Historiography and the Invention of British Identity: Troy as an Origin Legend in Medieval Britain and Ireland

In the medieval world order, which preceded the formation of what we now call nation-states, claims to nationhood competed with the larger ambitions of imperialism. While empires were essentially territorial, nations called themselves into being through discourse, through the sheer force of a shared language, shared culture, and the power of stories. Writing about the modern world, the historian Robert Holton has referred to a ‘Fourth World’ of “peoples or nations who are politically and culturally distinct but who do not possess a state apparatus with sovereign control of a given territory.”1 This was the status of Wales and Ireland throughout most of the Middle Ages, as nations without sovereign statehood, a political role exercised on their behalf, and through their subjection, by the kingdom of England.2

Given their relative lack of political power and sovereignty, a sense of nationhood in Wales and Ireland had to be created and asserted all the more vigorously, and it typically defined itself in opposition to the imperial power of the Norman and then English state. Claims to nationhood sometimes expressed themselves physically, in the form of warfare (though the jurisdictions of Wales and Ireland were each fragmented among a number of kings, which militated against a sense of shared singular nationhood) but more often through written texts which constructed and articulated, either in Latin or in the vernaculars, a sense of shared identity. One of the most powerful media for this discursive nationhood is the writing of history, recording what seems to be memory but is more often a means of creating new myths out of old ones. A subcategory of historiography is the origin legend, which works to establish the antiquity, and thus the legitimacy, of a particular people and their culture in terms of their attachment to a specific territory. Associated with these two strategies are the legends of heroes, historical or fictional, whose deeds as gifted warriors and leaders call a people into being through their role as followers.

These three strategies of discursive nationhood come together in the story of Troy as it was used by Welsh and Irish writers. It was received as if it were history—hence the value given to apparently eyewitness accounts—and it was given narrative prominence as an origin legend. Its heroes were positioned as founding fathers of the nation and role models for its male leaders. This use of the Trojan legend was not, of course, exclusive to Ireland and Wales; as new peoples emerged following the fall of the Roman empire in the 5th century C.E., narratives of nationhood began to circulate. Even before the end of Roman rule, provincial peoples such as the Gaulish Arverni and the Aedui had claimed Trojan descent and thus kinship with the Romans.3 After the fall of Rome, in order to distinguish themselves from the generic barbarii who brought down the Romans, the peoples who became the Irish, Welsh, Franks, and others looked for origin myths that predated the foundation of Rome and thus legitimized the territories they claimed for themselves as successors to Rome.4 Such a myth presented itself in the story of Troy and its survivors whose wanderings across Europe led not only to the foundation of Rome but to the beginnings of the national homelands of most of medieval Europe. The transnationalism of the Roman empire was replaced by a protonationalism that worked against the globalism of religion, trade, and the movements of peoples.