
History Today April 1995 v45 n4 p35(8)
Frontiers and power in the early Tudor state.
Ellis, Steven Abstract: Henry VIII reorganized the Tudor provincial
government so that it would be more centralized and uniform. These
changes in 1534 led to the decline of the borderland lords. Lowland
England could not at that time be considered a Tudor state.
Full Text: COPYRIGHT 1995 History Today Ltd.
Tudor monarchs could do anything -- or could they? Steven Ellis examines
what happened when wishes and commands from the centre had to be
executed in practice in the remoter parts of the kingdom.
[Expanded Picture] In May 1534 Henry VIII began a major overhaul of
Tudor provinicial government which lasted throughout the 1530s. He
replaced the key officials in charge of the more remote provinces by
other, more trusted men, and he later reorganised the provincial
councils and other administrative structures for these regions. In
Ireland the Earl of Kildare was dismissed as governor and replaced by a
military captain, Sir William Skeffington; in the north, Lord Dacre was
removed from the wardenship of the west marches towards Scotland and
replaced by the Earl of Cumberland; and in Wales Bishop Rowland Lee
replaced Bishop Vesey of Exeter as president - all in the same month.
Dacre and Kildare indeed found themselves charged with treason,
allegedly because of their contacts with the king's Scottish and Irish
enemies.
The overall thrust of the changes was to centralise control and to bring
administrative structures for the peripheries' more into line with the
arrangements for the government of lowland England, the `core' region of
the Tudor state. From the perspectives of the Tudor court and the
'central government' based in London, it no doubt made considerable
sense to extend the effective and highly centralised system of
government devised for lowland England to outlying parts. And historians
of differing sympathies have generally approved these reforms as
bringing about a greater degree of uniformity and integration in the
Tudor state.
Yet the debate about the effectiveness of Tudor government and the
changing role of the Tudor nobility has not so far taken much account of
the impact of change as seen in the borderlands or marches. How heavy
was the price paid there for centralisation and uniformity? The
attempted assimilation of its government to that in lowland England,
where conditions were quite exceptional and uniquely favourable to royal
authority, was certainly not the unqualified blessing it seemed in
London - hence the major rebellions in Ireland in 1534-35 and in the
north in 1536-37. The problem was not uniformity and centralisation per
se, but the assumptions which came with it. Tudor officials sometimes
seemed to think, for instance, that England was an island -
Shakespeare's `scept'red isle' - so that no special arrangements were
needed for the defence of the long landed frontiers which formed the
northern and western boundaries of the Tudor state. The crown had no
standing army, but the marches had hitherto protected lowland England
from the mere Irish and Welsh to the west and Scots enemies to the
north. The Tudors aimed at a greater diffusion of power in the
provinces, curbing overmighty subjects, replacing the feudal liberties
and marcher lordships of the borderlands with English-style shires
governed through substantial county gentry, and intervening to support
the merchant oligarchies of the towns against outside interference.
[Expanded Picture][Expanded Picture]But marcher society was quite unlike
the heavily manorialised English lowlands. The borderlands were
predominantly upland, pastoral regions far from London, with a sparser,
more turbulent, lineage society, and a powerful territorial nobility,
with compact lordships and a warlike tenantry. Distance and geography
hindered central control; quarter sessions were not always held because
there were few substantial gentry to put on the peace commissions; and
there existed few major towns to act as a counterweight to magnate
power. Thus the overall thrust of early Tudor policy - greatly
accelerated by the changes of the 1530s - placed great strains on
relations between the crown and the border communities. In particular,
it created considerable difficulties for the traditional leaders of
these communities, the nobility, as they tried to respond to the
conflicting demands of the crown and the reality of marcher conditions.
Historians have long agreed that the Tudors were not averse to noble
power as such. They continued to rely on the nobility to supervise local
government as the natural leaders of local society. Yet the kind of
noble power which most effectively addressed border conditions as shaped
by early Tudor policy - strong marcher lordship geared to defence -
increasingly conflicted with the sort of aristocratic values which the
Tudors wished to promote. Basically, the Tudors wanted what historians
have called a `service nobility' - a subservient, loyalist nobility,
which was dependent on the crown for fees and office, and which divided
its time between great state occasions at court or in Parliament and the
local supervision and enforcement of royal policy from its country
houses in the provinces.
Unfortunately for the Tudors, however, a service nobility of the kind
which developed in the more peaceful conditions of lowland England
lacked the power to maintain good rule in the marches. And the
territorial magnates who alone possessed the manraed (the men a lord
could call on in wartime) to discharge effectively the key border
offices were increasingly distrusted by the Tudors because of their
ability to use their power and influence in other, less acceptable ways.
Some nobles, like the 7th Earl of Ormond (1477-1515) or the 4th Earl of
Shrewsbury (1473-1538) tried to respond positively to the new Tudor
demands. But in his absence at court, Ormond's estates in Tipperary and
Kilkenny were destroyed by Gaelic raids, and Shrewsbury's lordship of
Wexford was so persistently neglected that the king eventually
confiscated it.
At the other end of the spectrum, Robert, 5th Lord Ogle (1530/32-1545)
simply ignored the court: he never attended Parliament, but served the
king all his life on the borders, and in 1545 died of wounds sustained
in battle. Thus the 1530s witnessed something of a crisis of marcher
lordship as ruling magnates like Dacre and Kildare found it impossible
to reconcile their position to these conflicting sets of demands.
Traditional `Westminster-centred' scholarship has by and large ignored
the plight of Tudor marcher lords, though the work of Mervyn James
offers some valuable insights. There has been some discussion of
differences between the new Tudor service nobility and traditional
territorial magnates, but it reflects too easily contemporary Tudor
assumptions that the `normalisation' of border rule and the reduction in
the powers of the marcher lords should lead automatically to the growth
of a more ordered 'civil' society there. The fact is, however, that
marcher society was a function of the survival until 1603 of the English
state's long landed frontiers; and the kind of marcher lordship which
aroused Tudor suspicions of `overmighty subjects' reflected the sort of
society in which the nobility was obliged to operate.
This point can be established from a consideration of the careers of the
two magnates whose fall in 1534 epitomised the crisis facing the
nobility. The careers of the 8th and 9th Earls of Kildare (1478-1513;
1513-34) who dominated the governorship of Ireland from 1478 to 1534
have hardly been considered by Tudor historians, presumably because like
most of the peers of Ireland they lacked an English title. And exclusion
of the Irish peerage - almost all of them marcher lords - allows a major
figure like Thomas, 3rd Lord Dacre of the North (1485-1525), warden of
the west marches for forty years and usually warden-general for the last
fourteen, to be dismissed as a feudal anachronism whose fall in 1525
marked the end of the age of the medieval robber baron' and 'a major
triumph for [Cardinal] Wolsey's policy of [law] enforcement' through
Star Chamber.
The reality, however, was that before 1461 the Dacres and Fitzgeralds
had both been minor peerage families, of purely local significance, who
were deliberately built up by the crown as ruling magnates. The Dacre
patrimony consisted chiefly of border manors in two north Cumberland
baronies (Burgh and Gilsland) which were regularly wasted by war with
the Scots. For the income tax of 1436, Dacre had been rated as among the
poorest of the baronage, worth a mere 320[pounds] per annum; but after
the death in 1487 of another northern peer, Lord Greystoke, Lord Thomas
was gradually allowed to secure the whole Greystoke inheritance by an
advantageous marriage to Elizabeth Greystoke. When Dacre died in 1525
his landed possessions were worth over 1,500[pounds] net per annum, and
as warden-general he had enjoyed an annual salary of 433[pounds] 6s. 8d.
The rise of the Leinster Fitzgeralds was equally spectacular. When
Thomas Fitzgerald was recognised as 7th earl in 1454, his wasted
inheritance was worth no more than 250[pounds] a year, mainly from lands
in Co. Kildare, with a secondary cluster of manors in Co. Limerick. Earl
Thomas increased this significantly by recovering family lands which had
been reconquered by the Gaelic Irish, but the financial basis of Kildare
power was a succession of grants to the Fitzgeralds of royal manors and
lordships, the result in part of astute marriages by the 8th and 9th
earls into the royal family. The Irish grants alone were worth
350IR[pounds] a year, with a further 100IR[pounds] worth of lands in
Warwickshire, Gloucestershire, and Norfolk. By 1534 Gerald, 9th Earl of
Kildare's landed possessions were worth around 1,586[pounds] a year, and
his income comfortably exceeded 42,000IR[pounds] (2,000 marks sterling)
a year.
Historians sometimes draw up tables which appear to indicate the
relative importance of individual nobles on the basis of their income.
These tables relegate most of the northern peers to the second division,
and exclude almost all the Irish peers on the grounds that they held
insufficient property on the mainland. If, however, a combined table of
the Tudor nobility were drawn up, instead of dividing them along
nationalist lines, both Dacre and Kildare would reach the Tudor top ten
under Henry VIII. But landed income is a very crude guide to the
relative power of Tudor nobles and the extent of their landed
possessions. Rents per acre in the pastoral uplands were generally far
less than in lowland England, and even where the land was suitable for
tillage the more turbulent border conditions were a severe disincentive
because, unlike cattle and sheep, crops could not be driven from the
path of impending raids. The estate-management policies of marcher lords
like Dacre and Kildare were thus geared chiefly towards military
considerations rather than the maximisation of profits.
[Expanded Picture]Undefended marchlands were worthless: they needed
castles and tenants to protect them. This meant that border lords and
gentry continued to live in castles and peles rather than the country
houses now favoured by southerners. Thomas, Lord Dacre spent much of his
income on building small castles at Drumburgh, Rockcliffe and Askerton
to protect his estates and on strengthening those at Naworth and
Kirkoswald, all in Cumberland. He normally resided in the marches, at
Naworth, Kirkoswald or Carlisle, although as warden-general after 1511
he lived at Harbottle or Morpeth in the middle marches, and left his
son, William, or his brother, Sir Christopher, as his deputy in the
west. He was also a member of the king's council, but rarely attended
council meetings or Parliament. Traditionally, individual members of the
northern nobility were excused attendance at Parliament in wartime so
that they could be available for border defence.
Kildare's initial response to a summons to court was often also that he
could not be spared, since his presence was necessary for ireland's
defence - as the king's council there or the lords of Parliament would
certify. When not on campaign, Kildare usually resided at his chief
castle of Maynooth, from where he could ride to Dublin for council
meetings. Among his more substantial building projects were the castles
of Powerscourt, Clonmore, Castledermot and Lea which, together with
Maynooth, ringed his chief possessions in Co. Kildare. Similarly, both
lords attracted tenants to settle on wastelands by offering holdings at
low rents in return for military service. Dacre instructed his estate
officials in 1536 to let any vacant holdings to good archers, even if
this meant a lower entry fine; and his tenants were generally bound by
their tenures to maintain horse and harness and to take part in raids
against the Scots.
In Ireland, Kildare's tenants were also bound to accompany their lord on
hostings against the Irish, and many holdings were let rent-free in
return for defending particular marches. In both regions the lords
attracted to their estates large numbers of Scots and Irish respectively
who were 'sworn English' and given tenements in more exposed districts
like Bewcastledale or Offaly where Englishmen were afraid to live for
fear of the wild Irish or Scots enemies nearby. Reputedly, Lord Dacre
`may at all tymes with little charge have 4 or 5,000 men off his owne'
to resist invasion, and at the siege of Dublin in 1534 the rebel army
raised by Kildare was 15,000 strong.
[Expanded Picture]The military character of marcher lordship reflected
the political instability of the English borderlands, but it was greatly
accentuated by early Tudor policy. During the Wars of the Roses, the
private armies built up by Richard, Duke of York as lieutenant of
ireland and Richard Neville, Earl of Salisbury as warden of the west
marches from the inflated stipends they received enabled them to
challenge the crown. The crown's response after 1471 was to ensure that
these offices presented no threat to the dynasty. They were entrusted to
less powerful lords and the salaries attached to them were reduced
sharply, to around an eighth of the previous levels. This greatly
reduced the threat to the dynasty from pretenders like Lambert Simnel
and Perkin Warbeck.
In Ireland, moreover, fortunes of war had removed from the political
stage the great houses which had dominated the viceroyalty under the
Lancastrians - Richard of York, the Talbots and, until 1515, the
Butlers. In the north, the Percies and the senior branch of the Nevilles
remained available, but until the mid-1520s they were deliberately
excluded from office by a suspicious king. Yet as the threat to the
dynasty declined, so also did the rule and defence of the marches. The
king's officers were forced to develop an alternative means of defence,
since they now lacked the funds to maintain retinues and fee the leading
gentry as formerly. indeed in the far north, where the Scots proved a
much more formidable adversary than Irish chiefs, the marches were
greatly weakened and local government virtually collapsed, to be
replaced by feuds and compositions for murder.
[Expanded Picture]One reason why the Dacres and Fitzgeralds had such a
monopoly of these border offices was that very few nobles could afford
to discharge them and defend the marches with the reduced resources now
available. Dacre and Kildare both established new systems of defence in
their respective marches by exploiting the extensive military powers
inherent in their offices to build up the military levels of preparation
of their own estates. The link between `public' and private' was most
obvious in the clause in successive commissions to Kildare as governor
grapting him any crown lands he could recover from the Gaelic Irish. But
both lords were given control of actual crown lands in the areas of
their jurisdiction and the leading of the king's tenants during their
tenure of office, and they integrated them into the one defensive
system.
In the marches, a major weakness of the `normal' English system of
government was the juridical division between lordship of land and
lordship of men. Territorial magnates had compact holdings of land, but
seigneurial authority over tenants was (in theory at least) heavily
circumscribed by royal authority over subjects. When real peace was a
rarity and frequent war followed uneasy truces, absentee lordship was a
major liability, and the crown was the worst offender. The key to the
defence of the English west march was the most northerly, royal barony
of Liddel, with its castle known as Liddel Strength built on a cliff
commanding the river crossing 160 feet below. The barony had once been
worth 295[pounds] per annum, but after 1296 it became a war zone,
nominally in crown hands. The burden of defence fell on the lords of the
small barony of Levington immediately to the south, and on the Dacre
baronies of Burgh and Gilsland. But Levington was in turn partitioned
between six co-heiresses and passed to absentee lords who lacked the
resources to defend it. Thus border defence was thoroughly undermined.
By 1485 much of the region, including large parts of Gilsland, had long
been uninhabited wasteland. The abeyance in the earldom of Kildare after
1432 had an equally disastrous impact on the English Pale in Ireland.
Lord Dacre's extended tenure of the wardenship enabled him gradually to
patch up this hole in border defence, even though he could not afford a
garrison to plug the gap. He gradually bought up freeholds in the
strategically important border manors north of Carlisle. These
wastelands could be purchased cheaply, but once they were tenanted and
defended, Dacre's purchases in north Cumberland yielded over 130[pounds]
a year in rent, even though their main value was strategic and the
military service owed by the tenants. Commenting on the sale of his
lands there to Dacre, Sir John Stapleton observed that 'he dwelt at
London so farre from his land & that his tenauntes could haue no socoure
of hym'.
The kind of overlapping, official and personal responsibilities inherent
in this situation are well illustrated by arrangements in the crown
outpost of Bewcastle. Bewcastledale had a separate royal keeper, based
in the castle there, who was responsible to the warden; but quite
bizarrely, its feudal overlordship pertained to the Dacre barony of
Burgh, even though it was geographically separate and lay between
Gilsland and the border. For almost forty years (1493-1530) the keeper
was Sir John Musgrave, knight for the king's body, and his son Thomas,
but since the Musgraves were Dacre followers, the conflicting demands of
the situation were amicably resolved by having all the inhabitants
(including Dacre's tenants) do suit at Dacre's court of Askerton in
Gitsland, and by giving Dacre the rule of the Bewcastlemen under their
keeper.
[Expanded Picture][Expanded Picture]Dacre also worked in other ways to
build up his control of the marches. Actual war with Scotland was not
the only cause of disorder. To the east of Gitsland, in the
Northumberland highlands, lived the quasi-independent border surnames or
clans of Tynedale and Redesdale. Like the Scottish surnames, they got
their living largely by reiving and robbery among the wealthier and
`more civil' lowland communities - 'the king's true subjects'. The same
was true in Ireland, where Kildare had to control the English marcher
lineages of Wicklow and Westmeath, and also in the Welsh marches. As
wardens, the Percies had traditionally solved this problem by retaining
the leading gentry, both those of the highlands who maintained the
thieves, and the low-land gentry who suffered at their hands. in 1489
the 4th Earl of Northumberland was spending 42 per cent of his income on
maintaining a large following of county gentry.
Dacre, by contrast, spent very little on feeing the leading gentry, even
after 1511 when he reluctantly assumed responsibility for the east and
middle marches. There were indeed relatively few substantial gentry
families in Cumberland, and since their lands were mostly in the west
and south they would have been little help to him in controlling the
surnames. Instead, and especially as warden-general, he built up a
following among the humbler border squires who kept thieves, and even
among the thieves themselves. Indeed, `bearinge of theaves' was a
principal reason for his disgrace in 1525. Like Gaelic chiefs, the
surname captains and headsmen were sometimes forced to surrender leading
clansmen as pledges for good conduct - in effect, they were told to
direct their activities northwards. Yet Tynedale and Redesdale could
each raise around 500 men for military exploits, so Dacre had a
considerable force available at virtually no cost to harass the Scots -
so long as the marches remained disturbed and worthwhile preys presented
themselves in Scotland.
[Expanded Picture][Expanded Picture]The other main way of defending the
marches without a garrison was by building up cross-border ties. In 1534
William, 4th Lord Dacre (1525-63) was tried for treason on a charge of
holding secret meetings with Scots enemies in wartime and making 'a
wicked and treacherous agreement' with Lords Maxwell and Buccleuch and
the Scots of Liddesdale for mutual immunity from raids and invasions for
the lands and tenants of either party. Dacre was extremely fortunate to
escape when his peers decided that the charges were malicious, since it
was no defence to say that the meetings and agreements had served the
English interest. in fact, the charges broadly correspond with Dacre's
known cross-border contacts before the war. Nor is this surprising,
because after 1452 none of the Scottish border lords had the power and
possessions of a Percy or a Dacre, and lacking the support of their
central government they were anxious for some private understanding to
safeguard their estates. By early Tudor times, moreover, attempts to
conquer Scotland were a distant memory, and Henry VIII could generally
rely on the support of one or two of the Scottish nobility in each of
his wars with Scotland.
[Expanded Picture] Cross-border ties were facilitated by the region's
common culture and the similarity of administrative institutions on both
sides of a border line which, despite many disputes about debatable
lands and outposts like Berwick, was increasingly seen as fixed. In
Ireland, however, the gulf between English civility and Irish savagery
proved harder to bridge. There was a remarkable coincidence of
geographical, cultural and political boundaries between the
English-speaking arable low-lands of the Pale and the Gaelic pastoral
uplands and boglands of the Irishry. Yet in Ireland, where power was
more decentralised and the marches more fluid, crossborder ties were
more thoroughgoing. Intermarriage between the English and Gaelic
aristocracies was a very common means of stabilising the marches - in
the Anglo-Sottish marches it was restricted to the lower orders - and
even English magnates like Kildare married their daughters to prominent
Gaelic chiefs. Yet the corollary was that successive Earls of Kildare
were able to bring unprecedented pressure to bear on the weak and
divided Gaelic chieftaincies, so that the English Pale expanded
significantly during the Kildare ascendancy. As with Lord Dacre,
however, Henry VIII grew increasingly suspicious of the earl's links
with Gaelic Ireland and the frequent complaints that his deputy was
maintaining English rebels and Irish enemies against the king's true
subjects. Thus in both borderlands the new system of defences, though
much cheaper, had considerable shortcomings in terms of order and good
government.
In the short term, however, Henry VII's overriding concern was that the
arrangements for the borderlands should present no threat to the crown.
Once he was assured of this and had sorted out his initially difficult
relations with Kildare, he showed more interest in restoring the crown's
finances than in promoting good rule in the marches. Thus from 1496 the
English exchequer was absolved from all responsibility for Ireland's
defence; while in the north the king even resorted to farming the
shrievalties. He also accepted Dacre's offer to assume responsibility
for Carlisle, thus saving the cost of a garrison.
In the 1520s, however, as Henry VIII's attention shifted from war
against France to the need for internal reconstruction, he began to take
more interest in border rule. But the demands he made of his officers
there were a good deal less realistic. The king was no more willing to
pay for an effective system of administration and defences than his
father had been, but Dacre and Kildare were nonetheless charged with
failing to maintain good rule and dismissed. Their successors, however,
immediately ran into the problem of how to deploy, respectively, the
Dacre and Fitzgerald manraed, still essential for border defence, when
neither lord, now had any incentive to co-operate. And by then both
nobles had exploited their extended occupation of key border offices to
build up their local connexion and influence, so that they were less
dependent on royal support.
For his part, the king apparently assumed that individual magnates were
expendable, and that these border offices could be exercised equally
well by other nobles simply by issuing them with the king's commission.
Thus when, after a reconnaissance in force by the Earl of Surrey, Henry
appointed Piers Butler, Earl of ormond, as deputy of ireland in 1522 on
the same terms as Kildare had enjoyed, Ormond quickly discovered that he
lacked a sufficient following in the Pale for its defence, and the
resultant feud between Butler and Fitzgerald retainers led to violent
disorders throughout the lordship. The same happened in the west marches
in 1525, when Henry Lord Clifford was promoted Earl of Cumberland - a
very provocative title considering he had little land in the county -
and appointed warden in place of Dacre. Serious disputes arose
concerning the custody of Carlisle Castle, farms of crown land which
were traditionally associated with the wardenry, and arrangements for
Bewcastle's defence; and the marches were disturbed by feuds between
Clifford and Dacre followers.
Cumberland proved no more capable of ruling the west marches from
Skipton Castle than Ormond could the Pale from Kilkenny Castle. In both
cases, the king was forced to back down within two years, and the old
order was temporarily restored. The basis of trust between king and
magnate, and between the respective lords and their retainers, was not
so soon restored, however, although the system's effective operation
depended on this. And both Cumberland and Ormond found themselves
pressed into service again - with even less happy results - after the
traditional ruling magnates had been restored, and again found wanting.
The increasingly strained relations between king and magnate and the
charged atmosphere at court during the Reformation crisis led to the
events of May 1534. Henry suspected that disaffected nobles were
actually plotting against him, and he lashed out against the two
magnates he suspected might be his most dangerous opponents. In
Kildare's case, the earl's mishandling sparked off a major rebellion
which took fourteen months and cost 40,000[pounds] to suppress. Dacre
was found not guilty at his trial, but nonetheless paid an enormous fine
of 10,000[pounds] and his disgrace meant that he too was unusable as
warden for the rest of the reign.
In the 1490s `riottes and insurrections' provoked by disagreements
between Lord Dacre and Sir Christopher Moresby forced the king's council
to intervene, because 'the kinges strength in the counte of Cumberland
dependith in effect oonly betwixt thaym too, and also remembryng the
great unstabilnes of the peax' with Scotland. Similarly, the king's
council in Ireland observed in 1523 that 'the quietie and restfullnes'
of the king's subjects there 'standith in the unitie and concord of the
noblis', particularly the Earls of Kildare and Ormond. Thus the king's
decision in the 1530s to appoint `mean men' to rule the borders -
Skeffington in Ireland, Sir Thomas Wharton in the north-west - was
really an admission of failure. By curbing magnate power, Henry VIII was
in effect reducing the capacity of royal government there. Unable to
rely on the defensive system built up by Kildare and Dacre respectively,
or to deploy their manraed effectively, the new order proved both more
costly and less effective in defending the borders.
After Henry's death, the 4th Lord Dacre was quietly reappointed warden
of the west marches. The problem of the north was eventually solved, not
by a policy of centralisation and uniformity, but by improved
Anglo-Scottish relations and then the dynastic union of 1603, which
eliminated the need for a defensive frontier. 1603 also saw the
dismantling of the state's western frontier, with the completion of the
Tudor conquest. In the interim, however, Tudor policies for the
reduction of ireland had proved so disastrous that their legacy
continues to sour Anglo-Irish relations to the present day.
[Expanded Picture][Expanded Picture] The disgrace of the two magnates
does not, of itself, amount to a crisis of the aristocracy. Yet Henry
VIII's relations with other long-established territorial magnates - the
Percies, Staffords and Courtenays - were also problematic. The fall of
Dacre and Kildare was thus more than an isolated incident. In
discharging these key provincial offices, the nobility was increasingly
caught between the changing demands of service to the local community
and the revised expectations of crown and court, although all marcher
lords faced these choices to a greater or lesser degree. They could not
afford to spend long periods at court without neglecting the defence of
their estates, but the king seemed increasingly distrustful of nobles
who reflected most effectively traditional aristocratic values of strong
resident lordship and extended military and political service to the
crown. The price of centralisation and uniformity was thus heavy: the
demise of the marcher lords was closely linked to complaints about 'the
decay of the borders' and the marked decline in English military
preparedness which characterised the mid-Tudor period. And the marches
were not a marginal addition to the Tudor state; in 1534 they covered
half its geographical area and constituted a central aspect of its
defences. Thus, while the growing influence of the Tudor court and of
the politics of faction may provide a key to developments in lowland
England, their impact elsewhere was less decisive and less fortunate.
Lowland England was no more then the Tudor state than is modern England
now the British state.
FOR FURTHER READING: S. G. Ellis, Tudor Frontiers and Noble Power: the
Making of the British State (Oxford University Press, 1995); idem et S.
Barber (ed.), Conquest and union: fashioning a British state, 1485-1725
(Longman, 1995); R. Bartlett and A. MacKay (ed.), Medieval frontier
societies (Oxford University Press, 1989); M. james, Society, politics
and culture: studies in early modern England (Cambridge University
Press, 1986).
Steven Ellis is Associate Professor of History at University College,
Galway and author of Tudor Ireland: crown, community and the conflict of
cultures, 1470-1603 (Longman, 1985). His two books listed above will
both be published in June 1995.
|
|