Richard Hakluyt

Hakluyt effectively ran an Elizabethan think-tank that brought together patrons, collaborators, and like-minded historians. Based at Christ Church, Oxford, and, for a time, in Paris, he dedicated his life to gathering accounts of British travel and exploration, while building a systematic case for the colonisation of North America by England.Footnote ² Working largely for a small circle drawn from the highest echelons of power, including Queen Elizabeth and her spymaster, Sir Francis Walsingham, Hakluyt had a considerable influence on English thinking on the Americas and their colonisation. His productivity was remarkable: in 1582, he published his Divers Voyages Touching the Discovery of America and the Islands Adjacent, a modest collection of mostly contemporary voyages. This was followed seven years later by his best-known work, the Principall Navigations, which he expanded in the second edition into a three-volume behemoth of 2 million words, published between 1598 and 1600.Footnote ³ Other works of Hakluyt’s have also survived, including his translation of Hugo Grotius’ Mare Liberum.Footnote ⁴

In his momentous book The Ideological Origins of the British Empire, David Armitage credits Hakluyt with the early modern origin of the British Empire (Armitage Reference Armitage2000, pp.70–75). Armitage attributes the economic argument for colonialism in its most comprehensive articulation to Hakluyt. The archipelagic English empire did not become colonial only with Hakluyt; instead, Armitage sees Hakluyt marking the inflectional point at which the empire moved beyond the archipelago. During this phase, English colonialism turned from being ‘internal’ to the British archipelago to becoming an ‘external’ phenomenon (Armitage Reference Armitage2000, p.6):

However, colonialism is always external. Armitage’s ‘internal’ is itself a deeply colonialist term that accepts the imperialist logic of having conquered and colonialised those territories and Celtic peoples closest, yet external, to one’s own. This notion continues and is built on the same imperialist premise that was used by Geoffrey of Monmouth in his spurious twelfth-century History of the Kings of Britain to offer a propagandistic instrument to subjugate Ireland, Wales, and Scotland. By including medieval texts as precedents in his collection – including the Galfridian tradition of subjugating the ‘Celtic fringe’ – Hakluyt implicitly extends this notion of ‘internal’ colonialism to represent the ‘sphere of influence’ of a polity, bequeathing this quintessentially imperialist argument to successive powers throughout the world, all the way to twentieth-century US administrations and present-day authoritarian regimes such as China or Russia, which justify their actions through unreliable precedents and propagandistic defences that can be traced to the tradition exemplified by John Dee and Hakluyt.Footnote ⁵

Thus, the idea of a ‘sphere of influence’, championed by Dee’s and Hakluyt’s cases for England’s entitlement to the Americas, is unabashedly imperialist and gives birth to forms of colonialism (as the title of this Element suggests) that remain relevant to this very day. ‘Influence’ denotes the exercise of power, while ‘sphere’ demarcates the claimed remit. Vulnerable polities do not have spheres of influence. Only those that claim for themselves political power over others speak in terms of ‘spheres of influence’, often by appealing to the absurd fiction of their own vulnerability and foisting on neighbouring polities invented narratives of ‘collaboration’, ‘provocations’, and ‘special operations’, as in the imperialist reasoning of Walter Mignolo (Mignolo Reference Mignolo, Steger, Benedikter, Pechlaner and Koer2023).Footnote ⁶ Hakluyt articulates England’s new collective self-confidence by assigning to England precisely this kind of political power. Armitage’s concept of ‘internal colonialism’ functions as a helpful historical marker for a period during which England practiced a mostly archipelagic sphere of influence (perhaps with the exception of France), as opposed to Hakluyt’s expansion of this very sphere to North America.

Hence, The Invention of Colonialism: Richard Hakluyt and Medieval Travel Writing acknowledges the imperialist claims underlying ‘internal’ – here, England’s self-declared archipelagic ‘sphere of influence’, best captured by King Edgar’s alleged insular circumnavigation. Thus, my argument maintains that Armitage’s shift from ‘internal’ to ‘external’ already occurred during the Middle Ages, and long before England’s archipelagic empire was consolidated, by extending the sphere of influence (the Four Seas of Britain) beyond the archipelago. In Elizabethan England, Edgar’s Four Seas of Britain were actively propagated by John Dee and Hakluyt. In turn, Hakluyt’s contribution was not to herald the ‘external’ phase of England’s colonialist imperialism but to find, gather, translate, and transmit medieval English ideas of colonialism. Ultimately, Hakluyt’s ideological rationalisation that colonialism is desirable is based on and grounded in the medieval archipelagic experience of England’s ‘sphere of influence’ or, to use Armitage’s term, ‘internal colonialism’. ‘Sphere of influence’ may strike readers as a term at home in modern political theory, but the concept it articulates has been around for a long time. Not only is the notion of ‘spheres of influence’ part and parcel of imperialism since the dawn of polities, but, as I will show, it was a central tenet of the fifteenth-century Libelle of Englyshe Polycye, which profoundly influenced Hakluyt’s own position.

Hakluyt indeed marks a significant departure in the history of English colonialism, not by breaking with the past, but by bundling and utilising medieval ideas about the colonial expansion of England’s sphere of influence. I shall read his Discourse Concerning Western Planting (1584) and his Principall Navigations (1589, much enlarged in 1598–1600) as a single project: the Discourse makes the intellectual case, while the two editions of the Principall Navigations offer case studies and empirical data for this undertaking. Together with the earlier Divers Voyages Touching the Discovery of America (1582), Hakluyt’s project establishes a considerable body of work to justify colonialism, itself grounded in medieval thought and practice.

While Armitage acknowledges the existence of an earlier, medieval English imperialism, this study of Hakluyt’s work explains the fundamental structural indebtedness of England’s early modern colonialism to medieval English imperialism. Armitage speaks of twelfth-century archipelagic imperialism as an important strand in early ideas of British imperialism (Armitage Reference Armitage2000, pp.6–7), citing John Gillingham’s work on this topic. To my mind, Gillingham accurately establishes the origins of English colonialism and the British Empire as lying in the twelfth century (Gillingham Reference Gillingham1987, Reference Gillingham1992). By contrast, Armitage argues that the early modernist position is to see the emergence of imperialism in the sixteenth-century conquest of Ireland, locating it therefore in the process of state formation. In order to accomplish this, Armitage presents Gillingham as severing continuities of state formation by shifting the origins of English imperialism to the twelfth century. This argument, however, downplays the historicity of Hakluyt’s sources: if anything, Hakluyt’s deft handling of medieval material demonstrates how the formation of the initially English then British imperial state had medieval roots and antecedents, particularly in Ireland. These political, economic, administrative, and cultural antecedents were acknowledged and weaponised by Hakluyt and his contemporaries in positions of influence. This is a point already anticipated by Gillingham (Gillingham Reference Gillingham1987, p.17):

Gillingham also draws attention to a crucial consequence of many forms of England’s colonialist imperialism (Gillingham Reference Gillingham1987, p.17): ‘It was not just in the modern era that Englishmen decided that the Irish were savages and should either be Anglicised or exterminated: they had thought so for centuries’. Without explicitly using the term ‘genocide’, Gillingham characterises English practices towards the Irish in terms of eliminatory forms, which often accompany colonialism. Patrick Wolfe notes that ‘settler colonialism is inherently eliminatory but not invariably genocidal’ (Wolfe Reference Wolfe2006, p.387), adding that ‘settler colonialism destroys to replace’ (Wolfe Reference Wolfe2006, p.388). Wolfe understands ‘elimination’ as the replacement of the colonised, whether through assimilation or genocide, defining the ‘elimination’ as ‘more than the summary liquidation of Indigenous people, though it includes that’ (Wolfe Reference Wolfe2006, p.390). Unfortunately, Wolfe’s helpful discussion of eliminatory practices and their relationship to genocide is marred by not paying sufficient attention to intent as a legal requirement for genocide (unlike the UN’s Genocide Convention) and restricting himself to indigenous rather than colonised populations more broadly. This stems from his over-reliance on a politicised interpretation of his main case study, the Israeli–Palestinian conflict, the complexity of which he views simplistically in the misleading and reductionist terms of ‘Indigenous’ and ‘settler-colonialist’. The eliminatory nature of English colonial practices in Ireland marks a crucial continuity spanning Hakluyt’s medieval sources and his own recommendations toward the Indigenous population of North America, as I will show.

A central part of the problematic nature of the term ‘internal’ is that it accepts the posited, imperial unity of the archipelagic idea – a unity unstintingly challenged for centuries to this day from the countless Irish uprisings to the ongoing political process of transferring power away from Westminster, known in the UK as ‘devolution’. At no point was England’s archipelagic sphere of influence stable or unchallenged. The circles of this sphere started expanding beyond the archipelago already in the Middle Ages, most dramatically when Edward III initiated in the middle of the fourteenth century what would become the Hundred Years’ War and, with it, the first major step in trying to extend English control beyond the archipelago and to the Continent. And when, in the first quarter of the fifteenth century, his great-grandson Henry V established an English bureaucracy in France, England’s sphere of influence had reached as far as Gascony and Paris. I want to argue that Hakluyt’s ‘external’ swing is not an internal-to-external movement but the continuation of a necessarily external colonialist project that began in the twelfth century. Hakluyt’s profound indebtedness to medieval sources and precedents demonstrates that not only was he aware of medieval England’s imperialist undertaking but also took a leading role in shaping its colonialist future. England’s relationship with Ireland plays a crucial role in medieval colonial thinking, but the significance of Ireland is not visible in much of Hakluyt’s work, although Ireland was a foundational experience of his patrons and interlocutors such as Sir Humphrey Gilbert or Sir Walter Ralegh. This is why a closer look at how Hakluyt read his medieval sources sheds important light on the role of Ireland in shaping his colonialist thinking. At the heart of Hakluyt’s project, I argue, was his long-term treatment of three medieval texts and traditions: the fourteenth-century Travels of Sir John Mandeville, the fifteenth-century Libelle of Englyshe Polycye, and the tenth-century circumnavigation of King Edgar. The latter two are directly relevant to understanding the role of Ireland in Hakluyt’s project.

The Structure of the Argument

In 1580, John Dee produced the first English map to advance England’s claim to New England, or Norumbega, as it was then called (Probasco Reference Probasco2014, p.428). The idea was to gain the Queen’s support for Sir Humphrey Gilbert’s expedition to Newfoundland, eventually undertaken in 1583. This remarkable manuscript map survives, and may not look like much, but it packs a punch (London, British Library, Cotton MS Augustus, I.i.1). This map was made for the eyes of the queen and her closest counsellors only; it shows North America and the Gulf of Mexico in the centre, with Western Europe in the top right corner. Dee’s focus, however, was on North America’s East Coast, and on Norumbega in particular, the area covering the St Lawrence River, New Brunswick, Vermont, and Maine. But what is truly remarkable about this map is that the dorse contains a historical justification for Queen Elizabeth’s title to North America. And medieval texts are essential to Dee’s case. The tabular layout shows each voyage in the centre paragraph, with the name of the traveller or text in bold. On the left is a column with dates. And on the right, another column gives the locations first claimed during these voyages. The list begins with Prince Madoc of North Wales who, so Dee, ‘led a colony and inhabited in Terra Florida or thereabouts’ – the nonchalant imprecision of this remark could not have been lost on Elizabeth. Next, Dee lists St Brendan, whose legendary Atlantic odyssey was wildly popular in the Middle Ages and has survived in more than 120 manuscripts in almost all European vernaculars (Barron and Burgess Reference Barron and Burgess2002). Then there is also King Arthur’s supposed conquest of Greenland and Iceland. Another significant medieval precedent is the now lost fourteenth-century Inventio fortunata (or Happy Discovery) – if there ever was an ironic title. Purportedly written by an Oxford Franciscan, the Inventio fortunata, which describes the North Atlantic, is only known through early modern summaries. It was already lost by Dee’s time, although Hakluyt prints Dee’s correspondence concerning the Inventio fortunata in the Principall Navigations.

For scholars of medieval literature, Dee’s map should be vitally important. This is a policy document that makes medieval literature and premodern travel writing pivotal for its declared objective of colonising North America. The map is part of Dee’s ongoing project to strengthen England’s title in the Americas and the Atlantic. Forcefully outlined in his 1577–78 treatise The Limits of the British Empire (Brytanici imperii limites), which was in all likelihood presented to the Queen (Dee Reference Dee and MacMillan2004, pp.43–49). In this work, which includes Madoc, Arthur, Brendan, the Inventio fortunata and a few other early voyages and accounts, Dee explains why these medieval precedents are so critical to England’s claim:

Hakluyt, who worked closely with Dee at the time, certainly took Dee’s ideas to heart.Footnote ⁷ For the first edition of his Principall Navigations, Hakluyt went back to the dorse of this very map and gathered a much longer list of medieval precedents bombastically to inflate England’s new sphere of influence, expanding Dee’s modest selection exponentially in the second edition to a total of seventy medieval texts. Hakluyt’s list is impressive: voyages by Arthur, Wulfstan, and Ohthere rub shoulders with the tours and expeditions of historical kings, including Edgar and Henry IV; Hakluyt prints trade disputes and shipping ordinances; he includes extracts from Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales and complete accounts of the spectacularly long journeys to Mongolia by the Franciscan friars John of Plano Carpini and William of Rubruck. But there is a momentous shift in emphasis between the first and second editions of the Principall Navigations: while Hakluyt dramatically expanded Dee’s political precedents, he placed the emphasis on commerce and dropped the sensationally popular Mandeville’s Travels from the second edition.

The first section of this Element, ‘Mandeville’s Hegemonic Gaze and Hakluyt’s Multi-Text’, argues that Hakluyt saw Mandeville’s Travels not as a single, unitary text but as a florilegium, mediated through the compilatory presence of a narrative persona. I suggest that as the project of publishing the Principall Navigations evolved between the first edition of 1589 and the vastly expanded 1598–1600 edition, the Travels became redundant because Mandeville’s work had outlived its role as one of the models for Hakluyt’s own florilegium. This reading strategy of the Travels as a collection is largely lost now, with centuries of authorial layers having accreted to Mandeville’s text. It is precisely the nature of the earlier text as a florilegium and prospectus – an inventory of the world’s humanity – that bequeaths, directly and indirectly, to Hakluyt the notion that all the world can be saved. Mandeville’s hegemonic gaze would become Hakluyt’s colonising imperative.

Section 2, ‘A Blueprint for Colonialism: The Discourse Concerning Western Planting (1584) and The Libelle of Englyshe Polycye (1436)’ sees Hakluyt depart from Dee and introduce a critical source of his own. This section reads Hakluyt’s confidential 1584 treatise for Queen Elizabeth, advocating the colonisation (or ‘planting of settlers’) in North America, as indebted to the fifteenth-century Libelle of Englyshe Polyce, a work he singled out for praise and printed in the second edition of the Principall Navigations 1598–1600). This unique Middle English poem contains in essence all the elements required to formulate a theory of mercantilist colonisation. I demonstrate that this poem was the cornerstone of Hakluyt’s and, thus, England’s policy of expansion into and colonisation of North America.

The third section, ‘Edgar’s Archipelago Revisited: Hakluyt, John Dee, and the Four Seas of Britain’ returns to and revises an earlier essay of mine on the central ideological kernel of English imperialist colonialism, the legend of King Edgar’s circumnavigation of Britain and his imagined extensive rule over the archipelago as expressions of England’s ever-widening sphere of influence. I follow this myth from its twelfth-century inception as a monastic forgery, over Hakluyt’s debt to Dee’s inflectional application to future colonial practices, to the subsequent reception of Edgar’s Four Seas of Britain as an expression of England’s global sphere of influence.

The upshot of my argument is threefold: first: Hakluyt and his contemporaries were much better and closer readers of medieval travel texts than we give them credit for; second: the ideology behind English colonialism was shaped in the late medieval period, not in Elizabethan England; and third: another facet of periodisation, with its epistemological emphasis on rupture rather than continuity, comes under pressure.

1.1 Hakluyt’s Mandeville

Mandeville’s fourteenth-century amalgamation of various travel and voyage accounts is often held up as an example of Europe’s early global thinking and the extent of late medieval ideas of tolerance, although this openness sits uneasily with the virulent antisemitism of the text. I argue that Hakluyt’s understanding of the Travels is sophisticated and dynamic; he had already read Mandeville’s travelogue for his 1582 Divers Voyages, and the medieval text may even inform his Discourse of Western Planting, Hakluyt’s pitch for colonisation prepared for Queen Elizabeth and her court in 1584. I maintain that Mandeville’s all-encompassing vision of a truly global world is subjected to the need for a future Crusade, an impulse channelled by Hakluyt into a Protestant desire to impose Reformed ideas of faith and social normativity on the inhabitants of the New World. Thus, Hakluyt’s Principal Navigations follows Mandeville’s Travels in viewing the populations of distant territories in relation to European hegemonic ambitions. I believe that Hakluyt saw Mandeville’s Travels not as a single, unitary text but as a florilegium, mediated through the compilatory presence of a narrative persona. This reading strategy of the Travels as a collection is much less accessible now, with centuries of authorial layers having accreted to Mandeville’s text. I suggest that as the project of publishing the Principall Navigations evolved between the first edition of 1589 and the vastly expanded 1598–1600 edition, the Travels became redundant because Mandeville’s work had outlived its role as a model for Hakluyt’s own anthology. It is precisely the nature of the earlier text as a florilegium and prospectus – an inventory of the world’s available humanity – that bequeaths, directly and indirectly, to Hakluyt the notion that all the world can be saved. Mandeville’s hegemonic gaze would become Hakluyt’s colonising imperative.

It all starts with Hakluyt’s language choice for Mandeville in PN1. Hakluyt certainly had access to multiple texts of the Travels. Thus, in PN1 alongside the Latin version of the text, he prints a Latin translation of Mandeville’s dedication to Edward III that is only found in Insular French copies of the text. Thus, Hakluyt also saw a French version of the Travels. In addition to having ready access to printed English versions, Hakluyt worked with several copies of the Latin text, as he states in his remarks to the reader (Hakluyt Reference Hakluyt1589, p.77). So, he read several Latin exemplars, at least one Insular French copy, and, in all probability, saw the English text available in several printed editions. Since there was no lack of English and French printed and manuscript exemplars, his decision to print the Latin text must have been a conscious one. Moreover, as is characteristic of his editorial working style, he was methodical in his textual approach, ensuring a reliable text generally free of errors (O’Doherty Reference O’Doherty2019, p.320).

In the most detailed study of Hakluyt’s use of Mandeville, Marianne O’Doherty discusses Hakluyt’s deliberate choice of this particular Latin version in place of an English translation (O’Doherty Reference O’Doherty2019). O’Doherty suggests that Hakluyt may not have been in a position to secure the rights to reprint the English text relatively soon after Thomas East’s own 1582 reprint. However, this argument rests on the belief that Hakluyt gave preference to English over Latin in the first place, and that he always translated Latin material in the Principall Navigations. On closer inspection, Hakluyt’s language policy across the two editions of the Principall Navigations is a good deal less consistent, and more complex, than is often assumed. It is all too often overlooked that Hakluyt does not translate every text in PN2. A particularly pertinent example is his treatment of John of Plano Carpini’s thirteenth-century Historia Mongalorum. This instance is especially relevant because John’s text is one of Mandeville’s sources, drawn by the medieval author from the abridgement of John’s account in Vincent of Beauvais’ Speculum historiale. When editing Hakluyt’s medieval texts for the forthcoming complete edition of the second edition of the Principall Navigations, my collaborator Lena Wahlgren-Smith and I noticed an important distinction that had been overlooked by prior scholarship: Hakluyt prints John of Plano Carpini’s text not in one but in two distinct versions: the first is Vincent of Beauvais’s thirteenth-century abbreviation and amalgamation found in Vincent’s Speculum historiale, taken by Hakluyt from Reiner Reinecke’s Chronicon Hierosolymitanum (1485) (Hakluyt Reference Hakluyt1598–1600, 1:pp.21–37), followed by the original account of John’s voyage, the Historia Mongalorum proper (Hakluyt Reference Hakluyt1598–1600, 1:pp.37–71), which Hakluyt transcribed from a manuscript miscellany in Lord Lumley’s library, now held in the British Library (BL, MS Royal 13 A xiv, fols 198 r–212 v). However, Hakluyt only translated Vincent’s version, printing it in both Latin and English, whereas he left the abridged version – John of Plano Carpini’s text as used by Mandeville for his Travels – in Latin only.

The decision to print John’s text in two versions but only translate one of them troubles any existing attempts to impose consistency on Hakluyt’s editorial decisions regarding his use of Latin. To my mind, Hakluyt replaced Mandeville’s Travels specifically with its direct source, the abridged account of John of Plano Carpini’s voyage as included in Vincent of Beauvais’ Speculum historiale; the fact that he left these substantial two texts in untranslated Latin, in PN1 and PN2 respectively, speaks not only to their relationship in Hakluyt’s project but points to Hakluyt’s editorial intention for specific material to appear only in Latin. (Among the few texts in the Principall Navigations that share this distinction of being printed only in Latin is also Stephen Parmenius’s 1582 poem De navigatione.) In printing the Vulgate Latin version of Mandeville’s Travels in PN1 without an English translation and doing the same for Vincent’s version of John’s Historia Mongalorum in PN2 suggests that the two untranslated Latin texts serve as versions of record by dint of the unmediated, privileged learnedness of the language, conferring authority not on these texts themselves (for Hakluyt could not have expected most of his readers to show the same level of competency in Latin as they possessed in English) but on his project as a whole. Hakluyt’s choice of selecting a Latin text does not sanction speculation about the role of English, just as much as the absence in PN1 of an English translation of the Travels does not necessarily say anything about how he valued or viewed English texts in relation to ones in Latin. But the fact that an English version is not present invites a simple argument ex silentio about his use of Latin in that not printing an English version of the text or having an English translation accompany it places considerable emphasis on the Latin text qua Latin.

The question of religious tolerance has been brought up, with limited success, in connection with Hakluyt’s use of the Vulgate Travels. Not only is Hakluyt’s Mandeville the only printed instance of the manuscript branch generally called the Vulgate Latin text, but, as Dimmock points out, this particular version of the Travels is considered to be less tolerant of religious heterodoxy than the vernacular redactions (Dimmock Reference Dimmock, Carey and Jowitt2012, p.222). Although a secular work, the Travels nevertheless makes faith a central concern that governs the first part of the work, which initially imitates a pilgrim’s guide to the Holy Land. While most manuscripts of Mandeville’s Travels proclaim that ‘we wot not whom God loves ne whom he hates’ (Letts Reference Letts1953, 1:p.207), and where Muslims are accorded consistent praise for keeping Islam, the Vulgate Latin text reserves salvation explicitly only for Christians and prefaces its discussion of Islam with ‘Of the detestable sect of the Saracens and their faith’ (‘De secta detestabili Saracenorum et eorum fide’) (Dimmock Reference Dimmock, Carey and Jowitt2012, p.222). Hakluyt also prints many other medieval texts with staunchly orthodox religious sentiments, including the papal missions of such notable Franciscan friars as William Rubruck and, of course, John of Plano Carpini – both sources for Mandeville’s work. Dimmock suggests that the Vulgate version was aligned with the presentation of Islam in PN1 and with a ‘dominant, demonizing perspective’ (Dimmock Reference Dimmock, Carey and Jowitt2012, pp.222–223), but, as Fuller has shown, Hakluyt’s treatment of Anglo-Ottoman relations assumes very different terms (Fuller Reference Fuller2023, pp.176–181). That said, there is a difference, I think, between Hakluyt’s trade-oriented pragmatism directed at the Ottomans on one hand, and generalising views about faith and the comparative validity of religions on the other. Faith, however, does play a role in Hakluyt’s selection process, and I will return to this point later.

There appear to be still more compelling reasons for selecting the Vulgate Latin text. O’Doherty notes that the Vulgate Version, in contrast with the more common vernacular texts, tends ‘to play down or eliminate the text’s well-known mirabilia and fabulae (marvels and stories)’ (O’Doherty Reference O’Doherty2019, p.324). The Vulgate does not so much elide as systematise the marvellous, shifting such tall tales to southern and eastern Asia (O’Doherty Reference O’Doherty2019, p.325). Most important, to my mind, is the consequential observation by O’Doherty that Hakluyt chose the Vulgate version because it presents a world not centred on Jerusalem, and therefore one more global in reach:

It would be too cumbersome here to elaborate on the intricate transmission history of the Travels with its many distinct branches. However, it is important to stress that while most versions of Mandeville appear to follow the geography of medieval mappae mundi with a clear focus on Jerusalem and the Holy Land, O’Doherty notes that the Vulgate reorders the chapters in a more geographically logical sequence. Furthermore, the Vulgate text marks a departure by formally separating Mandeville’s account of the Middle East from the sensationalist reports of Asia. The latent religious worldview of a planet rotating around Jerusalem at its heart, and the European faithful oriented toward it, underpinned many late medieval and early modern ideas of geography, but the Vulgate Latin text of Mandeville’s Travels marks a notable shift in emphasis. It is this global focus of the Vulgate, I would argue, that prefigured the shift from the conquest of the Holy Land to the conquest of the world, a changed prospect made possible by the sudden availability of more geography. The dusty Isidorean tripartite terrestrial universe made up of Asia, Africa, and Europe, with Jerusalem as its spiritual omphalos, made no sense for a world enlarged in quantity of creation. The need for such an expansion – not a decentring – was hammered home by the institutional fragmentation brought about by Europe’s Reformations: the Christian pitch for spheres of influence became not just bigger, but the pursuit of conquest now became a race between several hostile conquerors. This shift also reached Hakluyt through Giovanni Battista Ramusio’s Navigationi et viaggi (1556), but the Vulgate offered an earlier and, more significantly, English source for the new geographical prospect. The Christian promise to reconquer the Holy Land, in the case of Spain forged in its own postcolonial crucible of centuries of Islamic imperialist colonialism following the Umayyad conquest of Iberia, became a competitive project, ever since Columbus fired the first shot by chancing upon the Caribbean in his quest to bankroll a new Crusade in Palestine for the Catholic Kings of Spain. Although Jerusalem remained the centre of the world for Europe’s Catholics and Protestants, the city’s centrality no longer mattered strategically. The colonial project promised gold and souls across vast new geographies, and no existing text composed by an English author (whether real or invented) could match the Vulgate version of Mandeville’s Travels in historical pedigree and geographical scope.

1.2 Mandeville’s Spiritual Imperialism

Mandeville’s overall purpose for the peoples he encounters is to enfold the globe and its creatures in a geography of salvation. To this end, he pursues a comparativist and broadly sympathetic approach (Sobecki Reference Sobecki2002), encapsulated by the phrase ‘articles of our faith’ (or, in the Insular French text, articles de nostre foy/loy), which is repeated frequently and extended as an expression of conversion compatibility, in particular to the non-Latin Christians and, surprisingly, the Brahmins. Christians who live in areas of the Middle East governed by what Mandeville terms ‘Saracens’, that is, Muslims in most cases, are identified by how much they depart from Latin Christian doctrine: ‘they fail in some articles of our belief’ (Letts Reference Letts1953, 1:p.84). Explicitly identified as Eastern Orthodox, the Christians living in the Middle East are simultaneously recognised for their similarity and difference: ‘all are they called Christian men, and many of the articles of our belief they hold and use, but nevertheless in many points they vary from us and from our faith’ (Letts Reference Letts1953, 1:p.85). Thus, the Christians inhabiting the Asian realm of the legendary Prester John are indeed Christians ‘it be so that they have not all the articles of our belief so clearly as we have’ (Letts Reference Letts1953, 1:p.189). Finally, Mandeville extends the same metric to non-Christians whom he regards as essentially compatible with his own belief system. The Brahmins, in particular, are singled out by him, with natural law – where ‘kind’ in Middle English denotes ‘nature’ – acting as a proxy for their missing Christianity: ‘And if all it be so that this manner of folk have not the articles of our belief, nevertheless I trow that for their good faith, that they have of kind and their good intent, God loves them well and holds him well paid for their living’ (Letts Reference Letts1953, 1:p.207). This is no universalist catechism but a calculated attempt to survey, systematise, and ultimately convert where it suits the narrator. In other words, strategic reasons are never far when Mandeville speaks about whom he encounters. Consequently, those who are deemed by Mandeville to be familiar and too close for comfort, such as Greeks or Jews, are not given any of Mandeville’s strategic sympathy. Instead, he reserves prejudice for the former and unrestrained antisemitism for the latter.

Fundamentally, Hakluyt’s Discourse Concerning Western Planting inherits Mandeville’s instrumentalist approach to other cultures, a notion that will be reinforced by Richard Caudray’s fifteenth-century Libelle of Englyshe Polycye, which he prints in PN2, and which will be the focus of Section 2. This is not necessarily a form of direct borrowing, even though Hakluyt was familiar with Mandeville when he wrote the Discourse, but the result of a tradition that had filtered into his mostly Spanish sources. In the Discourse, with its post-Reformation setting of imperial and religious conflict, the survey of a world whose inhabitants could be converted – albeit with caution and patience – has now become a race for souls and resources on a grander scale. The main differentiator between Mandeville’s spiritual imperialism and the colonial approach to the North American population in Hakluyt’s Discourse is not the existence of the Reformation as such but the lack of a mercantilist imperative for Mandeville. The principles behind early mercantilism would only be formulated some eighty years later in the Libelle, which shaped much of Hakluyt’s thinking.

Instead, Hakluyt characterises the Indigenous population of North America as good, innocent people, as animists who need to be brought into the fold, not unlike Mandeville’s Brahmins. Queen Elizabeth and her councillors first learn in the Discourse about Indigenous Americans through this extended passage, which combines several sources, including Jacques Cartier’s second voyage (with whom Hakluyt had already engaged in print in 1580):

Such accounts of the worship of the ‘sun and the moon’ abound in Mandeville’s text. For comparison, Mandeville’s Mongols believe, in their worship of their emperor, that the sun and the moon serve their leader: ‘the sun and the moon to do him reverence, which shine so bright that men may not behold them’ (Letts Reference Letts1953, 1: p.164). The clearest analogy in Mandeville is the people of Cathay. In a passage ultimately sourced from John of Plano Carpini, Mandeville describes the same animistic worship of the sun and the moon: ‘The men of that country begin all that they do in the new moon, and worship it mickle; and they do great worship also to the sun, and make many kneelings thereto’ (Letts Reference Letts1953, 1:p.171).

Like Mandeville, Hakluyt does not advocate for the immediate conversion of the indigenous population at the hands of English preachers, a familiar concept to Hakluyt the minister (he also printed similar views by Edward Hayes, one of the sea-captain authors in the Principall Navigations (Fuller Reference Fuller2023, p.450)). Yet in contrast to Mandeville, Hakluyt thinks through the practical implications of attempting to convert Indigenous Americans:

In a rhetorical display of the Socratic method, Hakluyt’s string of questions stresses the practical challenges of bringing about conversion at the hands of priests, a complexity that speaks to his own position as a member of the Anglican clergy.

The next step would be the establishment of permanent settlements – colonies – to accomplish the conversion of the people:

Here, Hakluyt contrasts the problems into which the Spaniards ran with what he characterises as a hasty process (‘before any planting withoute strengthe’), with the strategic long-term approach taken by the Portuguese, who have erected ‘Colledges to traine vpp the youthe of the Infidells’ in the faith. Hakluyt advocates not conversion as such but the building of spiritual capabilities that allow Indigenous Americans to convert each other. This is not just a case of competing with Spain but of wishing to protect Indigenous peoples from exploitation and genocide, here, again speaking through his sources:

The case against Spain is fundamental because it heightens the urgency of Hakluyt’s colonial project and, at the same time, offers a justification because the Spanish have squandered their opportunity to ‘improve’ the condition of the Indigenous population:

Now that the overarching goal has been established – a protective imperial penumbra of English exceptionalism – strategic reasons come into play as Hakluyt encourages Elizabeth not only to protect the Indigenous population, but, exactly as The Libelle of Englyshe Polycye remarks about the ‘wild’ Irish (see Section 2), use them to check Spain’s mercantilist ambitions:

To return to Mandeville’s Brahmins: Hakluyt not only laments the deaths of ‘above fiftene millions of reasonable creatures’ at the hands of the Spaniards, but he also assigns kindness and insight, by way of natural law (‘not having studied Logicke’) to the Indigenous Americans:

For all their differences, both Hakluyt and Mandeville instrumentalise the inhabitants of the territories they covet, whether colonially or spiritually. Hakluyt’s colonial argument presents an evolution of Hakluyt’s hegemonic gaze, as Mandeville’s Travels and the narrow tradition of which it was part articulated a view of the world’s inhabitants not as enemies but as souls that were part of the same spiritual fabric and, in a missionary twist, by natural law were said to yearn for salvation. This is one of the central reasons, I believe, why Hakluyt needed Mandeville, and it helps to explain why early modern readers praised and printed Mandeville yet criticised him. But to understand why Hakluyt dropped the Travels between 1589 and 1598, I will look at something we appear to have missed by reading Mandeville anachronistically.

1.3 Mandeville’s Multi-Text and Hakluyt’s Travels

As we have seen, in breaking with scholarly tradition Fuller perceives a shift between the two editions of the PN not away from marvels but away from romance and toward history, whereas O’Doherty astutely notes that ‘no single factor can explain Hakluyt’s decision’, making the significant point that even the length of the work, with its fifty-seven pages, may have been an (economic) factor, though that still leaves the question why this text lost out to others. O’Doherty reminds us that David Wilmot Ruddy noted already in 1995 that Hakluyt’s encounter with Odoric of Pordenone, one of Mandeville’s sources, raised the evidentiary bar for the selection in PN2 (Ruddy Reference Ruddy1995, p.188). According to Ruddy, Hakluyt ‘eliminated Mandeville’s Travels from his collection not so much because [Mandeville] reported “incredibilities”, but rather because he was not meeting the cultural imperatives of the day, those demanding a reliable eyewitness’ (Ruddy Reference Ruddy1995, p.188). This would appear to be an attractive proposition, especially if paired with the argument that Odoric presented Hakluyt with an alternative.

However, this explanation does not account for the presence of marvels elsewhere in the PN2, as Fuller has shown. Furthermore, the two versions of John of Plano Carpini’s text, with Vincent’s abbreviated text being clearly inferior, complicate both arguments: Hakluyt could choose not to include inferior sources yet decided to print duplicative sources, with one being of poorer quality. What is more, in the case of John of Plano Carpini he prints the longest medieval text in PN2, with a combined total of some 60,000 words in English and Latin, including the inferior abridged text. Running to fifty pages in the PN2, the section dedicated to John’s Historia Mongalorum is as long as Mandeville’s Travels in PN1. In addition, the constantly repeated claim that Hakluyt substituted Odoric for Mandeville’s Travels since the former is one of the sources for the Travels is evidently misleading and at best a half-truth: as I noted earlier, John of Plano Carpini’s voyage account in the abridged version contained in Vincent of Beauvais’ Speculum historiale was also a source for Mandeville, and Hakluyt includes this text too, leaving it – like the Travels in PN1 – in untranslated Latin.

It is beyond any argument that Hakluyt omitted Mandeville from PN2 and instead provided material Mandeville had drawn upon. Additionally, he included duplicating sources and increased the volume of detail from medieval accounts of Central Asia. While this suggests that Asia mattered immensely in the PN2, the extensive inclusion of Mandeville’s sources is a massive enlargement of what used to be the Mandeville segment of PN1, and it turns the PN2 into the very container for Mandeville’s decompiled sources that the Travels used to be. Thus, the Travels are not gone; what has been removed is the first-person narrative that failed to attribute its sources. If anything, the Travels are granted greater respect in that Mandeville’s sources make up a large portion of the medieval corpus in PN2. All this points to another underlying rationale. O’Doherty’s methodical approach has led her to establish judiciously the assessment that no single cause can explain Hakluyt’s reasons for removing Mandeville’s Travels, while Fuller’s turn to genre as an explanation is crucial. To my mind, genre is indeed a factor, though the answer has been staring us in the eye. It is such a fundamental question that it has escaped our attention, with Hakluyt’s understanding of Mandeville’s sources, and Odoric in particular, being part of the answer.

In an essay that has shaped early modernists’ views of Mandeville but that remains virtually unnoticed by medievalists, Stephen Greenblatt introduces the tantalising and somewhat heretical view that early modern readers may have read Mandeville as a composite text, a curated collection, never really to be seen as a unitary text. In his trenchant pioneering reading of the Travels as understood by early modern audiences, Greenblatt asks the question of whether such readers would have read Mandeville as a unitary text:

Greenblatt’s ‘early readers’, whether medieval or early modern, did not presume the guiding presence of an anachronistic narrative persona:

The ready availability of such fictive devices as the narrative persona in default position is a postmedieval phenomenon; in Mandeville’s lifetime such conventions had not yet settled as conventions – they were simply experiments, exceptions to a rule coming under pressure.Footnote ¹⁴ And because we do not expect the unexpected, early readers saw the Travels as a florilegium. Greenblatt’s chapter stands out as one of the finest discussions of Mandeville’s Travels because it remains the only such essay that acknowledges that early readers of Mandeville did not fall for the persona: they saw the work for what it was, a multi-text. The modern focus on the author and their privileged position vis-à-vis the text has obscured this quality of the Travels, driven by the same teleological vantage point that sees in coherent prose fiction a forerunner of the novel. The same fate has plagued the reception of Malory’s Morte Darthur, which, much like the Travels, is written as a consecutive, albeit amalgamated, text in the Winchester manuscript. Though, unlike the Mandeville persona, Malory’s narrative presence is limited to occasional remarks and thus in essence much closer to the stances assumed by Hakluyt. Modern scholarship has grappled with this reading experience because our narrative neural pathways are hardwired to be built around a human, if not authorial, narrator (Sobecki Reference Sobecki2019). We are history’s vainest readers: we personalise our reading experience and think the text is about us; we identify with characters and believe the narrative persona speaks to us; we prioritise the individual over the collective, the singular narrator over the plural multi-text.

Medievalists are acutely aware of reading composite texts as precisely that, as composites, collections, and omnium gatherings. Discerning early modern readers, especially editors of a calibre such as Hakluyt who combed through different versions, compilations, and abridgements in pursuit of the best text, would have been mindful of Mandeville’s Travels as a medieval multi-text, that is, a palimpsestic digest of sources. If there was an evolution in Hakluyt’s thinking about Mandeville’s Travels, then it was one of absorbing its genre and rebuilding the Principal Navigations along these lines, by first referencing Mandeville in Divers Voyages, then printing it in toto in Latin only in PN1, before reprinting several of its components – Odoric and John (some of which in untranslated Latin) at much greater length in PN2. Of course, there were other models of multi-texts available to Hakluyt, such as Ramusio’s Navigationi et viaggi. Matthew Coneys has demonstrated that Mandeville was widely available in early modern Italy (Coneys Reference Coneys2016, p.132) and was known to Ramusio, who dismissed the Travels together with Marco Polo’s account as ‘favole’ – fables: ‘Lasciamo stare i viaggi scritti da moderni, cio è Marco Polo et Mandavilla, i quali sono scoperti essere in gran parte favole’ [Let us put aside the travels written by the moderns, that is Marco Polo and Mandeville, which turn out to be largely fablesl].Footnote ¹⁵ Like Hakluyt, Ramusio also changed his views, having printed Polo earlier before grouping him with Mandeville in this remark. The credibility of the mirabilia in Polo and Mandeville aside, the nature of the Travels as a compilatory multi-text may very well have contributed to Ramusio’s own collection.

The power of the multi-text is not invalidated by Hakluyt’s editorial objections to assimilating others’ accounts into his own first-person travel narrative, a point he expressly makes in the Preface to the Reader in PN1: ‘those wearie volumes bearing the titles of universall Cosmographies which some men that I could name have published as their owne, being indeed most untruly and unprofitablie ramassed and hurled together’ (Fuller Reference Fuller2023, p.293). Fuller sees this as Hakluyt’s editorial decision: ‘this editorial principle contributed to the compilation’s characteristic “fragmentation,” its attention to discrete, individual voices in contrast to the synthesis provided by comparable figures like André Thevet and Samuel Purchas’ (Fuller Reference Fuller2023, p.289). But as Hakluyt must have realised, the first-person principle behind Mandeville was a common idiom in medieval multi-texts, so while he may have objected to this practice in the instance of contemporary writers like Thevet, he could not hold it against Mandeville’s Travels. And Hakluyt did not discard Mandeville for PN2; he stripped out some of its constituent texts, treating several in the same way as he treated the Travels in PN1, thereby aligning Odoric and John with William of Rubruck and every other text gathered in the PN2. Nor did Hakluyt object to the first-person voice in principle, as long as accurate attribution is concerned: Hakluyt’s own voice shimmers through in his notes and comes to the fore in his brief headings to some of the texts, just as Hakluyt would have seen the voice of the Mandeville persona as editorial. Not only have we grown accustomed to interpreting the Mandeville persona as the narrator, we treat Hakluyt’s voice as that of the editor. But just as the narrator had not yet emerged as a clearly defined reading assumption in Mandeville’s time, so the editor had not yet become in Hakluyt’s day the bounded extra-textual voice we construe it to be.

Mandeville’s hegemonic gaze and, with it, the totalising global reach of the Vulgate version, was absorbed – via the equally totalising genre of the composite travel collection – into the colonial gaze of Hakluyt’s project, through Dee’s ‘conquest to enlarge the bowndes of your Majesties forsaid title royall’ (Dee Reference Dee and MacMillan2004, p.48). Hakluyt was aware of the composite nature of Mandeville’s text, which gave him the idea of a vastly more expansive compendium, turning the PN2 into his own multi-text, Richard Hakluyt’s very own Travels, yet one in which the editor’s voice presides over duly decompiled sources. The PN2 had thus become a version of Mandeville’s Travels, replete with its instrumentalist approach to territory and, specifically, the salvific potential of foreign peoples – two quintessential elements of colonialism. With PN2 Mandeville’s Travels became redundant. Mandeville has often been called the greatest armchair traveller in history, whose longest journey was to the nearest library. But isn’t this just as true of Hakluyt? PN2 is arguably the greatest work on travel writing in English history, making Hakluyt, not Mandeville, its greatest armchair traveller.

2.1 The Discourse on Western Planting

In what follows, I argue that Hakluyt worked with the Libelle already as early as 1584, and that he used this fifteenth-century poem as the blueprint for a confidential policy treatise for Queen Elizabeth, The Discourse on Western Planting (henceforth Discourse). Despite Sir Humphrey Gilbert’s expedition of 1583 which arrived in Newfoundland instead of on the mainland, while Gilbert and others drowned on the return voyage, Hakluyt produced this extensive treatise for the Queen to persuade her of the benefits of colonising North America. The tract shows not only the continued influence of Dee’s extensive written and cartographic work but also Hakluyt’s engagement with Sir Francis Walsingham and Gilbert’s undertakings and, specifically, his half-brother’s Sir Walter Ralegh’s plans for North America (Carey and Jowitt Reference Jowitt, Carey and Jowitt2012, p.8; Payne Reference Payne2024, pp.142, 194–196). Hakluyt presented the Discourse to Elizabeth on 5 October 1584 (Hakluyt Reference Hakluyt, Quinn and Quinn1993, p.xxi), just two days before leaving to continue his thinly veiled industrial espionage work in Paris. The work survives in only one scribal copy that was probably produced in 1585 (Payne Reference Payne2024, p.175), now held in the New York Public Library (MssCol 1282).Footnote ¹⁷ Most likely a document intended for limited circulation at court among Elizabeth and her advisors, the Discourse remained unknown until the late nineteenth century, much like Dee’s own Limits of the British Empire or Roger Barlow’s translation of Enciso’s Suma de geographia. This is a remarkable manuscript of some sixty pages in which Hakluyt makes the first extensive English case for colonising North America and, thus, England’s expanded sphere of influence. He does so by listing the advantages of ‘planting’ permanent settler colonies to benefit English trade and, nominally at least, care for the souls of the Indigenous population. While the superficial concern for the spiritual well-being of Indigenous peoples, couched in the Catholic-Protestant sectarianism of the time, is compromised by the overarching scramble with Spain for gold and souls, the mercantilist framework for justifying the project of colonialism and the structure of the Discourse are lifted directly, sometimes even verbatim, from the fifteenth-century Libelle.

After an introduction that amounts to little more than a case of English exceptionalism and spiritual one-upmanship on Spain that instrumentalises the North American population, Hakluyt promptly moves to revealing his actual concern: a list of countries with their principal trade interests – refracting the Old World through a mercantilist lens. Hakluyt includes France and Flanders, Prussia and Denmark, thus closely mirroring the main body of the Libelle which orders its metrical catalogue of commodities by nation, starting with Spain, Flanders, Portugal, Brittany, Scotland, Prussia, before enumerating the Italian city-states. However, the organising principle of these sections in both works is a comprehensive inventory of all the commodities being traded. Hakluyt lays out the wares of the New World before Elizabeth like a merchant on a bartering table, while Caudray, in the fifteenth-century Libelle, does much the same for Henry VI’s ruling Council – in their manuscripts both texts rattle down the goods in the margins. And in both cases, the word ‘merchandise’ – denoting both international trade and a merchant’s goods – takes centre stage. The Libelle was prophetic in making trade the cornerstone of an aggressive foreign policy, thus formulating the basic tenets of mercantilism a good century before the concept guided the behaviour of Europe’s states.

In its opening gambit the poem makes its mercantilist objectives crystal clear:

‘Keeping’ is the poem’s key verb, deployed sixty-six times across its 1,100 lines (Sobecki Reference Sobecki2008, pp.146–159), signifying the military enforcement of a territorial claim that extends not just to the Channel, the North Sea, and the Atlantic, but also to Wales and France, and to medieval England’s most comprehensive colonial project – Ireland, which I will turn to later. What matters here is the Libelle’s innovative twinning of mercantilism – the advancement of export-based trade by military force – with the notion of territorial waters, that is, of claiming the adjacent seas as having always belonged to the English crown (Sobecki Reference Sobecki2008, pp.140–160).

The mercantilist colonialism that has characterised England’s expansion into North America and, later, British rule over much of the globe, stems from the Libelle’s premise of using military might – the admiralte, which in Middle English means ‘jurisdiction over the sea’ – in order to promote, protect, and ensure trade – ‘Cherish Marchandise’. The word ‘merchandise’, used more than thirty times in this poem, outnumbers the established term ‘chaffare’ by three to one, but it was a relatively new addition to the English language. The earliest use of ‘marchandise’ to denote not just trade but also merchants’ goods, only appeared in 1350, but it was not until the early fifteenth century that this word gained in currency. The Libelle appears to have been instrumental in establishing the semantic remit of ‘merchandise’. And it is precisely this dual meaning, intertwining goods and trade, that Hakluyt deploys when prefacing the equivalent section in the Discourse: ‘The nexte thinge ys that now I declare vnto you the commodities of this newe western discouerie, and what marchandize are there to be had from thence to be expected’ (Hakluyt Reference Hakluyt, Quinn and Quinn1993, p.16).Footnote ¹⁹ By comparison, The Libelle opens its metrical inventory, also placed and the start of the poem, with a similar vocabulary, prioritising ‘commodities’ and ‘marchandie’, when starting its list with Spain:

Central to both works is the pairing of commodities or raw materials with merchandise in the sense of manufactured goods, but it is the medieval poem that spells out the underlying objective of all mercantilism – the pursuit of profit and material gain.

Having concluded his list of commodities and merchandise, and surveyed the territories and possessions of England’s competitors, Hakluyt’s Discourse then heaps accolades in Chapter 14 on the policies of past kings: ‘In the Statutes moste prouidently ordeyned for increase and maineteyaunce of our navigation in the Raignes of Kinge Richarde the seconde, Kinge Henry the seaventh, Kinge Henry the viiith, and her Maiestie that nowe ys’. In the Libelle this is Chapter 11, which begins with a prose heading: ‘After the Chapitles of commodities of divers lands, sheweth the conclusion of keeping of the sea environ by a storie of King Edgar and two incidents of King Edward the third, and King Henrie the fifth’. The legal justification for English imperialist colonialism rests on two pillars: the notion of territorial waters and historical precedent (Sobecki Reference Sobecki2008, pp.140–160). The Libelle bases its claims to the British archipelago on King Edgar’s tenth-century circumnavigation of Britain as evidence for England’s possession of the so-called Four Seas of Britain (as discussed in Section 2), thus anticipating Dee’s writings on the very same subject, which are also printed by Hakluyt in the Principall Navigations. The absurd precedent in Caudray’s Libelle of successful earlier trade entitling England to lay claim to the traversed bodies of water is mirrored in Hakluyt’s Discourse, as is the enumeration of past rulers’ exemplary policies. In fact, the Libelle pioneers the concept of territorial waters by invoking historical precedent: the poem systematically refers to the sea as ‘ours’, ‘our sea’, or ‘ours subject to the king’ (Sobecki Reference Sobecki2008, pp.148–158). In his Discourse, Hakluyt similarly speaks of ‘our occean’. When Edgar’s circumnavigation returned to the forefront of political discourse in the fifteenth century with the Libelle, the legal fiction of Edgar’s Four Seas had already been absorbed as an expression of territorial waters. It is this mechanism, as I will show in Section 3, that would later justify English claims to every shore that abuts that same sea, from Ireland to Australia and back again. The myth of King Edgar’s Four Seas was foundational for English exceptionalism: it was summoned in the Middle Ages as an argument for England to rule Ireland and define the country’s growing sphere of influence. England’s territorial waters, invented in twelfth-century forgeries and furthered by the Libelle, appeared to have no geographical or temporal limits whatsoever.

In the same passage on historical precedents, Hakluyt mentions ‘complaints of decaye of the navye’ (67), while the Libelle bemoans the very same in the 1430s in various places, most notably in the marginal remark to l. 472: ‘A woful complaint of lacke of navie if need come’. Hakluyt, like Caudray in the Libelle, recommends fixing this problem through a programme of shipbuilding. Hakluyt lists the underutilised capacities of Bristol and other shipyards, before suggesting how ‘to increase our greate shippinge’ (67). Caudray’s poem, too, recommends much the same, and extols Henry V’s programme of ship-building. After all, England’s navy is the engine that will drive and justify Hakluyt’s policy of colonisation, as the header to Chapter 14 proclaims: ‘That this action will be for the greate increase, mayneteyaunce and safetie of our navie, and especially of greate shippinge which is the strengthe of our Realme (67)’. This is precisely what the Libelle has as its central tenet, as stated at the outset of the poem: ‘Cherish Marchandise, keepe the admiraltie’.

To my mind, before John Locke’s Two Treatises of Government, early English colonialism had three central components: the overriding imperative of profit, the legal claim to land – based on territorial waters and grounded in English exceptionalism, and a dehumanising view of the indigenous population as requiring corrective intervention. All these are central to Hakluyt’s Discourse, but they are also enshrined in Caudray’s Libelle, a poem hailed as visionary by Hakluyt.

2.2 Ireland

So far, I have covered profit and merchandise, but what about the colonised population? Even if the Libelle is not a medieval poem about colonisation, it actually does have an awful lot to say on this topic. On concluding the list of England’s foreign trade and Europe’s commodities, Caudray turns briefly to an exhortation to keep the sea ‘in governance’, that is, claiming it as territory. This passage prepares the ground for his plea to maintain medieval England’s own colonial projects, first and foremost: Ireland. Although the Irish precedent for colonisation is broadly absent from the Principall Navigations, Hakluyt clearly was familiar with this experience, not least because his patrons and interlocutors Gilbert and Ralegh were active in Elizabethan wars and continued colonisation of Ireland. This section of the poem is prefaced with what must have appeared to Hakluyt as listing all the components required to formulate a plan for the colonisation of North America: ‘Of the commodities of Ireland, and policie and keeping thereof, and conquering of wild Irish … Chap. 9’ (p. 332). Here are the three elements of early English colonialism again: ‘commodities’ stands for the overriding imperative of profit; ‘keeping’ for the legal claim to territorial waters and land; and ‘conquering’ for a degrading model of the native population as begging for conquest. In what is a stunning understatement, Caudray begins this section by saying that he will speak of Ireland ‘but a litle’, yet lavishes 150 lines on Ireland, or almost 15 per cent of the poem. And if the Libelle served as a template for Hakluyt’s Discourse and the Elizabethan project of colonising North America’s East Coast, then the passage on Ireland is not just a microcosm of the Libelle itself but demonstrates the profound indebtedness of early modern ideas of colonialism to their medieval precursors.

With actuarial detachment merchandise and commodities are prioritised over any human cost of England’s colonial programme in Ireland:

Aware that this tantalising cornucopia of the medieval marketplace may be too much for his audience to absorb, Caudray justifies his effusion as follows

Ireland is a wonder, a marvel – a veritable Land of Cockaygne – the promised mythical western land of plenty, blessed with a legendary abundance of produce – a medieval myth that can be traced from St Brendan’s tenth-century Fortunate Isles in the Atlantic Ocean to Harry McClintock’s hobo paradise in the 1928 song ‘Big Rock Candy Mountain’.

Caudray’s praise for Ireland is immediately followed by a double whammy: not only do the English have a time-honoured claim to Ireland (a point extended by Dee and Hakluyt to North America), but the Irish can be instrumentalised to help ‘keep the sea’, that is, exercise maritime control:

Caudray authorises this claim by invoking the royal titles as found on England’s Great Seal in order to offer exactly the same argument as Hakluyt adduces when he talks of the usefulness of North America’s Indigenous peoples in checking Spain’s Caribbean expansion.

These are the first two elements of English colonialism, but what of the third, the treatment of the native population, described regularly as the ‘wild Irish’ in this poem? In fact, the wealth of the land is contrasted with the poverty, both material and civilisational, of the population:

A land of plenty, and of plenty of gold – medieval Europe’s natural resource par excellence. This is the same motivator that made Columbus seek a Western passage to India in order to line Spain’s coffers for a new crusade in Palestine. In fact, Columbus’ first encounter with the native population was not dissimilar from Caudray’s words about the Irish: they were classed as ‘rude’, ‘poore’, yet swimming in gold. In this passage in the Libelle, there is no concern for nor interest in the Irish; in fact, the pervasive medieval sense of efficiency makes them appear wasteful, squandering nature’s riches. They have no ‘skill’, that is, no technological means to work gold – this is the verb ‘fine’ or ‘refine’; they are ‘rude’ and ‘wild’ – both terms charged with specific semantic properties in Middle English. ‘Rude’ stands for ‘ignorant, uneducated, simple’, especially in the sense of ‘untutored’ – a word that almost always invites clerical remedy. ‘Wild’, a term the Libelle reserves six times for the Irish, is used here in sense 1.c) of the Middle English Dictionary: ‘without civilization, primitive; barbarous, savage; also, inhuman, brutish, beastly’. The Libelle’s concept of the ‘wild Irish’, to use Geraldine Heng’s words, is an attempt to make race ‘from the outside, against a people’ (Heng Reference Heng2018, p.449).

Dehumanised and commodified, and misrepresented as being in need of English social, spiritual, and technological supervision, the ‘wild Irish’ of Caudray’s Libelle complete the three components of English colonialism, the policy behind which is revealed and hammered home in the Libelle’s fast-paced pentameter couplets. Caudray turns the colonisation of Ireland into a moral imperative in a clever rhetorical feint that is central to Hakluyt’s case for planting English trading posts in New England:

Slought and racheshede mean ‘sloth’ and ‘recklessness’, respectively, the former being idleness charged with the power of a Deadly Sin, the latter material and strategic wastefulness. Not keeping Ireland, not mining its gold, not subjugating its population – all this is labour not undertaken for which Caudray’s privileged audience would have to answer before God. Letting one’s crop rot instead of harvesting it is an unforgivable Christian and societal offence. After all, the harvest was relevant to all in medieval society – even London’s national bureaucracy ground to a halt during harvest time.

As early as 1947, David Quinn stressed the connection between the English colonisation of Ireland and the New World during the early modern period (Quinn Reference 66Quinn1947), instigating a scholarly discourse that led to Nicholas Canny’s influential 1973 article ‘The Ideology of English Colonization: From Ireland to America’ (Canny Reference Canny1973). But this intellectual tradition from Quinn to Canny and beyond takes as its point of departure Elizabethan policies on Ireland, disregarding medieval continuities, despite invoking Tudor sentiments that were not only not original but clearly echoed medieval texts. Instead, for Canny the buck stopped with such figures as Sir Thomas Smith, who together with Sir William Cecil backed Sir Henry Sidney’s colonial ventures in Ireland in the 1560s. Smith asserts that God ‘did make apte and prepare this nation … to inhabite and reforme so barbarous a nation as [Ireland] is, and to bring them to the knowledge and lawe were both a goodly and commendable deede, and a sufficient work of our age’ (Canny Reference Canny1973, p.588), adding that it was England’s civic duty to educate the Irish … ‘in vertuous labor and in justice, and to teach them our English lawes and civilitie and leave robbyng and stealing and killyng one of another’ (Canny Reference Canny1973, p.588). These are not new Elizabethan sentiments, but long-standing English arguments for the continued colonisation of Ireland, a project that, as John Gillingham pointed out in 1987 (Gillingham Reference Gillingham1987, p.17; see the Introduction to this Element), had been ongoing for more than 400 years before Smith expressed these words. Thus, it is telling that William Cecil, who also backed Sidney’s Irish campaigns, owned a copy of Libelle.

The prospect of losing the Hundred Years’ War, prompted by the sting of Burgundy’s defection, fuels the jingoism of the Libelle’s rhetoric, which forged an English proto-national identity and the strategic teleology of colonialism. When Hakluyt read Caudray’s Libelle, which he studied in two manuscript copies, he clearly recognised its relevance to his own historical moment. But a close reading of the fifteenth-century poem shows that some fifteen years before he printed the poem in PN2, he drew on its structure and policies for The Discourse on Western Planting, which provided a blueprint for the English colonisation of North America. Given that the Discourse is a policy document intended for targeted circulation, opinions differ on how influential the work was. The Hakluyt editors Dan Carey and Claire Jowitt note that ‘it may have helped to secure him a lucrative ecclesiastical income, yet it had no discernible influence on policy’ (Carey and Jowitt Reference Jowitt, Carey and Jowitt2012, p. 21), while the literary historian of early globalisation Djelal Kadir calls Hakluyt’s Discourse on ‘perhaps the most influential in terms of policy’ (Kadir Reference Kadir1992, p.219, n16 to chapter 16). Of course, the survival of only one copy does not point to wide dissemination, although targeted circulation is the very idea behind manuscript transmission, especially in the age of print (Woudhuysen Reference Woudhuysen1996), and circulation cannot be used as a measure of success in such cases. Payne admits that the Discourse ‘had no obvious influence on policy, nor did it obtain the crown’s financial support for Ralegh’s project’ (Payne Reference Payne2024, p.206). But to judge the influence of the Discourse solely on its direct impact on immediate policy or project financing does not do justice to the central influence its engagement with the Libelle had on PN2. More importantly, perhaps, the Discourse ought to be primarily seen as an expression of ideas and proposals that circulated widely at the time or, as Payne puts it, the work contained ‘much discussion that was generally current and expresses concerns that were not exclusive to Hakluyt’ (Payne Reference Payne2024, p.208). Payne also reminds us that the Discourse was ‘Hakluyt’s most extensive work in his own words’ (Payne Reference Payne2024, p.193), and because many of its sentiments and their source – the Libelle – entered PN2, the Discourse emerges as one of the central intellectual drivers behind his best-known work. Peter Mancall even suggests that in it Hakluyt ‘had in some ways reached the height of his intellectual achievements’ (Mancall Reference Mancall2007, p.154).

The Discourse channels existing thought on colonisation and, with the help of the Libelle, shapes the direction of PN2 by including the poem remarkably in its entirety and piling extensive praise on it at the outset of the collection. In the Preface to the Reader to PN2 (Hakluyt Reference Hakluyt1598–1600) Hakluyt even gives us something that approaches a review of the medieval poem, a remarkable feat in literary history itself. Hakluyt states that he cannot compare Caudray’s Libelle to anything but

Hakluyt gives away much here, revealing that he studied the poem’s style and structure, calling the verses ‘substantiall’ and the Libelle’s argument ‘riches … hid within his inward sense and sentence’. The attention he pays to the shape, structure, and architecture of the poem by likening it to the tsar’s golden palace not only reveals Hakluyt’s keen eye for genre and literary composition but prioritises the craft of composing texts – the work as edifice – for the process of reading the Principall Navigations. This, I believe, is the same alertness to the design principles of a vast collection, a multi-text, that underpin his engagement with Mandeville’s Travels.

Thus, it was Richard Caudray’s fifteenth-century poem The Libelle of Englyshe Polycye and, indirectly, Henry VI’s faltering campaign in France during the Hundred Years’ War, that, by way of widening England’s sphere of influence to the Continent, helped to formulate the principles of English colonialism – the mercantilist imperative of profit, English exceptionalism grounded in territorial claims to the sea and adjacent lands, and, finally, the utilitarian degradation of the Irish as the realm’s colonised population.

Although Hakluyt was not the only person to pave the way for England’s settlements in North America, he was part of a network of those who propagated colonisation. In fact, he was England’s leading and ultimately successful propagandist of this cause. The Libelle furnished Hakluyt with all the elements he needed to craft his ideology, including the case study and precedent of maintaining English colonial rule in Ireland. Caudray’s poem effectively establishes the case for turning the British archipelago into what Lynn Staley calls England’s ‘highway of profit’ (Staley Reference Staley2023). All Hakluyt needed to do was to stretch the fiction of this archipelago to the shores of North America.

3.1 Altitonantis

Edgar’s nonpareil reputation rested on a series of intricately connected documents, a number of which were either forged in the twelfth century or are believed to be of disputed authenticity. The most sweeping claims to the extent of Edgar’s maritime rule are made in the notorious Altitonantis charter of ‘964’, a twelfth-century forgery, and, somewhat more mutedly, in a highly irregular Malmesbury charter, allegedly granted by Edgar in 974 (Sawyer Reference Sawyer1968, charter 731 (Altitonantis) and S 796/797, for the Malmesbury charter).Footnote ²⁸ Both charters were frequently adduced to cement England’s and, later, the British Empire’s claim to the entire archipelago and the British Ocean. The spurious Altitonantis charter, named after the first word that appears in the document, is dated 28 December 964 but was most likely forged at Worcester in the early 1140s (John Reference John1960, pp.106–108; Wormald Reference Wormald1988, pp.247–281 (no 42); Keynes Reference Keynes1991, supplementary vol. I:11; Barrow Reference Barrow and Magdalino1992, pp. 69–74, and 72 for the date of production; Thornton Reference Thornton2001, pp.56–57; Crick Reference Crick, Crick and Walsham2004, pp.124–134; only John regards the charter as authentic, though heavily interpolated). The charter purports to document the granting of land, the triple hundred of Oswaldslaw, by Edgar to the monks of Worcester priory, who had been installed there by Bishop Oswald. Worcester Cathedral underwent a process of monachisation during which secular priests were replaced by Benedictines, thereby making the bishop effectively abbot of the community (Barrow Reference Barrow and Magdalino1992, pp.53–54, 62).

Barrow has discussed the forgery of Altitonantis as well as of a number of other documents (Barrow Reference Barrow and Magdalino1992, Reference Barrow, Barrow and Brooks2005).Footnote ²⁹ Opening the charter is a particularly pompous variation of Edgar’s imperial formula, only on this occasion it appends the ocean together with nearby insular realms to his ambit:

Perhaps thinking of Charlemagne as a benchmark of regnal ambition, Edgar, as well as some of the other early rulers of English-speaking people, had a penchant for imperial titles. In order to justify these, neighbouring lands were frequently claimed. In his authentic charters Edgar’s title frequently includes adjacent peoples (for example, S 691, 699, 756, 786, 788, 793, 812), irrespective of whether he calls himself basileus and/or king of England or of the English region, Britain, or Albion.Footnote ³¹ What is new about Altitonantis is that it extends Edgar’s reign beyond the island of Britain to span the British Ocean. As if this were not sufficient, it explicitly mentions that Edgar ruled Dublin.

But why did the monks of Worcester style Edgar ‘ruler of the English and emperor and lord of all the kings of the islands of the ocean which surround Britain’, expressly including Dublin and most of Ireland? Between 1140 and King Stephen’s death in 1154, the immediate threat to Worcester’s monks was the ad-hoc creation of the earldom of Worcester as a result of Stephen’s campaign against Empress Matilda. During the years of the Anarchy, Worcester became a hub for Stephen’s operations in the west of the country. The monks of Worcester quickly realised that the fault lines of the Anarchy were running through their town, and at about the same time, the monks also forged Stephen’s confirmation of Altitonantis (Darlington Reference Darlington1968, pp. lxvii–lxviii; Barrow Reference Barrow and Magdalino1992, pp. 72–73).Footnote ³²

In this highly volatile climate, Matilda, who had overcome Stephen, scrutinised several foundations of interest to the monks of Worcester that had been made during the Anarchy (Sobecki Reference Sobecki and Sobecki2011b, pp.10–17), and the monks had to summon a super-sized Edgar – the source of the forged Altitonantis charter’s authority – as a king not only of the English but as one whose unquestioned rule reached overseas and had not been surpassed in its geographic extent. To secure their privileges from the scrutiny of the empress, Edgar’s own rank had to be boosted to that of her peer, an archipelagic emperor. Matilda styled herself imperially in most of her charters: Mathildis (or Matildis) imperatrix regis Anglorum (or Anglie) filia (Chibnall Reference Chibnall, Hudson and John1994, p.277). Indeed, Mathilda’s two charters for the Cistercian abbey at Bordesley (Regesta Regum Anglo-Normannorum 114 and 115) open with her usual ‘M(atildis) imperatrix’ in contrast to Stephen’s almost diminutive ‘S(tephanus) rex Angl(orum)’ (Cronne and Davis Reference Cronne and Davis2010, pp.42–43, King Stephen’s original confirmation of Waleran of Meulan’s foundation is item 114 on p. 42). It did not cost the monks much to forge the confirmation of a recently deposed king, but what mattered here was to state in one breath that Edgar was basileus, imperator, and dominus of ‘all the kings of the islands of the ocean which surround Britain’. With their abbot Bishop Simon looming large in every document pertaining to the contested foundation of Bordesley, it is clear that his monks were worried that their grants and concessions might be curtailed and the favourable arrangements of assets during the Anarchy nullified. And so, Matilda, unhappy with the use of royal demesne lands in a part of the country in which these were scarce to begin with,Footnote ³³ re-founded Bordesley on her own terms, triggering Altitonantis and its forged confirmation by Stephen.

The creation of Edgar’s maritime reputation happened to be a local Worcester product the monks could utilise. At the time, Edgar’s naval prowess was mainly associated with two traditions: the alleged subjection of between six and eight insular kings on the River Dee near Chester shortly after his coronation on 11 May 973 and the substantial size of his legendary fleet. Both traditions appear to be traceable to activity at Worcester’s cathedral priory in the early twelfth century. Pre-Conquest sources, primarily the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, have been instrumental in providing post-Conquest writers from Caudray to Hakluyt with the outline of the royal submission to Edgar’s insular overlordship at Chester. In its Northern recension (versions D, E, and F), the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle describes the well-known submission of six insular kings shortly after Edgar’s coronation:

The passage cited here is taken from the D version, the fullest version of the northern recension, which also includes versions E and F. David Thornton lists a number of other pre-Conquest sources for elements of this submission at Chester, most of which have either been produced by Ælfric, the eleventh-century abbot of Eynsham, such as the ‘Life of St Swithun’ and the epilogue to his work on the Book of Judges, or can be linked with him directly or indirectly. This second group contains the probably spurious ‘Ely’ charter and the two poems in praise of Edgar in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle that are attributed to Ælfric’s correspondent Wulfstan, archbishop of York and bishop of Worcester (d. 1023) (Thornton Reference Thornton2001, pp.51–54).

It was at Worcester, probably in the 1090s that the D version of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle was produced (Hart Reference Hart and Harper-Bill1997, p.124). In the 1120s and 1130s, again at Worcester, the Chronicon ex chronicis, a Latin commentary, started by Florence and continued by John, supplemented the D version.Footnote ³⁵ Most readers accept John’s authorship of most if not all of the chronicle, though this view is not shared by everyone (Hart Reference Hart and Harper-Bill1997, p.124, n.5). Although the ‘commendation’ of these kings to Edgar became the basis for subsequent elaborations of his imperial claim to Britain and its various inhabitants, Thornton has shown that many of the details of this event, especially the idea that the submission had occurred on the River Dee aboard a ship that was rowed by Edgar’s sub-kings, were most likely provided by the Chronicon ex chronicis of John of Worcester (Thornton Reference Thornton2001, p.74). The afterlife of this episode fed the imagination of national histories (Matthews Reference Matthews2009).

Why did John turn the submission on the River Dee into this spectacular rowing incident, with Edgar as helmsman, which the Libelle, Dee, and Hakluyt would come to celebrate? In the Libelle, for instance, Caudray styles this event as a ‘rowynge’ (ll. 976). Altitonantis states that the triple hundred of Oswaldslaw, given by Edgar to Bishop Oswald, was shaped to form a so-called ‘ship-soke’ (‘quod Anglice dicitur Scypfylleð oþþe scypsocne’) in memory of Oswald (Barrow Reference Barrow and Magdalino1992, p.70). According to Scandinavian custom, a ship soke was a district obliged to supply ships (Hollister Reference Hollister1962, p.113). The ship-soke system, by which three hundreds were required to provide a ship with sixty men, is first mentioned under Henry I but it may have been instituted by Edgar himself (Campbell and Wormald Reference Campbell, John and Wormald1991, pp.172–173). Edgar envisaged bishops, above all else, to supply his navy (John Reference John1977, pp.180–181; Campbell and Wormald Reference Campbell, John and Wormald1991, p.173; Giandrea Reference Giandrea2007, pp.186–187). Barrow states that there is no evidence for ship-sokes before 1008, probably thinking of Aethelred II’s fifth code, but in a letter from the beginning of the eleventh century Bishop Aethelric of Sherborne mentions a number of ship-sokes held by other bishops and he complains that he does not receive ship-scot from all of his hides unlike his predecessors (Harmer Reference Harmer1952, pp.266–270). There is also further evidence of early episcopal ship sokes (Yorke Reference Yorke1995, p.129; Rex Reference Rex2007, p.80).

In line with the ship-soke system, which supplied the pre-Conquest navy, Oswald had to provide a ship for the king’s use. Worcester’s monks, therefore, were required to provide ships in the memory of Oswald. Their contribution to Edgar’s navy would have been an important aspect of the priory’s history, not least because Edgar was ‘the patron and hero of English Benedictines from the tenth century onwards’ (Barrow Reference Barrow2001, p.89). In addition, some of his genuine charters refer to him as ‘steersman’ (Barrow Reference Barrow2001, p.92). Worcester’s monks had good reason to remember Edgar as a naval king, and his frequent circumnavigation of Britain and mastery of sea was therefore also a part of their own collective identity as a monastic community founded and shaped by Oswald. There is evidence that the ship soke of Oswaldslaw was not a hollow clause. As Frederic Maitland had already noted, in the time of Edward the Confessor the bishop of Worcester had a ship, filled with people from Oswaldslaw and commanded by a certain Eadric, the steersman of the bishop’s ship: ‘Edricus qui fuit, stermannus navis episcopi et ductor exercitus eiusdem episcopi ad servitium regis’ [‘one of whom was Eadric, steersman of the bishop’s ship in the time of King Edward, and leader likewise of the bishop’s army for the king’s service’] (Maitland Reference Maitland1907, p.308, n.2).Footnote ³⁶ The bishop’s ship was evidently the ship which was the contribution owed by the ship soke of Oswaldslaw (Hollister Reference Hollister1962, p.112).

But John of Worcester does not leave it at the River Dee account. He also extols Edgar’s naval prowess, claiming that he maintained a sizeable fleet that could circumnavigate the British Isles in defence of the archipelago. At the time, ships also sailed from Worcester directly to Ireland (Smith Reference Smith1999, p.57), and it is tempting to view Oswaldslaw ships as forming part of these patrols that were said to have travelled as far as Ireland. Dee and Hakluyt ultimate derive their figures from John, who attributes to Edgar a fleet of 3,600 ships which were assembled every year after Easter, 1200 on the east coast, 1,200 on the west, and 1,200 on the north, so that the king could circumnavigate the island (clockwise) each summer, in a show of force ‘for the defence of his kingdom against foreigners and to train himself and his men in military exercises’ (Darlington and McGurk Reference Darlington and McGurk1995, II:pp.424–427; Strickland Reference Strickland and Harper-Bill1997, p.376; Jayakumar Reference Jayakumar2001, pp.28–29; Williams Reference Williams, Matthew and Harrison2004). Strickland also notes that the ‘sub-kings’ swore to support Edgar by land by sea (as did the Welsh; Strickland Reference Strickland and Harper-Bill1997, p.375).

John of Worcester provided his fellow monks with Edgar as a maritime king who had colonially held Ireland, Dublin, and the sea, and who had ruled the entire archipelago peacefully (David Armitage’s ‘interior’ colonialism). In his discussion of Edgar’s submission of neighbouring kingdoms, Thornton observes that the inclusion of Scandinavian and Irish rulers in this particular tradition was not a pre-Conquest development but can be traced to John of Worcester (Thornton Reference Thornton2001, p.71). When looking for a historical foundation of the portrayal of Edgar as a maritime, pan-British king, the monks did not have to look any farther than their own library and to their chief chronicler, John, who may still have been alive or at least in living memory in early 1141. Although the Chronicon ends in 1140, this does not mean that he had passed away immediately: ‘the date of [John of Worcester’s] final writing here was presumably in or after 1140’ (Darlington and McGurk Reference Darlington and McGurk1995, III:p.xvi). Their homegrown yet nationally renowned historiographical tradition provided them with all they required for the forgery of Altitonantis.

John’s version of the River Dee episode and most of his other Edgarian descriptions circulated in William of Malmesbury’s Gesta Regum Anglorum. William completed this chronicle in 1120, and he later expanded it to include events up to 1127. The links between William and the monastic community at Worcester were strong, since he ‘demonstrably exchanged material with [Worcester’s] house-chronicler John, and knew Priors Nicholas and Warin, as well as other monks’ (William, Winterbottom, and Thomson Reference William, Winterbottom and Thomson2002, p.xiv). He visited Worcester to consult material between 1116 and 1124, and again between 1124 and 1142 (Thomson Reference Thomson2003, pp.73–74), at which stage he must have seen John of Worcester’s account of the rowing incident, which he also borrowed for his Gesta Regum Anglorum, probably during his first visit. The nature of William’s visits was likely extensive, and his most recent editors believe that ‘he drew on the rich stores of ancient books and documents’ during his stays at Worcester (William, Winterbottom, and Thomson Reference William, Winterbottom and Thomson2002, p.xiv).

The only other early text that makes a comparable claim to Edgar’s maritime rule is the Malmesbury charter, S 796. The charter is best known for its appearance in William’s Gesta Regum Anglorum. Its text expresses Edgar’s claim to the entire archipelago’s overlordship:

William uses the same charter in his Gesta pontificum Anglorum (completed around 1125) (William of Malmesbury Reference Winterbottom and Thomson2007, I:pp.604–605). What connects S 796 and Altitonantis is the extent to which Edgar’s realm stretches beyond Britain and absorbs surrounding islands and the ocean. Whereas Altitonantis is explicit in its inclusion of the ocean by virtue of claiming rule over its islands [‘insularum oceani que Brytanniam circumiacent’], S 796 annexes the sea that is appended to insular realms claimed by Edgar [‘maritimorum seu insulanorum regum circumhabitantium’]. As such, S 796 and Altitonantis have been recognised by early twentieth-century jurisprudents as documenting the first English claim to territorial waters: ‘the assumption being that he also exercised sovereignty over the intervening and surrounding seas’ (Fulton Reference Fulton1911, p.27). Fulton adds that the claim to territorial waters is made more fully in Altitonantis. These are, then, the foundational elements of extending the remit of England’s imperialist colonialism from what Armitage terms internal to external, as discussed in the Introduction to this Element.

3.2 Edgar, Lord of the Four Seas

Hakluyt’s imperial fictions of England’s British and American colonial reach, via Caudray’s Libelle and Dee’s writings, are essentially shaped by a pragmatically justified twelfth-century Benedictine version of a maritime Edgar. Altitonantis, S 796, and the Worcester/Malmesbury accounts of Edgar’s prowess at sea continued to influence, at first very much independently, the course of England’s maritime expansion. As I note in Section 2, one of the first works to recognise Edgar’s relevance in this domain is the proto-mercantilist Libelle. As if to illustrate how later medieval and early modern writers were mining earlier chronicles for suitable material, Caudray’s Libelle, as printed by Hakluyt, introduces its celebration of Edgar by acknowledging an older source:

The Libelle’s account of Edgar is, as Warner has pointed out, taken from Aelred of Rievaulx’s Genealogia regum Anglorum, who took the information from John of Worcester, perhaps via Roger Howden or the Melrose Chronicle (Warner Reference Warner1926, p.95). Warner mentions Howden, though Melrose could also have been used by Aelred. It is also possible that Caudray, for his Libelle, obtained the River Dee account from John of Oxenedes, who copies the description of the rowing verbatim from Aelred, but the Genealogia provides a more consistent source throughout. Caudray is mainly interested in Edgar’s control of the sea and in the submission of his neighbouring rulers. Thus, the poem gives John’s number for the size of Edgar’s fleet (‘Full three thousand and sixe hundred’, (l. 918)) and exploits the nautical sense of John’s ‘gubernauit’ when it portrays Edgar sitting in the ship rowed by the eight kings as their ‘steris man’ (Darlington and McGurk Reference Darlington and McGurk1995, II:p.424; Bale and Sobecki Reference Sobecki2019, p.344, l. 973).

The most significant stage of the subsequent political exploitation of Edgar is Hakluyt’s crucial printing of Dee’s writings. In PN2, Hakluyt printed most of Altitonantis (and, of course, the entire Libelle), besides commenting on the various sizes given for Edgar’s fleet. The chronicle tradition continued to be fascinated by Edgar’s fleet, including John Stow’s Summary of English Chronicles (1565), William Harrison’s Description of Britain (1577), and William Warner’s Albion’s England (1586) (Reimer Reference Reimer2006, pp.38, 42–43). To this can be added many more, including John Rastell’s unusual The Pastyme of People from 1530. Hakluyt, however, obtained the Edgar material from Dee’s General and Rare Memorials (Reference Dee1577) (pp. 57–60), since he includes an account by Dee already in PN1. In 1597, Dee wrote an epistolary tract on the sea at the request of Edward Dyer (Thallatokratia Brettaniki), which incorporates praise for Edgar (Sherman Reference Sherman1995, pp.192–200; Armitage Reference Armitage2000, p.106; Parry Reference Parry2006, pp.661, 674–675). Next, Edward Coke printed Altitonantis in 1604, John Selden commented on S 796 in his Titles of Honor in 1614, and included parts of Altitonantis in Analecton Anglobritannicon, published in 1615, cementing the role of Edgar in England’s imperial claims. But it is only in Selden’s Mare clausum – printed in 1635, though written before 1618 – that the various strands of Edgar’s archipelagic ambitions are brought together for the first time. Selden opens his account of Edgar in book 2, chapter 10, where he discusses Edgar’s circumnavigation of Britain, the size of his fleet, and the River Dee episode (Selden Reference Selden1635, pp.165–168). And in book 2, chapter 12, Selden cites both S 796 and Altitonantis.Footnote ³⁷

The apotheosis of Edgar as ruler over the archipelago, made possible by Dee’s and Hakluyt’s re-tooling of medieval sources, would only be fully integrated with England’s imperial and colonial ambitions by Nedham’s panegyric, where the conquest of the Four Seas is explicitly assigned to Edgar. So authoritative was Nedham’s translation of Selden that for the less discerning the panegyric became tantamount to weighty historical evidence. The ‘cock-brained’ Edward Waterhouse, if we are to believe his acquaintance Anthony Wood, tried to borrow its lustre for his patchwork legal compendium Fortescutus illustratus (1663) (Sharp Reference Sharp1974, pp.27–46, 27 for Wood’s characterisation of Waterhouse). That said, Wood, was notorious for character assassination, and he once described John Aubrey as a ‘shiftless person, roving and magotie-headed, and sometimes little better than crased’ (Dougill Reference Dougill1998, pp.50–51). Not only does Waterhouse cite Nedham’s lines referring to Edgar as prima facie proof in what is a slapdash abstract of Selden’s exposition, but he conflates them with a Stuart tag line: ‘King Edgar, who is said, Quatuor Maria vindicare’ (Waterhouse Reference Waterhouse1663, p.408). Selden comments on the four-part division of the British Ocean in book 2, chapter 1, pp. 119ff, and prints a map dividing the seas surrounding Britain into four parts on p. 122, but he does not state explicitly that Edgar attached the Four Seas to England, although Edgar’s dominion over parts of the seas is noted on pp. 166 and 178. Legal scholars subsequently seized on this concept. Travers Twiss drew attention to the legal doctrine of the Four Seas in an early article (Twiss Reference Twiss1876, p.161), while the fullest coverage is offered by Fulton more than a 100 years ago (Fulton Reference Fulton1911, pp.17–18). It is therefore surprising that a relatively recent discussion of the Four Seas as a legal concept mentions neither John Dee nor John Selden (Kiralfy Reference Kiralfy1989, pp.380–388).

But the notion that Edgar first attached the Four Seas to England is only found on Nedham’s frontispiece. Waterhouse must have been thinking of Neptune’s ode and of the motto famously claimed by Charles I for his flagship, The Sovereign of the Seas, which has been read as an allegory of the Edgarian tradition (Bath Reference Bath and Young1992). Thomas Heywood, in his description of the king’s ship published in 1637, writes that, although he himself has not seen it, the king claims for himself the motto ‘Ego ab Edgaro quatuor maria vindico’, which is engraved on his ship (Young Reference Young1990, p.22). By the mid seventeenth century, the legal phrase ‘infra quatuor maria’ had become a synonym for England and its imperial ambitions (Coke Reference Coke, Butler and Hargrave1823, p.156). Under the Stuarts, however, the Four Seas were being elevated from a legal doctrine to a political pledge: in 1617 the phrase marked James’ entry in Ben Jonson’s court masque Vision of Delight (ll. 179–80) (Creaser Reference Creaser and Lindley1984, pp.128–129).

In what appears to have been forgotten by modern scholarship, Restoration propaganda successfully combined the royal claim to the Four Seas with the Protectorate’s iconography. ‘Quatuor maria vindico’ became the motto carried by farthings after that time, popularly called ‘Lord Lucas’s farthings’ after his scathing attack on the king’s fiscal policies (Carlile Reference Carlile1901, pp.146–147). Following Britannia’s appearance on a Protectorate medal of 1654 (presumably part of the same campaign as Nedham’s translation of Mare clausum), coins minted after 1665 showed Britannia holding a Union Jack before she was reintroduced as a maritime figure on a 1667 medal (Mason Reference Mason1994, p.80). Mason appears to be unaware of Nedham’s allegory since he states that ‘it was the 1667 medal which first depicted Britannia seated on the seashore, holding a spear and shield, and watching the navy’ (p. 80). At this stage, the Edgarian claim had literally become a common currency. So common, that the luckless antiquarian Silas Taylor could not find a buyer for his copy of Altitonantis during his lifetime, which led John Aubrey to comment in the late seventeenth century that Taylor’s copy had ‘wrapped herrings by this time’ (Aubrey Reference Aubrey and Barber1982, p.300). By this point, the foundation of English colonial fictions of an ever-widening sphere of influence – the medieval myth of Edgar – so effectively developed by Dee and promoted by Hakluyt, had become an integral strand in the ideological fabric of the British Empire and its embedded claims of English exceptionalism.

King Alfred may have become the early English ruler of choice for nineteenth-century Britons living at the height of imperial influence, but Edgar’s legendary archipelagic and maritime dominion remained a force to be reckoned with in debates about the extent of imperial jurisdiction, or what I term, England’s colonial and imperial sphere of influence. When the captain of a Royal Navy ship had to defend himself against charges of falsely imprisoning a sailor off the coast of New Zealand in 1834, the side of the attorney general for New South Wales argued that

Clearly, it was impossible to state where the Four Seas ended and the ocean began, and this captures the impossibility of demarcating Armitage’s ‘internal’ imperialism from its ‘external’ variant. What this echo of Nedham’s imperial vision demonstrates is that the archipelago of the Four Seas had indeed become a moving frontier of English imperial and colonial ambitions. And just how potent a concept Edgar’s archipelago was at the frontier of the British Empire is shown by the dispute that would result in the Declaration of Independence, when a group of British colonies in North America argued that England’s sphere of influence was limited to Britain.