© Oxford University Press 2009, all rights reserved.
Power and Identity in the Middle Ages: Essays in Memory of Rees Davies
Trinity College, Dublin
Power and Identity in the Middle Ages: Essays in Memory of Rees Davies, ed. Huw Pryce and John Watts (Oxford: Oxford U.P., 2007; pp. 283. £58).
Such is the currency of the Festschrift that one fears the genre is fast depreciating. When the merest of mortals warrant such an accolade, what tribute is due to Rees Davies, whose passing in May 2005 robbed us of, among other things, the finest medieval historian of his generation? Were a general call-for-papers for his Festschrift issued to all who admired or were inspired by him, one could fill a small library with willing contributions. Any commissioning process, on the other hand, by an editor who would undertake the unenviable task of producing a worthy memorial, is apt to offend a few by omitting many. What to do? Perhaps an invitation restricted to medieval historians close in seniority to Rees and/or specialists in Welsh history and/or former students and/or dear friends. By this measure, most of the sixteen essayists in this volume are a perfect fit under at least one heading, but the selection, albeit a rich gathering of talent, nevertheless seems a little hit-and-miss. It is not that one necessarily required a veritable Who's Who of contributors to produce a fitting Festschrift in this instance, just that there are many other senior specialists of medieval Britain (including Wales itself), to say nothing of the wider medieval world, who are puzzlingly absent. And they are not absent because of the need to keep the book to manageable proportions as, excluding preliminary and end matter, it comes in at under 250 pages. This is indeed unfortunate: the inclusion of a greater number of top-drawer contributions would have given us a memorial volume that was even more memorable, all the more so if the essays came together around a certain theme or themes.
Generally speaking, the more organised a Festschrift is around a focal hub the more forceful its impact and, in a practical sense, the longer its shelf-life. For all the depth of insight that Rees Davies brought to bear on the study of his own beloved country, and for all the beauteous prose through which he communicated those insights and that love, what will endure is what made him pre-eminent beyond Wales. It is work that, ironically, began to take shape after he returned to Aberystwyth in the mid-1970s and that formed the theme of his inaugural lecture delivered in November 1978, subsequently published under the title Historical Perceptions: Celts and Saxons (Cardiff, 1979). Not long afterwards, when he accepted an invitation from the eminent Irish historian, James Lydon (alas, absent from this collection), to speak in Dublin at the first joint meeting of the British Academy and the Royal Irish Academy, Rees took the first public steps in developing the comparative and integrative approach to the study of medieval Britain and Ireland that remained his calling-card for the remainder of his career.1 He seized the initiative in organising a return match at the Gregynog conference centre in mid-Wales in 1986, the proceedings of which he edited for publication under the revealing title The British Isles, 1100–1500: Comparisons, Contrasts and Connections (Edinburgh, 1988; rev. ante, cvi [1991], 981–2). It was prefaced by his own manifesto ‘In praise of British history’, a landmark publication in what became ‘the new British history’, and a crucial milestone in Rees's own scholarly career. This appeared in the same year that he delivered the Wiles Lectures in Belfast, published in 1990 as Domination and Conquest: the Experience of Ireland, Scotland and Wales 1100–1300 (Cambridge, 1990; rev. ante, cix [1994], 135–6). Then came his four Royal Historical Society Presidential lectures, entitled ‘The peoples of Britain and Ireland, 1100–1400’, respectively dealing with ‘Identities’ (1994), ‘Names, boundaries and regnal solidarities’ (1995), ‘Laws and customs’ (1996), and ‘Language and historical mythology’ (1997).2 And this prodigious explosion of creativity culminated in his Ford Lectures delivered in Oxford in 1998 and published two years later as the masterpiece that is The First English Empire: Power and Identities in the British Isles, 1093–1343 (Oxford, 2000; rev. ante, cxviii [2003], 132–4).
This ‘new’ transnational landscape has been Rees Davies's vital legacy to scholarship, and one would have anticipated that it would form a core theme of this volume, in which, however, only one essay (the slimmest by some distance) addresses it directly. It is true that transnational issues are addressed. Susan Reynolds takes as her topic the relationship between secular power and authority in medieval Europe. She is a rock of common sense and a font of simple wisdom on this complex subject, giving a master-class in jargon-avoidance and clarity of thought in making a persuasive case for the power of custom in the legitimation of authority. Robin Frame, with typical eloquence, examines the extent to which franchisal rights in Ireland were often more circumscribed than those of the March of Wales, which he concludes was partly a consequence of the solidifying of English common law and royal jurisdiction in the gap between circa 1070 and circa 1170. Alexander Murray, on ‘Bede and the Unchosen Race’, in which he discusses the racial animus towards the Britons betrayed by the great English historian, is nothing short of enthralling. John Gillingham also deals with labels attached to peoples and, displaying the insatiable curiosity to track a thing back to source that has always characterised his work, sets out to discover when and why Irish historians first began to refer to the ‘Norman’ invaders of the late 1160s rather than the ‘English’. Sandy Grant, too, looks at peoples brought into contact by examining the extent and nature of changes that took place in landed society in the sheriffdom of Lanark in the twelfth century following its settlement by incoming ‘French’; he does so with all the forensic skill of a crime-scene investigator, his essay demonstrating the folly of underestimating the significance of the reign of Máel Coluim IV (1153–65) as an engine of ‘Normanisation’.
But the pick of this crop is Robert Bartlett's contribution. Only he would have the gall (its readers will perhaps pardon the pun) to construct an essay the credibility of which rests, at least in part, on convincing the reader to join him in, as he puts it, ‘concentrating on an object: the fur hat’. One feels that this is an exercise of which Rees Davies would have been most enamoured. It has the wonderfully imaginative ‘lift’ of which Rees was so capable: it takes an idea (core versus periphery) that initially evokes sighs of ‘Not again!’, but confounds cynicism by the clarity and simplicity, and also the ingenious originality, of the central argument. Doubting Thomases are won over by precisely the same prestidigitational talent with which Rees enraptured us, the talent for locating—in what the rest of us assumed were the long-dried-up wells of chronicles both familiar and unheard of—the mot juste that silences critics: all delivered in prose that is at once beautifully simple and, in its concluding remarks (on the declining significance of the core/periphery model: ‘It is now more possible to imagine that one is central without being located in the (fading) industrial might of the Ruhr or embracing the innocent cultural conceit of Paris. Perhaps the wider world of medievalists will come fully to realise that one of the great historical œuvres of present times is focused on Wales and was produced by a Welshman’), simply beautiful.
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1 ‘Lordship or Colony?’, in The English in Medieval Ireland, ed. James Lydon (Dublin: Royal Irish Academy, 1984), 142–60.
2 Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 6th ser., 4 (1994), 1–20; 5 (1995), 1–20; 6 (1996), 1–23; 7 (1997), 1–24.
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