Prophecy, Politics and Place in Medieval England: From Geoffrey of Monmouth to Thomas of Erceldoune by Victoria Flood (review)

Victoria Flood's book is a careful and thorough analysis of prophetic literature and its political usage and implications in England, Scotland, and Wales from the twelfth century to the fifteenth century. Flood undertakes to explore prophetic writings as discourse. As such, these writings not only reflected historical events and understandings, but also influenced them.

The first chapter investigates political prophecy from the 1130s to the 1260s. While the central theme emerging is of the conquering king who will unite the nations of England, Scotland, and Wales, the interpretation of these prophecies is dependent on, and reactive to, geography. The same, or very similar, prophecies take on different meanings in the borderlands between England and Scotland, in Wales, or in England. Geographical perspective is everything in providing the standpoint through which this literature is understood. Consequently Flood examines the role of prophetic literature in extending boundaries. Her close analysis of texts distinguishes various definitions of England and Britain, on different sides of the borders.

Chapter 2 focuses on Galfridian prophecies and their relationship with contemporary Scottish and Welsh prophetic literature. Her comparison of the Welsh, Scottish, and Galfridian literature leads her to the conclusion that both the Welsh and the Scottish prophecies 'present a vision of territorial possession that stretches from the British past to history's end, establishing English domination as a short-lived historical blip in an otherwise continuous state of indigenous rule' (p. 84). Whereas the Welsh and Scottish literature was essentially separatist, the English literature asserted a British unity. This chapter concludes with an examination of the ways in which kings Richard II and Henry IV used the imagery of prophecy in order to communicate messages about their own ancestry, associations, and assertions of power. Flood claims that these texts 'appear to have genuinely motivated political behaviour, as a succinct articulation of a dominant political ideology' (p. 108). In so doing, they 'spoke to the interests of polite elites'(p. 109). This literature was not the domain of the disenfranchised. Rather, it was actively used to influence political outcomes by those invested in maintaining their own power.

Chapter 3 is concerned primarily with the writings of Thomas of Erceldoune. Flood effectively argues a role for Thomas beyond that of articulating 'gnomic folk wisdom' (p. 111). Rather, she claims, 'these texts tell us something, both of the misery of life on the northern border during the wars, and the terms through which the high stakes of insular sovereignty were articulated by authors working in this region, deeply immersed in the long tradition of Galfridian prophesy' (p. 111). The discussion of the Erceldoune tradition contextualizes Flood's exceptional effort in tracing the threads of prophetic literature through Wales, Scotland, the borders areas, and England. She observes that the purpose of the literature is to address the ongoing perception of the prevailing 'crisis of kingship' (p. 140) or, to modern eyes, the inadequacy of monarchy. Her study of the Erceldoune text over time and place leads to an identification of a shift to the king as crusader, and also to visions of regional lordship being placed above insular unity.

The fourth and final chapter, and the one I enjoyed reading the most, analyses the Cock of the North and Ceiliog y North, and looks at the transmigrations of prophetic texts across borders and time, into the fifteenth century. The role of the Percies, the meaning of the prophecies in this context, and the transformation of the prophecies into Lancastrian support, all emerge here. The geographic movement of the prophecies and the ways in which they are used to claim, reclaim, and dispute cultural, historical, and political narratives are charted by Flood with confidence and scholarship. She concludes that 'prophecy was not simply an interpretative framework, the imposition of order on a disordered...