Food for Thought

Week 4: Tuesday, February 8

Adrian Hastings, "England as Prototype" from The Construction of Nationhood

Please read Adrian Hastings' chapter up to page 57 only. At the bottom of this page, I have included a glossary of terms and events to help you understand some of Hastings' references.

1) Why was King Alfred the Great of Wessex significant? Did England qualify as a nation-state under his rule? Why?

2) What is Hastings' assessment of the Norman invasion's impact on English identity?

3) What do the Canterbury Tales tell us about the English nation in the 15th century?

4) Why was the Hundred Years War so significant along with the rise of Parliament?

5) According to Hastings, so far as the history of English nationalism is concerned, what is significant about Shakespeare's plays?

Other Questions

1) Is Hastings a modernist, perennialist, primordialist, or ethno-symbolist?

2) What is the point of Hastings' survey of English history?

3) Is Hastings convincing? Were the English of the 14th and 15th centuries part of a nation? Were they nationalist? Were they as nationalist as we are? How are we different from them?

Glossary of Terms

Angles, Saxons, Jutes, and Frisians were Germanic tribes who invaded and settled England in the course of the 5th and 6th centuries.

Northumbria was the northernmost region of England. At the time Bede wrote his history, it was an independent kingdom.

Alfred the Great, king of Wessex, the southernmost of several Anglo-Saxon kingdoms in England, witnessed repeated Danish invasions that threatened to conquer the entire island in the latter part of the 9th century. Alfred eventually defeated the Danes, and his successors eventually conquered most of present-day England by the end of the 10th century.

Shires were local units of administration first created in Wessex which took a leading role in collecting taxes, raising soldiers, and running law courts.

William I (otherwise known as William the Conqueror and William the Bastard) and the Normans who conquered England in 1066 came from the Duchy of Normandy in northwestern France.

Agincourt (1415) was a famous battle from the Hundred Years War in which a badly outnumbered English army consisting mainly of longbowmen under Henry V destroyed a French army consisting largely of knights.

The Magna Carta (1215) was an agreement imposed upon King John I by his rebellious barons. It consisted of a series of stipulations that restrained the monarch's authority—most important of which were his feudal powers.

The Act in Restraint of Appeals (1533) forbad anyone to appeal to the Pope in ecclesiastical matters, giving King Henry VIII complete jurisdiction over such issues. It was an important step in Henry VIII's move to separate England from the Roman Church so he could place himself at the head of an independent Church of England.