Sweet Civility and Barbarous Rudeness

During the 1530s there was a lively debate among the circles of Henry VIII's advisers whether the Welsh were sufficiently mature to be admitted to the full privileges and responsibilities of English citizenship. Rowland Lee, bishop of Lichfield (1534-43), president of the Council of Wales and the Marches and arch-exponent of the virtues of terror as the means to obedience, had no doubt that the Welsh failed the litmus test of political maturity. "There are very few Welsh in Wales above Brecknock," he declared in a famous comment, "who have £10 in land, and their discretion is less than their land." Leaving discretion aside, what is striking about his observation is its assumption that wealth, preferably landed wealth, is a sine qua non for political maturity and responsibility, specifically for service as a magistrate, justice of the peace, or member of parliament, and for the measure of self-governance in the king's name which such posts implied. The English state, in other words, was not merely an institutional and political artefact; like all other states, it made assumptions, all the more fundamental for being unwritten, about the nature and distribution of wealth and its relationship to political power and responsibility. It had long been so. Soon after the last major Welsh revolt of the thirteenth century, that of 1294-5, English chroniclers observed with satisfaction that the Welsh were at last beginning to master the most basic political equation, namely that wealth accumulation equals peace equals political stability and so, eventually, social and political maturity. "The Welsh," noted the St Albans chronicle, "began after the English fashion (more anglicorum)" - the phrase is very significant - "to accumulate wealth and henceforth lived in fear of losses to their goods." A truly suburban, insurance broker's view of the good life, but one which opened the door eventually to membership of English society and the English polity. "Why," asked Ranulf Higden rhetorically, "do the Welsh live more peacefully now? Because they are richer. Fear of loss of their goods keeps them obedient." It was, appropriately enough, the desire to persuade the Welsh to "grow and rise to more wealth and prosperity" which Henry VIII was to cite in 1543 as the reason for the final assimilation of Wales into England politically and institutionally.

Apart from mastering the skills of wealth accumulation, there was another stumbling-block which the Welsh would have to overcome if they were to qualify for membership of the English state, that of learning the arts of what Edmund Spenser called "sweet civility". Bishop William Barlow of St David's (1536-48) took a rather more generous view of Welsh potential in this respect than did Rowland Lee, but even so he had no doubt that a period of cultural and educational re-orientation was necessary. If provision were made, he suggested, "for learning as well as in grammar as in other sciences and knowledge of the Scripture, the Welsh rudeness would soon be framed to English civility and their corrupt capacities easily reformed into godly intelligence" Barlow's recipe for civilizing the Welsh was in no way novel. It had, for example, been much more amply laid out by Archbishop John Pecham (1279-92) in the wake of Edward I's conquest of the country. Indeed, Pecham's programme had involved not only ecclesiastical and moral reform but also ideological cleansing (to wean the Welsh from their fantasies about descent from the Trojans), economic indoctrination, particularly regarding the virtues of hard work, and deliberate resettlement in towns (just as the Romans had resettled the Burgundians), so that, in the archbishop's words, the Welsh could be brought "to the knowledge of unity with English lordship and the English people" -a pregnant and suggestive phrase indeed.

The comments of Bishops Lee and Barlow, or of the St Albans chronicler and Archbishop Pecham about the economic lifestyle and social customs of the Welsh, are in fact the veriest commonplaces of the observations made about the peoples of the western British Isles - Wales, the north of England (as it now is), Galloway, Scotland, especially and increasingly the Highlands and the Isles and Ireland - from 1100 to 1600, and indeed often well beyond that date. Sometimes the comments are abusively short: "those stubborn, rude and most barbarous people" is a common formula. At other times - notably from the writings of Gerald of Wales in the late twelfth century to the full-blown treatises of men such as William Gerrard, Edmund Spenser, and John Davies in Tudor and Stuart times - they blossom into elaborate, interlocking, quasi-anthropological field reports. We need, of course, to approach such comments and commentaries with circumspection and to supplement and correct them by the evidence, especially from within the societies they claim to describe; but equally and more importantly for present purposes, we need to appreciate them as images created by contemporaries - and often perpetuated by reiteration - of the world as they understood it. Images in that respect were, and are, reality. Furthermore, in describing other societies and cultures which were not commensurate with, or could not be assimilated into, their own, they were, by refraction as it were, identifying some of the distinctive characteristics of their own society.

It was during the course of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries that the great socio-cultural divide within the British Isles came into clear focus. The reasons are manifold. It was then for the first time that an aggressive and expansionist English or, if you will, Anglo-Norman society engaged in a regular and sustained fashion with some of the peoples of the outer regions of these islands, not only in military campaigns but also in an extensive process of settlement, initially in Wales and northern England, then in Scotland, and finally in Ireland. Simultaneously, and particularly during the turmoil of Stephen's reign, Welsh and Scottish (especially Galwegian) troops brought parts of English society to the knowledge, profoundly disturbing as it turned out to be, of the behaviour and customs of a different and, as it must have appeared, barbaric world. Finally, and from the point of view of the historian crucially, it was during this period that a towering group of historians - most notably, of course, William of Malmesbury and Henry of Huntingdon - defined the essence and trajectory of what one may call political and social Englishness; 14 while some two generations later Gerald of Wales, whose massively pioneering achievement should not be concealed beneath the cultivation of his even more massive ego, provided one of the first sustained and coherent characterizations of a primitive people, the Welsh and the Irish. Gerald's work, especially on Ireland, was profoundly important not only on account of its undoubted novelty but also because it became an almost canonical text of English views of the Irish for the better part of five centuries.

The image of "sweet civility" was, as with so much about the early English state, a view of the world as seen from southern and midland England, albeit that one of its most voluble exponents came from Pembrokeshire, little England beyond Wales. It thereby inevitably reflected the values and priorities of a lowland, arable society, a relatively developed and monetized economy, and a region of intensive and exacting lordship and powerfully penetrative kingship. Given the political and economic orientation of southern England at this period, the image came also to be shaped by the aristocratic and cultural values of northern France. The reverberations of the French model reached to the extremities of the British Isles: that was why the modernizing kings of Scotland in the twelfth century were said to "regard themselves as Frenchmen by race, manners, habit and speech" and to "retain only Frenchmen in their service". That is likewise the explanation of the outburst that a native Irish ecclesiastic directed at the reforming and French-influenced St Malachy: "Who do you think you are? A Frenchman? Don't you know that we build in wood, not stone?" Needless to say, it was St Malachy and the French who prevailed: the churches of Ireland were henceforth built in stone, whilst French remained alongside English as the language of public discourse in English Ireland into the fourteenth century.

The image-makers of "sweet civility" drew on other sources also. As befitted their classical education, they were inevitably influenced by classical models of the good life. We should not dismiss such models as mere bookish analogies; topoi, after all, retain their plausibility only so long as they bear some relationship to contemporary practice and aspiration. So it was that when Geoffrey of Monmouth, fresh from reading his classical texts, explained why the Saxons had historically prevailed over the Britons, he provided simultaneously a revealing check-list of what were seen as the distinctly "English" virtues of his own day: the promotion of peace and unity, the cultivation of fields, the building of cities and towns, the appointment of magistrates and lords, and the imposition of laws. What was lacking in Geoffrey's check-list, as in his work in general, was morality and the Church; but others more than amply made good the deficiency. The model of "sweet civility" was, after all, being shaped during the very period when the Church was codifying its laws and extending its jurisdiction, defining and enforcing in detail what Pope Alexander III called "the established practice of the Christian faith" in terms of the behaviour of laymen and clerics alike. "Sweet civility" thereby became not merely a matter of refined manners and economic entrepreneurship; it also acquired a strong moral and moral-reforming dimension, and with it the censoriousness and self-serving sanctimoniousness which often come in the wake of such an attitude.

Finally, there was among the more intelligent and sensitive of the image-makers - notably William of Malmesbury and Gerald of Wales - a recognition that there was a historical dimension to the cultural divide that had come to prevail in the British Isles. Gerald, "avid student of natural history" that he proclaimed himself to be, perceived it most acutely. "Mankind," he pronounced with all the dogmatism of the social evolutionist, "progressed in the common course of things from the forest to the field, from the field to the town and to the social conditions of townsmen." This general formula provided the explanation, especially when sheer geographical inaccessibility was added thereunto, for the customs of the Irish and, by implication though to a lesser degree, the Welsh: "they have not progressed at all from the primitive habits of pastoral living." William of Malmesbury may not have been so explicit and determinist in his social evolutionism; but in his Gesta Regum Anglorum, alongside the overriding theme of the political unification of England, there surfaces an awareness that an improvement in manners, morals, and governance - often under the influence of France - was equally important in the transformation of the country and thereby in distancing it from its backward British neighbours. The importance of this time dimension in the cultural analysis of peoples was considerable. It helped, or could have helped, to move the argument away from mere censoriousness and condemnation. It introduced a comparative historical dimension into an issue which too often, contemporaneously and historically, has been imprisoned by the unilinealism of national historiography. It is worth noticing in this context that one of the most exciting developments in current early medieval historical scholarship is the growing awareness that, in broad terms, much of the British Isles may once have shared a common pattern in the organization of lordship and power; it was, arguably, only from about the ninth century that southern and midland England began to move rapidly its own way. It was at the very time that this process of differentiation was accelerating that the cultural divide within the British Isles became increasingly obvious and virtually unbridgeable. Gerald and William had the sensitivity to recognize that the divide was historically shaped. They also in effect perceived that while the cultural, social, and economic patterns of the outer British Isles were so far out of alignment with those of southern England and its Anglicized annexes, there could be no prospect of any real political union.

The cultural divide was a very real one: it was the distinction between what contemporaries occasionally called a regio composita and a regio barbara. We see it, it is true, largely though not exclusively through English eyes. It is one of the distorting prerogatives of a hegemonic culture, especially a written one, that history is largely written on its terms and using its categories. It is thereby difficult, and in some degree impossible, to recover the culture, and the rationale of the culture, it displaces or relegates to the status of the barbarous. Thus, the culture and society of Gaelic Scotland is almost completely hidden from us by the absence of surviving evidence. Nevertheless, the dimensions of the cultural divide are not in doubt. Contemporaries registered the depth of the chasm, as in the report of a Shropshire monk dispatched from a dug-out oak tree in Dunbrody (Co. Wexford) on "the desolation of the place, the sterility of the soil and the wildness and ferociousness of the natives", or in the pathetic protest of the tax-collector that he would not return to Ireland even if his allowance were doubled or indeed even if he were threatened with imprisonment. The natives, of course, learnt to play to the gallery of these images. One Irishman prefaced his petition by describing himself as "a resident at the end of the world in the Irish parts". A Welsh cleric was even more wily: asked to accompany one of Henry II's knights on a reconnaissance of a part of south-west Wales, he resorted to eating grass and roots, thereby ensuring that a report was duly sent back to the king that this was indeed a God-forsaken country fit only for a bestial race of people.

What, then, was it that consigned these people to the category of the bestial and the barbarous? We may begin with those tests of economic competence (in all senses of that word) which Bishop Rowland Lee had decreed to be a minimum qualification for full membership of the English state. Those tests were ultimately constructed from an image of what was deemed to be normal, though not of course necessarily universal or uniform, features of economic activity in lowland England and the Anglicized parts of the British Isles. Already by the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, if not indeed earlier, we might in very general terms itemize the following as some of those features: a well-populated, village-centred country; a cereal-based agriculture; a world of manors and open and common fields; a dependent landed peasantry more or less firmly locked into an intensive system of seignorial exploitation; a powerful lay and ecclesiastical aristocracy and, arguably, an even more significant class of country gentry; an extensive and overlapping network of towns, markets, and fairs and thereby the opportunities for some measure of specialization and surplus production; a single coinage and a rapidly increasing volume of coins in circulation; a well differentiated social structure; some measure of social mobility and an active land market, even among peasants; and finally an economic, as well as a political, order in which a unitary monarchy played a pivotal part in providing peace, founding towns, monopolizing the mints, levying taxation (direct and indirect), and fostering trade. There is, of course, much that can be added to, and qualified about, such a simplified model; but its main features, if not its terminology, would surely be recognizable to Sir Ralph Pipard, the squire of Rotherfield Peppard in the 1280s and 1290s who figured in the previous chapter. By then - though not in the late eleventh century - many of its features were, in a greater or lesser degree, replicated in a great swathe of the British Isles from the Moray Firth through eastern and southern Scotland, across the coastal lowlands and river valleys of south Wales, and throughout the towns and manors of English Ireland.

Elsewhere in the British Isles it was different. Even the very aspect of the countryside was different: that is why "wild" (silvestris) was the word which came most readily to the pen of observers, and from being applied to the landscape was almost instantly transferred to its inhabitants. It was partly a matter of distance and impenetrability: the Welsh, commented John of Salisbury flaunting his experience of European travel, live in their Alps and sub-Alps; Archbishop Pecham was even more dismissive, showing his talent for turning every comment into an insult: "you live in your little corner in the far end of the world. . . . The rest of the world scarcely knows that you exist as a people"; while Gerald sought to explain some of the idiosyncrasies of the Irish by observing that Ireland "was separated from the rest of the known world and in some ways is to be distinguished as another world". Once one had overcome the fatigue of travel to such inaccessible places, the very aspect of the countryside was disturbingly different to those accustomed to the well-manicured arable plains of southern England. "Wales," said the author of the Gesta Stephani, "is a country of woodland and pasture . . . abounding in deer and fish, milk and herds . . . a country breeding men of a bestial type." The image became a literary topos: the Welsh, said Chrétien of Troyes crushingly, "are by nature more uncouth than the beasts in the fields". The national character was, as it were, ecologically determined; both were repulsive. The same was true of Ireland. Thus what struck the author of The Song of Dermot and the Earl in the thirteenth century about the country was its wastes, woodlands, lakes, and "flowery moor". Much in the same vein - and now almost stereotypical - was Jean Froissart's description of it as "abounding in deep forests and in lakes and bogs".

Stilted such comments may sound; but their emphasis on forests and water was amply echoed in contemporary Irish annals and poetry. The very structures of social life and political power in Wales, Ireland, and western Scotland were shaped by the still untamed forces of nature. One's mental geography had to adjust to the aspect and exigencies of the landscape. We can see as much in contemporary analyses: a Description of England composed c.1140 33 proceeds by itemizing the shires and towns of a well-ordered, well-settled country; but when Gerald of Wales came to present his Description of Wales he constructed his account around mountains, rivers, and tidal estuaries. The values of these two worlds were bound to be different. Which English annalist would record years of good crops of acorns and beechmast, as Irish annals regularly do, or which English poet would exult in the greenness of grass and the thickness of nutsweet woods, as the Irish poet did? Forests in England may have been appropriate venues for outlaws, knightly quests, and royal hunts; in Ireland and Wales they were often central to the livelihood of the population. It is, for example, "in the middle of an oak wood surrounded by his womenfolk and cattle" that we catch a glimpse of an Irish leader, while the men of north-east Wales could likewise claim that "the greater part of their sustenance is derived from the woods."

Weather added to the sense that these were indeed foreign countries. "When elsewhere it is summer," said an English chronicler sourly, "in Wales it is winter." The north of England was similarly handicapped: "Spring and summer never come here. The north wind is always blowing, and brings with it cold or snow, or storms in which the wind tosses the salt sea-foam in masses over our buildings. . . .See to it, dear brother, that you do not come to so comfortless a place." Exaggerated and stereotypical such comments about the northern and western British Isles might be, but they were more than amply matched by the experiences of English soldiers and administrators. Henry II's military ambitions and dignity were swept away in torrential rain in the Welsh uplands in 1165, and Henry IV suffered a like fate in 1402. It comes as no surprise that one of the earliest accounts of the misery of rain-sodden and exhausted troops comes from an Englishman serving in Degannwy in north Wales in 1245; nor is it surprising that the Black Prince's officials were given a special allowance of winter clothing when they were sent on a tour of duty to Wales. The wildness of the geography and peoples of this western world seemed to be matched by the foulness of its weather.

Within this alien countryside the settlement pattern was also disconcertingly unfamiliar to southern English eyes. Three features in particular caught their attention and were the occasion of recurrent comment. First, these people, notably in Ireland and Wales, lived in a dispersed habitat, not in neat, well-organized villages - sparsim not vicatim, as John Leland was to express it pithily. Secondly, their houses were shoddy and impermanent: Walter Daniel, for example condemned the men of Galloway for living in huts and mean hovels rather than in houses and four-square buildings. The subtext of such a comment, of course, was that only householders disciplined by the cares and demands of permanent homes could qualify for membership of civic and civilized society. Thirdly, the population of the western British Isles was to some degree mobile and unstable, be it because of the demands of pastoral agriculture, or because of the impact of periodic partition and reallocation of lands in a kin-based society and the purely contractual nature of Gaelic tenancy, or because native princes and lords regularly viewed their men and animals as movable commodities to be taken whither they willed. As late as 1596 a commentator could, no doubt with exaggeration, observe that "the tenants continue not past three years in a place, but run roving about the country like wild men, fleeing from one place to another." The prevalence of such practices varied hugely over time and place; they were already largely a thing of the past in Wales by the thirteenth century, but survived much longer in parts of Gaelic Ireland. But it is not difficult to see why they were an impediment to the inclusion of such societies within English political culture, predicated as it was on a stable population, on precisely defined units of territorial measurement and the obligations attached to them, and on the discipline, regimentation, and communal responsibilities of a well-organized and submissive village and shire life.

The economic practices and priorities of these western British Isles communities likewise increasingly distanced them from their neighbours to the south and east. Well into the twelfth century in Wales, and far beyond then in Ireland and the Isles, the plunder of goods and the capture of people - a virtual form of slavery - were the normal, almost annual, coin of political competition and wealth accumulation. When we learn, for example, that Owain Gwynedd (d.1170), a prince who was after all extolled for his "infinite prudence", led his host to Arwystli in 1162 "and carried away vast spoil", we understand why the Welsh law-texts are so particular in their details about the division of plunder. Likewise, the centrality of the control of men, women and cattle to political power in these societies is a recurrent feature of the native sources, as in the report of the Welsh chronicle of a Welsh princeling ravaging Tegeingl in north-east Wales in 1165 and taking "all its people and all their chattels with him" into a nearby district. The Irish annals resonate to the lowing of herds being driven hither and thither. English settlers quickly picked up the idiom and practice of this pillage economy, as viciously and deliberately destructive as modern asset-stripping. There was, of course, more, much more to these native economies than plunder and slave-taking; but even that more was disturbingly different. In a world where the advance of bread-grains was much the most dominant feature, these societies appeared to be culpably backward and underdeveloped. William of Newburgh's famous comment on Ireland may speak for many others: "the soil of Ireland would be fertile if it did not lack the industry of the dedicated farmer; but the country has an uncivilized and barbarous people, almost lacking in laws and discipline, lazy in agriculture, and thereby living more on milk than on bread."

William's observation is a capacious, interlocking set of value judgements. That it should end, almost in bathos, with the charge that the Irish lived on milk and milk products rather than on grain shows how much an arable-based society - in its rhythms and social organization as much as in its diet - found it difficult to engage with the values and habits of a stock-rearing society. It was a contrast which retained its force for centuries. Exaggerated and oversimplified as the contrast was, there is no doubt that the perceived dominance of cattle (and to a lesser extent horses and pigs) in the economies and value systems of the British Isles - primarily in Ireland but also extensively in Wales, the Lordship of the Isles, the Highlands, Galloway, and Cumbria - set them apart from the arable lowlands. Cattle here were fundamental not only to diet but to power structures and social relationships. They were the basic surplus product of these societies. They were the units for the measurement of value: so it was that Art Macmurrough's horse was said to have cost him 400 cows. They were also the expression of power and of powerlessness: so it was that the security and acquisition of stocks of cattle were among the basic rules of Irish political power, while to be "left without kine" was to be stripped of power. They were the prime unit of exchange; and it was in cattle that status and honour was measured, tributes and penalties large and small paid and bonds of dependence and clientage expressed. As one historian has put it, admittedly with reference to early medieval Ireland: "It was the circulation of cattle that created a hierarchy of lords and vassals and this is what bound society together." Nor was this emphasis on cattle merely the prevalence of pastoral over arable agriculture; it shaped the whole code of values and perceptions of authority within society. Equally, it created a set of pejorative assumptions in those societies which did not share its values. So it was that the Bretons, another western people, were criticized because, in William of Poitiers' words, "they do not engage in the cultivation of fields or of good morals," as if corn-growing and clean living went together. Edmund Spenser was, as usual, even more dogmatic: countries that live by keeping cattle are both very barbarous and uncivil and also greatly given to war. Tilling and husbandry, he in effect concluded, were the necessary foundations of a civilized commonwealth. The men of the north and the west for their part had nothing but contempt for those whom they dismissed as "mere tillers of the soil", "damned rascals that did nothing but plough the land and sow corn".

The apartness and backwardness of northern and western British Isles societies were also manifested economically in what they did not have. They did not have their own coinage and made little use of money. It was the Welsh of west Wales themselves who declared in 1318 that they were "never accustomed to have money in the Welshry"; while a French observer noted of the Irish that "there is little money in the country, so they usually trade in cows." To societies where money was already a prominent medium of exchange and a source of power - for as William of Malmesbury observed famously, "money is capable of persuading what it lists" - this was indeed a sign of true backwardness. Towns of any size and significance were also notable by their absence: there was, for example, no burgh in Scotland west of a line from Dumbarton to Dornoch. Trade there was in some degree, but on a very unsystematic, irregular, and non-institutional pattern. Regardless of the exceptions (of which historians have made a great deal) this was, particularly in the twelfth century and away from a few coastal centres, a world very considerably of gift exchange, tribute and reciprocity, of extensive lordship, and of kingships and a military and serviential aristocracy exercising billeting rights and claiming food renders (as once had been the case in much of lowland England). The implications for political power and for claims to membership of the English commonwealth of the virtual absence, or very limited role, of coins, towns, and trade were far-reaching. Each of these features was in its fashion a vital ingredient of effective state-formation, penetrative royal power (ideological as well as political and fiscal), the exchange of large and recurrent surpluses, and capital accumulation. How, as William of Malmesbury might have put it, could one be urbane without an urbs or civic and civilized without a civis?

Ultimately, as almost all observers agreed, the disqualification par excellence of western communities was one not of economic performance but more fundamentally of economic attitude. They simply lacked the spirit of economic enterprise and wealth creation and accumulation. The charges tumble out wherever we look: "they think," said Gerald of the Irish, "that the greatest pleasure is not to work, and the greatest wealth is to enjoy liberty." Pecham diagnosed the same culpable shortcoming among the Welsh and branded it as otium corporale. In the late fourteenth century, John of Fordun likewise identified it as a feature of the men of the Highlands and Islands of Scotland whom he stigmatized famously as "a savage and untamed people, rude and independent, given to rapine and ease-loving", compared to the "home-loving, civilized . . . polite . . . and pacific householders" of the Lowlands. There was, it is true, a recognition that such ease-loving, economically unambitious societies had their virtues - notably a fierce love of liberty, an independence of spirit, a self-denying frugality, and a remarkable etiquette of hospitality. But when the ethic of hard work - "virtuous labour", as Sir Thomas Smith called it 60 - and capital accumulation were ignored and even despised as primary goals, and when economic effort in one generation was often totally undone in the next by the application of the custom of the partibility of lands between male heirs agnatic, there was little prospect indeed of sustained wealth creation or of the emergence of a truly economically differentiated ruling class, comparable with the country gentry of England or the lairds of lowland Scotland. It was for that reason, as we saw earlier, that Bishop Rowland Lee concluded that the Welsh did not qualify for full membership of the English body politic. Where there was no well-calibrated set of social distinctions and no recognized hierarchy of landed competence (whose threshold Bishop Lee set at £10 per annum), there could be no political discretion. Here was a touchstone of political maturity à l'anglaise.

It was also in effect a touchstone of civility. The connection between wealth and civility was one which contemporaries made almost unthinkingly. So it was, for example, that an Elizabethan commentator laid out his prescription for the Welsh with admirable succinctness: "the people of Wales are to be enriched and brought to civility." Civility - and its Latin counterpart, mansuetudo - was, of course, a wonderfully imprecise and catch-all phrase; but its endless repetition in the writings of observers and pundits is a reminder that the cultural fault-line within the British Isles was as much about social mores and codes of values as it was about economic lifestyle and attitudes. Civility implies an image of acceptable behaviour and norms; it also implies an antonym - incivility at best, barbarousness at worst. Without civility, membership of civil or civic society, of the English polity, was out of the question. So what was it about the Welsh which required them, in Bishop William Barlow's view, to undergo a long process of education and indoctrination if they were to attain to what he termed English civility or about the Irish which persuaded Edmund Spenser that they would never be able to reach that happy state?

We should not dismiss the physical and the obvious, if only because they proclaimed the profundity of the cultural divide without the need to resort to thought or analysis. The men of the west looked different: the moustaches and hairstyle of the Irish, the bare legs and feet of the Welsh, and the half-naked buttocks of the Scots proclaimed their apartness and their barbarousness. So did their clothes - such as the rough cloth and sinister mantles of the Irish - and their lack of, and indeed indifference, to dress and body cover, civilian or military. "They pay no attention to outward appearance," said a fastidious and shocked English observer. To them indeed, such indifference was a cause of pride: "Little he cares for mantle of gold-embroidered; he has no longing for a feather bed or stockings in the English style" was how an Irish poet put it. Their table manners barely existed, not surprisingly so because they had no tables and no sense of the cult of precedence and the snobbery of public eating so familiar in the best Anglo-French circles. That is why the crash course of cultural reorientation devised for four Irish chieftains by an English knight included teaching them how to sit at high table and how to distance themselves from their valets and minstrels. Their manner of riding might also mark them out, most notably the Irish who, as observers regularly noted, used no saddles or stirrups. One should not make light of such differences; they were powerful and visible cultural and ethnic identifiers. Particularly was this so in Ireland, where such differences were legislatively defined as bulwarks of Englishness from the late thirteenth century, and where to become English required one, literally, to change one's hairstyle.

Men who were so uncouth in their appearance could not be expected to be other than loose in their morals. The charges in this respect are broadly similar whether they are directed at the Welsh or the Gallovidians, the Irish or the Highlanders: sexual lasciviousness, pre-nuptial trial marriages, sale and bartering of wives, ease of divorce, equality between legitimate and bastard children, and the practice of fosterage are among the hardy perennials on the list. The charges come, of course, almost exclusively from the pens of reforming ecclesiastics (including, it has to be said, Welsh and Irish clerics) anxious to instil the values and code of practice of a militant Church; as such they have a universal rather than a specifically British application. Yet they are also significant in the construction of cultural stereotypes within the British Isles: churchmen such as Pecham worked hand in hand with the agents of the English state, and the Church's social morality became thereby, as it were, the ethical wing of English civility. Take the question of the status of illegitimate sons as an example. When the papacy declared in 1222 that there was an objectionable custom in Wales whereby the son of the handmaiden shared the inheritance with the legitimate child, such a view would have found warm endorsement in English circles (where the government showed its intolerant zeal on the issue in a famous ruling in 1236). It is no surprise, therefore, that at the conquest of Wales in 1284 the ban on the rights of inheritance of illegitimate males (as they were regarded by English law) was legislatively endorsed by Edward I. As such, ecclesiastical morality and English civility marched conveniently together hand in hand.

Morals, dress, and physical appearance were immediately recognizable and easily pilloried features of the broad cultural fault-line within the British Isles; but they were, of course, only the external manifestations of even more profound differences in social values, hierarchies, and organization. Even the sources reflect the profundity of the fault-line. In the western British Isles the most important, if often also the most rebarbative, sources were those produced by hereditary learned classes - jurists, poets, remembrancers, physicians, genealogists, and musicians. They are sources with which the modern document-oriented historiographical mind is barely able to engage, just as the medieval English government dismissed their authors as "rhymers and wasters". Yet this professional mandarin class was crucial to the cultural coherence and self-perception of the native societies of western Britain and Ireland. That is why obits of poets and remembrancers figure side by side with those of princes in the native annals, and why more than 2,000 officially composed poems survive in Ireland for the period 1200-1650. These men provided and upheld the framework of memory, mythology, and ideology of their societies; they validated and explained its activities. They took a key part in inaugurating its rulers; their poems were - and were meant to be - resounding affirmations of the traditions, norms, and aspirations of a heroic society. The absence of such a powerful hereditary mandarin class - itself drawn from, and overlapping with, the native aristocracy - is one of the distinctive features of the English and Anglicized polities within the British Isles; there its role was performed by an emergent civil service and judiciary. The difference between the elaborate odes of the great Welsh poet, Cynddelw Brydydd Mawr, and the Dialogue of the Exchequer by his contemporary, Richard fitz Neal, is a measure of the cultural chasm within the British Isles.

Cynddelw addressed his eulogies and elegies to the warrior leaders of Wales; his English contemporaries, had they been able to penetrate his recondite archaisms, would have been both surprised and appalled. They would have been surprised that he lauded men who, in the words of Henry of Huntingdon, were as ferocious as beasts and "ignorant of the science of warfare, of experience in battle". They would have been appalled because these were men who lived by and for war, and for whom the equation of peace and prosperity was the very reverse of the truth. As Walter Map said of the Welsh: "They are prodigal of life, greedy of liberty, neglectors of peace, warlike and skilled in arms. . . . Their glory is in plunder and theft, and they are so fond of both that it is a reproach to a son that his father should have died without a wound." This rampant militarism infected the whole of free society; it was the enemy of the arts of peace and economic effort; and it begat parasitic groups of professional or semi-professional warriors who battened on the rest of society through subsidies, levies (the commorthau or aids of Welsh parlance), billeting claims, coyne and livery, and sheer plunder. These men - kern, caterans, galloglasses, juvenes electi, and (a significant phrase) idlemen, as they were variously called - offended against all the values of chivalry, good order, and peaceful governance on which the ruling classes of English and Anglicized British Isles based their authority. Here was one of the obvious boundary lines of sweet civility.

But it was not only what were seen as organized thuggery and brutal protection rackets which set the western British Isles outside the pale of civility; so also did their code of social values and the character of their social organization. Most societies have well-articulated codes of honour, punishment, reparation, and dispute settlement; but they are normally, and sometimes very firmly, controlled within a framework of lordship and state authority. That was so in some and in varying measure in the western British Isles; but what struck all observers was how central and very concrete were concepts of honour and gentility (in the sense of pride in descent), and of shame and vengeance in the value systems of these societies, and how much the personal (as opposed to the public), and the reckless, maintenance and pursuit of these values were central preoccupations of their members. The bonds within society, or at least free society, were as various and as variable as in England. They included rituals of dependence and submission; they also included alliances and blood brotherhoods (as can be seen from both the Irish and the Scottish Gaelic evidence). The centrality, and indeed sanctity, of such bonds explains the sense of moral outrage in native Celtic societies when English settlers ignored the obligations arising from them.

But perhaps the central feature of the societies of the west was the degree to which they were kin-centred, whether it be in male agnatic lineages with their own clan captain - the pencenedl of Welsh sources and "the captain of his nation" in the terminology of English Ireland - or in ego-centred groups of kinsmen. It was in respect of kin-membership that land, mills, churches, and communal easements were inherited and divided, tributes and renders assessed and collected, and warranties of acts and the prosecution of criminals arranged. It was a world whose whole social organization, including the distribution of wealth and power and the maintenance of social peace, was founded on principles quite different from those of most of England and the Anglicized British Isles, albeit that they were principles which had once been known and practised there. The culture shock experienced on entering such a world registers itself regularly in the documentation: we can see it, for example, in the puzzled marginal entry scrawled on Edward I's report on Welsh laws, Quid est lex galanas (blood-feud compensation), or in Archbishop Pecham's outrage at the practice. We can see it equally in the way that the English government had to accept that responsibilities which in England would be discharged by tithings, juries of presentment, and the process of hue and cry had to be placed on kindred groups and their leaders in the western British Isles.

It was ultimately in the sphere of life covered by the catch-all phrase "law and order" that the political and cultural fault-line within the British Isles was seen at its most unbridgeable. It was not merely or even mainly a matter of procedures, institutions, and jurisprudential principles, even though these were hardening by the generation with the definition and elaboration of the common laws of England and Scotland. Rather was it a matter of attitudes and even psychology. The explanation of the chronic disorder of the western British Isles was seen as a profound character fault; it arose out of the pathological unreliability and inconstancy of the peoples, summed up in the recurrent phrases "levity", "lightheadedness", levitas cervicosa, "fickleness", "excitability". The consequence was diagnosed as being the same in Galloway as in Ireland, and among monks as well as laymen: "unruliness and civil disorder", "ignorance of law and discipline", or the absence (as Stephen of Lexington said of Cistercian monks in Ireland) of "a well-ordered mind" and "ordered habits". It was little wonder that land transactions in Shropshire could be warranted against everyone except Welshmen; they, like acts of God, were beyond any insurance policy. If sweet civility of the English variety was to make headway in such a benighted world it would ultimately do so only by instilling the values and practice of law, order, and obedience, as these concepts were understood and interpreted by English and Anglicized observers. So it was that the author of the Gesta Stephani commented on how "the Normans imposed law and statutes on the Welsh", that Gerald hailed Hugh de Lacy's greatest achievement as that of "compelling the Irish to obey and observe laws", and that the supreme accolade given to David I of Scotland was the comment that he had weaned the Scots from "their natural fierceness and submitted their necks to the laws which royal gentleness dictated". Law and order, preferably English law and order, always marched hand in hand with civility. Until the victory of the one was assured, the other could not prevail; until both were securely ensconced, the peoples of the western British Isles could not be fully admitted into the political and social world of Englishness. That is why Sir Thomas Smith in the sixteenth century advocated a programme "to teach [the Irish] English laws and civility", and equally why Sir William Gerrard, writing in 1577, concluded that it was through Henry VIII's dispatch of itinerant justices that "Wales was brought to know civility."

The contrast which has been presented here between the economic, social, and cultural zones of the British Isles in the medieval period is, of its very nature, a very simplified intellectual construct; so likewise is the image of the "barbarous rudeness" (as Edmund Spenser called it) of the societies of the west. In reality and in detail both contrast and image would have to be qualified in many directions. The applicability of the image varied hugely, in part or in whole, both in time and in place across the fragmented and highly individual societies of the western British Isles. This is a point that cannot be emphasized too much. Furthermore those societies, it is now recognized, also underwent far-reaching changes within the time-frame covered by this book: the Wales of Llywelyn ap Gruffudd (d.1282) was as different from the Wales of Gruffudd ap Cynan (d.1137) as is the England of Edward I from the realm ruled by Henry I; likewise, recent scholarship has begun to reveal the profound social and political changes that were afoot in Gaelic Ireland and the Lordship of the Isles in the later Middle Ages. Too often these societies have been pickled in a historiographical aspic created from the intensively conservative, even archaic, sources available to the historian - notably the annals, a large corpus of poetry, and perhaps above all an exceptional corpus of legal texts, all of which to a greater or lesser degree convey an image and façade of unchangeability. Furthermore, between the two broad cultural zones (of "sweet civility" and "barbarous rudeness"), there were both large and indeed growing regions of cultural overlap (districts such as Galloway, Powys, and the Ormond lordship immediately spring to mind) and even beyond those frontier regions an inevitable process of acculturation, contact, and invitation. When we learn, for example, of the recently discovered hoards of English coins in the Welsh proto-town of Llanfaes in Anglesey, or of the conferral of knighthood and the earldom of Ross on Farquhar Maccintsacairt after he had brought the heads of rebels in Moray to the king of Scots in 1215, or of how in September of the same year Cathal Crobderg O Connor of Connacht (whose table manners had doubtless been reined by spending Christmas in the English justiciar's house in Dublin) agreed to hold his land on English terms and was endowed with sake and soke as if he were an English baron, we recognize that these cultural zones were fully permeable frontier lands of acculturation as much as of confrontation. Finally, and most important of all, the borderline between these broad culture zones changed dramatically between the eleventh and the fourteenth centuries. In many respects the zone of "sweet civility" barely extended east of Offa's Dyke or north of the River Ribble in 1093; by 1170 it could be said to embrace the north of England and much of southern and eastern Scotland, and to extend sinuously along the major river valleys and coastal plains of south Wales; by a century later it extended in a broad swathe from the Dornoch Firth to the Shannon, taking in a more or less urbanized, monetized, manorialized, and seignorialized society whose similarities and bonds were ultimately more important than their differences. One of the bonuses of studying the British Isles as a whole, alongside the study of its individual countries and polities, is that it should help us to grasp and characterize the scale and nature of the economic and social changes they experienced across these centuries. Any division of the medieval British Isles into two broad zones of "sweet civility" and "barbarous rudeness" needs, therefore, to be hugely qualified; but the significance of the division surely remains and remains important. It is important because it was itself a contemporary image, a mental package ranging from the crude and abusive to the well-articulated and complex which men at all levels - from government officials to local settlers - deployed to make sense of their world, to bolster their privileges, and to confirm their prejudices. It was also a satisfyingly unchanging image: writing in 1577, for example, Sir William Gerrard held that the Irish of his day "lived as the Irish lived in all respects before the conquest", some 400 years earlier. Such images became imprisoning categories, and it was in the light of those categories that the ethnic line of separation between the "pure Welsh" or the "wild Irish" on the one hand and the English on the other was drawn with increasingly intolerant definition from the thirteenth century onwards, be it in official legislation (such as the legislation of the 1297 parliament or the Statutes of Kilkenny of 1366 in Ireland) or in curial practice. Nor was such ethnic definition merely the mental construct of over-zealous English administrators (though it was certainly that); it was also a recognition that on the frontier lands of the cultural fault-line of the British Isles, English settlers often became the prisoners of the social customs and cultural habits of native society. In much of English Ireland, for example, it had to be conceded that English settlers had frequently deserted the norms of English law in favour of practices such as the taking of preys by way of distraint, concluding redemption fines for homicide, and holding parleys with their enemies ad modum hibernicorum (as it was said). In such borderland cultural zones - in northern England and Scotland as much as in Wales or Ireland - the appearance of extended lineages or surnames, as they were called, often bearing sound English names such as Barry, Bermingham, Le Poer, or Archbold, was further confirmation that power structures and social networks took on the colour of their local landscape. Even English officials had no alternative - however distasteful and alien they might find the experience - but to be party to such developments. Or, to take an individual local example, no one who lived at Kilkenny in the fourteenth century could have been in doubt that they lived astride a profound cultural fault-line. The town, with its imposing cathedral of St Canice, was in many respects an epitome of Englishness; its citizens could still be addressed in the fourteenth century by their bishop in both English and French. But the annals compiled in the local Franciscan friary by John Clyn open a window into a very different world - one of "nations", surnames, kerns, hostages, plunder, war, and a fiercely protected division between Irish and English.

The essential appropriateness of the notion of a cultural fault-line within the British Isles is also vouched for in the scale of the transformation of those societies which moved from one zone to the other within the time-frame of this book, that is, 1093 to 1343 - notably northern England, southern and eastern Scotland, lowland south Wales, and southern and eastern Ireland. In none of these areas in 1093, with the possible exception of the Viking towns of Ireland and of proto-urban settlements around major monastic and royal centres, was there any clear sign of truly burghal life. By the end of the twelfth century one might count some forty or fifty boroughs or markets in northern England and forty new burghs (most of them royal foundations) in Scotland; by 1300 one could on a generous definition count some 225 towns (many of them admittedly very small) in Ireland and some 85 in Wales. The same pattern applies broadly to mints and to monetization. In 1093 no coins were struck in these areas (except in Durham) and there is no evidence that the coins in the hoards in the western British Isles were part of a local money economy. By the thirteenth century coins were minted in sixteen centres in Scotland (including western burghs such as Glasgow, Ayr, and Dumfries) and, albeit very intermittently, at up to six centres in Ireland. There was an astonishing growth in the money supply in Scotland in the thirteenth century, so much so that Nicholas Mayhew can speak of it as "a widely monetized society". Moreover, there was a remarkable degree of homogeneity and interchangeability about the coins which circulated throughout the lowland British Isles: the zone of "sweet civility" and a common coinage coincided.

The same transformation with its far-reaching social and political repercussions can be traced in many other directions; it is particularly vivid in southern and eastern Ireland between 1170 and 1220. It is to be seen - and is well documented - in the establishment of manors and common fields, the building of mills, bridges, fords, salt-pans, and lime-kilns, the assarting of waste land and disafforestation, the market-oriented, large-scale, demesne production both of cereals and of sheep, and a more dynamic and exploitative lordship. It is as evident around the new borough of Carlisle as in the lordship of Garioch in north-east Scotland, in the earl of Gloucester's estates in Glamorgan as in the great demesne enterprises of the Marshals and the Lacies in Ireland. What binds it together ultimately is a mind-set: that of an entrepreneurial, exploitative, and profit-making aristocracy. It was not without reason that Gerald of Wales identified lucrum (profit) and cupiditas (acquisitiveness) as the distinguishing hallmarks of these men and their followers. We get an echo of the same entrepreneurial drive in the commission to inquire how Connacht could be turned to the king's profit, how it should be settled and colonized, what and how many towns and castles ought to be constructed and where, and what demesne should be retained. How far this transformation was shaped and triggered by rising populations, yields, and expectations within native societies and how far by the impetus of the Anglo-Norman diaspora and its habits may be a moot point; but the scale of the transformation is not to be doubted, in spite of the fact that it has not won the historical headlines it deserves. When Ailred of Rievaulx commented that Scotland was "no longer a beggar from other countries . . . [but is now] adorned with castles and cities and her ports filled with foreign merchandise", he is only sharing in florid language the same sentiment as a modern historian who claims that Ireland in the century or so after 1170 underwent "a radical social and economic revolution".

We can take the argument one step further. Just as it is now increasingly recognized that much of southern and midland England was transformed between the mid-ninth and mid-twelfth centuries, and much of the template of its social, economic, and political power for the rest of the Middle Ages established in that period, so the period between 1093 and 1343 witnessed an equally far-reaching transformation in what might be called by way of shorthand the intermediate zone of the English and Anglicized British Isles, the area that lay between and astride the region of "sweet civility" on the one hand and that of "barbarous rudeness" on the other. The variations in development within and between this intermediate zone and the original English heartland were, of course, immense. We might recall, for example, that the number of coins circulating in late thirteenth-century England was possibly five times as much as a century earlier and that, impressive as was the advance made in the use of money in Scotland, the coinage in circulation there in the third quarter of the thirteenth century was still only equivalent to 2 or 3 per cent of the coinage in circulation in England. Yet in spite of these disparities, what is surely even more striking is that the advancing tide of Anglicization - in the very widest sense of that term - within the British Isles had made the chasm between England and the Anglicized zone on the one hand and the zone of "barbarous rudeness" that lay beyond it on the other even starker, both in material terms and mind-set, in 1343 than in 1093. If, for example, one looks at two documents produced within a couple of years of 1343, the terminus ad quem of this study - the rental of the Englishry and Welshry of Hay on the border with England of 1340 and the detailed division of the Multon inheritance in Ireland of 1341 - one cannot but be struck by the continuing economic and social fault-line between these two societies. To talk of "sweet civility" on the one hand and "barbarous rudeness" on the other was to overlay the fault-line with a value judgement; but that is not to deny that the fault-line existed. It is replicated, in greater or lesser degree, wherever one looks: be it in the contrast between the demesne manors of the earls of Ulster and the cow-based economy of the O'Neills, or in that between the seignorial demesnes of Lisronagh (Co. Tipperary) or Knocktopher (Co. Kilkenny) and their surrounding Irishries, or in a similar contrast between the new-fangled manors and knights' fees of north-east Wales and the world of food renders, circuit dues, and kin-based obligations revealed in the splendid array of post-Edwardian surveys, of which the most magnificent is the Survey of Denbigh of 1334. Furthermore, this fault-line was to persist in some measure for generations, indeed centuries, to come. It is not the least of the handicaps of our modern assumptions and the overwhelmingly English-adjusted character of so much of the documentation that we have consistently underrated it.

The existence of such a fault-line was bound to have profound political repercussions for the British Isles. The social and economic character of the English and Anglicized parts of these islands - be it in England itself or in Scotland, Wales, or Ireland - existed in intimate symbiosis with their political institutions and procedures. Where the one was lacking, the other could scarcely exist or survive. There was, moreover, a further and sinister dimension to the issue, at least in Wales and Ireland. The economic, social, and cultural fault-line coincided very broadly with an ethnic one and came to be defined in ethnic terms. It looked periodically in the late twelfth and early thirteenth centuries as if the high kingship of the British Isles might evolve into a federative, loose-limbed, composite monarchy. That, after all, had been the character of the so-called Norman and Angevin empires - composite assemblies of peoples and territories under the presidency of a single and multi-titled ruler. But as the Angevin power contracted mainly into the confines of an English state and its annexes, and as the ideology and institutions of that state became more stridently and defiantly English, so the prospect of the kingship of the English converting itself into the monarchy of the British Isles other than on its own terms largely disappeared. Rather were the ethnic lines vis-à-vis the Welsh and especially the Irish drawn more clearly and intolerantly than ever before. When Edward I issued his ordinances in 1295, imposing specified restrictions on Welshmen, and when the Irish parliament two years later proclaimed its statutes against degeneracy in an attempt to prevent Englishmen in Ireland from going native, an ethnic line was formally drawn on the sands of the map of political power in the British Isles. The fault-line of cultures, economies, and societies had thereby become the frontier line of political and legal exclusion.

The only possible route across that frontier line lay not only in military power and political control, but also in the acceptance of the social, economic, and cultural norms of the English state and its Anglicized look-alikes. The programme was explained with admirable clarity in the list of requirements that the Chief Governor of Ireland laid out in 1541 to the Irish chiefs: they were to renounce Gaelic titles; to accept, assist, and obey the courts, writs, and laws of the English government; to do military service; to adopt English customs and language; and to encourage tillage, build houses, and generally reorganize their territories on more English lines. It was an updated and expanded version of the agenda that Archbishop Pecham had laid out for the Welsh in 1284. Its ultimate aim was spelt out with his usual bluntness by Edmund Spenser: "union of manners and conformity of minds, to bring them to be one people [with the English]". In order to be worthy to enter the portals of the English state, it was essential to travel the path from "barbarous rudeness" to "sweet civility". Until and unless that happened, the kingship of England could not be translated into the monarchy of the British Isles, nor could the peoples of the north and west be admitted into full membership of an England- and English-centred polity.