From tribe to nation?

Despite the extensive effort that generations of chroniclers and analysts have devoted to the history of Europe and its peoples, assigning dates to the acquisition of national consciousness by any of Europe’s roughly fifty national groups remains a most contentious undertaking. Disagreement is very conspicuous in the writings of some of the last generation’s distinguished historians. To the French medieval authority, Marc Bloch, for example, ‘the texts make it plain that so far as France and Germany were concerned this national consciousness was already highly developed about the year 1100’; Bloch felt the same could be said of the English. ’ Others placed the rise of national consciousness among the major peoples of Western Europe at only a slightly later date. The Dutch scholar, Johan Huizinga, perceived national consciousness evolving throughout the Middle Ages, and considered French and English nationalism to be ‘in full flower’ by the 14th century.2 The British historian, George Coulton, agreed; basing his analysis on the foreign alignments of the Italian states, France, England, Scotland, Germany, Hungary, Flanders, and Spain during the late 13OOs, he concluded that ‘by this time, the nationalism towards which Europe had been evolving for three centuries past was accepted not only as a social fact but as a fundamental factor in European politics.‘3 Another British scholar, Sydney Herbert, concurred that ‘the idea of nationality (began to) appear in real force [as] medieval society was dying’; he asserted that the Scottish 13th century ‘fierce resistance to an English overlord, provides one of the first examples of nationalism in action’, and he added that ‘if the Hundred Years War (1337-1453) between France and England is as far as possible from being a national war in its origins, yet toward its close genuine nationality appears, splendid and triumphant, with Jeanne d’Arc’.4 In an article dedicated to the early stirring of national consciousness among the English, the American scholar, Barnaby Keeney, concluded: