ABSTRACT
In 1395 Philippe de Mézières, former chancellor of the crusader Kingdom of Cyprus, wrote to Richard II of England seeking his support for an Anglo-French expedition to the Holy Land. Mézières addressed Richard as ‘gentle and thrice noble King of Great Britain, Prince of Wales and North Wales, Lord of Great Ireland and King of Cornwall’. 1 The titles used by the diplomat reflected the continued identification of the English kings as rulers over all the peoples of the British Isles. They also suggest that, in the last decade of the fourteenth century, contemporaries sensed a heightened significance to such claims for both King Richard and those lords and peoples he claimed as his subjects in the archipelago. This significance can be seen as a reversal of the trends of the preceding half-century. As we have seen, in the decades from 1340 to 1390 it is possible to compare the resources and energy expended by the governments of Edward III and his successor on participation in warfare with France with the limited initiatives undertaken by the English crown in terms of its rights and authority in the insular lands beyond England. This relative disengagement by the English crown has led to connections and patterns of political activity across the British Isles being relegated to a secondary position in political analysis. However, as has been examined in earlier chapters with regard to royal governments, to the ideas of nations and communities, to elites and to regional power structures, especially those where royal administration was not the principal political focus, contacts and comparisons across these insular lands retained importance. Such common themes and interlinked histories form a vital element in the changes to the internal characters and external relations of the realms of the British Isles between 1280 and 1340. This chapter will demonstrate that they continued to be of consequence through the fourteenth century and that events in these realms still need to be placed into the wider context if their full meaning is to be grasped.
