The English State and its Frontiers in the British Isles, 1300–1600

Abstract

Frontiers were a natural product of the process of state formation. The problems they posed not only influenced relations in general between different kingdoms and peoples; they also determined the nature of the frontier itself, and conditions on the border. This was true also of the English state’s frontiers in the British Isles. This essay considers the English frontiers in their final period before the Union of the Crowns with Scotland and the completion of the Tudor conquest of Ireland in 1603. It argues that these frontiers were powerfully shaped both by England’s highly centralised system of government and its problematic relations with the other peoples of the archipelago. In the later Middle Ages, English kings had coped fairly comfortably with this important but routine task of frontier administration, which they also faced in the government of their French possessions. Indeed, of the territories held by medieval English kings, the frontiers in Gascony and Normandy were far more difficult to police and defend because of their length, remoteness, and the greater power of the French monarchy. Thus, one unintended result of their loss in the mid fifteenth century was that later kings faced these difficulties in a much more manageable form. In the sixteenth century, however, the remaining borderlands came to be identified by the Tudors as presenting an acute problem of government as the regime attempted to centralise its control over outlying territories.