Perceptions of the Past in the Early Middle Ages

Historically Speaking May/June 2007 tioned royalism became latently subversive to the provincial order and ultimately to the entire empire. Explosive population growth, an expanding print culture, new ethnic and racial tensions, and warfare with the French and Native Americans encouraged some provincials to appropriate imperial rites and symbols during the conflicts such changes entailed. England's ambiguous, violent 17th-century history was used to justify all types of public behaviors. Rioting yeomen struggling for ownership of untold millions of acres in North America invoked a benevolent king to legitimate their violent actions, and rebelling slaves repeatedly claimed that the distant monarch intended to free them. Native Americans invoked Britain's kings against his American subjects as more settlers moved into the interior. In incident after incident, colonists revealed that they loved the king. But they did not share a universal understanding of his nature, the character of political patriarchy, the British constitution, or even a perception of whether they lived under an imperial, British, English , or customary constitution. This fragmentation helped tear the AngloAmerican world apart. The failure to extend the British state's financial structures to America after the Seven Years War grew as much from provincial society's royalization as it did from any other ideological factor. Affection for and faith in imagined kings and constitutions, coupled to unique understandings of British history, informed the colonists' actions in the imperial crisis as much as Country thought or natural-rights ideology did. Royal rites shaped the pattern of resistance in the streets as mobs confronted royal officials. The belief that the Glorious Revolution's settlement might manifest itself in their charters, or in natural law, informed colonial defiance of metropolitan norms. Only in 1774-75 did that royal America finally collapse amid a potent but decentralized terror against those loyal to the empire . An iconoclasm against royal emblems followed, punctuated by a series of symbolic regicides in the summer of 1776. In the terror's aftermath, the long struggle to make a workable republican society began. Seen this way, colonial history becomes more than a preparation for the Revolution or the seed ground for the hyper-democratic America we now live in. Rather, profoundly different assumptions shaped that world. By rejecting teleology we let the colonists' lives speak to our own, not as agents of an emergent modernity but rather as human beings who inherited and adopted certain beliefs that they then used to confront change. By conceptualizing the period in this fashion I am not claiming that provincials did not read "republican" or "Country" influenced tracts, that commerce did not expand dramatically , that election days and assemblies were not important, that religious revivals did not take place, or that no social oppression existed. But these changes occurred within the period's predominant political culture. Royalism was a primary force of change before 1 776. What it was to be an American subject, in love with king and country, has been lost to us. But for the people of that time, it was a consuming attachment, one that separates their world from our own. Brendan McConville isprofessor of history at Boston University. His most recent book is The King's Three Faces: The Rise and Fall of Royal America (The Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture/University of North Carolina Press, 2006). 1 Diary of John Rowe, November 5, 1 764, Massachusetts Historical Society [hereafter cited as MHS]. -' The most sophisticated statement in this strain is Gordon Wood, TAc Radicalism of the American Revolution (Knopf, 1991). Perceptions of the Past in the Early Middle Ages Rosamond McKitterick { { ^^T^ ^e k^n8 remams unharmed and safe ^ ™ I therefore, ruling the kingdom of the JL, Franks and the Lombards and Romans most excellently inasmuch as the king of heaven is proved to be his protector. And the aforementioned king journeyed to Rome." The terrestrial and spiritual horizons of the Franks of the Carolingian empire in the early 8th and 9th centuries are neatly suggested by this triumphant conclusion to the entry for 788 in a set of Frankish annals known as the Annales na^ariani. The unique copy is preserved in a late 8th-century manuscript in the...