Rosalind Field notes that Anglo-Norman romances often have a ‘powerful feeling of locality’ as they function as histories for ‘a country, a family, a city’. This is certainly true of the romances explored thus far, and Gui de Warewic and Boeve de Haumtone are no exception. These texts are frequently seen as proto-nationalist romances, but have a local element, given that they were probably written ‘to celebrate, or create, founding English heroes for two of the great medieval aristocratic dynasties, those of the Albini family of Arundel and of the earls of Warwick’. Botah of these stories value regional matters above national ones, especially Boeve, which, like Fouke, critiques the imposition of royal rule onto matters of inheritance. While they do provide foundation stories for particular localities, it is clear that both Boeve and Gui were also written for more general audiences and the identities they present are complex: they are local and proto-national as well as religious. While these texts do perform their function of creating ‘a country’, they do so from the outside-in; they position England as a site of foreignness and exoticism, centring the perspectives of those from elsewhere. Like many other insular exile-andreturn romances, Gui and Boeve are set predominantly outside England, and so the Englishness they construct is necessarily predicated on interaction with cultural others. In establishing multi-layered English identities that are at once dynastic, local, national, transnational, exotic, and religious, these romances grant audiences imaginative access to the world beyond England's shores. They situate England as a region within the rest of the world, a place as exotic and alluring to others as the East was to those in England.

The embrace of exoticism was not unusual in High Medieval England. In one of his many attempts to infiltrate King John's court, Fouke le Fitz Waryn's John de Rampaigne disguises himself as an Ethiopian minstrel: ‘se atyra molt richement, auxi bien come counte ou baroun’ [he dressed himself very richly, as well as a count or baron].

While the Gesta Herwardi examines the impact of national political events on local communities, Geffrei Gaimar's Estoire des Engleis operates inversely: it makes local stories nationally relevant by eliding distinctions between England and the individual regions that constitute it. Regional writing is often concerned with the ‘representation of difference’ between the local and the national, the periphery and the centre. To create a narrative that is distinctively regional, cultural boundaries must be drawn between the spotlighted area and the remainder of the country: ‘A regional identity then, is a sense of belonging, an awareness of similar traits among people living under similar conditions, or not coincidentally, of how their cultural patterns are distinctive in comparison to other regions or places.’ While this sense of isolation or distinction from other regions – or from the country as a whole – may apply to the Gesta, which demonstrates a retreat to a more local imagining of England in the face of political turmoil, the Estoire operates quite differently, even though its focus is unmistakably regional. This chapter will show that instead of highlighting the uniqueness of the areas in which he was writing, Gaimar appropriates local stories and uses them to construct his history of England. Even when it purports to discuss England as a whole, the Estoire mostly focuses on events in Lincolnshire, taking the region to be representative of the nation. Unlike an overtly regional text, such as the Liber Eliensis, the Estoire does not claim to be restricted or bounded by a sense of place, and it does not focus on a single locality through time. Rather, it is concerned with the place of regional history in the greater context of England's past.

Gaimar brings together a range of sources from different regions, namely Hampshire, which had been in the kingdom of Wessex, and Lincolnshire, one of the boroughs of the former Danelaw. The confluence of these sources from different parts of England enables the text to construct an English identity and a regional identity simultaneously.

In his geographically prejudiced disparagement of the Northumbrian accent and character, William of Malmesbury writes, ‘Quod propter uiciniam barbararum gentium et propter remotionem regum quondam Anglorum modo Normannorum contigit’ [‘This is the result of the barbarians being so near and the kings, once English, now Norman, so far away’]. Here, William succinctly expresses the relationship between regional identity and cultural contact; England's regions were deeply influenced by their locations, their neighbours, and those who had settled in the area; and writings about English regions were largely determined by the perspectives, ideologies, and agendas of those who put quill to parchment. While interaction with a cultural Other is often thought to strengthen national sentiment and is even associated with the construction of the nation, this is not always the case. The texts examined here, all of which depict or facilitate cultural contact, create regions of varying scales. They range from the smallest local unit to transnational and transcultural communities.

By focusing on regions that contain, and are contained within, England, these texts complicate English identity, highlighting its paradoxes and inherently imagined nature. Yet these contradictions do not negate the concept of Englishness. Rather, they suggest that Englishness is multivalent, with different meanings, nuances, and identitary strategies that depend on context, location, or ideology. We are instead left with a multitude of Englands, none more or less English than the others. They simply imagine Englishness differently. These varied identities are defined by cultural contact, but not necessarily in an oppositional sense; rather, they are intercultural, operating in constant dialogue with other identities and are perpetually in the process of being created, adapted, and performed.

These identities can be ideologically, socially, or politically powerful. More than merely telling us how those in the Middle Ages saw themselves, imagined the spaces in which they lived, or envisaged their communities, an appreciation of English identities can provide a more thorough understanding of politics in the post-Conquest period. They can help scholars to better appreciate the dynamics between countries – whether peaceful or hostile – and within England itself. An awareness of England's geographical relationships and the identities associated with its regions can elicit new readings of texts and historical events.

The decades following the Norman Conquest of England are often regarded as a time of intense national trauma. Within months of the Battle of Hastings, the crown was firmly in Norman hands and the lands previously held by the English were redistributed amongst William the Conqueror's followers. The twelfth-century historian Orderic Vitalis describes the humiliation suffered by the English after their defeat:

Elisabeth van Houts argues that English writers suffered from the ‘traumatic effects of shock’ in response to the events that had recently befallen their country and they were too ‘stunned’ to write about the Conquest until well into the twelfth century. The Gesta Herwardi, written between 1109 and 1131 by a monk or clerk probably called Richard of Ely, is an exception to this assertion. It manifests an ‘attempt to cope with the trauma of defeat’ by means of epic narrative and through the depiction of heroic behaviour and ‘honourable surrender’. In addition to displaying England's post-Conquest coping mechanisms through the repetition and remodelling of traumatic events, the Gesta also explores how individuals and communities adjust to political upheaval by recalibrating their identities, and asserting the importance of local, rather than national, histories, communities, and heroes. The text depicts a hero and community retreating to a local sense of identity as a way of mitigating greater political changes sweeping over England.

The Gesta reveals the fragility of the eleventh-century English ‘nation’ by presenting regions on the margins of England splintering off from the heartland after the Conquest, providing alternative, community-oriented nodal points around which the English people could construct their identities. Literary accounts of English resistance to the Norman Conquest, the Gesta chief among them, draw models of England that diverge from those of a unified country.

The fourteenth-century Hereford mappa mundi is a temporally and spatially dynamic representation of the medieval English geographic and cultural imagination. Although it is centred on Jerusalem, it is the waterways of the map that draw the eye. The Mediterranean Sea, which may have once been a vibrant green but has become darkened with time, dominates the parchment as it flows into the oceans that enclose the physical world, inviting viewers to examine the earth's margins. The world's edge contains islands inhabited by monstrous peoples, with the blemmyes to the south, the cenocephali to the north, and sciapods found in the southern and western reaches of the world. Yet the map's peripheries also contain another set of islands, tucked away in the bottom left-hand corner: the British archipelago.

While the British Isles’ location on the edge of the world map was both a part of the European map-making tradition and a geographical necessity given that few in Europe knew about the Americas, it also suggests that English writers, artists, and cartographers may have embraced their own marginality. Britain itself was widely perceived as a periphery, a border space between the known and the unknown world. Aisling Byrne notes that descriptions of the British Isles drew on imagery associated with otherworlds, while Kathy Lavezzo writes, ‘the English were not simply self-conscious of their marginality during the Middle Ages; English writers and cartographers actively participated in the construction of England as a global borderland’. England was, after all, one of the most prolific sites of mappa mundi production in the premodern West. Levazzo argues that the margin was a socially and politically powerful position to occupy, straddling the line between wildness and sophistication. This discourse of marginality arose because of the regional heterogeneity within England itself; by presenting itself as a threatening symbol of alterity to the rest of the world, it could mask the internal difference that might dismantle the unity of the ‘nation’. However, if we envisage England as a borderland rather than simply a margin, then this dynamic shifts: England instead becomes an interconnected space.

The ‘discourse of Britishness’, which proclaimed the ‘natural unity of the island(s) of Britain, inferring from physical continuity and inevitable political unity’, was a powerful ideological force in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, and was used by both the Welsh and the English to justify political action. For the English, it culturally legitimised the English seizure of Welsh territory, which culminated in the Edwardian conquest of Wales in 1282–83. For the Welsh, it galvanised resistance to English hegemony. The Welsh text Enweu Ynys Prydein, or Names of the Island of Britain, unambiguously proclaims the right to Welsh dominance over Britain. It yokes together the whole island: ‘Teir Ynys Prydein: Lloegyr a Chymry a’r Alban’ [‘Three Realms of Britain: England, Wales, and Scotland’] and continues: ‘Ac nyt oes dlyet y neb ar (yr) Ynys Honn, namyn y genedyl Gymry ehun, Gweddillyon y Brutannyeit, y ddeuth gynt o Gaer Droea’ [‘And no one has a right to this Island except only the nation of the Cymry, the remnant of the Britons, who came here formerly from Troy’]. While Geoffrey of Monmouth's Historia regum Britanniae is significantly more ambiguous than the Enweu, it is possible that in addition to the pseudo-Nennius's Historia Britonnum, he drew on similar Welsh oral traditions, especially the Trioedd Ynys Prydein, in espousing a mythical paradigm for the unity of Britain: ‘Insula hec Britones et Pictos et Scottos incolas recepit. Britones autem a quibus nomen accepit in primis a mari usque ad mare totam insulam insederunt.’ [‘This island received Britons, Picts and Scots as settlers. However, the Britons from whom it first took its name occupied the whole island from sea to sea.’] Geoffrey's text has been interpreted as both an argument for the restoration of Welsh cultural pride and as a contribution towards the ideology that validated English domination over ‘totam insulam’, the whole island.

The Gough Map of Britain, too, can be read as a participant in this discourse: while it is a matter of some debate, it has been interpreted as a mappa regni, a survey of Edward I's empire or latter-day Domesday Book, reflecting his claim to the whole island.

In the two and a half centuries following the Norman Conquest of England, English identity was reassessed and renegotiated in a new cultural context. This English identity took many forms across the kingdom, however, and was defined not only through interaction with the Normans, but through contact with other cultures as well. This book establishes a link between cultural contact and the literary formation of English regional identities by analysing romances and histories from the twelfth to fourteenth centuries. It articulates the role that other cultures, polities, and countries played in constructions of Englishness, and shows how English identities differed depending on a region's location, history, stories, and inhabitants.

The texts explored in this book suggest, in distinctive ways, that as English peoples come into contact with their neighbours, the cultural frictions that arise consolidate or alter existing identities – or forge new, intercultural ones. Peter McDonald asserts that this intercultural dynamism is universal: ‘since all cultures, including dominant ones, are less coherent and more mixed than we like to believe, or than the political pressures of a particular moment might require us to believe, the intercultural as an on-going, open-ended process is all-pervasive’. Although McDonald writes in reference to present-day culture, his claims are no less valid for medieval England. The medieval construction of English identity can be seen as an ongoing dialogic process, constantly unfolding, and created through interactions with itself and with other cultures. It is social and performative; because the practice of English identity varies throughout the kingdom, defined by local histories, cultural influences, ethnicities, and religious identities, among other factors, regional understandings and articulations of English identity are disparate. The richest, most intercultural medieval texts are found in areas that Robert Stein categorises as ‘border territories and areas of shifting sovereignties’, or which Mary Louise Pratt calls ‘contact zones’. These are places where cultures intersect, generating a new perspective that ‘treats the relations among colonizer and colonized, or travelers and “travelees”, not in terms of separateness, but in terms of co-presence, interaction, interlocking ideas and practices, and often within radically asymmetrical relations of power’.