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23 Holinshed, Chronicles, i, 576. Mordred’s Pictishness seems to be an addition of Holinshed’s; Geoffrey described him as the second son of Aurelius’s sister (Gawain is his elder brother) and Loth, a Briton who becomes the rightful king of Norway through Arthur’s timely intervention (Historia, pp 221, 223). The change from a betrayal by an insider to one by an outsider may be of significance in the context of a centralised Tudor state keen to erase the differences of its marginalised peoples and to assimilate them into a homogeneous unit: see Hechter, Michael, Internal colonialism: the Celtic fringe in British national development (London, 1975), esp. ch. 4.Google Scholar

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30 Campion might have become a Catholic by the time he wrote his Two bokes of the histories of Ireland, which may have made him less willing to assert a British imperial authority to rival that of Rome than other writers, who do not seem to be quite so concerned to mask a violent colonial origin. That the work was hurriedly written (probably in less than ten weeks) could also account for certain errors and inconsistencies: see Vossen’s introduction in Campion, Two bokes, pp 108-9; Waugh, Evelyn, Edmund Campion: scholar, priest, hero, and martyr (Oxford, 1980 ed.), ch. 1.Google Scholar

31 The 1570s, when both Hanmer and Campion were compiling their histories, was a time of relative stability in Ireland, and many English government officials and writers believed that Ireland was about to accept the spread of English law, order and administrative machinery: see Ellis, Steven G., Tudor Ireland: crown, community and the conflict of cultures, 1470-1603 (London, 1985), pp 264-74Google Scholar; Canny, Nicholas P., The Elizabethan conquest of Ireland: a pattern established, 1565-76 (Hassocks, 1976), ch. 5.Google Scholar

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35 The use of both ‘allegiance’ and ‘subjection’ seems to imply that the Irish surrendered to a superior power and yet did so voluntarily, i.e. that equal and subordinate status are simultaneous, precisely the ambiguity of imperial authority discussed above.

36 The words Irenius cites are marraah (in Irish ‘horseman’, from the Saxon marh, ’horse’), gemanus (‘to ride’ in Irish and Saxon); these correlations are said to have come about through trade and common inhabitance. ‘Mere Saxon’, as in ‘mere English’ (see, e.g., Holinshed, , Chronicles, i, 27 Google Scholar) or ‘mere Irish’ (see, e.g., Campion, Two bokes, p. 21; Moryson, Fynes, ‘A description of Ireland’ in Morley, Henry (ed.), Ireland under Elizabeth and James I (London, 1890), p. 426)Google Scholar. Moryson more often writes of the ‘wild Irish’, which helps to emphasise the lack of a pejorative implication in ‘mere’, which signifies the purity of that group in terms of the people stated.

37 More specifically they claim a Basque ancestry. In the middle ages the Basques had an extremely low reputation, not unlike that of the Irish: see Gillingham, John, Richard the Lionheart (London, 1978), p. 50.Google Scholar

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39 I have followed Michael Richter and John Gillingham in calling the Anglo-Norman invasion of Ireland an English invasion: see Richter, Michael, ‘The interpretation of medieval Irish history’ in I.H.S., xxiv, no. 95 (May 1985), pp 289-98Google Scholar; Gillingham, John, ‘Images of Ireland, 1170-1600: the origins of English imperialism’ in History Today, xxxvii (Feb. 1987), pp 16–22 Google Scholar; see also Frame, Robin, English lordship in Ireland (Oxford, 1982).Google Scholar

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43 Speed, Theatre, p. 137. Brittany was more usually referred to as ‘Little Britain’: see Hay, Denys, ‘The use of the term “Great Britain” in the middle ages’ in Proceedings of the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland, lxxxiv (1955-6), pp 55-6.Google Scholar

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45 See Hugh Trevor-Roper, Queen Elizabeth’s first historian: William Camden and the beginnings of English ‘civil history’ (London, 1971)Google Scholar; Fussner, F. S., The historical revolution (London, 1962), ch. 9Google Scholar; Gottfried, Rudolf B., ‘The early development of the section on Ireland in Camden’s Britannia’ in English Literary History, x (1943), pp 117-30.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

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52 Spenser also notes the connexion of Gauls and Britons, the latter being descended from the former (View, p. 45), but nothing is made of this, presumably because it might serve to undermine the distinctions made.

53 The only really significant ‘Gaulish’ custom the Irish are said to have preserved is the ritual blood-drinking described by Irenius at the execution of Murrogh O’Brien (and even here the practice is transformed from the original consumption of enemies’ blood to that of friends).

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56 See, e.g., Hooker, Richard, ‘The chronicle of Ireland’ in Holinshed, , Chronicles, vi, 369 Google Scholar; Rich, Barnaby, A new description of Ireland (London, 1610), ch. 5Google Scholar. Rich refers to the Irish as ‘barbarous savages’ (p. 18).

57 The phrase is borrowed from Benedict Anderson’s influential study of nationalism, Imagined communities: reflections on the origin and spread of nationalism (London, 1983; repr. 1990).Google Scholar

58 Lucian, ‘Toxaris’, pp 115, 119–21, 205–6. The tract concludes with a hope that their friendship will continue, as they are bound together by ‘this conversation … and the similarity of LtheirJ ideals’ (Mnesippus). The dialogue serves as a fictional narrative of union.

59 Spenser variorum, x, 372; Faerie queene, VII, vi, 37. In the View Irenius praises the religious nature of the Irish, claiming that this will aid their conversion (pp 161–2). Here, at least, Spenser’s text is ‘dialogic’ as Coughlan claims (’“Some secret scourge”’, pp 62–8).

60 Hough, Graham, A preface to Spenser (London, 1968 ed.), p. 192 Google Scholar; Jones, Ann Rosalind and Stallybrass, Peter, ‘Dismantling Irena: the sexualising of Ireland in early modern England’ in Parker, Andrew et al. (eds), Nationalisms and sexualities (London, 1992), pp 157-71.Google Scholar

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63 Camden, Britannia, pp xvii–xviii. On ‘humanism’ and history see Kendrick, British antiquity, ch 6; Eisenstein, Elizabeth L., The printing press as an agent of change (Cambridge, 1980 ed.), ch. 3CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Fussner, Historical revolution, chs 1, 5; Ferguson, Arthur B., ‘Circumstances and the sense of history in Tudor England: the coming of the historical revolution’ in Medieval and Renaissance Studies, iii (1967), pp 170–205 Google Scholar; Levy, Tudor historical thought, ch. 2.

64 Hanmer, ‘Chronicle of Ireland’, pp 14–15.

65 See Appiah, Anthony, ‘The uncompleted argument: Du Bois and the illusion of race’ in Gates, H. L. (ed.), ‘Race’, writing and difference (Chicago, 1986), pp 21–37 Google Scholar, for an analysis of an identical contradiction in nineteenth- and twentieth-century discourses of racial origins.

66 On Stanihurst and the question of the identity of the Palesmen see Lennon, Colm, ‘Richard Stanihurst (1547-1618) and Old English identity’ in I.H.S., xxi, no. 82 (Sept. 1978), pp 121-43Google Scholar; idem, Richard Stanihurst.

67 Stanihurst, ‘Description of Ireland’, p. 6. In Camden’s Britannia Japhet’s descendants populate Europe and north Africa (p. x). On the use of the postdiluvian diaspora as an explanatory narrative of cultural difference in Renaissance ethnology see Hogden, Margaret, Early anthropology in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries (Philadelphia, 1964), ch. 8.Google Scholar

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69 Stanihurst, ‘Description of Ireland’, p. 4; Lennon, Richard Stanihurst, ch. 7.

70 The notion that life amongst the Irish would serve to make the English ‘degenerate’, i.e. lose their ‘civilised’ characteristics and become Irish, dates back to Giraldus’s observations of the behaviour of the Norman settlers in Ireland: see Topographia, c. 101. It is commonplace among Tudor and Jacobean observers of Ireland: see, e.g., Campion, Two bokes, pp 9, 14–15, 107; Hooker, ‘Chronicle of Ireland’, pp 265-6; Hughes (ed.), Shakespeare’s Europe, pp 201–3 and passim.

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80 On the problem of defining the term ‘colony’, which is often assumed (erroneously) to be identical with the later historical phenomenon ‘colonialism’, see Finley, M. I., ‘Colonies: an attempt at a typology’ in R. Hist. Soc. Trans., xxvi (1976), pp 167-88CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Hadfield, A. D., ‘The spectre of positivism?: sixteenth-century Irish historiography’ in Text & Context, iii (1988), pp 10–16 Google Scholar. Richard Beacon, the Munster planter, uses the word in the way described: see Solon hisfollie (Oxford, 1594), Bk 3, c. 14.

81 Holinshed, Chronicles, i, 37; see also William Harrison, ‘The description of Britain’, ibid., p. 201.

82 See Shire, Helen, A preface to Spenser (London, 1978), p. 51 Google Scholar; O’Connell, Michael, Mirror and veil: the historical dimension of Spenser’s ‘Faerie queene’ (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1977), p. 139 Google Scholar; Norbrook, David, Poetry and politics in the English Renaissance (London, 1984), p. 140.Google Scholar

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86 On Spenser see Brady, , ‘Spenser’s Irish crisis’; Grennan, Eamon, ‘Language and politics: a note on some metaphors in Spenser’s View ’ in Spenser Studies, iii (1982), pp 99–110 Google Scholar; on Hanmer and Moryson see the relevant D.N.B. entries; on Stanihurst see Lennon, Richard Stanihurst; on Campion see Vossen’s introduction in Campion, Two bokes.

87 This paper was written with the aid of a British Academy Post-Doctoral Fellowship in the Humanities and Social Sciences. I would like to thank Lesley Johnson and John Gillingham for helpful comments on an earlier draft, which saved me from numerous errors.