ABSTRACT
The English fitfully exploited the Brutus myth in asserting authority over the whole of Britain in the sixteenth century, but it is the myth of a founding conqueror who divided up the three British kingdoms and which had nothing to say about Ireland. Coping with, devising strategies to deal with, the reality of the superior might of the English is part of the warp and woof of Irish, Scottish and Welsh historiography. But there remains a tendency in Irish, Scottish and Welsh historiography to play down the effects on the Irish, Scottish, Welsh and English peoples' of the dialectical process involved, the degree to which native cultures did not heroically resist acculturation and integration but interacted so as to experience profound change without disintegrating. Englishness is self-evidently the product of complex interactions of peoples' and cultures; but Scottishness, Irishness and Welshness too are the product of complex interactions of peoples', one of them the English.
