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Defending English Ground: War and Peace in Meath and Northumberland, 1460–1542. Steven G. Ellis. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015. xxii + 210 pp. $100.

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 November 2018

David Heffernan*
Affiliation:
Queens University, Belfast
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Abstract

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Reviews
Copyright
Copyright © 2016 Renaissance Society of America

Defending the subject, Steven Ellis asserts in his new book Defending English Ground, was one of the most basic duties of a Renaissance monarch. For successive kings of England this responsibility was felt most keenly toward the border region with Scotland in the north of England and the march area of the Dublin-centered Pale in Ireland. Ellis’s book comprises a comparative study of the counties of Meath in Ireland and Northumberland on the Anglo-Scottish border to question how effective successive kings of England in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth century were at fulfilling this vital component of Renaissance monarchy. The answer, it appears, is not very successful at all. As chapter 3 demonstrates, much of this was owing to the civil wars that beset England in the second half of the fifteenth century, when defense of the border regions was essentially devolved to local magnates such as the Earls of Kildare. Yet even following the advent of the Tudors the duty to defend English subjects was meeting mixed fortunes in the two regions. Tudor Meath gradually became more secure as direct rule of Ireland from England was reintroduced under Henry VIII (113–33). Consequently, in 1542 the county was divided into Meath and Westmeath, an indication of heightened security in the region adjoining the Irish lordships of Leinster and Ulster, yet ultimately a confidence wrought by a form of “self government at the king’s command” (166). The north of England did not experience such good fortune. By the 1530s the Crown had become the largest landholder in the region but failed to commit anything near adequate resources for the defense of Northumberland. This combined with the divided state of the community there late in Henry VIII’s reign ensured that when war yet again broke out with Scotland in the 1540s the border region was ill prepared (134–62). Here Henry VIII had most assuredly failed in his duty to provide for the defense of his northern subjects.

Beyond appraising the success or failure of successive English monarchs in providing for the defense of these two border regions, Ellis’s study has much to say on the character of the two societies that emerged in Meath and Northumberland. These were both intrinsically shaped by their position as border communities, a fact that Ellis brings out in two chapters extensively detailing the provisions for border defense and on the economy and landholding in the two regions. Here historians of Tudor Ireland will encounter Ellis’s long-held belief that the Dublin-centered Pale was a bastion of English society and was largely culturally and demographically distinct from Gaelic Ireland. This “two-nation theory” is maintained despite the appearance of many recent studies demonstrating that significant cultural osmosis had occurred even within the confines of the English Pale in counties such as Meath. Indeed, by the Elizabethan period senior officials, such as the lord chancellor of Ireland William Gerrard, freely admitted that the tenantry in the Pale was largely composed of individuals of Irish descent. This important issue aside, Ellis’s study of the economy and social structures of the two counties is welcome, aided by a series of exceptionally well-produced maps. Though much of the statistical information is quite dense, and perhaps does not make for light reading, this rich data is where Ellis’s work has always broken new ground and in this respect Defending English Ground is no exception.

In setting out his work Ellis notes that historians of early modern Britain and Ireland have been markedly less keen than their Continental peers to examine the history of border regions. By producing a comparative study of Meath and Northumberland, then, he has gone some way to remedying this lacunae. Though some will argue that Ellis’s perception of the march region in Ireland as a rigidly established border dividing and isolating two separate cultures is far too severe, this does not distract from the rich detail on the economy and society of these two regions. Defending English Ground will find a wide audience among scholars of Ireland and the north of England in the early Tudor period, and also students of wider European border regions in the early modern period.