Historia Successorum Regum Britanniae: A Study in Medieval and Early Modern English Historico-Legal Argument

Abstract

This thesis is a longue-duree intellectual history that takes as its subject a form of historico-legal argument, which, for the sake of analytical convenience, will be termed the 'succession claim'. Employing the serial contextualist method pioneered by David Armitage, the dissertation constructs a transtemporal narrative that ranges across some three-and-a-half centuries in order to trace the trajectory of a single intellectual tradition through time. It seeks to prove that numerous periods of English history which are usually considered discrete and are ordinarily analysed synchronically were in fact linked by a common diachronic context.

The succession claim was a form of English historico-legal argument invented at the turn of the thirteenth century. It was predicated on the idea that the kings of England were the juristic successors to the kings of Britain, and, as such, were entitled to preserve or recover -- as the case may be -- the rights and lands which had once been enjoyed by their eminent predecessors. In other words, the succession claim assumed that the various forms of regalian property which had been accumulated (and subsequently lost) between the reign of the first British monarch, Brutus, and that of the last, Cadualadrus, belonged de jure -- if not de facto -- to the kings of England. According to this logic, if certain British rulers had once enjoyed overlordship of the island then it followed that the English were subsequently entitled to recover these territories at their pleasure. Likewise, if certain British rulers had once wielded caesaropapal power then it followed that their English successors were entitled to restore this authority at will. It did not matter that the English were not the British, nor that decades, centuries, and even millennia might have passed since such rights or lands had last been possessed.

The succession claim consisted of two key elements. Its historical component was grounded in the English appropriation of Geoffrey of Monmouth's Historia Regum Britanniae (c. 1138). Initially suspicious of the Historia for political and historiographical reasons, the English began incorporating Geoffrey's legendary epic into accounts of their own history from the late twelfth century. The constitutional component of the succession claim presupposed the inalienability of regalian property. It assumed that that which belonged to the realm -- as opposed to the king in his private capacity -- could never truly be lost. Even those rights and lands which had been forfeited in the conventional sense of the term were said to remain the kingdom's on a de jure basis.

A potent and highly versatile form of historico-legal argument, the succession claim was episodically deployed throughout the medieval and early modern periods in support of a wide range of political programmes. The English thinkers who used it did so, almost invariably, in order to portray revolutionary goals as attempts either to conserve the status quo or to restore the status quo ante. This thesis does not purport to document every instance in which identifiable historical agents utilised the succession claim; it is intended to be a selective -- though representative -- account of the intellectual tradition. The dissertation reconstructs four synchronic "moments" -- two from the medieval period and two from the early modern -- against the backdrop of the diachronic succession claim. Looking in particular at baronial resistance to John's kingship, Edward I's overlordship of Scotland, Henry VIII's break with the Roman Church, and Lord Protector Somerset's campaign for Anglo-Scottish union, the thesis demonstrates that historical actors from each of these periods were engaged in a transtemporal dialogue with one another, a dialogue which was made possible in large part by England's sophisticated record-keeping practices. Show more