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.