Chapter 2 studies Scottish responses to English claims, illustrating a shift in Scottish views of independence from parallel demonstrations of imperial sovereignty via historical narratives to more radical notions of consensual acknowledgment of equivalence. My discussion moves from political texts such as the Instructiones for Scottish lawyers at the papal curia, The Declaration of Arbroath, and John Ireland’s The Meroure of Wyssdome, to Andrew of Wyntoun’s Orygynale Cronykil of Scotland, to two romances, John Barbour’s The Bruce and the anonymous Knightly Tale of Gologras and Gawain, and ends with John Mair’s Historia Maioris Britanniae. While some texts assert Scottish independence through existing sovereignty discourse, others, such as Gologras and Gawain, innovatively focus on mutual recognition freed from precedent. The fact that this obscure romance features one of the earliest recorded expressions of what we would call the modern doctrine of recognition reveals the benefits of comparative study across disciplines.

Britten’s relationship to his predecessors and contemporaries in the ‘English Musical Renaissance’ was complicated. He found the Royal College of Music parochial and amateurish, and was frustrated by composition lessons there with John Ireland, not least in comparison to his private study with Frank Bridge. He largely rejected the influence of English folk traditions and Tudor music important to the ‘pastoral school’, favoring the more cosmopolitan example of Bridge, and his own exploration of continental European modernism. Britten’s view of composers such as Vaughan Williams as insular and regressive has shaped the historiography of British music in ways that still reverberate today. Scholars have typically taken such attitudes at face value; but this obscures a more complex reality, in which the composer attempted to annex and reimagine, rather than simply reject, core achievements of his predecessors, incurring conceptual if not direct stylistic debts to them. In the case of Holst in particular, whom Britten came to embrace in later life, insufficient attention has been paid to this legacy.