Abstract
In November 1457, John Hardyng—an Englishman, ex-soldier, and royal spy turned chronicler—delivered six documents concerning English hegemony over Scotland to Henry VI’s treasurer, John Talbot, second Earl of Shrewsbury; several days later he was granted an annuity for his services to the crown.1 It was not the first time that he had submitted evidence of suzerainty to an English king, nor would it be the last, but the wording of the letters patent confirming Hardyng’s reward and the prologue to the first version of his Chronicle (1457) seem to indicate that this submission was unique because Hardyng presented his text to Henry VI—or one of his officials—at or around the same time.2
This chapter argues that John Hardyng uses England’s long-standing conflict with Scotland to articulate his concerns about the wider sociopolitical difficulties facing England in the late fifteenth century.
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Notes
For Hardyng’s documents, see Alfred Hiatt, The Making of Medieval Forgeries: False Documents in Fifteenth-Century England (London; Toronto, ON: The British Library and University of Toronto Press, 2004). An indenture dated November 15, 1457, recording the delivery of the documents survives in The National Archives of the UK: Public Record Office (PRO), E 39/96/3.
See Charles Kingsford, “The First Version of Hardyng’s Chronicle,” English Historical Review 27 (1912): 466, 468 [462–69]. Other critics repeating this suggestion include Antonia Gransden, Historical Writing in England II: c. 1307 to the Early Sixteenth Century (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1974), pp. 276–77; Edward Donald Kennedy, “John Hardyng and the Holy Grail,” Arthurian Literature 8 (1989): 190 [185–206]; Felicity Riddy, “John Hardyng’s Chronicle,” 94; and Alastair J. MacDonald, “John Hardyng, Northumbrian Identity and the Scots,” in North-East England in the Later Middle Ages, eds. Christian D. Liddy and Richard H. Britnell (Woodbridge: Boydell and Brewer, 2005), p. 30 [28–42].
For the northern marches in the period 1296–1502, see Cynthia J. Neville, Violence, Custom and Law: The Anglo-Scottish Border Lands in the Later Middle Ages (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2009), p. ix.
See L.C. Hector and Barbara F. Harvey, eds., The Westminster Chronicle 1381–94 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982), pp. 350–51.
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© 2012 Mark P. Bruce and Katherine H. Terrell
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Peverley, S.L. (2012). Anglo-Scottish Relations in John Hardyng’s Chronicle . In: Bruce, M.P., Terrell, K.H. (eds) The Anglo-Scottish Border and the Shaping of Identity, 1300–1600. The New Middle Ages. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137108913_5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137108913_5
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