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URL: https://tcd.academia.edu/PeterCrooks

⇱ Peter Crooks - Trinity College Dublin

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My primary research interest is in Ireland in the period 1171-1541 and, arising from that, in the wider 'English world' or 'Plantagenet empire' of which Ireland formed an important part. Before returning to Trinity in 2013, I was a Past and Present Society Research Fellow at the Institute of Historical Research and a Lecturer in Late Medieval History at the University of East Anglia. I am currently completing a monograph entitled England's First Colony: Power, Conflict and Colonialism in the Lordship of Ireland, 1361-1460. I am the principal editor of 'CIRCLE: A Calendar of Irish Chancery Letters, c.1244-1509' (https://chancery.tcd.ie/), a reconstruction of the Irish chancery rolls destroyed in the 1922 cataclysm at the Four Courts. A four-volume print edition of CIRCLE will appear with the Irish Manuscripts Commission. In September 2013, I co-founded (with Professor S. Duffy) the Trinity Medieval Ireland Series (TMIS), the first volume of which has been published as: The Geraldines and Medieval Ireland: The Making of a Myth.

I am also interested in 'empire', not least as a means of subverting or complicating the narratives of centralization and uniformity that have dominated much research on the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries in Europe. These are the centuries normally classified as 'late medieval', a problematic term used more for the purposes of sub-disciplinary gate-keeping than for any real meaning that it holds. The challenge of research on this period -- sandwiched as it is between the 'high medieval' and the 'early modern' -- is to understand and describe its historical developments without resort to narratives of either decline or anticipation. So long as 'medieval' is understood to be a chronological descriptor (and a Eurocentric one at that), rather than a value-laden term with an implicit developmentalist agenda, then its use need not foreclose on meaningful structural comparisons, whether synchronic or diachronic in perspective.

I essayed a general interpretation of England's empire, which adopts such perspectives, in 'State of the Union: Perspectives on English Imperialism in the Late Middle Ages' (Past and Present, no. 211). In July 2014, together with David Green and W. Mark Ormrod, I co-convened the Harlaxton Medieval Symposium, which took as its subject 'The Plantagenet Empire, 1259-1453' (now published as Harlaxton Medieval Studies no. 26). My work on England's late-medieval 'empire' has sparked a research interest in the history of empires and colonialism more generally. With Timothy H. Parsons (Washington in St Louis), I am co-editor of Empires and Bureaucracy in World History: From Late Antiquity to the Twentieth Century (Cambridge University Press, 2016).
Address: Department of History, Trinity College Dublin
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Books by Peter Crooks

Between the Treaty of Paris in 1259 and the end of the Hundred Years War in 1453, the kings of En... more Between the Treaty of Paris in 1259 and the end of the Hundred Years War in 1453, the kings of England claimed dominion over a wide range of territories in both the British Isles and continental Europe, and the existence, and attempts to preserve, this empire were major features of late-medieval politics, society and culture. This new collection of essays reflects the geographical and thematic range of this phenomenon and, in the tradition of the Harlaxton symposia, takes a distinctively interdisciplinary approach to the topic through contributions focusing on historical, literary, linguistic and visual materials and associated methodologies. Grouped into four thematic sections, a series of original and innovative studies explore aspects of 'Empire, dynasty and identity', 'Regional responses to empire', 'Networks and communications' and 'The empire in retrospect and prospect'. A question running through the collection, and brought into concentrated focus in a major conceptual essay by the editors, is the meaning and meaningfulness of 'empire', both for those who inhabited the Plantagenet dominions in the later Middle Ages and for modern scholars interrogating the dimensions of the imperial experience in comparative contexts.

Published papers by Peter Crooks

English Ireland may not have been set apart entirely from political developments in late-medieval... more English Ireland may not have been set apart entirely from political developments in late-medieval Europe, but neither were its politics without their own distinctive flavour. Two of the most familiar structural features of Irish politics in the centuries after the English invasion are the island’s status as a lordship separate from, but dependent upon, the English Crown; and the division of the island into two peoples. Historians seek to understand and explain dependency and division by describing Ireland as a classic colonial situation. The problem with the colonial paradigm is not that it is wrong, but that, by itself, it explains too much and too little. What is most interesting about Ireland as a specimen of European political ideas in action is that the characteristics of dependency and division sat awkwardly –  indeed, sat increasingly awkwardly – in the evolving thought-world of late-medieval Europe. This was the era when the ‘state’ was emerging as something more than an idea and was beginning to coalesce with conceptions of nationhood. As Andrea Ruddick has shown, the kingdom of England was being conceptualized in the late Middle Ages as a defined physical space that supplied the homeland of a distinct people.  How, then, was one to define the status of those of the king’s English lieges who resided outside the realm yet claimed the liberties of freeborn Englishmen as their birth right? Since the king could not perform his office in person, how much of his sovereign authority devolved upon his representative in Ireland, who took an oath of office based upon the coronation oath? What were the king’s duties, whether of care or correction, towards the native inhabitants of Ireland whom the settlers had displaced and disenfranchised? And finally – a question prior to all of these – by what right did the monarch of England claim to rule Ireland in the first place?
2017 'Comital Ireland, 1333–1534' (for publication in David Crouch and Hugh Doherty, eds., The Earl in Medieval Britain (forthcoming).
2016. ‘The Ascent and Descent of Desmond under Lancaster and York’, in Peter Crooks and Seán Duffy (eds), The Geraldines and Medieval Ireland: The Making of a Myth, pp 233–63. Dublin, Four Courts Press.
2016. (with David Green and W. Mark Ormrod), ‘The Plantagenets and Empire in the Late Middle Ages’, in Peter Crooks, David Green and W. Mark Ormrod, The Plantagenet Empire, 1259–1453, pp 1–34. Donnington: Shaun Tyas.
Discernible across the flux of history is a persistent trend: the proclivity of human groups to e... more Discernible across the flux of history is a persistent trend: the proclivity of human groups to establish large-scale and durable political formations that rule over subject populations of different ethnicities, religions and cultures—in short, to build empires. On this narrow point, scholars appear to have achieved consensus. 1 But having gained power, usually through violent conquest, how did empires rule over different peoples across vast expanses of space and time? Or to recalibrate the question with the particular concerns of the present volume in mind: how did relatively small numbers of imperial bureaucrats govern large numbers of subordinated peoples? Dane Kennedy has aptly described this as 'one of the most persistent conundrums to arise from the study of Western Imperialism'. 2 Indeed, we can amplify his observation: this administrative sleight-of-hand is a conundrum of world history. It is also a matter with an urgent contemporary resonance. The past decade has witnessed a surge of work on the subject of empire inspired by what might be termed the 'imperial turn' in contemporary world affairs. Much of this literature swirls around a deceptively simple question: 'what is an empire?' Any satisfactory answer must take account of political structures and forms of governance—of how real empires actually ran. This book represents a collaborative effort to advance our understanding of these issues by exploring the power and limits of bureaucracy in historical empires across a broad canvas, from ancient Rome to the dismantling of European empires after World War II.
‘No Caesar or Charlemagne ever presided over a dominion so peculiar’, exclaimed Benjamin Disraeli... more ‘No Caesar or Charlemagne ever presided over a dominion so peculiar’, exclaimed Benjamin Disraeli in a speech of April 1878 on what he imagined to be the singular diversity of the nineteenth-century British empire.  But what about the Plantagenets? In the later Middle Ages, the Plantagenet kings of England ruled, or claimed to rule, a consortium of insular and continental possessions that extended well outside the kingdom of England itself. At various times between the treaty of Paris in 1259 and the expulsion of the English from France (other than the Pale of Calais) in 1453, those claims to dominion stretched to Scotland in the north, Wales and Ireland in the west, Aquitaine (or, more specifically, Gascony) in the south of France, and a good deal else in between. By the standards of the ‘universal empires’ of antiquity or the globe-girdling empires of the modern era, the late-medieval English ‘empire’ was a small-scale affair. It was no less heterogeneous for its relatively modest size. Rather it was a motley aggregation of hybrid settler colonies gained by conquest, and lands (mostly within the kingdom of France) claimed by inheritance though held by the sword. The constitutional relationship of the constituent parts to the crown of England was vaguely defined. There were marked differences in law and custom between the dominions, and variations in the legal status of the king’s subjects.  Across—indeed within—the dominions, administration was geographically fragmented, and there were marked modulations in the intensity of government.  Given all the diversity and flux, one might well query whether ‘empire’ is the appropriate word at all. 
This essay starts from the assumption that it is the very peculiarity of the wider realm of the Plantagenet monarchs that makes it typical when considered in comparative terms as an empire.  Among the structures that provided a degree of cohesion more than sufficient to warrant the ascription of that label was the royal bureaucracy.  The ‘transnational’ nature of this bureaucracy, and its role in creating a political culture and a shared imperial ‘space’, are key themes in the pages that follow. A second theme, paradoxically, is the brittleness of that same bureaucracy. The overseas empire of the Plantagenets was unusual in the late Middle Ages for its capacity to mobilise resources and co-ordinate action across geographically dispersed territories. By comparison, the Catalan overseas ‘empire’ of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries has been shown to be a chimera.  And yet, for all the sophistication of its military and bureaucratic apparatus, the administrative reach of England’s medieval empire was frequently beyond its grasp. Many of the lands that came into Plantagenet possession, whether through inheritance or conquest or a combination of the two, were subsequently lost—sometimes wrested away in wars of re-conquest (as occurred in Scotland and France), sometimes lost by piecemeal nibbling at the edges (as occurred across much of Ireland). The final part of the chapter seeks to show that an explanation for this brittleness must take account of the markedly different attitudes of officialdom towards the various peoples subject to the English crown. The key question is not to what extent was the English ‘official mind’ willing to devolve power upon local elites in general, but rather which particular ethnic groups were deemed sufficiently responsible and civilized to exercise the offices of government, and how did the ‘rule of difference’ constrain the Plantagenets’ exercise of power across their empire.
From Seán Duffy (ed.), Princes, prelates and poets in medieval Ireland: essays in honour of Katha... more From Seán Duffy (ed.), Princes, prelates and poets in medieval Ireland: essays in honour of Katharine Simms (Dublin, Four Courts Press, 2013), pp 159 - 184. Notes: [includes editions of East Riding of Yorkshire County Record Office (Beverley), DDX 152/50; British Library, Cotton Titus B XI, nos. 31 and 46; National Archives of the U.K., PRO SC 1/43/176.]
Felix M. Larkin and N. M. Dawson (eds.), Lawyers, the Law and History: Irish legal History Society Discourses and Other Papers, 2006–2011 (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2013), 281–309, 2013
Reconstructing the past: the case of the medieval Irish chancery rolls PE TE R CRO OKS * As we st... more Reconstructing the past: the case of the medieval Irish chancery rolls PE TE R CRO OKS * As we stood near the gate there was a loud shattering explosion … The munitions block and a portion of Headquarters block went up in flames and smoke … The yard was littered with chunks of masonry and smouldering records; pieces of white paper were gyrating in the upper air like seagulls. The explosion seemed to give an extra push to roaring orange flames which formed patterns across the sky. Fire was fascinating to watch; it had a spell like running water. Flame sang and conducted its own orchestra simultaneously. It can't be long now, I thought, until the real noise comes.
2012. ‘Constructing a “Laboratory for Empire”: Colonial Ireland from the Statute of Kilkenny to Poynings Law’, SHISO [Japanese Intellectual Journal], no. 1063, pp 9–43.
S. Duffy (ed.), Medieval Dublin X (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2010), pp 299–311, 2010
Previously unpublished article discovered among unsorted papers of Professor Otway-Ruthven, Trini... more Previously unpublished article discovered among unsorted papers of Professor Otway-Ruthven, Trinity College Dublin. Includes a bibliographical note by P. Crooks on developments in medieval Irish urban history c. 1980-2010.
Studia Hibernica 35 (2009) 167–86, 2009
Review article of the following: THREE ARMIES IN BRITAIN: THE IRISH CAMPAIGN OF RICHARD II AN... more Review article of the following:

THREE ARMIES IN BRITAIN: THE IRISH CAMPAIGN OF RICHARD II AND THE USURPATION OF HENRY IV, 1397–1399. By Douglas Biggs. Pp xvi + 295, illus. Leiden: Brill, 2006. €110 hardback (History of Warfare, vol. 39).

INQUISITIONS AND EXTENTS OF MEDIEVAL IRELAND. Edited by PaulDryburgh and Brendan Smith.Pp vi, 290. Kew: List and Index Society, 2007. Distributed to subscribers: £17 members, £22.50 non-members paperback (List and Index Society, vol. 320).

DE COURCY: ANGLO-NORMANS IN IRELAND, ENGLAND AND FRANCE IN THE ELEVENTH AND TWELFTH CENTURIES. Pp 205, illus. By Steve Flanders. Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2008. €55 hardback.

IRELAND AND WALES IN THE MIDDLE AGES. Edited by Karen Jankulak and Jonathan M. Wooding. Pp 296.Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2007. €55 hardback.

MEDIEVAL IRELAND: TERRITORIAL, POLITICAL AND ECONOMIC DIVISIONS. By Paul MacCotter. Pp 320, illus. Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2008. €55 hardback.

MANX KINGSHIP IN ITS IRISH SEA SETTING, 1187–1229: KING RÖGNVALDR AND THE CROVAN DYNASTY. Pp 254, illus. By R. Andrew McDonald. Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2007. €55 hardback.

IRELAND AND THE ENGLISH WORLD IN THE LATE MIDDLE AGES: ESSAYS IN HONOUR OF ROBIN FRAME. Pp xii + 241. Edited by Brendan Smith. Basingstoke: Palgrave MacMillan, 2009. £50 hardback.

THE ANNALS OF IRELAND BY FRIAR JOHN CLYN. Edited by Bernadette Williams. Pp 303. Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2007. €65 hardback.

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