All those who joined the British forces in Ireland during the First World War did so voluntarily. There was never any conscription, as there was in Great Britain from early 1916, although the government tried and failed to introduce it in the spring of 1918. Across the war as many as 210,000 Irishmen served in the British forces. When war broke out, around 21,000 were already in the British Army, especially but not solely in the Irish infantry regiments. They were rapidly supplemented by 30,000 reservists from the Special Reserve or Army Reserve who were called up to the ‘Regular’ 1st and 2nd battalions of each regiment. The city and county of Dublin made a particular contribution to the war effort. Pre-war, with a population of just under 11 per cent of the island as a whole, Dublin supplied around 30 per cent of the army's Irish recruits. In August 1914, as many as 6,500 of the Irish regulars and 6,900 of the reservists could have been from Dublin, and towards 40,000 Dubliners served across the war. The peak month for army recruitment across the UK and also in Dublin was September 1914 when 3,091 enlisted. By mid-December 1914, one-quarter of Dublin's total wartime recruits had enlisted. By the end of the war, Dublin's total recruits for the army represented around one-fifth of Ireland's total of 123,724, almost twice its share of the population.

Irish voluntary recruitment was focused on three divisions: the 10th (Irish), the 16th (Irish) and the 36th (Ulster). The latter two were political and sectarian in their composition. The infantry battalions of the 36th were initially formed from the Ulster Volunteer Force, the Unionist paramilitary group established to oppose Home Rule. The Unionist leader, Edward Carson, secured War Office agreement to transfer their ranks en masse to the British Army from early September 1914. Soon after, the Nationalist leader, John Redmond, did a similar deal and the pro-Home Rule National Volunteers joined the 16th (Irish) Division, especially its 47th Brigade. Because of the political context, the 16th (Irish) and 36th (Ulster) divisions had the highest profile of the New Army divisions. Each ‘side’ of the divide had interests in promoting ‘their’ own activities. Yet the first New Army division formed in Ireland, on 21 August 1914, was the 10th (Irish), a non-political formation which recruited across the island.

Late evening on 17 August the 6th Royal Dublin Fusiliers were sent to ‘A’ Beach for rest. This was a welcome move for Drury who was beginning to suffer from dysentery, and it also provided an opportunity for reinforcements to settle in the battalion, whose strength was now 487 men and just four officers. On 21 August the 10th (Irish) Division was once again sent to the front, at Lala Baba, but only in reserve as the 29th Division and 11th (Northern) Division attacked Scimitar Hill and W Hill. They came under fire but saw no major action. The next six weeks saw them rotating in and out of trenches and attempts to advance in the area ground to a halt. Trench warfare ensued. During this time, Drury was again ill and left the battalion for treatment on 27 August, returning three days later.

As September began, nights were colder, but during the day flies were still a persistent problem. Daytime work was primarily focused on improving the line, but there was also burying of the dead with efforts made to retrieve bodies from No Man's Land. Drury was promoted to Captain and given command of ‘B’ and ‘C’ Companies in mid-September. He noted, ‘These are very quiet days, and except for the morning and evening “hate” there is hardly any shooting.’ Shell fire and unexpected encounters with individual Turks provided shocks. Religious services became important as a coping mechanism, along with material comforts from home. Drury noted that sermons were ‘but just the simple truths one hears from the cradle, which now seem invested with a new meaning’. Drury noticed how the Anglican and Roman Catholic chaplains got on well and that many Catholic soldiers went to hear the former, just as he had himself visited the latter. He reflected, ‘If the two creeds could come together at home as they do here, what a different story there would be.’

The most dangerous situation faced by the 6th Royal Dublin Fusiliers was the result of a misunderstanding. On 27 September, great cheering was heard from British lines and that led to heavy machine gun and rifle fire in response from the Turks.

BRITAIN, as Bede notes, may be an island in an ocean, but its diverse inhabitants in the early medieval period were neither insular nor isolated. Global Perspectives on Early Medieval England examines some of the ways in which the emergence of an English cultural identity and polity within a culturally contested island was fundamentally joined to and interpenetrated by other parts of the world. Ideally, a global perspective can work to undermine anthropogenic borders, combat nationalistic ideologies, and reveal connections and commonalities. Less ideally, globalization as a universalizing or totalizing perspective has been adopted as a tool of power colonizing other peoples and their histories. This volume focuses on the complex interdependencies that develop through human mobility in zones of contact, while remaining cautious about the limits and abuses of global and comparative methodologies.

For the study of early medieval England, a global approach offers the opportunity to break free of the ethnic nation-state paradigms of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century western historiography, not coincidentally the defining stage for the field of ‘Anglo-Saxon’ studies. The interdisciplinary essays in Global Perspectives present various starting points for rethinking the subjects specialists in the field engage with, and how they do so utilizing diverse frames of reference. First of all, a global perspective suggests closer attention be paid to the ways in which ethno- linguistic English communities inhabiting the island of Britain during the period circa 450–1100 were not only not a singular homogeneous ‘Anglo-Saxon’ polity, but were also part of a North Atlantic Insular world connected to the Eurasian continent and the Mediterranean in complex ways.

THE FOCUS of the following discussion is an intriguing Arabic account of early medieval Britain that appears to have its origins in the late ninth century. Despite being rarely, if ever, mentioned by historians of Britain concerned with this era, this account has a number of points of interest. In particular, it may contain the earliest reference yet encountered to the idea that there were seven ‘Anglo-Saxon’ kingdoms – a ‘Heptarchy’ – in pre-Viking southern and eastern Britain (the area conventionally termed Anglo-Saxon England), and both it and a related tenth-century Persian text imply that a potential sixth- to seventh-century sense of Britain as still in some way part of the Byzantine world continued to persist in Byzantine thinking, or was at least remembered, into the ninth century.

The author of the account under discussion here is Hārūn ibn Yaḥyā, about whom little is known beyond the fact that he was probably a native of the Levant who is usually thought to have been either a Muslim or possibly an Eastern Christian from Syria. Hārūn was taken prisoner by the Byzantines in Palestine at Ascalon (modern Ashkelon, Israel) probably in the 880s – perhaps a little before 886 – and was subsequently kept as a prisoner of war at Constantinople for a period, before being released and then choosing to travel westwards to Thessalonica, Venice and finally Rome. The accounts he left of Constantinople, Rome and north-western Europe survive in fragments preserved by the early tenth-century Persian author, ibn Rusta, a native of Isfahan (Iran), in his Kitāb al-Aʿlāḳ al-nafīsa (‘Book of Precious Records’) of c. 903–13. Ibn Rusta includes the following passage on Britain that is derived from Hārūn ibn Yaḥyā's account:

Having withdrawn to Salonika, the British and French soon began to extend their defensive positions beyond the city. They created an area which became known as ‘The Birdcage’, extending about 15 miles west, 10 miles north and around 40 miles east to the coast of the Gulf of Rendina. This meant that after arriving at Salonika in mid-December 1915, the next six months saw the 6th Royal Dublin Fusiliers located in a number of places just outside the city. Initially, they recovered from their time at Gallipoli and took stock of their equipment. Little more than a week after their arrival they began to work on digging and building the Birdcage.

By mid-January Drury believed that ‘The defence works are getting immensely strong and I don't think any Balkan army, as usually equipped, could get through.’ He described how the placing of wire would force attacking troops to bunch together in gaps covered by machine gun crossfire. Work was hard, but there were opportunities for tourism and Drury wrote many accounts of his outings. In one, he described the Turkish bazaar in old Salonika. The amount of material gathered by officers and men suggested that many had patronised local traders. There were also battalion exercises and sports competitions. In late April, ‘We got the most astounding news […] that a rebellion had broken out in Ireland.’ Drury feared, ‘I don't know how we will be able to hold our heads up here as we are sure to be looked upon with suspicion.’ However, such fears appear to have been ill-founded as there were no signs in later diary entries of them being realised. Drury's duties within the battalion changed in early May as he lost his Adjutant responsibility and became Assistant Adjutant with, again, a role in signals. All of this time around Salonika was calm, with the nearest sighting of enemy forces being a Zeppelin which was shot down, although martial law was imposed on the town in early June after the Greeks had withdrawn their garrison at the entrance to the Struma Valley. This raised fears that Greece might capitulate to the Bulgarians and a standoff ensued between British/French and Greek forces, after which Greece eventually agreed to demobilise its forces.

ON WHAT assumptions are modern conceptions of the Anglo-Saxon origins of the English people based? How, in recent years, have those assumptions been challenged? And what shifts of perspective can be expected in the future?

The present paper offers a preliminary response to these questions while directing attention to one major shift that can be anticipated in the years ahead. This has to do with widening the field of vision so that relevant developments within a broad expanse of Eurasia are taken into account, and not just those phenomena that fall within the segment of that landmass that, with some terminological audacity, we call the continent of Europe.

Of course, Europe is no such thing as a continent, at least when one looks at the more northerly latitudes of the northern hemisphere. I have been told, though I have yet to try the experience, that one can cycle from Belgium or Jutland to Poland, from Poland to Ukraine, and from Ukraine to the shores of the Caspian Sea without the necessity of changing gears. Regardless of the validity of that claim, there are grounds for thinking that travel, with a corresponding interchange of goods, ideas, and cultural practices, has in fact been occurring for thousands of years along these northern corridors; doing so during the earlier centuries of the first millennium ad in a manner that ought to have an impact on our use of the terms ‘Germanic’ or ‘Anglo-Saxon’ when discussing the origins of the English.

During the nineteenth century, when Anglo-Saxon studies were being consolidated into a single discipline out of a miscellany of antiquarian and philological pursuits, the remarkable changes that were perceived to have taken place in Britain after the collapse of Roman rule – that is, during the fourth to seventh centuries ad – were subsumed into a discourse inflected by the pan-Germanic ideology espoused by John Mitchell Kemble (1807–57) and other leading intellectuals of his day. Anglo-Saxon England, now named as such, came to be conceptualized chiefly in terms of the Germanizing of the Roman world through invasion from across the North Sea, in a process that was thought to have strengthened the sinews of the incipient English nation.

In structure and themes, the Heptameron seems deliberately designed to interrogate the social roles, expectations, and relationships of women and men. In comparison with Boccaccio’s Decameron, where seven women and three men tell the stories, Marguerite’s collection insists on gender equality, at least in numbers, suggesting that gender difference will be a primary concern. In the first section of this chapter, I will consider this polemical setting-up of gender in the Prologue. The storytellers’ allegiances do not always divide along gender lines, but they often do; and both women and men point out at various times the socially constructed nature of male and female honour, and the different demands these conceptions make on behaviour. The next two sections consider the models of masculinity and femininity assessed in the text. The Heptameron’s exploration of male and female nature and honour place it in the context of the long-running literary debate about the status of women known as the querelle des femmes, and a further section will consider Marguerite’s engagement with this debate, in particular the question of marriage that was a central part of it. The next section explores the literary model of courtly love and the Heptameron’s critique of it; and a final section returns to the question of the similarities and differences between the sexes. Marguerite’s own approach recognises the complexities of the relationships between women and men: multi-voiced, open-ended, and ultimately unresolved, the Heptameron encourages its readers to exercise their own judgement on the relationships it puts before us.

Equality in the Prologue

The Heptameron has elicited a large body of scholarship on how gendered communities are defined and delineated in the stories and the relationships between the storytellers. The Prologue both establishes and erases gender differences in the storytelling group. When they finally gather at the monastery in Sarrance after their ordeals and realise that they will have to wait at least ten days before they can leave, the group looks to Oisille, the oldest, and who, in Parlamente’s words, should act as a substitute mother for them all, for guidance on how to pass the time. It is the women who rally first to Parlamente’s request for entertainment, worried that they will sicken or become melancholic without it.

SURPRISING THOUGH it may seem, the study of Anglo-Saxon art does not feature with any great regularity in the history of western European art; in Britain only two or three universities include specialist modules on Anglo-Saxon art in their art history curriculum. In large part this is because the art of the Anglo-Saxons is (rightly) not considered to exist comfortably within the parameters of the classical tradition, the art emerging from the visual traditions of ancient Greece and – more usually – republican and imperial Rome. It is this that is prioritized within the canon of art history in the western European tradition, not only in and of itself, but because it is also considered to underpin the art of the Renaissances of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, that of the ‘Baroque’ of the seventeenth century, and to inspire the neo-classical revivals of the eighteenth through early twentieth centuries. In other words, the art of the last five centuries articulated within a perceived classical tradition is that which, in effect, forms the canon of art history within the parameters of post-medieval western European art that is the focus of the discipline across much of Europe, North America and Australasia. This is not, of course, the tradition of art produced by the majority of cultures across the globe. But global art is also studied in only a very few art history departments in Britain, except in so far as it is deemed to impact on the art of Western Europe, as in the late nineteenth century or the early twentieth century when the art of eastern Asia and that of continental Africa, perceived as exotica, influenced artists working in Europe.

In other words, Anglo-Saxon art plays as little a role in the canon of western European art history as it is studied today within the university as does any art produced outside that canon. This, of course, is also true of other arts emerging from the islands of Britain and Ireland during the early medieval period: those produced by the Scandinavian settlers in the region and by the ‘Celtic’ peoples of Ireland (and Scotland), so-called since the late eighteenth/nineteenth-century move towards independence from England by these regions.