Earls and Transnational Kingship in the Medieval Plantagenet Empire, c.1300-1399

This project was the subject of a Early Career Fellowship funded by the Leverhulme Trust. It started from the idea that lordship in Britain and Ireland was not something organised with reference to national boundaries; instead, the horizons of the lords of England, Wales, Ireland, and Scotland extended across the British Isles. While these nobilities have attracted rich historiographies over the last century, though, they have generally been studied within national traditions of scholarship. Nor have there been many comparative studies of nobilities in different regions.

This project applied the analytical category of 'empire' to provide a transnational analysis of the role of lords in governance across the British Isles and, by doing so, to highlight how nobles were embedded in these regional contexts and how this varied over time and space. Above all, the project aimed to use this perspective to place national traditions of research in conversation with each other, and thus to foster a shared awareness of different research agendas and prospects for future work. A highlight of the project in this respect was a conference, entitled 'Nobilities and Political Cultures in Britain and Ireland, c.1272–1450', which was held at the University of Nottingham in January 2023. This featured a number of external speakers and a substantial audience. It is expected that a volume of published proceedings will be produced in due course. Beyond this conference, the project has resulted in a number of outcomes. Perhaps most directly, its transnational and comparative perspectives inform a book chapter entitled 'Cultures of Kingship, 1320-1399' which will be published in The New Cambridge History of Britain, Volume 2: 1100–1500, ed. P. Crooks.