Investigations of a Dog

Following on from yesterday’s post, here’s an added bonus: some paragraphs that I’ve just cut from the article I’m working on. I’ve decided not to take it too far into the debate over “determinism” and the outcome of the war because it’s not entirely relevant to what the article is really about, and I needed to lose some words somewhere. It’s also not very safe territory to be on, and I’ve changed my mind about some of this stuff since I wrote it, so I don’t necessarily believe everything that’s written below.

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When I set out on my PhD I was hoping to use the supply of horses to English Civil War armies as a case study to demonstrate how logistics influenced the outcome of the war. In the end it didn’t work out like that. The biggest problem was loss of royalist records. Because they lost the war there wasn’t much reason to keep their archives, and many officers burnt their papers before surrendering. It seems like a miracle that so many parliamentarian records survived the Restoration and ended up in the Public Records Office. This means that there’s a huge disparity in surviving administrative records that makes it difficult to compare both sides. The comparisons I could make weren’t very helpful to my original hypothesis. Where there was definite evidence of how the royalists got their horses it was quite similar to the methods used by parliament at the same time. Clutching at straws, I deduced that the royalists were unlikely to have been able to buy horses on the scale that parliament did in 1644-46 because they didn’t have similar tax revenues. That wasn’t a very safe assumption, and Martyn Bennett quite rightly demolished it during the viva (although the viva was actually a pleasant experience, and I passed with minimal corrections mostly consisting of commas and apostrophes!).

Ultimately there wasn’t much evidence that the royalists were suffering from a major shortage of horses at any crucial stages of the war. It wasn’t until the very end of the war in 1646 that royalist cavalry were making do with worn out or low quality horses. That makes it look like horse shortages were a consequence, not a cause, of defeat. So the study of horse supply doesn’t provide much evidence that finance, supply, or logistics contributed to royalist defeat. Malcolm Wanklyn would say, of course not, that’s far too determinist.

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Brett at Airminded has produced statistical evidence to show that Investigations of a Dog is the third most popular military history blog. It’s nice to be popular, but beware of the truth effect. As Brett says, the figures have their limitations, and a lot depends on how you define a military history blog. I’m all too aware that this could make me complacent. When I started this blog last year I worked really hard to build up a reputation, but recently I haven’t been posting much because I’ve been busy moving websites to a new server, setting up the Military History Carnival, writing an actual article for an actual real journal, and various other things. But when I haven’t got much to write about, I can always fall back on computer games…

Just after Christmas I wrote about Brothers In Arms: Road To Hill 30, a World War 2 first person shooter which is, unsurprisingly, an incremental improvement over Call of Duty. After finishing that (only on “normal” difficulty though — “authentic” must be insanely difficult!) I moved on to the next instalment: Earned In Blood. In a lot of ways it’s the incremental improvement over Road To Hill 30 which I was expecting, but the designers also did some surprising things with narrative.

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[EDIT: submissions are now open — e-mail them to me at mhc1@4-lom.com or use the submission form. Preferably posted after 1st March 2007. Carnival information page is now here, or see link on sidebar]

I’m back, having more or less successfully moved to a new server and upgraded from WordPress 2.0.9 to 2.1.2 (something seems to have gone wrong with character encoding during the move but I can live with it!).

I can now announce that the first Military History Carnival will be held here on Thursday 12th April. Once I’ve written the information page and added the carnival to Blog Carnival (probably by the end of tomorrow) submissions can begin.

I decided to go with Military History Carnival to show that military history can be broad and inclusive, and that the word “military” is nothing to be scared or ashamed of.

The cut-off date will be 1st January 2001, ie history will be defined as the 20th century and earlier.

The carnival will continue to be held around the middle of every month for as long as I can get hosts. The exact date is up to the host. It should be as close to the 15th as possible, but it will probably be more convenient to do it at the weekend before or after. (Ironically, 15th April is at a weekend but I’ll be away at a conference.)

Could anyone who wants to host e-mail me and say whether you have any preference for which month you do it.

No proper posts this week because I’m busy sorting out a change of webservers. I now have new webspace (which is better and cheaper than my current host) so I’ll be moving this site later in the week. The address will stay exactly the same but there will probably be some downtime while DNS records update. Once everything’s back to normal I’ll be making an announcement about the military history carnival.

Yesterday I went to the Institute of Historical Research to hear Peter Burke talking about “Strengths and Weaknesses of Cultural History 1980-2006″. Judging by how full the Pollard room was this was a major event. I thought I might be out of my depth there, but as it turned out I didn’t hear anything that surprised me or that I couldn’t understand. The paper was a very general overview of cultural history which did pretty much what the title suggests. I can’t remember all the points because I wasn’t taking notes, but most of the suggested strengths and weaknesses were fairly obvious. I didn’t take part in the discussion at the time because it was already going on long enough and I wanted to get away (and also didn’t want to embarrass myself by asking stupid questions of course!), but other people asked some interesting questions. This post was going to be an attempt to summarise the paper, but it went off on various tangents.

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