland: une question mal posée. Journal of Ecclesiastical History 30, 423450.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Canny, N (1987) From Reformation to Restoration: Ireland, 1534–1660. Dublin: Helicon.Google Scholar
Canny, N (1995) Irish, Scottish and Welsh responses to centralization, c.1530–c.1640: a comparative perspective. In Grant, A and Stringer, KJ (eds) Uniting the Kingdom? The Making of British History. London & New York: Routledge, pp. 147169.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Canny, N (2001) Making Ireland British, 1580–1650. New York: Oxford University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Colls, R (ed.) (2007) Northumbria: History and Identity, 547–2000. Chichester: Phillimore & Co. Ltd.Google Scholar
Davies, CSL (1997) Review of Tudor Frontiers and Noble Power: The Making of the British State, by Ellis SG. The English Historical Review 112, 976977.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Davies, RR (1991) The Age of the Conquest: Wales, 1063–1415. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Dodgshon, RA (1998) From Chiefs to Landlords: Social and Economic Change in the Western Highlands and Islands, c. 1493–1820. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.Google Scholar
Ellis, SG (1985) Tudor Ireland: Crown, Community and the Conflict of Cultures, 1470–1603. London & New York: Longman.Google Scholar
Ellis, SG (1988) The Pale and the Far North: Government and Society in Two Early Tudor Borderlands. Dublin: National University of Ireland.Google Scholar
Ellis, SG (1995a) Tudor Frontiers and Noble Power: The Making of the British State. Oxford: Clarendon Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Ellis, SG (1995b) Tudor State formation and the shaping of the British Isles. In Ellis, SG and Barber, S (eds) Conquest and Union: Fashioning a British State, 1485–1725. London & New York: Longman, pp. 4063.Google Scholar
Ellis, SG (1998) Ireland in the Age of the Tudors, 1447–1603: English Expansion and the End of Gaelic Rule. London: Longman.Google Scholar
Ellis, SG and Esser, RM (eds) (2013) Frontier and Border Regions in Early Modern Europe. Hannover: Wehrhahn Verlag.Google Scholar
Ellis, SG and Maginn, C (eds) (2007) The Making of the British Isles: The State of Britain and Ireland, 1450–1660. London & New York: Routledge.Google Scholar
Etty, C (2002) A Tudor solution to the ‘Problem of the North’ government and the marches towards Scotland, 1509–1529. Northern History 39(2), 209226.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Goodman, A (2007) The impact of warfare on the Scottish marches. In Clark, L (ed.) The Fifteenth Century VII: Conflicts, Consequences and the Crown in the Late Middle Ages. Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 195211.Google Scholar
Greengrass, M (ed.) (1991) Conquest and Coalescence: The Shaping of the State in Early Modern Europe. London: Edward Arnold.Google Scholar
Griffiths, RA (1972) Wales and the marches. In Chrimes, SB, Ross, CD and Griffiths, RA (eds), Fifteenth Century England, 1399–1509: Studies in Politics and Society. Manchester: Manchester University Press, pp. 145172.Google Scholar
Groundwater, A (2014) The middle shires divided: tensions at the heart of the Anglo-Scottish union. In Sharon Adams, S and Goodare, J (eds), Scotland in the Age of Two Revolutions. Woodbridge: The Boydell Press pp. 2340.Google Scholar
Hague, W (2005) William Pitt the Younger: A Biography. London: Harper Perennial, Rep.Google Scholar
Hechter, M (1975) Internal Colonialism: The Celtic Fringe in British National Development, 1536–1966. Berkeley: University of California Press.Google Scholar
Hughes, M (1994) The fourteenth-century French raids on Hampshire and the Isle of Wight. In Curry, A and Hughes, M (eds), Arms, Armies and Fortifications in the Hundred Years War. Woodbridge: Boydell Press, pp. 121144.Google Scholar
Jennings, JD (2011) Bioarchaeology of border creation. In Mullin, D (ed.), Places in Between: The Archaeology of Social, Cultural and Geographical Borders and Borderlands. Oxford: Oxbow Books, pp. 2339.Google Scholar
Jones, JG (1994) Early Modern Wales, c.1525–1640. London: St. Martin’s Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
King, A (2012) The Anglo-Scottish marches and the perception of ‘the North’ in fifteenth-century England, Northern History 49(1), 3750.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Leyburn, JG (1962) The Scotch-Irish: A Social History. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press.Google Scholar
Levack, BP (1987) The Formation of the British State: England, Scotland, and the Union, 1603–1707. Oxford: Clarendon Press.Google Scholar
Macinnes, AI (1999) Regal union for Britain, 1603–38. In Burgess, G (ed.), The New British History: Founding a Modern State, 1603–1715. London: I. B. Tauris, pp. 3364.Google Scholar
Meikle, MM (2004) A British Frontier? Lairds and Gentlemen in the Eastern Borders, 1540–1603. East Linton: Tuckwell Press Ltd.Google Scholar
Morgan, R (2014) The Welsh and the Shaping of Early Modern Ireland, 1558-1641. Woodbridge: Boydell Press.Google Scholar
Mullin, D (2011) Towards an archaeology of borders and borderlands & border crossings. In Mullin, D (ed.), Places in Between. Oxford: Oxbow Books, pp. 112, 99–104.Google Scholar
Newton, D (2007a) ‘Dolefull dumps’: Northumberland and the Borders, 1580–1625. In Colls, R (ed.) Northumbria: History and Identity, 547–2000. Chichester: Phillimore & Co. Ltd, pp. 88103.Google Scholar
Newton, D (2007b) Border and bishopric: regional identities in the pre-modern north east, 1559–1620. In Green, A and Pollard, AJ (eds), Regional Identities in North-East England, 1300–2000. Woodbridge: Boydell Press, pp. 4970.Google Scholar
Palmer, W (1997) Review of Tudor Frontiers and Noble Power: The Making of the British State, by Ellis SG. The American Historical Review 102(1), 99.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Pease, H (1912) The Lord Wardens of the Marches of England and Scotland: Being a Brief History of the Marches, the Laws of March, and the Marchmen, together with Some Account of the Ancient Feud Between England and Scotland. London: Constable.Google Scholar
Pollard, AJ (1990) North-Eastern England during the Wars of the Roses. Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Power, G (2013) Monarchy, nobility and state formation in Bohemia and Ireland, c. 1526–1609. In Power, G and Pilný, O (eds) Ireland and the Czech Land. Pieterlen: Peter Lang AG Internationaler Verlag der Wissenschaften, pp. 2554.Google Scholar
Senior, M (1991) Disputed Border: History of the North Wales Marches from Chester to Shrewsbury. Llanrwst, Wales: Gwasg Carreg Gwalch.Google Scholar
Tanner, M (2006) The Last of the Celts. New Haven: Yale University Press, p. 230.Google Scholar
Thornton, T (1999) Taxing the King’s dominions: the subject territories of the English crown in the late middle age. In Ormrod, WM, Bonney, M, and Bonney, R (eds), Crises, Revolutions and Self-Sustained Growth: Essays in European Fiscal History, 1130–1830. Donnington, UK: Shaun Tyas, pp. 97109.Google Scholar
Thornton, T (2000) Dynasty and territory in the early modern period: the Princes of Wales and their western British inheritance. Welsh History Review (Cylchgrawn Hanes Cymru) 20(1), 133.Google Scholar
Thornton, T (2002) The English King’s French islands. In Bernard, GW and Gunn, SJ (eds), Authority and Consent in Tudor England: Essays Presented to C. S. L. Davies. Burlington: Ashgate Publishing Company, pp. 197218.Google Scholar
Williams, G (1987) Recovery, Reorientation and Reformation: Wales c. 1415–1642. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Wrightson, K (2007) Elements of identity: the re-making of the North East, 1500–1760. In Colls, R (ed.) Northumbria: History and Identity, 547–2000. Chichester: Phillimore & Co. Ltd, pp. 126150.Google Scholar