National Identities and the Hundred Years War

Summary

Examinations of national identity and nationalism have been and remain a staple of historical research for medievalists and modernists alike. Works have considered the essential components of a national identity, the preconditions necessary for its construction, the point at which the nation first became a fundamental political factor, and when the idea of nationhood began to permeate political institutions. Although the Hundred Years War has not been excluded from such discussions, the bulk of recent later medieval work in this field has analysed developments in the British Isles and offered new interpretations of the national and regional identities constructed in Britain and Ireland. A number of seminal works in this ‘British’ tradition, such as those by Rees Davies, Ralph Griffiths and Robin Frame, for good reason bisect the period of the Hundred Years War and pay comparatively little attention to events on the continent; while works concerned with Anglo-French affairs by Christopher Allmand, Colette Beaune and Anne Curry, similarly, rarely concern themselves with developments in the wider British Isles and Ireland during the period of the war. One of the aims of this paper is to draw together these different approaches and distinctive historiographical traditions in search of a more widely contextualised understanding of the construction of national identities in England, France and the British Isles during the Hundred Years War. Additionally, although not seeking some ‘unified theory’, this paper also considers a more fundamental distinction, that which divides those scholars who assert the nation was a distinct political and cultural feature of medieval Europe, and those who view the modern nation as a radically different social, political and cultural unit and date its birth to the Enlightenment and Revolutionary era. Such wider studies of nationhood and nationalism contend that England and France in the Middle Ages should not, categorically, be considered ‘nations’.

Certain aspects of this approach to the subject are, of course, not original. Rees Davies provided a robust response to the assertion made by such figures as Ernest Gellner, Eric Hobsbawm and Benedict Anderson that the nation is purely a creation of the modern world, and Robin Frame has suggested it is necessary to consider a broader canvas than just the British Isles when analysing its national political cultures in the later Middle Ages.