This chapter considers Arthuriana in two distinct linguistic zones: the Celtic languages (excluding Welsh) and Older Scots.  The Arthur of the ‘Gaelic world’ is a figure associated with marvellous, and sometimes comic, adventures – the overtly political themes that persist in Welsh and English writing are usually absent. In the Cornish and Breton regions, Arthur appears in politically complex hagiographical and prophetic material. Older Scots also offers complex and consistent engagement with politics, though from a different vantage point. Here, the dual themes of sovereignty and advice to princes are closely related both to one another and to the long and complex history of contemporary Anglo-Scots political and literary relations. At issue too are crucial questions of geography and national identity.

A cherished myth in devolved Scotland is that writers and artists were crucially responsible for the establishment of the new parliament. While there is some truth to this, understanding the full context requires looking beyond the literary texts typically viewed as pivotal in reviving national confidence. Alasdair Gray’s Lanark (1981) certainly impacted a small literary audience, but its status as a “national” novel emerged from broader print culture networks. To appreciate its political significance, we must consider magazines like Scottish International, which published extracts of Lanark in 1969, alongside cultural periodicals like Chapman and the Edinburgh Review, which integrated Gray’s political vision into their missions during the 1980s and 90s.This chapter considers a range of Scottish political writing that contributed to this process. Here, “political writing” refers not to grand rhetoric, but to the organised creation of a neo-national public that recognised itself. It encompassed literary novels, journalism, and philosophical essays, including Tom Nairn’s work and the Red Paper on Scotland, edited by Gordon Brown (1975). The Red Paper, published by the Edinburgh University Students Publication Board (EUSPB), was connected to numerous Edinburgh-based magazines and the literary publisher Polygon. By examining this network of magazines, campaign groups, and party factions (Labour and SNP), we can identify the discursive frameworks and political alliances that led to the Scottish Parliament’s establishment in 1999, tracing much of contemporary Scottish politics back to the writing, editing, and publishing efforts of prior decades.

Matthew Paris’ representation of and reporting on Ireland, Scotland and Wales.

This chapter traces the progression of nationalist writing in Wales and Scotland from the Popular Front fiction of the 1930s through to the devolved nations of the twenty-first century. Raymond Williams’s changing position on the nationalist question is charted and related to the work of the political theorist Tom Nairn. Williams is further analysed in the second half of the chapter as an indicative case study of a creative writer who drew on the legacy of the 1930s writers in order to tackle the centralist tendencies of English literature. In the process, Williams himself became a protagonist in the devolution struggle and is portrayed as such in John Osmond’s Ten Million Stars Are Burning (2018). The chapter concludes by discussing why documentary approaches, such as Osmond’s novel and James Robertson’s And the Land Lay Still (2010), are important to the fictional representations of the struggle for Welsh and Scottish independence.

Surveying a range of literary texts written in the vernacular languages of medieval Britain, this chapter is concerned with the ways in which the peoples of Ireland, Scotland, and Wales defined themselves in opposition to the dominant state power of England. Countering the Latin historical tradition which positioned British history as English history, writers working in Irish, Scots, Scottish Gaelic, and Welsh constructed origin myths and literary traditions that worked to build local communities and regional identities. Though the territories clustered around England were far from united in their political structures, they came together as peoples to resist the imperial ambitions of the English state.

The Statute of York in 1322 recognised that ‘in time past … troubles and wars have happened in the realm’, blaming this on the various attempts to restrict royal power in the thirteenth century. Reform, sometimes led by the crown and sometimes imposed upon it, was a key theme in the reigns of Henry III (1216–72) and Edward I (1272–1307). Two other themes, focused on the king’s interests beyond the borders of England, had significant effects on relations between the king and his English subjects, as the king sought to access their manpower, money and material. These interests were the king’s claims to sovereignty over all Britain and protecting his remaining lands in France.

In an era steeped in national stereotypes that bled into slanders and hatred, the English were notorious in later medieval Europe for three things: drunkenness, bearing a tail and killing their kings. But it is with the implications of another alleged propensity – for waging wars of conquest that sought to turn neighbours into subjects – that this chapter is largely concerned. By the later Middle Ages, the bellicose reputation of England’s kings reverberated across Christendom. Jean Froissart (d. c. 1405), the chronicler of chivalry who visited the court of Edward III, noted that, because of their great conquests, the English were ‘always more inclined to war than peace’.

The ninth chapter expands the analysis to Scotland and Ireland; in both kingdoms, wardship was instrumental in the disintegration of royal power. In Scotland, Charles I’s efforts to re-write the land law and extend his rights to wardships via an Act of Revocation (1633) was considered to be ‘the ground stone of all the mischeiffe that folloued after’ (sic), an arch reference to the rebellion that began in Scotland in 1638. In Ireland, wardship and the entire land law were deployed as a means of religious conversion. Wardship was thus an integral component of the bitter religious conflict that erupted in 1641. It was these rebellions which ultimately precipitated the English Civil War, that offered Parliament the opportunity to finally abolish the feudal tenures in 1646, an abolition confirmed at the Restoration of the Crown in 1660.