Colonialist Rhetoric in the Middle Ages: Thomas Walsingham and the Black Death on the Anglo-Scottish Border

Abstract

Whether we can speak of colonialism in the Middle Ages has been a long-standing matter of debate. 2 While the question "Was there colonialism in the Middle Ages?" has produced much useful scholarship by medievalists and non-medievalists alike, I would also suggest that the yes or no framing of this question has at times placed counterproductive limits on scholarly analysis. After all, we do not require a country to meet the definition of "textbook" democracy before we use it to advance the study of democracy. Should we require the medieval period to exhibit "textbook" colonialism before we use it to advance our understanding of colonialism?This article investigates what, if anything, we can learn from exploring the almost-but-not-quite-colonial aspects of the Middle Ages. More specifically, it examines the interplay of colonialist rhetoric and medieval historiographical conventions in one historian's account of the second bubonic plague pandemic, now commonly known as the Black Death. This pandemic first spread across Europe in 1347-1353, and eventually resulted in the deaths of at least fifty million people globally, with different regions across the world losing anywhere from thirty to sixty percent of their population. 3 Local and regional outbreaks recurred roughly once every decade until c. 1500, with further outbreaks persisting through the early modern period. 4 I analyze the English chronicler Thomas Walsingham's (c. 1340-c. 1420) reaction to one such outbreak, which occurred on the Anglo-Scottish Border in 1379. 5 Walsingham's historical position makes him a particularly useful object of study for scholars working in our modern, postcolonial-yet-still-colonialist world. As I will discuss in greater detail below, Walsingham wrote his account of this outbreak during a contraction of English colonial ambitions in Scotland. Nevertheless, he used classical tropes about civilization and barbarity to provide readers with a pro-English interpretation of this outbreak. His work therefore underscores how colonialist rhetoric