Live At Lincoln
I’ll be giving a paper to the research seminar at Bishop Grosseteste University College, Lincoln, on Wednesday 14th November at 4pm. The paper is entitled “The Great Supply Chain of Being: Horses, People, and Networks of Authority in Civil War Essex”. I’m still not sure whether that’s a good title, but it’s a reaction against my “stuckist” phase when I hated puns and tried to make my paper titles as boring and descriptive as possible! The paper will be a fairly brief and accessible overview of some work in progress, which takes in military supply systems, authority, property rights, and the human/animal boundary. Abstract below, although the focus keeps changing as I rewrite it:
The right of humans to control and exploit the non-human was justified by the concept of the Great Chain of Being, which also reflected the hierarchical ideal of early-modern government and society. Much recent work has shown that this concept is inadequate as a model for analysing realities which were far more complex than the ideal. Grids and networks are now seen as better analogies for understanding what Michael Braddick and John Walter termed a “complex of hierarchies”. As King and Parliament raised armies, created new administrative structures, and sought legitimation, these hierarchies multiplied and the relationships between them became even more complex.
Horses were a vital resource for armies and economies, leading to conflicts over ownership. These conflicts can not simply be seen in terms of binary oppositions between military and civilian, or local and central. There were many different ways in which soldiers, administrators, and civilians negotiated power and property rights. Material contributions to the war effort ranged from voluntary contributions to requisitioning through military force. Even when arbitrary force was used, there was scope for choice and agency in strategies for seeking redress. Ultimately forced requisitioning proved to be inefficient and counter-productive. Parliament found that the consent and co-operation of property owners was vital. The war could only be won by resolving conflicts of interest and maintaining enough consensus for long enough to overcome the royalists.
While isolated from the main theatres of military operations, the county of Essex was a major contributor of horses, men, and money to the parliamentarian war effort. This was not simply determined by the dominance of pro-parliament puritans in county government. Authority still had to be negotiated both within and outside the county. This paper will explore experiences of war in Essex in 1642-45, demonstrating the complexity of networks of power, and how conflicts could arise within them and be resolved. The pressures of war revealed that even the distinction between man and beast was not as clear as the chain of being might suggest.
Comment by Zebee — 12:00 pm, 20 August 2007 [permanent link to this comment]
“sought legitimation”? Is there a reason “legitimacy” isn’t the right word?
Comment by Gavin Robinson — 6:24 pm, 20 August 2007 [permanent link to this comment]
To be honest I didn’t think about it much when I was writing the abstract. My choice of words was mostly determined by genre conventions. But now that I’ve thought about it there is a justification for the choice. Although “legitimacy” and “legitimation” are both similar nouns they don’t quite suggest the same meaning: “legitimacy” implies the state of being legitimate; “legitimation” implies the act of making legitimate. I prefer the latter in this context because I want to stress the constructed and contested nature of legitimacy: it wasn’t just there, it had to be negotiated. Nothing actually is absolutely or naturally legitimate or illegitimate. It all depends on what people think is legitimate.
Comment by mercurius politicus — 6:42 pm, 20 August 2007 [permanent link to this comment]
I assume “legitimation” is being used in its sociological sense. More generally, I’ll be interested to see the full paper if you feel able to publish it here! After the great swathe of local studies during the 1960s and 1970s, it’s about time that issues of local loyalty, administration and the provincial response to war were revisited with new perspectives. Are there other recent books/articles you know of that revisit particular areas with the sort of analytical perspective you’re taking?
Comment by Gavin Robinson — 9:15 am, 21 August 2007 [permanent link to this comment]
I’m mainly following in the footsteps of Michael Braddick, John Walter, Steve Hindle, and Andy Wood, who have all done a lot of work on power/authority and popular agency in early-modern England, although not all of it is specifically about the civil wars. John Walter’s book about the Colchester riots and Andy Wood’s article on the Derbyshire lead miners are particularly important, but still relatively little has been written and there’s plenty of scope for more. Although they’ve done some work on the middling sort, they’re mainly interested in the lower classes (whereas work on neutralism in the 1970s seems to have been mostly preoccupied with the gentry). There was also a special issue of History Workshop Journal in 2006 which focused on new approaches to the civil wars, but I haven’t read it yet.
The History of Parliament people have done a lot of detailed work on the development of parliament’s administrative system and the make-up of committees, but that tends to be focused on Westminster more than the provinces and has less to say about how committees interacted with ordinary people. They’re also firmly locked into the peace party vs war party paradigm, which might not be relevant outside Westminster. I’m very sympathetic to John Morrill’s view that these parties, if they existed at all, were small minorities even at Westminster, with most MPs not committed to either, and that the distinction was meaningless in the provinces.
Meanwhile, the animal stuff mostly comes from literary studies and cultural history, although Peter Edwards has an excellent new book – Horse And Man In Early Modern England – which combines those approaches with his empirical work on the horse trade.
What I’m trying to do is take an eclectic selection of approaches and combine them in a new way. I’m still not sure whether they all fit together comfortably. When I first had the idea I thought the chain of being was the perfect way of tying it all together, but now I have doubts about how important that idea was to most people in 17th century England. It’s still a useful rhetorical strategy though, and it’s easy to show that hierarchical thinking was dominant in this period, even if it was challenged sometimes.
Comment by Ross Mahoney — 3:37 pm, 21 August 2007 [permanent link to this comment]
Gavin – Sounds like an interesting paper. Any chance we will see a copy of it here. Thought about podcasting your talk.
Comment by Gavin Robinson — 5:38 pm, 22 August 2007 [permanent link to this comment]
I’ll see how it goes. I might post it (or some of it) here afterwards if I don’t want to use it for anything else. I’m thinking there might be a book in this topic, if I can get some funding to do some more research on it.