Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-dzt6s Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-25T17:18:27.918Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Briton and Scythian: Tudor representations of Irish origins

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 July 2016

Andrew Hadfield
Andrew Hadfield*
Affiliation:
Department of English, University of Wales, Abersytwyth
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

It is a commonplace of recent British historiography that in the early modern period a sophisticated and sceptical concept of writing history began to develop which involved, among other things, historians becoming significantly less credulous in their use of sources. Often the crucial break with medieval ‘chronicles’ is seen to have been brought about by the triumph of the exiled Italian humanist, Polydore Vergil, over the fervently nationalistic band of British historians and antiquarians led by John Leland, establishing that the Arthurian legends were no more than an origin myth. Jack Scarisbrick, for example, has argued that ‘early Tudor England did not produce a sudden renewal of Arthurianism … As the sixteenth century wore on, Geoffrey of Monmouth’s patriotic fantasies received increasingly short shrift from reputable historians.’ However, this comforting narrative of increasingly thorough and careful scholarship ignores the fact that there was a form of history writing in which the reliance upon origin myths such as the Arthurian legends and the ‘matter of Britain’ actually increased dramatically after the Reformation, namely English histories of Ireland.

Type
Articles
Information
Irish Historical Studies , Volume 28 , Issue 112 , November 1993 , pp. 390 - 408
Copyright
Copyright © Irish Historical Studies Publications Ltd 1993

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

1 See Kendrick, T. D., British antiquity (London, 1950), chs 3-6.Google Scholar

2 Scarisbrick, J. J., Henry VIII (London, 1988 ed.), p. 271.Google Scholar

3 Spenser, Edmund, A view of the present state of Ireland, ed. Renwick, W. L. (Oxford, 1970 ed.), p. 46.Google Scholar

4 Geoffrey, of Monmouth, , The history of the kings of Britain, ed. and trans. Thorpe, Lewis (Harmondsworth, 1980 ed.) (henceforth cited as Geoffrey, Historia), pp 221-2.Google Scholar

5 On Geoffrey as a historian see Flint, Valerie, ‘The Historia regum Britanniae of Geoffrey of Monmouth: parody and its purpose — a suggestion’ in Speculum, liv (1979), pp 447-68Google Scholar; Brooke, Christopher, ‘Geoffrey of Monmouth as a historian’ in Brooke, Christopher and Dumville, David (eds), The church and the Welsh border in the central middle ages (Woodbridge, 1986), pp 95–107 Google Scholar; Johnson, Lesley, ‘Commemorating the past: a critical study of the shaping of British and Arthurian history in Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia regum Brittaniae, Wace’s Roman de Brut and the alliterative Morte Arthure ’ (unpublished Ph.D. thesis, King’s College, London, 1990).Google Scholar

6 Kendrick, British antiquity, ch. 3; Pocock, J. G. A., The ancient constitution of the feudal law (rev. ed., Cambridge, 1987), pp 40, 96CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Harper, Carrie A., The sources of the British chronicle in Spenser’s ‘Faerie queene’ (Bryn Mawr, 1940).Google Scholar

7 For details of Dee’s life see Deacon, Richard, John Dee: scientist, geographer, astrologer and secret agent to Elizabeth I (London, 1968)Google Scholar. Dee traced his own genealogy back to Roderick the Great, prince of Wales, to affirm his own Britishness: see his D.N.B. entry.

8 Taylor, E. G. R., ‘A letter dated 1577 from Mercator to John Dee’ in Imago Mundi, xiii (1956), pp 56–68.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

9 Hakluyt, Richard, The principal navigations, voyages, traffiques and discoveries of the English nation (8 vols, London, 1926 ed.), i, 99–100.Google Scholar

10 Ibid., v, 79–80.

11 Sir Humphrey Gilbert, ‘A discourse of the necessities and commoditie of planting English colonies upon the north partes of America’, ibid., vi, 58–9.

12 Hanmer, Meredith, ‘The chronicle of Ireland’ in SirWare, James (ed.), Ancient Irish histories (repr., 2 vols, Dublin, 1809), i, 221–3.Google Scholar

13 Kendrick, British antiquity, p. 37; Trattner, Walter, ‘God and expansion in Elizabethan England: John Dee, 1527-83’ in Journal of the History of Ideas, xxv (1964), pp 26-7.Google Scholar

14 Hakluyt, Principal navigations, i, 8, 32–3, 61–3. On Dee see also Taylor, E. G. R., Tudor geography, 1485-1583 (London, 1930), pp 106, 121-2Google Scholar; Andrews, K. R., Trade, plunder and settlement: maritime enterprise and the genesis of the British empire, 1480-1630 (Cambridge, 1984), p. 10 Google Scholar and passim. On the readership of Hakluyt see Parker, John, Books to build an empire (Amsterdam, 1965), ch 8Google Scholar; Wright, Louis B., Middle-class culture in Elizabethan England (Ithaca, 1963 ed.)Google Scholar, ch. 14 and passim.

15 Cambrensis, Giraldus, Expugnatio Hibernica, ed. and trans Martin, F. X. and Scott, A. B. (Dublin, 1978), Bk 2, c. 6Google Scholar; idem, The history and topography of Ireland (Topographia Hibernica), ed. and trans. J. J. O’Meara (Harmondsworth, 1982 ed.), c. 92. Ironically, like so many of the Tudor historians, Giraldus elsewhere ridicules Geoffrey’s intellectual achievements as a historian: see Richter, Michael, Giraldus Cambrensis and the growth of the Welsh nation (Aberystwyth, 1976 ed.), pp 67, 75–6.Google Scholar

16 On Laudabiliter and its significance see Martin, F. X., ‘Diarmait Mac Murchada and the coming of the Anglo-Normans’ in Cosgrove, Art (ed.), A new history of Ireland, ii: Medieval Ireland, 1169-1534 (Oxford, 1987), pp 57–60 Google Scholar; Richter, Giraldus Cambrensis, p. 28; Maxwell, Constantia, Irish history from contemporary sources (1509-1610) (London, 1923), p. 22.Google Scholar

17 Keating, Geoffrey, Forasfeasa ar Eirinn: the history of Ireland, ed. and trans. Comyn, David and Dinneen, P. S. (4 vols, London 1902-14), i, 153.Google Scholar

18 Hooker, John, ‘The conquest of Ireland’ in Holinshed, Raphael, Chronicles of England, Scotland and Ireland, ed. Snow, Vernon (6 vols, New York, 1976 ed.), vi, 109.Google Scholar

19 See Giraldus, Expugnatio, Bk 2, cc 24, 35, 39.

20 See Dickens, A. G., The English Reformation (London, 1986 ed.), p. 416 Google Scholar and passim; Wright, Middle-class culture, pp 333–4 and passim; Knowles, David, Thomas Becket (London, 1970), p. 2.Google Scholar

21 It is worth noting that one modern commentator speculates that John of Salisbury, one of Henry II’s emissaries to Pope Adrian IV and secretary to Archbishop Theobald, might have ‘played the Arthurian card’ to obtain authorisation for Henry to enter Ireland on his own: Dolley, Michael, Anglo-Norman Ireland, c. 1100-1318 (Dublin, 1972), p. 45.Google Scholar

22 Obviously the claim to Ireland as a part of the Angevin empire via Eleanor of Aquitaine was no longer applicable; on this claim see Flanagan, Marie Therese, Irish society, Anglo-Norman settlers, Angevin kingship: interactions in Ireland in the late twelfth century (Oxford, 1989), p. 274.Google Scholar

23 Holinshed, Chronicles, i, 576. Mordred’s Pictishness seems to be an addition of Holinshed’s; Geoffrey described him as the second son of Aurelius’s sister (Gawain is his elder brother) and Loth, a Briton who becomes the rightful king of Norway through Arthur’s timely intervention (Historia, pp 221, 223). The change from a betrayal by an insider to one by an outsider may be of significance in the context of a centralised Tudor state keen to erase the differences of its marginalised peoples and to assimilate them into a homogeneous unit: see Hechter, Michael, Internal colonialism: the Celtic fringe in British national development (London, 1975), esp. ch. 4.Google Scholar

24 Hanmer, ‘Chronicle of Ireland’, pp 101-2; see also SirMalory, Thomas, Le Morte D’Arthur, ed. Cowen, Janet (2 vols, Harmondsworth, 1984 ed.), i, 303, 330Google Scholar. On ‘fealty’ see Bloch, Marc, Feudal society, trans. Manyon, L. A. (2 vols, London, 1975 ed.), i, ch. 11.Google Scholar

25 Keating, Foras feasa, i, 13–19. For evidence that the controversy about Arthur’s conquest of Ireland and the use of Geoffrey’s Historia raged well beyond the Reformation see Walsh, Peter, A prospect of the state of Ireland (London, 1682), pp 396–401.Google Scholar

26 Pawlisch, Hans, Sir John Davies and the conquest of Ireland: a study in legal imperialism (Cambridge, 1985), p. 63.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

27 Scotia is sometimes made the mother of Gathelus, whose father was a Scythian: see Myers, J. P. (ed.), Elizabethan Ireland: a selection of writings by Elizabethan writers on Ireland (Hamden, Conn., 1983), pp 32-3.Google Scholar

28 Campion, Edmund, Two bokes of the histories of Ireland, ed. Vossen, A. F. (Assen, 1963), Bkl, c.9.Google Scholar

29 On the distinction between ‘New’ and ‘Old’ English see, for example, Canny, Nicholas, ‘Identity formation in Ireland: the emergence of the Anglo-Irish’ in Canny, Nicholas and Pagden, Anthony (eds), Colonial identity in the Atlantic world, 1500-1800 (Princeton, 1987), pp 159–212 Google Scholar; Moody, T. W., ‘Introduction: Early modern Ireland’ in Moody, T. W., Martin, F. X. and Byrne, F. J. (eds), A new history of Ireland, iii: Early modern Ireland, 1534-1691 (Oxford, 1976), pp xlii–xlvii.Google Scholar

30 Campion might have become a Catholic by the time he wrote his Two bokes of the histories of Ireland, which may have made him less willing to assert a British imperial authority to rival that of Rome than other writers, who do not seem to be quite so concerned to mask a violent colonial origin. That the work was hurriedly written (probably in less than ten weeks) could also account for certain errors and inconsistencies: see Vossen’s introduction in Campion, Two bokes, pp 108-9; Waugh, Evelyn, Edmund Campion: scholar, priest, hero, and martyr (Oxford, 1980 ed.), ch. 1.Google Scholar

31 The 1570s, when both Hanmer and Campion were compiling their histories, was a time of relative stability in Ireland, and many English government officials and writers believed that Ireland was about to accept the spread of English law, order and administrative machinery: see Ellis, Steven G., Tudor Ireland: crown, community and the conflict of cultures, 1470-1603 (London, 1985), pp 264-74Google Scholar; Canny, Nicholas P., The Elizabethan conquest of Ireland: a pattern established, 1565-76 (Hassocks, 1976), ch. 5.Google Scholar

32 Lennon, Colm, Richard Stanihurst the Dubliner, 1547-1618 (Dublin, 1981), p. 38.Google Scholar

33 Stanihurst, Richard, ‘The chronicle of Ireland’ in Holinshed, , Chronicles, vi, 77.Google Scholar

34 Spenser, View, pp 197,42; see also The works of Edmund Spenser: a variorum edition, ed. Greenlaw, Edwin et al. (10 vols, Baltimore, 1966 ed.) (henceforth cited as Spenser variorum), x, 85–6, 89.Google Scholar

35 The use of both ‘allegiance’ and ‘subjection’ seems to imply that the Irish surrendered to a superior power and yet did so voluntarily, i.e. that equal and subordinate status are simultaneous, precisely the ambiguity of imperial authority discussed above.

36 The words Irenius cites are marraah (in Irish ‘horseman’, from the Saxon marh, ’horse’), gemanus (‘to ride’ in Irish and Saxon); these correlations are said to have come about through trade and common inhabitance. ‘Mere Saxon’, as in ‘mere English’ (see, e.g., Holinshed, , Chronicles, i, 27 Google Scholar) or ‘mere Irish’ (see, e.g., Campion, Two bokes, p. 21; Moryson, Fynes, ‘A description of Ireland’ in Morley, Henry (ed.), Ireland under Elizabeth and James I (London, 1890), p. 426)Google Scholar. Moryson more often writes of the ‘wild Irish’, which helps to emphasise the lack of a pejorative implication in ‘mere’, which signifies the purity of that group in terms of the people stated.

37 More specifically they claim a Basque ancestry. In the middle ages the Basques had an extremely low reputation, not unlike that of the Irish: see Gillingham, John, Richard the Lionheart (London, 1978), p. 50.Google Scholar

38 See also Spenser variorum, x, 309–10 for the Polydore Vergil comparison. The annalist John Stowe is another who is sceptical of the explanatory value of the ‘matter of Britain’: see his Survey of London (London, 1965 ed.), p. 486.

39 I have followed Michael Richter and John Gillingham in calling the Anglo-Norman invasion of Ireland an English invasion: see Richter, Michael, ‘The interpretation of medieval Irish history’ in I.H.S., xxiv, no. 95 (May 1985), pp 289-98Google Scholar; Gillingham, John, ‘Images of Ireland, 1170-1600: the origins of English imperialism’ in History Today, xxxvii (Feb. 1987), pp 16–22 Google Scholar; see also Frame, Robin, English lordship in Ireland (Oxford, 1982).Google Scholar

40 On the legends of the genealogy of Brutus, Polydore Vergil comments: ‘I have stedfastlie promised that I will neither affirme as trew, neither reproove as false, the judgement of one or other as concerning the originall of soe auncient a people, referring all things, as wee have don hertofore, to the consideration of the reader’ (Polydore Vergil’s English history, i, ed. SirEllis, Henry (Camden Soc, London 1846), p. 31)Google Scholar. Despite this disclaimer Vergil makes it quite clear that he has little time for such theories, believing that England being so close to mainland Europe must at some point have been colonised by Spaniards, French, Germans or Italians. He is similarly leading on the authenticity of Arthur (pp 121–2). As Denys Hay has noted, ‘Vergil subjects both stories to a devastating historical analysis, although he politely concludes with a verdict of not proven’ (The Anglia history of Polydore Vergil, ed. Hay, Denys (Camden Soc., London, 1950), p. xxiv)Google Scholar. Camden’s rhetorical manipulation of the reader is identical.

41 Camden, William, Britannia, ed. and trans. Gibson, Edmund (London, 1695), pp 966-8.Google Scholar

42 Speed, John, The theatre of the empire of Great Britain (London, 1625), p. 137 Google Scholar. On the popularity of such geographical surveys see Wright, Middle-class culture, pp 315–19.

43 Speed, Theatre, p. 137. Brittany was more usually referred to as ‘Little Britain’: see Hay, Denys, ‘The use of the term “Great Britain” in the middle ages’ in Proceedings of the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland, lxxxiv (1955-6), pp 55-6.Google Scholar

44 Geoffrey, Historia, pp 100–1.

45 See Hugh Trevor-Roper, Queen Elizabeth’s first historian: William Camden and the beginnings of English ‘civil history’ (London, 1971)Google Scholar; Fussner, F. S., The historical revolution (London, 1962), ch. 9Google Scholar; Gottfried, Rudolf B., ‘The early development of the section on Ireland in Camden’s Britannia’ in English Literary History, x (1943), pp 117-30.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

46 See Kendrick, British antiquity, ch. 3; Levy, F. J., Tudor historical thought (San Marino, 1967), pp 65-8Google Scholar and passim; Millican, Charles Bowie, Spenser and the Table Round: a study in the contemporaneous background for Spenser’s use of the Arthurian legend (London, 1967 ed.), ch. 2.Google Scholar

47 For a discussion of the interrelationship between the proper name and property see Derrida, Jacques, Of grammatology, trans. Spivak, G. C. (Baltimore, 1976), pp 106-18.Google Scholar

48 See Spenser variorum, x, 308–12, 318–22 and passim.

49 Sicilius, Diodorus, The library of history, ed. and trans. Oldfather, C. H. et al. (12 vols, London, 1933-57), iii, 181.Google Scholar

50 Strabo, , Geography, ed. and trans. Jones, H. L. and Sterrett, R. S. (8 vols, London, 1917-32), ii, 259–61.Google Scholar

51 Herodotus, , The histories, trans. Selincourt, Aubrey de and Burn, A. R. (Harmondsworth, 1986 ed.), pp 271-2, 289-95Google Scholar and passim; Tacitus, , Germania, trans. Mattingly, Harold (Harmondsworth, 1951 ed.), cc 43-6Google Scholar; Stanihurst, Richard, ‘The description of Ireland’ and ‘The chronicle of Ireland’ in Holinshed, , Chronicles, vi, 6, 76Google Scholar and passim; Buchanan, George, The history of Scotland, trans. Aikman, James (4 vols, Glasgow, 1827), i, 154–5Google Scholar. See also Holinshed, , Chronicles, i, 501, 550Google Scholar; Bodin, Jean, Method for the easy comprehension of history, trans. Reynolds, Beatrice (New York, 1945), chs 5-6Google Scholar. Jones, H. S. V. has argued that Bodin was the crucial influence behind the View in Spenser’s defense of Lord Grey (Urbana, III., 1919).Google Scholar

52 Spenser also notes the connexion of Gauls and Britons, the latter being descended from the former (View, p. 45), but nothing is made of this, presumably because it might serve to undermine the distinctions made.

53 The only really significant ‘Gaulish’ custom the Irish are said to have preserved is the ritual blood-drinking described by Irenius at the execution of Murrogh O’Brien (and even here the practice is transformed from the original consumption of enemies’ blood to that of friends).

54 Lucian, , ‘Toxaris, or Friendship’ in The works of Lucian, ed. and trans. Harmon, A. M. et al. (8 vols, London, 1913-67), v, 101–208.Google Scholar

55 Patricia Coughlan, ‘“Some secret scourge which shall by her come unto England”: Ireland and incivility in Spenser’ in idem (ed.), Spenser and Ireland: an interdisciplinary perspective (Cork, 1989), pp 64–70.

56 See, e.g., Hooker, Richard, ‘The chronicle of Ireland’ in Holinshed, , Chronicles, vi, 369 Google Scholar; Rich, Barnaby, A new description of Ireland (London, 1610), ch. 5Google Scholar. Rich refers to the Irish as ‘barbarous savages’ (p. 18).

57 The phrase is borrowed from Benedict Anderson’s influential study of nationalism, Imagined communities: reflections on the origin and spread of nationalism (London, 1983; repr. 1990).Google Scholar

58 Lucian, ‘Toxaris’, pp 115, 119–21, 205–6. The tract concludes with a hope that their friendship will continue, as they are bound together by ‘this conversation … and the similarity of LtheirJ ideals’ (Mnesippus). The dialogue serves as a fictional narrative of union.

59 Spenser variorum, x, 372; Faerie queene, VII, vi, 37. In the View Irenius praises the religious nature of the Irish, claiming that this will aid their conversion (pp 161–2). Here, at least, Spenser’s text is ‘dialogic’ as Coughlan claims (’“Some secret scourge”’, pp 62–8).

60 Hough, Graham, A preface to Spenser (London, 1968 ed.), p. 192 Google Scholar; Jones, Ann Rosalind and Stallybrass, Peter, ‘Dismantling Irena: the sexualising of Ireland in early modern England’ in Parker, Andrew et al. (eds), Nationalisms and sexualities (London, 1992), pp 157-71.Google Scholar

61 See Brady, Ciaran, ‘Spenser’s Irish crisis: humanism and experience in the 1590s’ in Past & Present, no. Ill (1986), pp 17–49.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

62 Moryson, Fynes, ‘A description of Ireland’ in Morley, (ed.), Ire. under Eliz. & Jas I, pp 413, 428Google Scholar; Campion, Two bokes, Bk 1, cc 4, 8–10; Hanmer, ‘Chronicle of Ireland’, pp 13–14; Quinn, D. B., The Elizabethans and the Irish (Ithaca, N.Y., 1966), pp 53, 79, 83Google Scholar; Jones & Stallybrass, ‘Dismantling Irena’.

63 Camden, Britannia, pp xvii–xviii. On ‘humanism’ and history see Kendrick, British antiquity, ch 6; Eisenstein, Elizabeth L., The printing press as an agent of change (Cambridge, 1980 ed.), ch. 3CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Fussner, Historical revolution, chs 1, 5; Ferguson, Arthur B., ‘Circumstances and the sense of history in Tudor England: the coming of the historical revolution’ in Medieval and Renaissance Studies, iii (1967), pp 170–205 Google Scholar; Levy, Tudor historical thought, ch. 2.

64 Hanmer, ‘Chronicle of Ireland’, pp 14–15.

65 See Appiah, Anthony, ‘The uncompleted argument: Du Bois and the illusion of race’ in Gates, H. L. (ed.), ‘Race’, writing and difference (Chicago, 1986), pp 21–37 Google Scholar, for an analysis of an identical contradiction in nineteenth- and twentieth-century discourses of racial origins.

66 On Stanihurst and the question of the identity of the Palesmen see Lennon, Colm, ‘Richard Stanihurst (1547-1618) and Old English identity’ in I.H.S., xxi, no. 82 (Sept. 1978), pp 121-43Google Scholar; idem, Richard Stanihurst.

67 Stanihurst, ‘Description of Ireland’, p. 6. In Camden’s Britannia Japhet’s descendants populate Europe and north Africa (p. x). On the use of the postdiluvian diaspora as an explanatory narrative of cultural difference in Renaissance ethnology see Hogden, Margaret, Early anthropology in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries (Philadelphia, 1964), ch. 8.Google Scholar

68 For similar comments on language, conquest and obedience see Spenser, View, p. 67; Hughes, Charles (ed.), Shakespeare’s Europe (being the unpublished chapters of Fynes Moryson’s ‘Itinerary’) (London, 1903), p. 213 Google Scholar; ‘Lord Chancellor Gerrarde’s notes of his report on Ireland’ in Anal. Hib., no. 2 (1931), pp 95–6, 123, 184–5.

69 Stanihurst, ‘Description of Ireland’, p. 4; Lennon, Richard Stanihurst, ch. 7.

70 The notion that life amongst the Irish would serve to make the English ‘degenerate’, i.e. lose their ‘civilised’ characteristics and become Irish, dates back to Giraldus’s observations of the behaviour of the Norman settlers in Ireland: see Topographia, c. 101. It is commonplace among Tudor and Jacobean observers of Ireland: see, e.g., Campion, Two bokes, pp 9, 14–15, 107; Hooker, ‘Chronicle of Ireland’, pp 265-6; Hughes (ed.), Shakespeare’s Europe, pp 201–3 and passim.

71 Fogarty, Anne, ‘The colonization of language: narrative strategies in A view of the present state of Ireland and The faerie queene, Book 6’ in Coughlan, (ed.), Spenser & Ireland, p. 84.Google Scholar

72 See Attridge, Derek, ‘Language as history / history as language: Saussure and the romance of etymology’ in Peculiar language: literature as difference from the Renaissance to James Joyce (Ithaca, N.Y., 1988), pp 90–126.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

73 For a convenient overview see Bottigheimer, Karl, ‘Kingdom and colony: Ireland in the Westward Enterprise, 1536-1660’ in Andrews, K. R. et al. (ed), The Westward Enterprise: English activities in Ireland, the Atlantic and America, 1480-1650 (Liverpool, 1978), pp 45–64.Google Scholar

74 Michael MacCarthy-Morrogh, The Munster plantation: English migration to southern Ireland, 1583-1641 (Oxford, 1986), pp 279-80Google Scholar; Canny, Nicholas, ‘Protestants, planters and apartheid in early modern Ireland’ in I.H.S., xxv, no. 98 (Nov. 1986), pp 111-14Google Scholar; Quinn, D. B., ‘“A discourse on Ireland (circa 1599)”: a sidelight on English colonial policy’ in R.I.A. Proc, xlvii (1942), sect. C, pp 151-66.Google Scholar

75 Morgan, Hiram, ‘Mid-Atlantic blues’ in Irish Review, xi (winter, 1991-2), pp 50–55.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

76 See Brady, Ciaran, ‘Court, castle and country: the framework of government in Tudor Ireland’ in Brady, Ciaran and Gillespie, Raymond (eds), Natives and newcomers: essays on the making of Irish colonial society, 1534-1641 (Dublin, 1986), pp 22–49.Google Scholar

77 Pawlisch, Sir John Davies & the conquest of Ireland, p. 131. Davies was referring specifically to the use of the customs’ practice of ‘murage’ in Bristol and Waterford. More generally, see Russell, Conrad, ‘The British background to the Irish rebellion of 1641’ in Historical Research, lxi (1988), pp 166-82CrossRefGoogle Scholar; idem, ‘The British problem and the English Civil War’ in History, lxxii (1987), pp 395-415. Williams, Penry, in one of the best discussions of the government of the Tudors, omits a consideration of the administrative machine in Ireland because ‘the complex field of Irish history would have needed a book to itself, so different were Irish society and Irish government from English’ (The Tudor regime (Oxford, 1986 ed.), preface).Google Scholar

78 Barthes, Roland, ‘Myth today’ in Mythologies, trans. Lavers, Annette (London, 1983 ed.), pp 109-59.Google Scholar

79 Hanmer, ‘Chronicle of Ireland’, pp 14–23. Hanmer provides a long list of all the Arthurian figures who went to Ireland (pp 16–17), many of whom seem to be taken from Malory’s Morte D’Arthur.

80 On the problem of defining the term ‘colony’, which is often assumed (erroneously) to be identical with the later historical phenomenon ‘colonialism’, see Finley, M. I., ‘Colonies: an attempt at a typology’ in R. Hist. Soc. Trans., xxvi (1976), pp 167-88CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Hadfield, A. D., ‘The spectre of positivism?: sixteenth-century Irish historiography’ in Text & Context, iii (1988), pp 10–16 Google Scholar. Richard Beacon, the Munster planter, uses the word in the way described: see Solon hisfollie (Oxford, 1594), Bk 3, c. 14.

81 Holinshed, Chronicles, i, 37; see also William Harrison, ‘The description of Britain’, ibid., p. 201.

82 See Shire, Helen, A preface to Spenser (London, 1978), p. 51 Google Scholar; O’Connell, Michael, Mirror and veil: the historical dimension of Spenser’s ‘Faerie queene’ (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1977), p. 139 Google Scholar; Norbrook, David, Poetry and politics in the English Renaissance (London, 1984), p. 140.Google Scholar

83 Higden, Ranulph, Polychronicon, ed. Babbington, Churchill and Lumby, J. R. (9 vols, London, 1865-86), i, c. 33Google Scholar; Geoffrey, Historia, pp 197,221–2; Giraldus, Topographia, Bk 3, c. 92; idem, Expugnatio, Bk 2, c. 6; William, of Malmesbury, , Gesta regnwn Anglorum [c. 1125], ed. Giles, J. A., trans. Sharp, John (London, 1847), p. 443.Google Scholar

84 See Malory, , Morte D’Arthur, i, 22, 303; ii, 103Google Scholar; Wace, , ‘Roman de Brut’ in Arthurian chronicles, trans. Mason, Eugene (London, 1962), pp 54-7Google Scholar; Layamon, ‘Brut’, ibid., pp 205–7.

85 Higden, , Polychronicon, i, c. 33 Google Scholar; Henry, of Huntingdon, , Historia Anglorum [c. 1129], ed. and trans. Forester, Thomas (London, 1853), pp 10–11 Google Scholar; Nennius, , British history and Welsh annals, ed. and trans. Morris, John (London, 1980), pp 10, 21Google Scholar; Geoffrey, Historia, pp 123–4; Giraldus, Topgraphia, Bk 3, c. 87 and passim. On English policy see Brady, , ‘Court, castle & country’; Edwards, Philip, Threshold of a nation: a study in English and Irish drama (Cambridge, 1979), ch. 4Google Scholar; Loades, D. M., Politics and the nation, 1450-1660 (London, 1972), pt 3.Google Scholar

86 On Spenser see Brady, , ‘Spenser’s Irish crisis’; Grennan, Eamon, ‘Language and politics: a note on some metaphors in Spenser’s View ’ in Spenser Studies, iii (1982), pp 99–110 Google Scholar; on Hanmer and Moryson see the relevant D.N.B. entries; on Stanihurst see Lennon, Richard Stanihurst; on Campion see Vossen’s introduction in Campion, Two bokes.

87 This paper was written with the aid of a British Academy Post-Doctoral Fellowship in the Humanities and Social Sciences. I would like to thank Lesley Johnson and John Gillingham for helpful comments on an earlier draft, which saved me from numerous errors.