Steven Ellis’s new book revisits a topic that he first explored two decades ago in Tudor frontiers and noble power: the making of the British state. Then, he compared magnate lordship in what he saw as the English state’s two borderlands: Ireland and the far north of England. Defending English ground builds upon that work, providing a stronger basis for his conclusions about frontier configurations by analysing two shires, Meath and Northumberland, which lacked strong magnate control from 1460 until 1542. Drawing inspiration from the European field of frontier studies, which, among other things, examines how rulers sought to govern and defend peripheral territories, Ellis frames his study in terms of English Staatsbildung or Staatlichkeit (p. 3). From this perspective, the Pale and the far north as two extremities of the same polity. Defending English ground is therefore both an exercise in transnational history, and a study of the development of the English state.
The book is organised thematically to allow for a better comparison between Meath and Northumberland, though different evidential bases makes Ellis’s task more difficult. Chapter one addresses the character of the frontier in Ireland and the far north of England. The comparison shows that both regions were strikingly similar in institutions, culture and social organisation. Ellis argues that these similarities have been obscured, because of a tendency to partition history along ‘national’ lines. To take the Irish example, he claims that most studies incorrectly situate Meath (and the Pale in general) within an Irish framework by focusing on instances of interaction and exchange with the Gaelic Irish. Instead, he argues that the Pale was a frontier of separation, where proximity heightened a sense of alterity and imbued the frontier elite with a strong sense of Englishness. This theme is carried over into chapter two, which looks at military organisation. Among other things, Ellis argues that the government resorted to the ideological weapon of a rhetoric of difference, which sought to drive a cultural wedge between the communities on either side of the frontier, and to strengthen the ties between the centre and peripheries of the English state. In this context, taking on Gaelic Irish cultural identifiers was seen by contemporaries as ‘a disease which gradually undermined the body politic’. (p. 56). This focus on Englishness is akin to David Green’s recent reinterpretation of the 1366 Statutes of Kilkenny, and, like that study, is a welcome reminder that the members of the English colony were members of a socio-political world that stretched well beyond Ireland. Nevertheless, the approach risks downplaying local conditions, which, as Ellis shows in later chapters, had a significant impact on the implementation of crown policy.
Chapter three surveys the impact that the deaths of their ruling magnates had on each border shire. Once military subventions trickled out by 1479, local lords and gentry worked through the traditional structures of local government to build up a system of standing defences, and to coordinate the military service of the tenantry. Ellis displays the benefits of his comparative approach by characterising this as a distinctively English system of border defence, grown out of the later fourteenth century, which was more economical than European-style standing armies. Chapters five and six consider the tensions between traditional forms of governance and the new demands of a centralising Tudor monarchy. When, from about 1530, the early Tudors attempted to impose a more uniform style of rule throughout the English state, each region responded differently. In Meath, devolved government allowed the Dublin government greater freedom to support the local community, with the Irish parliament serving as the setting for some local planning. Tudor policy therefore met with greater success in Ireland than in the far north, where local communities were left to pay for expensive peacetime patrols, and to put up with sporadic royal interference in local office holding. This reinforces the importance of regional studies to our understanding of the English state’s development in the later middle ages and renaissance.
No study cutting across several historiographies can be comprehensive in its coverage, yet Ellis opens himself up to criticism by making a number of bold claims about the current state of research. Most notably, he goes too far in his attempt to posit a dominant ‘national’ view of Irish history that this study seeks to refute. For instance, Ellis states that the late James Lydon’s understanding of the medieval Irish frontier has become ‘almost canonical’ since its first publication in the 1960s (p. 10). This may be correct to a point, but it downplays the significance of Brendan Smith’s important contributions, the ‘British’ perspective applied by Rees Davies and others, and Robert Bartlett’s use of Turner’s frontier thesis to place Ireland in a European context. More engagement with these works would have lent further historiographical weight to Ellis’s conclusions. It is also unfortunate that Ellis did not engage meaningfully with the work of younger historians, such as Peter Crooks and Sparky Booker, which has brought a new level of nuance and sophistication to our understanding of fifteenth-century identity politics in Ireland. Finally, Ellis’s argument that the annual commemoration in Elizabethan Dublin of Black Monday has fallen victim to ‘collective amnesia’ (p. 11) ignores Declan Johnston’s 2013 article on that very topic. Nevertheless, Defending English ground is a welcome reminder to Irish historians of the wider contexts of their subject, and shows British historians the benefits of a comparative approach to the history of the late medieval English polity.
