ABSTRACT
I begin with the view from London. The late twelfth-century historian, Ralph, dean of St Paul’s, regarded the kingdom of England as a model state-literally the model on which he believed that a new king of France, Philip Augustus, intended to pattern his own kingdom. This model state was, in Ralph’s words, ‘wide in extent, peacefully governed, and contained within it some very barbarous inhabitants, the Scots and the Welsh’.1 Dean Ralph’s view encapsulates two perceptions of fundamental importance for the history of the United Kingdom: the first, that the king of England is the ruler of Britain; the second, that some of his subjects are barbarians. Since in this passage Ralph was limiting his remarks to Britain, he made no mention of the latest of Henry II’s acquisitions, Ireland. Had he done so, he would certainly have added the Irish to the list of Henry’s barbarous subjects. By the 1180s, when Dean Ralph was writing, the foundations of an English empire had been well and truly laid-‘an empire based on the wealth, population and resources of southern England over the rest of the British Isles’.2 That there was an English empire of Britain had been claimed two hundred years earlier still, in the 980s-not surprisingly, given the military and political achievements of the tenth-century West Saxons. But what was new about the twelfth-century ‘empire’ was the assumption that some of the ruler’s subjects were barbarians. Given that, for all its power then and in subsequent centuries, the English state never managed to introduce measures for the effective integration of the ‘Celtic’ parts of the British Isles which it controlled into its own, distinctively English, political community, this new assumption was to be of critical significance. It meant that those whose lands were taken often remained undervalued and alienated.3 If English power tended to unite Britain and
Ireland, English attitudes tended to divide; hence the long history of a disunited kingdom.
