ABSTRACT
This essay has two parts, dividing in the early fourteenth century. The first chimes with the agreeably Whiggish title of this section of the volume, which commands the medievalists to consider the ‘foundations’ of the United Kingdom-the Westminster-centred state which was at its height between 1801 and 1922, and most of which still exists. (Indeed, whether through arrogance, absence of mind, muddle or guilt, that state, so strict in its treatment of Commonwealth citizens, has never brought itself to regard the inhabitants of the bit that has seceded-the citizens of the Irish Republic-as aliens.) Until the early fourteenth century, the historian surveying the British Isles with later events in mind can discover an organising theme ready made: English expansion and responses to it.1 In the later Middle Ages, however, English power ceased to spread; in Ireland it receded. The proto-United Kingdom often attributed to Edward I proved to be built on sand. Its crumbling, at a time when the eyes of the more effective English kings were firmly fixed on France, may prompt another, prior, question. How appropriate is it to take the British Isles as our mental arena, in an age when the kings of England were also continental rulers, and when into the bargain they shared the island of Britain with kings of Scots whose royal status was recognised by Popes, by other European rulers, and indeed by the kings of England themselves? These are issues to which I shall return.
