These lines express nostalgia for a golden world long lost, a microcosm of the poem from which they come. Moreover, they express it with a trope redolent of that older world: the medieval form of the truth-conferring etymology. Spenser's new world is, in this formulation, an old one: a warre-old (echoing its likely early modern bisyllabic pronunciation). Warre is glossed ‘worse’ by E. K. in The Shepheardes Calender, in a line that expresses the same trope (‘They sayne the world is much war then it wont’), so superficially this passage evokes the familiar idea of the world getting worse as it gets older, falling further from the golden age when it lived ‘like an innocent’. However, warre was an unusual spelling for worse by 1590, part of Spenser's archaising style: the more likely, immediate interpretation for early modern readers of The Faerie Queene (especially if they did not have their Shepheardes Calender with its glossary to hand) was its more obvious pun on war, the clear example of the ‘new’ world's loss of innocence, as well as the thing singled out for removal with the advent of the true ‘new world’: ‘they shall turn their swords into ploughshares, and their spears into sickles: nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they be exercised any more to war’. Spenser's war-old worolde captures in one, doubleedged word the ideological interception of language, history and war, which is the heart of this study.

The world of the 1590s was indeed war-old. The conflict that rumbled on fitfully throughout the later Middle Ages is loosely called the Hundred Years War, although its origins lay long before 1337, and it did not finally end until 1558, with the loss of Calais. For writers in this period, language was born of conflict. ‘English’ was an idiom whose very words were spoils of war, etymologically testifying to the ways in which they had been authored by ancient French conquest.