This declaration is made by a character known only as ‘the Englishman’, in a throng of mercenaries (including a Frenchman and a Spaniard) who offer their services to the Prince of Cyprus in Thomas Kyd's Soliman and Perseda (c. 1592), a play that foregrounded the conjunction between language and war that is the axis of this book. By the 1590s, the heyday decade of the history play, the representation of war in words had become a commonplace, because three centuries of conflict and its chronicling had made it so. This scene constructs its boastful and bellicose nationalism though the metaphor of language: the ‘word of courage’. When the exiled protagonist Basilisco joins the throng, he lays his hand on his sword and asserts, with the same metaphor, ‘I fight not with my tongue; this is my oratrix’ (1.3.69, p. 170): the punning wordplay of the word literally embedded within the sword expands into a larger collapse of the two, in the playhouse in which verbal violence inevitably overtakes and replaces physical violence. Invited to make a brave to match those of the assembled mercenaries (‘whats the word that glories your Countrey?’), Basilisco replies, ‘I haue no word, because no countrey’ (1.3.78, 111, pp. 170–1). ‘The word’ is the medium through which war is not only performed but configured, and its ready metaphor.

This book explores the ways in which England's wars with France, which dominated the international affairs of the two countries for two centuries, shaped the emerging and contradictory articulations of national language and linguistic nationalism. The Hundred Years War overshadowed political and social experience from 1337 to 1453 (arguably until 1558), and fundamentally characterised articulations of national and linguistic identity, from fourteenth-century concerns over ‘strange Inglis’ to sixteenth-century mantras against ‘strange and inkhorne tearmes’.