RS

Rolls Series

TRHS

Transactions of the Royal Historical Society

Thus Thomas Brinton, bishop of Rochester, expressed his concerns for the state of the English nation in a public sermon given at St Paul's Cross in London in 1375, as the country faced humiliating military reversals abroad, growing concern about corruption in the ageing Edward iii's household, and yet another outbreak of pestilence.Footnote ² This description of God having abandoned a once-favoured English nation as a result of its collective sinfulness is striking in that it posits a close connection between religious belief and English national sentiment, well before the sixteenth-century Protestant Reformation, when the idea of the English as God's chosen people is commonly supposed to have become entrenched in the national psyche.Footnote ³ It also challenges the false dichotomy between national and religious identity created by some modern social and political scientists, who view national identity as a modern phenomenon, which replaced the supranational religious perspectives of the Middle Ages.Footnote ⁴

Most medieval historians now reject this paradigm, and do not see the existence of the international Catholic Church as a barrier to national sentiment in the pre-modern period. Indeed, there have been some significant studies of religious ideas and symbolism in medieval nation-building, notably in Capetian France.Footnote ⁵ Historians of the late medieval British Isles, however, have as yet paid little attention to this theme, despite a growing body of work concerned with national identity in the period.Footnote ⁶ With respect to England, concepts of nationhood underwent consolidation in the late thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, partly owing to the tax-raising and war-making activities of the Plantagenet government. This is not to say that all expressions of national identity were the result of ‘top-down’ initiatives; chronicles, political prophecy and poetry offer rich alternative examples of national sentiment, and are especially significant in view of the spread of vernacular lay literacy during this period.Footnote ⁷ Nevertheless, the government's role was significant. Following the loss of Normandy, the Westminster-based royal government had developed into a nation-wide bureaucratic, financial and legal system, which drew an ever wider section of English society into an orbit of political awareness and official responsibilities.Footnote ⁸ At the same time, relations with Celtic neighbours were forcibly redefined, and royal claims to lands in France were repackaged as a national concern.Footnote ⁹ All of this influenced the ways in which English nationhood was conceptualised, particularly in official rhetoric. As part of this process, the government's use of the Church to disseminate information and encourage support for its military campaigns through orders for nation-wide prayers, processions and sermons is well-known.Footnote ¹⁰ Yet the content of this material has been somewhat neglected and, with it, the wider significance of religious language, ideas and imagery in English national identity in the late Middle Ages.

More broadly, this gap in the analysis also leaves unexamined important questions about the relationship between religious beliefs and political ideology in this period. Given that the medieval Church was not just an institution, but also equated to the whole of society, it should not be surprising to find considerable overlap between religion and politics. Yet English historians have tended to restrict their comments on the role of religion in medieval political thought about nationhood to the observation of a few well-known uses of religious imagery by the government, and the commonplace assumption of English chronicle writers and poets that God was on their side.Footnote ¹¹ Moreover, because many of the religious themes in English sources appear either to have been borrowed from the French, or to have been in circulation for centuries, their significance in the context of fourteenth-century England can sometimes be downplayed as derivative, conventional and having little to say about specifically English identity.Footnote ¹²

The aim of this essay, therefore, is to discuss the neglected role of religious themes and vocabulary in official expressions of national sentiment, particularly during the reigns of Edward ii, Edward iii and Richard ii. Is it possible to trace the development of a ‘political theology’ of English nationhood?Footnote ¹³ To what extent were religious ideas and language part of an official discourse of nationhood at the time? How successfully were such ideas disseminated among the wider population? The chief sources for this study will be, first, royal prayer requests in times of national crisis, in both direct letters from the king, and those which survive in bishops' registers as orders from the archbishops of Canterbury or York, themselves usually initiated by a royal letter.Footnote ¹⁴ These orders were passed down the ecclesiastical hierarchy, via suffragan bishops and diocesan officials, until they reached the clergy of every parish. Secondly some related sermon material, mainly from public and official contexts, will be considered.

First, however, it is worth noting the impact that orders for nationwide prayers and processions may have had in themselves on concepts of nationhood. Such orders were part of a range of strategies used by the government to encourage sympathetic political awareness among the English population, alongside other means such as official newsletters, MPs' reports back from parliament, and proclamations in the county court, markets and other public places, particularly after the outbreak of the Hundred Years War.Footnote ¹⁵ As such, simply the act of participation at a parish level in prayers and processions for the success of the king's war, or for the cessation of the plague, is in itself likely to have reinforced a sense of belonging to the wider national entity of the kingdom of England. In this way, official religious activities could have political consequences, which included encouraging a sense of nationhood, even before the specific theological content of the accompanying rhetoric is examined. Yet the political functions of these orders cannot really be separated from their theological content, for their theology was central to their political purpose.

What, then, was the content of these orders for prayers and processions, and how did it contribute to a sense of national identity? In many respects, orders for prayers did not differ markedly from more ‘secular’ government documents in their vocabulary. Like other types of official document, letters requesting prayers were infused with religious assumptions, simply by virtue of the Christian worldview of their mainly clerical writers.Footnote ¹⁶ In common with other government documents, orders for prayers expressed the conventional hope of defeating the enemy ‘with God's help’ (‘cum Dei adjutorio’).Footnote ¹⁷ They also contained the same stock phrases as documents sent to sheriffs to order military arrays and tax collections, denouncing atrocities by the French and the Scots and justifying royal actions as the necessary defence of the realm.Footnote ¹⁸ Meanwhile, letters sent to both secular and ecclesiastical officials frequently featured ‘the English Church’ (‘ecclesia Anglicana’) as an integral part of the package of elements for which the king was requesting aid, listed alongside the king, the kingdom and the English people.Footnote ¹⁹ Such overlap in vocabulary should encourage us not to make too fine a distinction between the discourses of ‘religion’ and ‘politics’ in the period. It suggests that the official rhetoric used in both secular and ecclesiastical contexts existed within the same linguistic and conceptual framework, without any great differentiation between the language addressed to the sheriff and that directed at the parish priest. This should be a warning against treating prayer request documents in isolation from other, more ‘secular’, branches of official rhetoric.

Moreover, much religious language used in government documents reflected literary conventions that were common to several genres of writing, rather than representing any coherent ‘political theology’ exclusive to official discourse. Accounts of battles in government documents, for example, might appear to be an instance of the official promotion of a theologically-inspired national sentiment, in their assertion that God was on the winners' side.Footnote ²⁰ Yet such interpretations of events were governed by long-established conventions, equally found in chronicles and poetry. Central to these formulaic accounts, based on Old Testament models, was the assumption that God had aided the winning side because of their humble trust in him, in contrast to the pride of the enemy, who had trusted in their own large numbers.Footnote ²¹ Thus when, in an extension of the same moral economy to their own day, orders for national prayers stated that the king trusted ‘more in the help of heavenly strength than in earthly power’, it did not necessarily imply a special relationship between God and the English king.Footnote ²² Nor was this the case when such statements were accompanied by explicit Old Testament parallels, a favourite in prayer request documents being the victory of Joshua over the Amalekites, won through the intercession of Moses, who stood with his arms raised in prayer throughout the battle.Footnote ²³ Rather, such language reflected a broader usage of biblical examples and morality, found in all types of medieval literature, as a source of illustration and explanation for contemporary events. Biblical analogies were simply a natural medium for writers who viewed society and politics through the lens of their belief that the God of the Old Testament also controlled the circumstances of nations in their own day. It did not imply an elevated view of the Welsh as a new Israel, for example, when one mid fourteenth-century English chronicler compared the mourning of the Welsh over the death of David ap Gruffydd to the prophet Jeremiah's lament for the fall of Jerusalem.Footnote ²⁴ Consequently, it should not be assumed that every echo of Old Testament language in official rhetoric points to a direct and deliberate suggestion that the English were God's new chosen people, as part of a coherent propaganda campaign.

These caveats notwithstanding, certain ideas about the relationship between religion and politics do emerge from official rhetoric, particularly in orders for prayers, which amount to what might be viewed as a basic political theology of nationhood. It was commonplace when requesting prayers, for example, to acknowledge that the outcome of military campaigns lay in the hands of God, who, to quote one recurrent stock phrase, ‘subjects those he wants to subject, and gives victory to those whom he wants’.Footnote ²⁵ The king himself, meanwhile, was consistently described as having been given his authority by God, in line with New Testament teaching on obedience to civil authorities.Footnote ²⁶ At this basic level, therefore, official rhetoric reflected the assumption that the world was made up of nations ruled by God-ordained monarchs, and that God was active in, and sovereign over, their political and military affairs. While these beliefs reinforced a biblically-inspired view of a world divided into nations, however, they did not in themselves constitute a conscious cultivation by the government of an explicitly English national sentiment.Footnote ²⁷

Yet further examination of orders for prayers and processions suggests that closer conceptual connections between God and England were being encouraged by the government. This is particularly evident in the theology of prayer that can be traced in these orders, central to which was the idea that national troubles were caused by national sins, which could be remedied by national prayer and repentance. Again, this idea was not unique to official documents, but also appeared in contemporary chronicles and poetry.Footnote ²⁸ In contrast to the more elite context of literary Latin sources, however, its propagation in nation-wide orders for prayers was a particularly public, and participatory, manifestation of such theology. Its application to military failure was, perhaps, particularly convenient for the government, but the same interpretation was also applied to other situations. During the agrarian crisis of 1315, for example, during which time poor harvests and animal diseases were accompanied by devastating Scottish raids, the archbishop of Canterbury, Walter Reynolds, wrote to his bishops that the country's tribulations were the manifestation of God's righteous wrath, which had been aroused ‘by the vast sins and unfaithfulness of the people’.Footnote ²⁹ This divine anger could, however, be mitigated by a return to true devotion. Consequently, he ordered processions throughout the province, to be accompanied by masses and sermons in which preachers would explain to listeners the danger they were in, ‘in order to arouse the clergy and the people to expiate their misdeeds and to show devotion together through prayers, fasting, almsgiving and other works of charity, so that the wrath of God … will be mitigated in this way by such pleasing offerings’.Footnote ³⁰ Almost identical phrases were used sixty years later, in 1375, when Archbishop Sudbury similarly ordered public prayers for the cessation of pestilence, bad weather and threats of foreign invasion. Once again, the country's troubles were attributed to God's anger at ‘the vast sins and unfaithfulness of the people’, and it was hoped that his wrath could be appeased by the people's penitent prayers.Footnote ³¹

The consistent application throughout the period of the same theological reasoning to such orders, even using the same phrases, suggests that the ideas contained in these documents were well-established in the public political and religious culture of the time. What is striking about the language used is that it offered a very national framework of explanation for England's reversals of fortune – it was the sins of the English people that were to blame for the troubles of the English kingdom, and the only remedy was a programme of nation-wide repentance and prayer. As the documents requesting prayers during the Black Death put it, the orders were given ‘in order that God will be pleased by their prayers and in this way will rescue the English people from tribulations’ – tribulations which were again explained as God's punishment on the nation's ‘innumerable sins’.Footnote ³² Such language created the impression of England not just as a political and territorial unit, but also as a coherent national moral community under God, bearing a collective guilt for its sins, and a collective national responsibility for repentance. In a sermon from the reign of Richard ii, this was summarised as a need for ‘our whole community of England’ (‘tota nostra communitas anglie’) to call out to God for help, emphasising the corporate, national nature of the prayers.Footnote ³³

As with the battle accounts, the chief model on which this interpretation of events was based was Old Testament Israel, and particularly its conditional covenant relationship with God, in which the nation's continued blessing was dependent on the people remaining obedient to God's commands.Footnote ³⁴ Of course, this idea was not new in the fourteenth century, nor was it solely an English concept. The idea of a parallel with Israel became established in medieval France from around 1300 and was also a feature of the dynastic politics of Amharic Ethiopia in the Middle Ages, while descriptions of England in terms of analogies with Israel can be traced back to Bede, Gildas and other Anglo-Saxon writers.Footnote ³⁵ Nor, moreover, was it viewed as unique to England by English writers, who readily applied the same model of divine retribution for national sins to other nations. The writer of the so-called ‘Lanercost’ Chronicle attributed a sudden flood in Paris in 1296 to the sins of the French, and viewed the defeat of the Scots in the same year as God's judgement on their unrepentant pride.Footnote ³⁶

However, there are hints in official rhetoric that this relationship between God and the English was understood as more than just the generic application of Old Testament theology to any parallel contemporary political situation, and that there was also a more specific association between God and England. For example, in documents requesting prayers in 1321 and again in 1353, the English kingdom was described as facing ‘terrible desolation’, unless God mercifully intervened and had compassion on ‘his English people’.Footnote ³⁷ This language was also echoed in the prayers themselves. Archbishop William Courtenay's orders for nation-wide intercession in 1382 provide a rare opportunity to examine the actual content of such prayers, as they incorporate the specified prayers at the end. Notably, these include frequent descriptions by the praying congregation of themselves to God as ‘your people’, such as an opening call to God to notice ‘your people prostrate before you’.Footnote ³⁸ If the English did not necessarily view themselves as the chosen people of God in this period, therefore, it appears that they were certainly encouraged to view themselves as a chosen people, in a covenant relationship with God as a nation united in repentance and prayer – and, of course, united in support of the king who had requested the prayers. Even more explicit parallels with Israel are evident in Archbishop Sudbury's orders for prayers, fasting and almsgiving at the beginning of Richard ii's reign. Sudbury lamented the daily conspiracies from the French now faced by ‘the renowned kingdom of England, which used to rejoice in the tranquillity of peace more than any other kingdom, as a result of divine mercy and special grace’ [emphasis added].Footnote ³⁹ Again, the implication was that a previous state of particular national blessing, based on a special relationship with God, was now in danger of reversal, a description that appears to have deliberately recalled the situation of Old Testament Israel.

Indeed, these more direct comparisons may shed a new light on apparently formulaic biblical examples, such as Joshua's victory over the Amalekites through the intercession of Moses.Footnote ⁴⁰ Such examples need not imply any specific connection between England and Israel. However, when viewed in the context of the more explicit language used elsewhere, such analogies may have taken on additional significance, deliberately or otherwise. To take another example, the prayers specified in 1382 called on ‘God, who rescued the Ninevites from the threat of destruction only by your mercy’.Footnote ⁴¹ Nineveh was one of the stock examples of judgement averted by repentance that featured in medieval sermons and religious literature.Footnote ⁴² This might suggest that the analogy belonged more to the category of generic biblical allusions than to any discourse of nationhood. At the most, it could be seen as an image which contributed to the broader notion of England as a collective unit with shared responsibility for its sin and repentance – although not necessarily a national one, as Nineveh was a city. However, Patrick Collinson has noted how the example of Nineveh was employed in seventeenth-century preaching in the same way as it was used by Christ in the Gospels: to stand as a warning to God's people that if they failed to follow the pagan Ninevites in repentance, they might face a worse judgement.Footnote ⁴³ It is not inconceivable, therefore, that a similar implication, with England cast as a dangerously unrepentant Israel, might have been behind its use in medieval sources, including official prayers. Thus even seemingly conventional religious language may in certain contexts have gained connotations of a closer link between England and Israel.

The language used in royal and ecclesiastical documents, therefore, particularly in requests for prayers, points to various uses of religious ideas in official rhetoric. Many of these were of a fairly conventional nature, shared with other literary genres. Yet even conventionally pious phrases could contribute to a basic political theology that informed the way in which England was viewed, along with other nations, as a kingdom under God's sovereign control. Moreover, the documents sometimes suggest a closer connection between God and the English nation, particularly as contemporary events were placed in a framework of collective national sin, tribulations and repentance, to present England as a moral, as well as a political and territorial, national entity. Indeed, at times the rhetoric appears to have implied more direct parallels with Old Testament Israel, with the suggestion that England enjoyed a similar covenant relationship with God, which could lead either to blessing or to punishment. The theological content of these documents, therefore, complemented their practical function, and reinforced national identity on several levels. However, it is to sermon material that we need to turn in order to see these connections between religious thought and national identity more fully worked out.

The use of religious language in respect of a developing official discourse of nationhood is particularly interesting in sermons preached in response to royal requests, and on other official occasions, as preaching is likely to have taken such ideas to a much wider audience. Sermons preached to lay audiences are not always easy to identify, however, and where they do exist the manuscripts pose a number of methodological problems, not least the difficulty of working out the relationship between the Latin text and what was originally preached, usually in the vernacular.Footnote ⁴⁴ None the less, the theological content of what survives demonstrates a notable congruence with the themes found in the prayer request documents discussed above. Again, this included much that was conventional and common to other sources. A Rogation Day sermon from the reign of Richard ii on the need for nations to call out to God in prayer, for example, acknowledged that ‘victory in war is not in the multitude of an army but in the strength of heaven’, and attributed military defeats to sin, citing as an example Judas Maccabeus' defeat of the army of Syria.Footnote ⁴⁵ Similarly, Archbishop Fitzralph of Armagh, at a thanksgiving procession held in London in 1346 to mark the English triumph at Crécy, explained that the victory was a sign of God's favour towards Edward iii, and argued that Phillip vi's defeat was divine judgement on his excessive pride, using Old Testament illustrations.Footnote ⁴⁶ More specific parallels between England and Israel, meanwhile, appeared in the frequent application of the Old Testament model of national sin leading to national misfortune, which was employed by Brinton when he announced in 1377 that ‘God, who used to be English’ had withdrawn his favour from the nation.Footnote ⁴⁷

This overlap in content and vocabulary also makes it reasonable to assume that, on other occasions where preaching was requested by the government but sermon manuscripts do not survive, these too probably contained many of the same ideas about the connection between religion and English nationhood as those expressed in official documents. In fact it is likely that many of the stock phrases, arguments and illustrations used in documents requesting prayers and processions were deliberately intended to inform the content of the accompanying sermon. Certainly, the vivid descriptions of enemy raids and justifications for taxation which appear in these documents are unlikely to have been solely for the benefit of the clergy who received them.Footnote ⁴⁸ It seems plausible, therefore, that the theological explanations for England's woes in the same documents were similarly intended as part of what the government wanted ‘to be openly published and explained’ to the population from the pulpit.Footnote ⁴⁹

Moreover, sermons sometimes elaborated upon religious ideas about nationhood that were only implicit in official documents. This was particularly the case in respect of parallels with Israel: for example, Brinton's aforementioned claim that God's previous support for England was such that he might even have been considered English. Brinton repeated this idea in a sermon in 1378 and, in both cases, he supported his point by applying Old Testament prophecies about God's withdrawal of favour from Israel as a result of her sin to England, making the analogy yet more explicit.Footnote ⁵⁰ Similarly, in another sermon from 1377 (the audience for which is less clear, although internal evidence suggests that it included laity), Brinton lifted from the book of Malachi the idea of God turning national blessings into curses – while ‘we’, the English, obeyed God's commands, he explained, our enemies fell before us and we enjoyed prosperity in the city and in the countryside, but now God holds the people ‘in hatred and abomination above all nations because of your evil lives’.Footnote ⁵¹ This application of Old Testament prophecy to the decline of English fortunes was common in contemporary preaching. The lament of Hosea 4, for example, that ‘there is no faithfulness or steadfast love or knowledge of God in the land; instead there is swearing, lying, murder, stealing and adultery … therefore the land mourns and all who dwell in it languish’, was a favourite among preachers as a description of English society, and appears in a number of sermon manuscripts and preaching manuals.Footnote ⁵² By putting England's fall from a position of special divine favour in the context of Old Testament prophecy, preachers drew very deliberate parallels between ‘we English’ (‘nos Anglici’) and Israel, as the English were ascribed a similarly privileged status as a nation with whom God had direct dealings.Footnote ⁵³ Consequently, even more than in official rhetoric, the regular use of such language in preaching is likely to have encouraged the inhabitants of England to view themselves as a national unit, placing their local experiences of war, hardship and pestilence into a national framework that was theological as well as territorial and political.

Another way in which contemporary preaching appears to have developed the idea of a particular relationship between God and England was in preachers' treatment of the theme of national sins. This often took the form of a specification of the particular sins of which different sections of English society were guilty. For example, in a sermon preached at St Paul's Cross late in his career, Brinton denounced the clergy for simony and flattery of the rich, temporal lords for their immoral and extravagant lifestyles and the commons for their use of false weights and measures and warned that all sections of society needed to mend their ways to avoid judgement.Footnote ⁵⁴ This type of social criticism was, of course, a long-established convention in sermon literature, and also appeared in other genres, notably the poetry of social satire, but its use in the particular context of fourteenth-century preaching nevertheless has implications for our theme of national sentiment.Footnote ⁵⁵ For, despite the socially specific nature of such complaints, the overall effect was still to promote the concept of English society as one unit. In one sermon addressed at least partly to a lay audience, Brinton stressed that different groups in society should not blame others for the sins that had caused national disasters, but that each individual should examine his own conscience, like King David, who recognised that his own sins had caused the tribulations of his people.Footnote ⁵⁶ In other words, individuals existed as part of a wider national community, towards which they had a moral responsibility. This was reinforced by frequent use of the first person plural by preachers and, particularly, references to ‘our sins’ (‘peccatis nostris’), which emphasised the corporate nature of the nation's guilt.Footnote ⁵⁷ The implication was that listeners (and, later, readers) formed part of a collective national entity, along with the preacher and the rest of the English population. As Brinton put it, ‘if we English are troubled on all sides by enemies, if we who used to be victors are oppressed and captured on all sides, surely we suffer this because we sin?’Footnote ⁵⁸

The ultimate divine sanction for national sin, meanwhile, was the overthrow of the kingdom, akin to the exile of the Israelites. This was another common motif in sermons, sometimes linked to the text of Ecclesiasticus x. 8: ‘because of injuries, injustices and impurities, a kingdom is transferred from one people to another’.Footnote ⁵⁹ In an anonymous sermon from the later years of Richard ii, for instance, the preacher quoted this text along with examples from ancient history (although not, on this occasion, Old Testament Israel), before he expressed his fears of a similar fate for England, and offered a comprehensive list of the sins prevalent among different sections of society.Footnote ⁶⁰ In the context of the very real threat of French invasion faced by England at the time, such fears may not have sounded implausible. The impact of such ideas is likely to have been enhanced by the tradition in English historiography that the successive waves of foreign invasion and settlement in Britain's past represented a cycle of divine judgement, based on Israel's fall from a golden age of blessing to decline and exile. This typology, which had been applied to history since Eusebius' Eccelesiastical history in the early fourth century ad, was well-established in English history-writing by the fourteenth century, through the influence of earlier writers such as Bede and Henry of Huntingdon.Footnote ⁶¹ It is not surprising, therefore, to find that in the anonymous Rogation Day sermon, noted above, the ejection of the Britons was cited as a warning to contemporary English society. When famine and pestilence failed to correct the Britons' evil ways, the preacher explained, God had expelled them from the land and he could equally decide to take similar action against the English on account of their sins ‘unless they quickly correct themselves’.Footnote ⁶²

Finally, another strand in this more explicit exposition of the themes of English chosenness and a covenant relationship with God can be found in an official sermon from a more elite political context: Chancellor Houghton's well-known opening speech to Edward iii's last parliament in 1377. The speech appears to have been intended to pave the way for his grandson Richard's imminent succession, presenting the young prince in terms of parallels with the Christ-child as God's anointed ruler-to-be. Drawing an analogy with Simeon's acknowledgement of the infant Christ in the Temple, Houghton explained:

Again, military victory was portrayed as evidence not just of God's general approval of the winning side, as was commonplace in standard battle accounts, but also as a sign of God's particular favour to the English nation, to the point where a direct and even exclusive relationship between God and the English people was posited. Moreover, the analogy with Israel here – usefully for the government – reinforced the position of Prince Richard as a God-approved heir to the kingdom; for, if the English were God's chosen people, their king must be God's anointed ruler. Indeed, the idea of the king as a Messiah figure, whose own relationship with God set the tone for the nation as a whole, was a recurrent theme in sermons and other literature of the period.Footnote ⁶⁴ The text of a sermon ordered by Edward iii to celebrate English victories in France and Scotland in 1346, for instance, commonly attributed to the scholar and army chaplain Thomas Bradwardine, included a striking application of Psalm ii to the situation faced by Edward iii at Crécy. In this Psalm, the rulers of the world conspire in vain against the Lord's anointed, an analogy which implied a Messiah-like status for the English king as the leader and saviour of God's people.Footnote ⁶⁵

Consequently, the suggestion made in the past that Houghton's speech marked the introduction of the idea of England as an elect nation into mainstream political discourse, as the climax of long-running attempts to usurp the French monarchy's claims to unique status as the Most Christian Kings of God's new chosen people, may need revision.Footnote ⁶⁶ In the light of its continuity with the related strands of political theology that had been circulating in English official rhetoric from at least the reign of Edward ii, Houghton's statement seems somewhat less innovative a feature of English political discourse than has sometimes been claimed. Indeed, it might even be seen as an example of how well-established the parallel with Israel was by this time in English political culture. Sermon material from official contexts, therefore, demonstrates considerable overlap with government documents, particularly requests for prayers, both in the use of religious vocabulary and in general theological outlook. In respect of religious ideas about nationhood, moreover, sermons often expanded on the imagery used in official documents to give a more detailed portrait of England as a united national moral community and to draw out parallels with Old Testament Israel in a way that was not just generic, but which posited a close identity between God's original chosen people and the English nation.

To identify the use of these religious images and ideas in official documents and preaching, however, does not necessarily mean that their political message was absorbed by the wider population, and it is worth concluding with some brief remarks about reception. Clearly, the government's aim in ordering such prayers, preaching and processions was to gain maximum publicity for its causes, and this was sometimes explicitly stated in documents. In 1314, for example, the archbishop of Canterbury ordered prayers and processions to be held throughout the province in ‘places and buildings where people can easily gather together’, with preaching in every suitable venue, at which clergy would ‘explain clearly in the vernacular the threat of the aforementioned dangers and will carry out masses for the peace and state of the church, the king and the kingdom of England’.Footnote ⁶⁷ Like many similar documents, the letter also requested that diocesan clergy sent back certification to their bishops when the orders had been carried out, which suggests a persistent central concern for the enforcement of such orders.Footnote ⁶⁸

Yet other sources raise questions about the extent to which the laity genuinely engaged in these activities on behalf of their nation. Non-attendance at processions was a well-established theme in clerical literature, including John Bromyard's preaching manual Summa predicantium, which also criticised those who attended with sinful motives, such as women showing off their finery.Footnote ⁶⁹ Similarly, Brinton frequently complained that lay people, especially the rich, failed to attend prayers and processions, preferring to continue in their immoral pursuits. If an illegal duel was held in London tomorrow, Brinton declared, the capital would hardly hold all the wealthy men who would gather, but if a procession were held to pray for the king and the kingdom, scarcely one hundred would turn up.Footnote ⁷⁰ Behind these literary clichés, there appears to have been real concern that the people's spiritually lax attitudes would render their pious activities ineffective. Brinton warned in a sermon at St Paul's Cross that when those who had made a false confession took part in processions for the peace of the kingdom, God would not hear their prayers.Footnote ⁷¹ In 1359, meanwhile, the archbishop of Canterbury's request for prayers noted the current neglect of holy days, on which lay people conducted business and got drunk instead of attending church to pray for the king's expeditions and mitigate God's anger.Footnote ⁷² In respect of sermons, too, lay people's lack of enthusiasm was something of a truism in clerical literature. It was often observed that the laity preferred to frequent the tavern rather than come to church, and sermon material was replete with complaints about their inattentiveness when they did turn up.Footnote ⁷³ Brinton lamented how few of the sinners who heard his sermons actually changed their behaviour as a result.Footnote ⁷⁴ Although much of this material was conventional by the fourteenth century, therefore, the fact that preachers still chose to apply it to their own day perhaps raises questions about how seriously preaching and processions were taken by those who participated in them.

In this context, the frequent specification in prayer request documents that processions and other pious activities be carried out in a humble and devout manner, following genuine confession and repentance, may further suggest clerical concerns that lay involvement was not as enthusiastic as might have been hoped.Footnote ⁷⁵ The standard offer of a forty-day indulgence for participation may suggest a distinct lack of fervour on the part of the population for such activities without some incentive.Footnote ⁷⁶ Indeed, there are hints of outright scepticism; Bromyard commented that some folk derided the pious and argued that there have never been such evil times, nor so many tempests, since the world was filled with men who prayed.Footnote ⁷⁷ Moreover, both Brinton and Bradwardine were anxious to refute alternative explanations for national troubles, such as the idea that they were caused by astrological factors or by fate or fortune, which may suggest that the population at large was not entirely convinced by the official line that explained national misfortunes in terms of a covenant relationship with God.Footnote ⁷⁸

Yet it remains the case that a significant proportion of the population would have participated in the processions, masses and prayers ordered by the government; had attendance really been as low as some clerical literature implied, the persistence and, indeed, increased frequency of these orders throughout the period would seem rather odd. Indeed, public preaching, prayers and processions are likely to have been the primary means of communicating religious images and ideas of nationhood to the wider population. While public reception of these images and ideas can only be guessed at, therefore, the material was at least made available beyond the literate elite that formed the main readership for the chronicles and poetry, mostly in Latin, which expressed similar ideas.Footnote ⁷⁹

It appears, therefore, that religious views and vocabulary played a significant role in the ideas about English nationhood expressed in official rhetoric in this period, and that this rhetoric was consciously intended by the government to reach a broad section of the English population. Of course, not all the biblical motifs which appeared in official sources were directly related to nationhood or even to politics in general, but rather they represented long-established literary conventions. While these contributed to a general theological view of the world, they did not form part of any official ‘discourse of nationhood’ in political rhetoric. However, other aspects of religious language used in official documents do suggest that the government found it advantageous to portray England as a nation which was not only an ethnic, political and territorial unit, but also a discrete moral and religious community under God, with a collective national responsibility to maintain the kingdom's welfare by remaining in God's favour. The model for this relationship was Old Testament Israel, an idea which was neither new in the fourteenth century nor unique to England. At times, however, official rhetoric, especially in sermons, appears to have suggested that these parallels did apply to fourteenth-century England in a special and particular way, rather than just following a generic pattern common to all Christian nations. The English were portrayed as God's people, who enjoyed God's special favour – or at least had, until their persistent sin brought God's wrath upon them in the shape of national misfortunes. Consequently, an image was promoted of England as a nation set apart by God, with a special elect status, but one which could be forfeited if the nation continued in its sinful ways. Even if the extent to which this interpretation of events was absorbed by the wider population is open to question, therefore, it can certainly be said that religious ideas and language formed an important part of the official discourse of nationhood which was presented to the English people in the fourteenth century, a period in which religious and political ideology were closely intertwined. Moreover, one might speculate that this laid an important foundation for the better-known uses of religious vocabulary for nationalist ends in later periods.