В 1418 г. Элхэм преподнес королю «Рифмованную книгу о Генрихе V» («Liber metricus de Henrico Quinto»). Это сочинение весьма близко к анонимным «Деяниям Генриха V», что позволяет предположить знакомство приора из Лентона с трудом анонимного капеллана. О второй королевской континентальной кампании Элхэм повествует вполне самостоятельно, опираясь на официальные донесения об успехах английских войск. Книга заканчивается провозглашением законности притязаний английских королей на французскую корону, восходящим по своему содержанию к текстам прокламаций Эдуарда III, которые Элхэм вполне мог прочитать в одной из более ранних хроник.
Images of War and Perceptions of History in Late Medieval England[1582]
Images of War and Perceptions of History in Late Medieval England[1582]
The present book deals with the ideas, notions and attitudes of the late-medieval people of England towards the wars waged by English sovereigns. Among the numerous foreign policy conflicts of that period 1 have considered several principal ones: the Hundred Years' War, hostilities in Scotland and Flanders, and the two Castilian campaigns of 1367 and 1386. Without going into the details of foreign affairs, my aim is to examine the motives and circumstances behind each conflict through the eyes of the participants and their contemporaries, to scrutinize stereotypes, commonplaces and topoi created by the medieval historiographical tradition, and to raise the question of the influence of prolonged warfare on the English national identity of that period.
Analysis of royal official documentation, as well as court-initiated propaganda reflected in the works of late-medieval historians, clearly testifies that even in the Early Modem period, just as in the previous epoch, formal observance of conditions of the just war was extremely important. Any military conflict conducted without it was resolutely condemned by the Christian community as a sinful act. The full conformity of each conflict in which the English sovereigns took part to all the criteria of just war, as formulated by the Church Fathers and expressed in canonical law, was constantly accented in all propagandists and historical texts. Reasoning from justice as the main principle of organization of the cosmic order, English authors represented their kings' military campaigns as just acts directed not so much towards the defence of those monarchs' personal interests as the protection of the very foundations of that order. Thus, in all the official letters and proclamations of the English kings, the war against France was not only presented as a conflict between two pretenders to the French throne, but also viewed at a different angle as a struggle between law and lawlessness. The English opposed the ancient custom of the Franks which dismissed women and their descendants from royal succession, appealing to a higher law they saw as written in the Old and New Testaments and embodied in nature. Thus, in the conception of the English theologians and lawyers, the French who appealed to the Salic Law opposed the Law of the Lord and were apostates. This reinforced the notion that the English fought not only for the rights of their suzerain, but also for divine truth and justice.