France and Frenchness in Late Medieval Welsh Poetry

Welsh poetry of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries features extensive praise for patrons’ exploits in battles abroad and, in particular, for their efforts in fighting the French. At the same time, terms, places, images, and figures associated with France and Frenchness are often evoked as markers of excellence or refinement, deployed as items of praise for the very same patrons lauded elsewhere (or even in the same poem) for their slaughter of the French. The purpose of this article is to explore the ways in which such violent anti-French rhetoric intersects and competes with these alternative discourses. Specifically, the essay proceeds by exploring moments where Welsh representations of France are enfolded within wider English-imperial frameworks; it then considers examples that articulate desires for the cultural prestige, commercial exchange, and genealogical distinction that are also associated with France. My argument throughout is that these apparent contradictions speak to the wider political positions of the Welsh gentry in overlapping domestic and international contexts, notably the aftermath of the Edwardian conquest of Wales in 1282–3 and the series of conflicts now known as the Hundred Years War. The approaches articulated in the poetry relate, I suggest, to the Welsh gentry’s attempts to navigate their relationships with ruling insular elites at a time when both the Welsh and English were engaged in complex processes of entanglement with, and disentanglement from, continental France.