Investigations of a Dog

Previously I wrote about how Henry Marten criticized the Earl of Essex for keeping his army in winter quarters at Windsor in December 1642. It took a whole post just to establish what Marten (probably) said. But did he know what he was talking about, and was the criticism fair?

Henry Marten had no military experience before the outbreak of the First Civil War. That didn’t automatically mean that he was going to be inept. Oliver Cromwell had no previous experience of war either, and he turned out to be very good at it (as I pointed out here, not a super-special genius, but he could hold his own against professional soldiers of similar rank). Marten seems to have been strongly opposed to the monarchy and the House of Lords from very early in his political career, and in 1642 he was a very active supporter of the parliamentary war effort. He used his inherited wealth to pay spies, which along with his extravagant personal spending eventually bankrupted him (Barber, Revolutionary Rogue, 4-5, 36, 39-40). His first military command was as governor of Reading but he abandoned the town without fighting when the King’s army approached in November 1642 (Waters, Henry Marten, 17). This fact alone makes it look a bit hypocritical of him to complain about Essex not fighting, but that wouldn’t undermine the point if it was a good argument.

Marten’s basic facts were correct: there was action in Yorkshire and Devon while Essex’s army was inactive at Windsor. But he wasn’t comparing like with like. Most of the forces which were fighting in the north and west were very new. Cornwall wasn’t secured for the King until the Cornish rising in early October, and Hopton’s first (failed) attempt to invade Devon was only made in November (Stoyle, Soldiers and Strangers, 40, 43). Lord Fairfax, Parliament’s commander in the West Riding of Yorkshire, had agreed to a neutrality pact in September and didn’t start raising his army until October. Newcastle’s ‘popish’ army didn’t invade Yorkshire until 1 December (Hopper, Black Tom, 26-8, 36). These forces were only just starting their first campaigns when Essex had finished his. Parliament had started raising its main army in June 1642 and appointed Essex as general in July. He set out with the army in September, advancing to Worcester and fighting a cavalry skirmish at Powicke Bridge. On 23 October Essex’s army fought the King’s main army at Edgehill in the first major battle of the First Civil War. After a few days of rest at Northampton, Essex rushed his army south to block the King’s approach to London. He arrived just in time, and although some of his infantry were wiped out by Prince Rupert at Brentford, the main body of the army linked up with the London Trained Bands at Turnham Green. The King decided not to fight when the weight of numbers was against him and retreated to Oxford. It was only after this that Essex settled at Windsor. His army had been on campaign for three months, fighting battles before the northern and western forces had done anything, or even before they existed. A period of rest and recovery in a safe place was probably necessary.

Even when they were completed, the armies fighting in Yorkshire and Devon were significantly smaller than the main armies in the Thames Valley. The best recent calculations put both armies at Edgehill at similar strengths with about 10,000 infantry and 2,500 cavalry each (Graham, ‘Earl of Essex‘, 282, 288-9). They also had large artillery trains. Newcastle’s army was the most comparable, but at 8,000 men in total was still only 2/3 the size. The remaining forces were even weaker. Hopton’s Cornish army was only 3,000 strong, and Lord Fairfax had only 2,000 men (Stoyle, Soldiers and Strangers, 43; Hopper, Black Tom, 36). Moving and quartering were much easier with a small army than with a big one, especially when rain made the roads muddy and cold made it more necessary for soldiers to sleep indoors. Transporting heavy artillery was a particular problem if there was too much mud. So why not leave it behind? Essex and the King had both made their winter quarters in strong defensive positions. Essex’s headquarters were at Windsor castle, and the King was at Oxford, safely situated between two rivers. If either army advanced it would need heavy artillery if the other wouldn’t come out and fight in the open. Since advancing, especially with an artillery train, was very difficult it made sense for both armies to stay in their winter quarters and prepare for the next year, which is what they did. It’s also possible that Essex’s army was suffering from desertion and shortages of money and horses (although the jury is still out on Parliament’s financial situation after Edgehill), but even without that there was no good reason to expect the army to advance in the middle of winter.

This week the UK National Archives announced that they will be closing the Your Archives wiki in September 2012. Existing content will be preserved as HTML snapshots and kept available on the government web archive, but it won’t be running on MediaWiki so search, edit and export won’t work. Along with TNA’s other online resources, Your Archives will be replaced by the new Discovery service (now in beta), which will integrate the Catalogue, DocumentsOnline and user-created content, along with a powerful search engine and an API so that third parties can query the data (so no more need for Python scripts to scrape data out of the HTML). It’s not yet clear exactly what kind of content they will and won’t let us add, and I suspect that the scope will be narrower than Your Archives, but better integration should make up for that. One of the biggest problems with Your Archives was that getting incoming links from the Catalogue was very clunky and getting incoming links from DocumentsOnline was impossible (so people browsing DocumentsOnline had no easy way of knowing if a transcript of the document was available). This was a limitation of the Catalogue and DocumentsOnline as much as a limitation of MediaWiki, but in any case it’s good that they’ve solved it.

The announcement claims that ‘online technologies have changed rapidly in that time, and the expectations of our users have also changed’ but I’d say it’s more that TNA’s attitude to user-created content has changed. Back in 2007 they still seemed to be suspicious of it and had to keep it quarantined away from their official website. Now they want to bring it into the catalogue so that everyone can find it more easily. I think Your Archives must have played a part in bringing about that change of policy by showing that user-created content is nothing to be scared of, and that closer integration of all TNA online resources is absolutely necessary. If that’s the case then Your Archives has been a successful experiment. TNA also seem to be getting better at open access and re-usability. In 2007 I complained that the terms of use were too restrictive because they didn’t allow re-use of content, but now they seem to be moving towards putting material under the Open Government Licence, which is pretty much the same as a Creative Commons attribution licence (see draft terms of use for the new service).

I’ve been contributing to Your Archives on and off for over four years. According to the log of my contributions, the first page I created was a transcript of a prisoner of war report on 27 October 2007. Up to now I’ve made 3,410 edits, including creating the third most popular page (which has had over 80,000 views – my ‘proper’ academic publications will never be that widely read). Now as a community moderator I’ll be helping to manage the transition by tidying up existing content and ensuring that it will be as accessible as possible in the archived snapshot version. I’ll also be exploring the possibilities of MediaWiki outside Your Archives. It’s still an immensely powerful and useful piece of software. I used it to draft my book and it worked really well for that, which shows that wiki doesn’t have to mean letting just anyone edit, or even any kind of collaboration at all. I really want to find out how to use Semantic MediaWiki and what it can do. It is kind of sad that Your Archives is coming to an end, but that’s just sentimentality. If things don’t change they’ll stay as they are, and who’d want that?

On 5 December 1642 Henry Marten (MP for Berkshire and a well-known radical extremist) made a speech in the House of Commons which criticized the Earl of Essex, commander of Parliament’s main army, which was in winter quarters at Windsor. But what did he say? Several books in my collection mention the incident but they don’t always say the same thing.

Here are the references and quotes. References in square brackets are the sources cited by the author:

J. H. Hexter, The Reign of King Pym (Cambridge, MA, 1941), p. 110 [British Library, Harleian manuscript 164, f. 243]:

The cry without the walls found echoes in the House of Commons, as some of the fiery spirits began to cry down the Lord General. Martin attacked him openly, contrasting the military successes in the north and west with the Earl’s immobility near London in December. “It is summer in Devonshire, summer in Yorkshire and only winter at Windsor,” where the general was in quarters. Hoyle seconded Martin hinting that Essex’s slowness and carelessness would ruin the kingdom. Suspicions of the Earl’s integrity, groundless as they were, “had already taken birth”…

Vernon F. Snow, Essex the Rebel: the Life of Robert Devereux, the Third Earl of Essex 1591-1646 (Lincoln, Nebraska, 1970), p. 349 [Hexter, King Pym, p. 110]:

The war party in the Lower House and London disapproved of Essex’s reluctance to take the initiative and give battle. Radical Henry Marten disparaged Essex when he asserted, “It is summer in Devonshire, summer in Yorkshire and cold winter in Windsor.”

Ivor Waters, Henry Marten and the Long Parliament (Chepstow, 1976), p. 17 [nothing]:

Essex delayed in Windsor, and on December 5th. Henry Marten stood up in the House to describe the royalist victories all over England and attack the dilatory Captain-General who, he alleged, “would have it was summer in Devonshire, summer in Yorkshire, and early winter at Windsor”.

Sarah Barber, A Revolutionary Rogue: Henry Marten and the English Republic (Stroud, 2000): doesn’t mention the incident at all, which is kind of strange for a biography of Henry Marten.

Ian Gentles, The English Revolution and the Wars in the Three Kingdoms, 1638-1652 (London, 2007), p. 159 [BL Harl. 164, f. 243]:

The almost unrelieved gloom induced by these despatches from the north, south and south-west prompted the hard-line war party member Henry Marten, ‘whose custom it was to bark at everybody’, to voice the first public dissatisfaction with the Earl of Essex’s leadership. Referring to his stationary presence at Windsor Marten declared rhetorically ‘that all these miseries proceeded from his slowness… It was summer in Devonshire, summer in Yorkshire and only winter at Windsor; and therefore desired that we might speedily send to the Lord General to move forward.’

Harleian manuscript 164 is the diary of Sir Simonds D’Ewes, MP for Sudbury in Suffolk. He usually took a moderate conservative position and opposed anything to do with fighting the civil war. This is my transcript of the relevant passage:

Mr Henry Marten stood upp whose custome it was to barke at everie bodie & fell upon the Earle of Essex Lord generall being at windsor: saying, that all these miseries proceeded from his slownes, that wee saw it was summer in Devonshire, summer in yorkeshire & onlie winter at Windsor; & therefore desired that wee might speedelie send to the Lord General to move forward. Alderman Hoile of yorke seconded him; & saied that unless the saied Lord Generall used more care & speed the kingdome would be ruined: but S[i]r Gilbert Gerrard & others excused him that what hee did was by advise of a councell of warre & soe the matter was laied aside for the present

So Ian Gentles wins for quoting D’Ewes most accurately. The way Hexter put the phrase in speech marks and changed the tense of the verb made it look like a direct quote of Marten’s actual words when it wasn’t. Snow followed Hexter but changed ‘only winter’ (which was correct) to ‘cold winter’ for no apparent reason. Waters changed it again to ‘early winter’ (or were these typesetting errors that were missed at the proof stage?). We can correct these errors by comparing with what D’Ewes wrote, but we still don’t have direct access to the words Marten actually used. Other sources don’t help with this.

The incident is also mentioned in the diary of Lawrence Whitaker, MP for Okehampton in Devon (British Library, Add. 31116, f. 14v). After recording reports of atrocities committed by the Cornish army, he wrote:

It was Ordered [tha]t these Relac[i]ons should be sent to [th]e Lo[rd] Gen[er]all, & to desire him to Consider whether it were not high time for [th]e Army to move, w[hi]ch now was, & for a fortnight had beene lying still at Windsor

The Commons Journal never records speeches so there’s no trace there. According to my notes, Walter Yonge’s diary (BL, Add. 18777, f. 81v.) doesn’t add much to the Commons Journal, although his writing is extremely difficult to read (I’m usually good at palaeography, but everyone has their limits).

Every historian I’ve looked at prefers D’Ewes’s account, which is understandable because he gives more detail than Whitaker. But they all omit one part: according to D’Ewes, Essex was defended by his ally Sir Gilbert Gerard. Leaving this out gives the impression that Essex was more unpopular than he actually was. He had friends as well as enemies. Hexter and Snow were generally sympathetic to Essex, and the quote from Hexter above asserts that the aspersions were ‘groundless’, but they both left out some evidence that would have supported their views. As Gentles points out, this was the first time that Essex’s competence had been questioned by someone on the parliamentary side. At this time it was still quite unusual.

Overall this isn’t a very important point but it shows that if something is in quote marks in a peer reviewed publication that doesn’t guarantee that it’s an accurate quote, and if it is an accurate rendition of the quoted text, there might be something interesting next to it in the source that it came from. Footnotes (or other methods of citing sources) don’t automatically give a claim authority, but they make it possible to check. That’s why they’re important.

The future has taken root in the present. It is done.

Or in other words:

No more forever FINISHED ABANDONED COMPLETE DONE FINAL LAST FINISHED We finished it. I finished it for you.

Yesterday I sent off the final typescript of my book to Ashgate. So it’s all over (apart from proofreading, indexing and then promoting it when it comes out). The title is now Horses, People and Parliament in the English Civil War: Extracting Resources and Constructing Allegiance, and the ISBN is 978-1-4094-2093-4. There were more things I could have done to make it better, but you have to draw the line somewhere, and as it ended up at 99,037 words there wasn’t space for anything else. The perfect is the enemy of the good, and I think I’ve written something that’s good enough to kick ass. Determinism and essentialism don’t stand a chance.

So now what?

I’m going to watch every episode of Thundercats.

And probably some more sensible things too, but my plans are in the air because I’m waiting to hear details of some possible paid work. Expect more blog posts (and maybe better ones too) than I’ve managed so far this year.

Also congratulations to Brett Holman, who has just got a book contract from Ashgate. As one of them finishes another one starts…

I promised more posts, but I didn’t promise that they’d be about history or that they’d be any good. As well as writing a book I’ve been watching some rubbish 80s TV. You can see some complete episodes of He-Man and She-Ra on YouTube. On one level this is harmless fun that you don’t have to think about, but there are also plenty of Fedex arrows that can be spotted without having to try too hard. Obviously with something called He-Man there are going to be gender issues, and there are going to be even more gender issues when they make what is basically (and almost certainly intended to be) ‘He-Man for girls’. The very existence of She-Ra signifies that He-Man itself wasn’t for girls and they weren’t supposed to be interested in it. That’s already a big ideological assumption, because why shouldn’t girls be interested in violent hypermasculine men, and conversely, why should boys be interested in that? There’s a whole other post that could be written on how the writers mistreated Teela, but for now let’s take it for granted that this is all ‘just how it was’ in the early 80s. Taking He-Man as a starting point, what does the realization of a ‘He-Man for girls’ tell us about how gender ideology was (or wasn’t) contested in that period?

The first thing to note is that the creators were really trying to avoid some of the more obvious stereotypes. He-Man was a very stereotypically muscular hypermasculine man, like a cross between Conan and Superman. A similarly hyperfeminine mirror image would be something like Barbie, but She-Ra is usually as strong, active and violent as He-Man (when I say violent I should point out that being 80s cartoon series aimed at fairly young children, the violence is quite gentle, but they’re still a whole lot more violent than My Little Pony or the Care Bears). The devil is in the detail. If we carefully compare the standard opening sequences of an episode of He-Man and an episode of She-Ra, we can see the subtle semiotics of gender differences at work.

First of all, the music is noticeably different. He-Man has a stirring orchestral theme but She-Ra gets some cheesy synth-pop that could have been produced by Stock, Aitken and Waterman.

Almost immediately we can see that She-Ra most definitely isn’t equal to He-Man:

I am Adam, prince of Eternia…

Adam/He-Man is an important person in his own right.

I am Adora, He-Man’s twin sister…

Adora/She-Ra is defined in relation to a man.

Fabulous secret powers were revealed to me…

Adam/He-Man has powers, which is not altogether surprising considering that he’s a superhero. Presumably his sister has the same powers too.

Fabulous secrets were revealed to me…

Oh no, she only has secrets. Despite the full title of the series being She-Ra: Princess of Power, the writers go out of their way to avoid Adora/She-Ra using the word ‘power’ during the opening sequence. The emphasis on secrets also connects with the stereotype that women are mysterious and impossible for men to understand.

the day I held aloft my magic sword and said: BY THE POWER OF GRAYSKULL!

He-Man has power and Castle Grayskull serves him.

the day I held aloft my sword and said: FOR THE HONOR OF GRAYSKULL!

She-Ra doesn’t have power, and she serves Castle Grayskull.

When Adam turns into He-Man he gets struck by lightning and looks active and confident.

When Adora turns into She-Ra she’s surrounded by swirls of sparkly glitter and looks more passive and slightly bemused.

Then they shout:

I HAVE THE POWEEERRRRR!

He-Man’s still got the power.

I AM SHE-RAAAAAAA!

She-Ra still doesn’t got the power.

Then each one points hir sword at hir pet to transform it into a war mount.

He-Man points the tip of the sword at Cringer, and the magical beam shoots out of the tip. How much more phallic can you get? (Quite a bit more in Thundercats actually, where the Sword of Omens grows in size as Lion-O shouts ‘Thunder… thunder… thunder… thundercats HOOOOOOO!)

She-Ra holds her sword upright with the tip out of the top of the shot. The magical beam comes from an oval stone set into the hilt, which kind of resembles a vagina. (But then so does the Eye of Thundera, so I’m not sure what to make of that.)

He-Man rides an armoured tiger, which he describes as ‘the mighty Battlecat’. He then says ‘and I became He-Man, the most powerful man in the universe’ and punches the camera (just like Jack Regan in the titles of the fourth series of The Sweeney) before telling us who else shares his secret and who his enemies are.

She-Ra rides a winged unicorn with pink trappings. She doesn’t say or do anything between the pet transformation and telling us who shares her secret and who her enemies are.

So before the story even starts we’re primed to see She-Ra as more feminine and less powerful. In fact the stories make it fairly clear that She-Ra is just as physically strong as He-Man. And she gets some extra powers too. But wait, these extra powers are healing and empathy, which are stereotypically feminine and would probably be seen as emasculating if He-Man had them. The paradox is that having more powers effectively makes She-Ra appear inferior. (We can also infer that she has the supernatural power to stop anyone from ever seeing up her absurdly tiny and strangely physics-defying skirt, but that’s probably not ‘canon’.)

It could be worse (just google for the feminist reaction to the horrendous misogyny in the recent DC comics reboot) but it could be better. Looking at the relatively recent past should remind us that gender and patriarchy aren’t fixed or natural, but that we’re not making inevitable progress against them either.

More filler this week as I’m too busy to write anything intellectual. As it’s Remembrance Sunday, here’s a selection of WW1 pictures from my random ebay acquisitions. Click the thumbnails to see full size versions at Flickr. First of all I bought another photo of the frisky horse that I posted here. Not much need for an epic Errol Morris style investigation as I think it’s pretty obvious what order they go in.

Before:

After:

London Division horse show, Overath, Germany, 1919. Even during the war divisions and corps often held horse shows to encourage the men to look after their horses as well as possible. This was important because infantry and artillery depended very heavily on draught horses throughout the war. This one’s really worth viewing at full size as there’s so much detail.

This looks like two women in the uniform of the Scottish Horse. It apparently wasn’t unusual for women to dress up in men’s uniforms to have their photos taken.

A mounted artillery driver, photographed in Edinburgh. Photos like this cause lots of confusion because people get the idea that their ancestors were in the cavalry and then go off looking in the wrong places and asking the wrong questions.

Girls on ponies watching a Royal Artillery column. Not strictly WW1 as it looks like it was taken in the 1920s or 1930s. The Royal Field Artillery wasn’t fully mechanized until 1939. This photo captures the period when horses were making the transition from useful work in the army and economy to a hobby seen as mostly for girls.

From now until the end of 13th November 2011, Ancestry.co.uk is offering free access to First World War British Army service records and medal cards. They’ve also just finished digitizing Silver War Badge rolls, but these aren’t included in the free stuff.

The Horse as Cultural Icon: The Real and the Symbolic Horse in the Early Modern World is a new collection of essays about early-modern horses edited by Peter Edwards, Karl Enenkel and Elspeth Graham, and published by Brill. It should be out next week and it’s already available for preorder on Amazon US (if you’ve got loads of money) but I can’t find it on Amazon UK yet.

I’ve got a chapter in it about the military and social value of horses, mostly in early-modern England but it also touches on the middle ages and the First World War. It’s basically exploring Bruce Boehrer’s idea that horses were socially devalued in early-modern England. It includes an alternative narrative of cavalry warfare, a discussion of how horse ownership and cavalry service were (or weren’t) related to elite social status, and a look at the cultural myths of cavalry and chivalry in literature.

The full contents are:

1. Greg Bankoff, ‘Big Men, Small Horses: Ridership, Social Standing and Environmental Adaptation in the Early Modern Philippines’, pp. 99-120.
2. Pia F. Cuneo, ‘Visual Aids: Equestrian Iconography and the Training of Horse, Rider and Reader’, pp. 71-97.
3. Louise Hill Curth, ‘‘The Most Excellent of Animal Creatures’: Health Care for Horses in Early Modern England’, in pp. 217-40.
4. Peter Edwards, ‘Image and Reality: Upper Class Perceptions of the Horse in Early Modern England’, pp. 281-306.
5. Amanda Eisemann, ‘Forging Iron and Masculinity: Farrier Trade Identities in Early Modern Germany’, pp. 377-402.
6. Jennifer Flaherty, ‘‘Know Us by Our Horses’: Equine Imagery in Shakespeare’s Henriad’, pp. 307-25.
7. Elspeth Graham, ‘The Duke of Newcastle’s ‘Love For Good Horses’: An Exploration of Meanings’, pp. 37-69.
8. Ian F. MacInnes, ‘Altering a Race of Jades: Horse Breeding and Geohumoralism in Shakespeare’, pp. 175-89.
9. Richard Nash, ‘‘Beware a Bastard Breed’: Notes Towards a Revisionist History of the Thorough bred Racehorse’, pp. 191-216.
10. Gavin Robinson, ‘The Military Value of Horses and the Social Value of the Horse in Early Modern England’, pp. 351-76.
11. Elizabeth Anne Socolow, ‘Letting Loose the Horses: Sir Philip Sidney’s Exordium to The Defence of Poesie’, pp. 121-42.
12. Sandra Swart, ‘‘Dark Horses’: The Horse in Africa in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries’, pp. 241-60.
13. Elizabeth M. Tobey, ‘The Legacy of Federico Grisone’, pp. 143-71.
14. Andrea Tonni, ‘The Renaissance Studs of the Gonzagas of Mantua’, pp. 261-78.
15. Elaine Walker, ‘‘The Author of their Skill’: Human and Equine Understanding in the Duke of Newcastle’s ‘New Method’’, pp. 327-50.

The blogroll is back again and Google Reader shared items have gone because Google is about to destroy the sharing features in Reader. This is apparently an attempt to force us to switch to Google Plus but in my case it just means that I’ll switch to Liferea, which is a perfectly adequate RSS reader from the Ubuntu repository. I’ll miss the sharing but I’ll also have more time to do constructive things, and I’ll be slightly less dependent on Google services, so it’s not all bad.

Dealing with this has taken up the time I was going to use to write a proper post, so here are some acquisitions instead. Remember there’s still another week to take advantage of the Ashgate sale.

1. Frances E. Dolan, Whores of Babylon Catholicism, gender, and seventeenth-century print culture (Notre Dame, Ind., 2005).
2. Peter Doyle, British Army Cap Badges of the First World War (2010).
3. Dagmar Freist, Governed by Opinion: Politics, Religion and the Dynamics of Communication in Stuart London, 1637-45, illustrated edition. (1997).
4. Lien Luu, Immigrants and the industries of London, 1500-1700 (Aldershot, 2004).
5. Brian Manning, ed., Politics, Religion and the English Civil War (London, 1973).
6. Jason McElligott and David L. (David Lawrence) Smith, eds., Royalists and Royalism During the English Civil Wars (Cambridge, 2007).
7. Mark Philp, ed., Resisting Napoleon: The British Response to the Threat of Invasion, 1797-1815, illustrated edition. (2006).
8. Nehemiah Wallington, The Notebooks of Nehemiah Wallington, 1618-1654: A Selection, David Booy (ed.) (Aldershot, 2007).

Today this blog has made it to five years, although there have been some significant gaps so it’s not exactly five years of continuous blogging. My book has now passed peer review and I’ve got until the end of November to make the final revisions, so I’ll be able to post a bit more frequently now. For now here are some quick links and random thoughts:

• Brett Holman has made a free ebook version of his series of posts on the Sudeten crisis. Highly recommended: going through newspaper reports day by day gives a very different perspective on events.
• TARDIS Eruditorum is blog which offers intelligent and entertaining critiques of Doctor Who stories. It started working through them in chronological order from An Unearthly Child and is now into the Tom Baker years. There’s also a forthcoming book compiling expanded versions of all the Hartnell era stuff.
• Meanwhile Andrew Hickey has just started blogging his new book about Doctor Who, and has nearly finished another one about The Monkees.
• I’ve finally got the hang of the British Library’s computer ordering system for manuscripts, but I wish they had card readers like the PRO. I still don’t get what makes the difference between select manuscripts and normal ones. It seems completely arbitrary.
• I’ve found out that I have ancestors from the Isle of Man who can apparently be traced back to the 17th century. Plenty of material for future blog posts there.
• I’m not sure what to make of this Daily Telegraph report about a jug supposedly made from the skin of Oliver Cromwell’s horse. I’m usually sceptical about Cromwell relics, not least because it seems unlikely that puritans would have approved of something so idolatrous. Also the names of warhorses in the civil wars are almost never mentioned in contemporary records.
• The Common Swings has a new serialized story in progress involving a mysterious 1970s TV series.
• The National Archives are planning to digitize all of the WW1 war diaries in WO 95 and are looking for volunteers to help sort them out.
• Bench Grass continues to be brilliant.