2016. ‘Before Humpty Dumpty: The First English Empire and the Brittleness of Bureaucracy, 1259–1453’ in Peter Crooks and Timothy H. Parsons (eds.), Empires and Bureaucracy in World History: From Late Antiquity to the Twentieth Century, pp 250–87. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. (original) (raw)

‘No Caesar or Charlemagne ever presided over a dominion so peculiar’, exclaimed Benjamin Disraeli in a speech of April 1878 on what he imagined to be the singular diversity of the nineteenth-century British empire. But what about the Plantagenets? In the later Middle Ages, the Plantagenet kings of England ruled, or claimed to rule, a consortium of insular and continental possessions that extended well outside the kingdom of England itself. At various times between the treaty of Paris in 1259 and the expulsion of the English from France (other than the Pale of Calais) in 1453, those claims to dominion stretched to Scotland in the north, Wales and Ireland in the west, Aquitaine (or, more specifically, Gascony) in the south of France, and a good deal else in between. By the standards of the ‘universal empires’ of antiquity or the globe-girdling empires of the modern era, the late-medieval English ‘empire’ was a small-scale affair. It was no less heterogeneous for its relatively modest size. Rather it was a motley aggregation of hybrid settler colonies gained by conquest, and lands (mostly within the kingdom of France) claimed by inheritance though held by the sword. The constitutional relationship of the constituent parts to the crown of England was vaguely defined. There were marked differences in law and custom between the dominions, and variations in the legal status of the king’s subjects. Across—indeed within—the dominions, administration was geographically fragmented, and there were marked modulations in the intensity of government. Given all the diversity and flux, one might well query whether ‘empire’ is the appropriate word at all. This essay starts from the assumption that it is the very peculiarity of the wider realm of the Plantagenet monarchs that makes it typical when considered in comparative terms as an empire. Among the structures that provided a degree of cohesion more than sufficient to warrant the ascription of that label was the royal bureaucracy. The ‘transnational’ nature of this bureaucracy, and its role in creating a political culture and a shared imperial ‘space’, are key themes in the pages that follow. A second theme, paradoxically, is the brittleness of that same bureaucracy. The overseas empire of the Plantagenets was unusual in the late Middle Ages for its capacity to mobilise resources and co-ordinate action across geographically dispersed territories. By comparison, the Catalan overseas ‘empire’ of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries has been shown to be a chimera. And yet, for all the sophistication of its military and bureaucratic apparatus, the administrative reach of England’s medieval empire was frequently beyond its grasp. Many of the lands that came into Plantagenet possession, whether through inheritance or conquest or a combination of the two, were subsequently lost—sometimes wrested away in wars of re-conquest (as occurred in Scotland and France), sometimes lost by piecemeal nibbling at the edges (as occurred across much of Ireland). The final part of the chapter seeks to show that an explanation for this brittleness must take account of the markedly different attitudes of officialdom towards the various peoples subject to the English crown. The key question is not to what extent was the English ‘official mind’ willing to devolve power upon local elites in general, but rather which particular ethnic groups were deemed sufficiently responsible and civilized to exercise the offices of government, and how did the ‘rule of difference’ constrain the Plantagenets’ exercise of power across their empire.