The Ancient Enemy: England, France and Europe from the Angevins to the Tudors 9781472599216

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England and its neighbours

The English and the French have never been good neighbours, or so it is often asserted. The enmity between them, noted by independent observers in the eighteenth century, already had a long ancestry.l A Swiss essayist reported in 1768 that As to the word 'French', the national [English) antipathy against their opposite neighbours is so great, that to call a foreigner, dog, is not insulting enough, but he must be called French dog, to convey the highest degree of detestation. 2

Neighbourly rivalry and its attendant animosity was placed in a more general scheme of things by fifteenth-century commentators, such as Philippe de Commynes, who thought that 'wars and divisions are ordained and permitted by God' as: God has created neither man nor beast in this world without making something which is opposed to them, to induce humility and fear in them ... Nor is it only to this nation [Flanders) that God has given some kind of goad. For to the kingdom of France He has opposed the English; to the English the Scots; and to the kingdom of Spain, the Portuguese. 3

Although the Anglo-French relationship acquired many other dimensions over the course of time, including colonial rivalry and, ultimately, uneasy and often mistrustful alliance, the old enmity has never been forgotten; in its more extreme manifestations, it was often to be found on the English side, but did not exclusively originate there. Its later incarnation was to be found in the words of Charles de Gaulle when, in June 1962, he declared Our greatest hereditary enemy was not Germany, it was England. From the Hundred Years War to Fashoda, she hardly ceased to struggle against us ... She is not naturally inclined to wish us wel1. 4

He was repeating a theme that had already appeared in the later Middle Ages. In January 1436, for instance, King Charles VII of France could refer, in a reply to a petition from his 'loyal subjects' in the Limousin, to 'our ancient enemies the English'.s It was to become a common and universal formula in letters issued

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The Angevin Empire and the Kingdom of France

As we have seen, the succession of Henry II to the throne of England in 1154 brought another essentially Francocentric dynasty to power. I Angevin kingship succeeded to the Anglo-Norman complex of territories which had been divided since the death of Henry I in 1135. An interrupted and broken succession was to some extent restored with the accession of Henry's grandson to both the English throne and the duchy of Normandy. The marriage of Henry's only surviving legitimate heir - the ex-empress Maud - to Geoffrey Plantagenet, count of Anjou, was to bring the lineage which had posed the most serious threats to the AngloNorman monarchy in its continental dominions to power over a much-enlarged polity. The re-creation and enlargement of the Norman Empire replaced the fragile regime of Stephen of Blois (1135-54) with a vast cross-Channel lordship, stretching from Normandy to Aquitaine and from Brittany to the Massif Central. The Anglo-Norman baronage was now joined by the nobilities of the other Angevin lands, all of them vassals of Henry II Plantagenet. These men - from Anjou, Touraine, Poitou, Limousin, Angoumois, Saintonge, Perigord, Aquitaine and Gascony - held little or no land in England, unlike many of their Norman peers and contemporaries. 2 The ultimate allegiance of many of them was, in theory, not to the Plantagenet ruler but to the Capetian crown of France. In many cases this feudal superiority was more apparent than real, and the Plantagenet king-duke-count in effect exercised a degree of pragmatic power over the lands and inhabitants of western France which excluded Capetian authority altogether. 3 But this duality of allegiance posed potentially significant problems for the Angevins. The implications of the potential clash between Angevin territorial lordship and Capetian claims to suzerainty were wide-ranging: they could not fail to influence the mutual relationships between the kings of England and their neighbours in Brittany, Flanders and other regions of the French kingdom. The English monarch was obliged to act in a number of different capacities and his behaviour towards the other great magnates of France could not ignore the fact that he was in effect one of their number, as well as the ruler of an independent and free-standing kingdom.4 How, if at all, did Angevin rule differ from that of the Anglo-Norman past? Did it build upon pre-existing tendencies under the Normans towards the 'Europeanization' of England? A study of the itineraries of the Angevin rulers

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Aquitaine and the French Wars An early fourteenth-century description of the lordships held by the king of England as duke of Aquitaine in south-west France, composed at the abbey of St Seurin

1303, the king-duke's dominion broadly coincided with the territorial limits of the ancient duchy of Gascony, before its fusion with the duchy of Aquitaine proper, in 1063. 2 This was not the 'coastal strip' to which, it is sometimes alleged, the Plantagenet dominions had been reduced by the early fourteenth century. On the contrary, it consisted of two archbishoprics, nine bishoprics, four comtes, and 15 vicomtes. The Anglo-Gascon connection stemmed from a twelfth-century dynastic acquisition through marriage - the duchy, unlike Ireland or Wales, was a legitimate inheritance, not the product of imperialist conquest and occupation. It has been justly said that 'the habit which English historical atlases have of colouring the king-duke [of Aquitaine's 1 lands red, as though they were part of some medieval British Empire, gives a very wrong impression,.3 A common feature of popular historical writing, especially in France, is the notion that an 'English occupation' or 'English domination' of the south-west took place during the Middle Ages. 4 In the mid-fifteenth century, the duchy of Aquitaine was therefore 'liberated' by the French, it is claimed, from the 'English yoke'. Nothing could be further from the truth. The Gascons did not consider themselves to be 'liberated' from anything in 1453, least of all from some imagined servitude to their English masters. But a teleological, deterministic approach of this kind to French history has rendered it more or less axiomatic that the inexorable onward march of the unitary nation-state should be mythologized in this way. Although the kings of England might also lay claim to the duchy of Normandy, their conquest and occupation of that province (only undertaken in the fifteenth century) bore little resemblance to the regime that was already in place in southwest France. Normandy was, to some degree, 'colonized' by the English under Henry V. Aquitaine did not have to be conquered, nor colonized, by him for it to remain united with the English crown. Is there, therefore, any evidence for the 'colonial' status of Aquitaine? A good, popular work on its history under English

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Allies, Mediators and the French Enemy

For a country which lacks extended land frontiers with other continental powers, the sea necessarily serves as its border. Medieval England had other close neighbours, besides France, across the Channel and the North Sea. They could serve as allies, intermediaries or enemies. Thus the seaboard of the Low Countries had never ceased to be of concern to the English. It stood as the second closest cross-Channel neighbour of the English kingdom after northern France. From Gravelines, in the county of Flanders, to Alkmaar, in the county of Holland, the Netherlandish coastline sheltered ports and harbours, protected by sandbanks and shoals, which played vital roles in English trade and commerce. In his Life and Raigne of King Henry the Eighth (1649), Edward Herbert, lord of Cherbury, wrote that at the beginning of his reign (1509), the most serious external threat to Henry's security came, as ever, from France, but As for the house of Burgundy, and the Low-Countryes ... hee needed not feare anything, unlesse he would willfully provoke them; the causes of love on that part seeming to be perpetuall; as being founded upon the mutuall necessity of those Ports and Havens, which, upon all foule weather the Shipping must resort to, on either side. l

There was an essential economic mutuality and reciprocity between the Low Countries and England. Although politically divided among a number of autonomous - or quasi-autonomous - principalities, the Low Countries provided both markets and sources of supply for English commerce. The multiplicity and plurality of their political structures worked in many respects to England's advantage. Until the early fifteenth century, no one power was supreme over the rest. It was thus very much in England's interests to ensure that French ambitions either to acquire or control any of the principalities of the region were resisted and thwarted. The steady rise of Burgundian power to hegemony over the whole region, however between 1384 and 1430 changed the political climate. If the initially pro-French leanings of the Valois dukes of Burgundy were not to threaten England's security, an alliance had to be constructed with Burgundian power. Any signs of Burgundian disaffection from Valois France were to be encouraged. A pro-French Netherlands - both southern and northern - might, as in 1385-6, lead to a projected invasion of England which could stand some chance of success. If the coastal provinces of northern France and the Low Countries were not to

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English Identity: Language and Culture We have seen how, for much of the Middle Ages, England maintained very close links with continental Europe, partly as a direct result of its retention of its French continental dominions. Yet a major theme of British historical writing has been the emergence, or re-emergence, of a distinct English identity after the trauma of the Norman Conquest. Bishop Stubbs, founder of the Oxford School of Modern History, could write in his 'Sketch of the Constitutional History of the English Nation' appended to his Select Charters (1870): Every infusion of new blood since the first migration [to England) has been Teutonic: the Dane, the Norseman, and even the French-speaking Norman of the Conquest, serve to add intensity to the distinctiveness of the national identity ... The Teutonic element is the paternal element in our system. I

Stubbs's racial interpretation of national identity did not meet with universal approval. By 1920, perhaps in reaction to the events of 1914-18, English historians challenged the primacy of Germanic influence on English constitutional history. T. F. Tout wrote in 1922 of: the tendency of English political and constitutional historians not to give due recognition to the French element in English history. One cause of this refusal ... is that excessive following of the Germans which, blatantly expressed by Freeman, is found in more cautious and judicious form in even so eminent a scholar as Stubbs. 2

What Tout called the 'close interconnection of the French and English peoples,3 was, he argued, an essential element in England's evolution, politically, socially, institutionally and culturally. It would be to Stubbs, rather than Tout, that modern apologists and propagandists for 'Euroscepticism' might go, emphasizing less the racial element in his thinking than the notion of a distinct, separate, fundamentally Anglo-Saxon identity which has survived 1,000 years of admixture and immigration. It was a notion shared by other eminent scholars (and influential public figures) such as J. R. R. Tolkien. The origins of the popular myth of 'a thousand years of British sovereignty' lie in a confused misapplication of pseudo-historical arguments of this kind. 'Our island's story' is, it is claimed, to be told as one of insular withdrawal from continental Europe, in which the decline of England as a European land power is mistaken for a decline in England's active and inextricable participation in European affairs.

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The Legend ofJoan of Arc

Charles de Gaulle's views of England's role as France's 'hereditary enemy' reflected a traditional and long-standing French attitude, which had experienced a significant revival in the course of the nineteenth century. I De Gaulle dated the origins of that hostility to the Hundred Years War, a period which saw the brieflife, martyrdom and subsequent rehabilitation ofJoan of Arc (c. 1412-31), the Maid of Orleans, as represented in historical writing, popular journalism, pietist hagiography and republican polemic since the 1840s. 2 It had become a widespread belief that Joan had been a victim of the English occupation of northern France in the fifteenth century and that she had been charged, tried, condemned and executed solely by the English. The tenacious survival of this belief can be illustrated by an anecdote. During the Parisian troubles of 1968, a young British student found himself caught up in a violent demonstration. Innocent soul that he was, he thought he might escape arrest, or at least assault, by displaying his British passport. This proved counter-productive. A charging member of the Compagnies Republicaines de Securite promptly hit him with a baton saying 'that's for Joan of Arc' ['