Disunited Kingdoms
Peoples & Politics in the British Isles 1280-1460
By Michael Brown
July 2013
Pearson Education
Distributed by the Trans-Atlantic Publications
ISBN: 9781405840590
319 Pages, Illustrated
$57.50 Paper original
As king of England, lord of Ireland, conqueror of the Welsh prince and Scottish king, Edward I in 1305 seemed to contemporaries to have cemented an English royal hegemony over the British Isles, uniting them under his rule. An English poet praised his royal lord ‘our king Edward’, ‘who puts to flight his enemies like a leopard’. The king’s enemies, the Scots and Welsh, were the ‘wolves’ who hoped to tear England apart. Instead Edward had now subdued them to his will and authority.
But the expectation that Edward’s authority would create a single hierarchy in which the English nation would define and dominate the British Isles never came to pass. Instead, the 14th century became a crucial period in the history of the British Isles, an era shaped by Edward I of England, by Robert Bruce in Scotland and by Owain Glyn Dwr in Wales and characterised by emerging senses of nation and race.
This textbook brings new research and historiography to students of medieval history, and is suitable for undergraduate history students new to the period, and those returning to it.
Contents:
Abbreviations
Figures
Maps
Introduction: Warlords and Sovereign Lords
Chapter One: Edward the Conqueror
Chapter Two: Robert Bruce
Chapter Three: Sovereignty and War
Chapter Four: Rulers and Realms
Chapter Five: Peoples, Crises and Conflicts
Chapter Six: Elites and Identities
Chapter Seven: Borderlands: Lords and Regions
Chapter Eight: Hundred Years Wars: The European Context
Chapter Nine: Politics and Power in the British Isles (c.1360-1415)
Chapter Ten: Four Lands: The British Isles in the Early Fifteenth Century
Conclusions Nations and Unions
Bibliography
Index
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