Yet more English Civil War historiography. The Nature of the English Revolution (1993) is a collection of essays by John Morrill, mostly published over the previous 20 years, with some previously unpublished or hard to find material, and new essays to introduce each section. This work gives a different perspective from both the original 1976 Revolt of the Provinces and the 1998 rewrite Revolt in the Provinces (here he gives a different story about the original title, claiming that it was entirely his own fault - presumably it still wasn’t safe to blame Geoffrey Elton in 1993!). The most obvious difference is given away by the title: in 1993 Morrill had come round to thinking that there was a revolution. He placed it in 1649, considering that the regicide and republic brought about the change in consciousness which he had made the defining characteristic of a revolution. However, he maintains that the First Civil War was more a war of religion than a revolutionary war, and that it was the strains of war which led to revolution rather than any long term social or economic changes. Claiming that his model has been misrepresented as monocausal by his critics, Morrill offers plenty of qualification. He does not claim that religion was the only source of division in England in 1642 but that it was the one factor above all others which made the militant minorities want to fight each other. The rest of this post will focus on the issues of allegiance, particularly with Morrill’s critiques of David Underdown and B. G. Blackwood.
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War in the Mediterranean is a new blog by Mike Ingram, covering the Mediterranean campaigns in World War II. It should be worth following, although it means that Brett’s latest post on the state of the military historioblogosphere is already out of date.
Michael Howard, Liberation Or Catastrophe? Reflections on the History of the Twentieth Century, (London, Hambledon Continuum, 2007; ISBN: 9781847251596).
Before I start this review I have to point out a couple of things. This is the first time that I’ve been sent a review copy of a book rather than reviewing something that I’ve bought myself. For some bloggers this situation is an ethical dilemma, but I’ve had enough experience of PR from the other side (the thankless task of sending CDs to fanzines who ignore you or slag you off) that I wouldn’t hesitate to kick the author and publisher in the teeth if I thought that the book was a load of rubbish. I know that I’m doing them a favour even by mentioning the book on a highly Google ranked blog, and that no review is ever so bad that you can’t get a good selective quote out of it.
Second, this book is by Michael Howard the eminent military historian and founder of the War Studies department at Kings College London, not Michael Howard the former Tory leader.
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This is my second post on R. C. Richardson’s edited collection The English Civil War: Local Aspects (1997), but it’s really just about B. G. Blackwood, ‘Parties and Issues in the Civil War in Lancashire and East Anglia’, first published in Northern History in 1993. That date is quite surprising as Blackwood’s approach seems very old fashioned even for the early 90s.
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The English Civil War historiography goes on and on. This week I’ve been looking at R. C. Richardson (ed.) The English Civil War: Local Aspects (1997), a collection of articles on local history previously published between 1969 and 1994. Not all of these are directly relevant to the questions I’m focusing on: how is the problem of the civil war/revolution defined? How is “allegiance” conceptualised? How many people did it take to start the war?
Richardson’s introduction to the collection is mostly a straightforward descriptive survey of the historiography (much like his Debate on the English Revolution). He suggests that the approaches used by local historians have become increasingly important to our understanding of the period. In some ways this depends on how you define “local history”. Is microhistory always a subset of local history, or can it be something entirely different? Richardson seems to be assuming that anything less than national history is necessarily local. Maybe this was more or less true at the time he was writing, although even then he lumped in a couple of books which sought to reconstruct the experiences of one individual (Alan MacFarlane on Ralph Josselin and Paul Seaver on Nehemiah Wallington). You can argue that such a narrow focus is necessarily local, but you could just as easily argue that it’s both more and less than local history. Things have only got more complicated in the last ten years. For example, John Adamson’s recent work The Noble Revolt is hardly local history (even though most of the action takes place in Westminster) but its narrow focus is hardly national either.
I’m not going to go through the rest of the collection in order, as I haven’t looked at all the essays, and some needed more comment than others. B. G. Blackwood is getting a whole post to himself tomorrow. Below are some thoughts on John Webb ‘The Siege of Portsmouth in the Civil War’, and Alan Everitt, ‘The Local Community in the Great Rebellion’.
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So I’ve finally finished reading John Adamson’s The Noble Revolt (2007). Mercurius Politicus has already posted a review of the book, having read it twice. That’s quite an achievement as it’s huge: an extremely detailed narrative of English and Scottish politics from May 1640 to January 1642. The main text alone is over 500 pages, and there are nearly 200 pages of endnotes after that! Fortunately Adamson’s style is very readable, making the story atmospheric and exciting, and the outstanding colour plates provide some much needed eye-candy as well as adding to the atmosphere. Whether or not Adamson’s argument stands up, this is a very nice book to own (and I’m not normally into book porn!), and since it’s the most recent major contribution to the debate on the origins of the English Civil War, it can’t be ignored.
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The 6th Military History Carnival is now up at Armchair General. Thanks to Jim for doing a great job of putting it together.
The next edition will be at Airminded on 14th October. Send submissions to $bholman$@$airminded$.$org$ (without the dollar signs) or use the submission form.
The 6th Military History Carnival will be at Armchair General on September 16th (that’s this Sunday). There’s still time to email submissions to $jim@$armchairgeneral.com$ (minus the $) or use the carnival submission form.
I’m still ploughing through The Noble Revolt, but luckily I still have some posts saved up. I originally got a copy of Dan Beaver, ‘The Great Deer Massacre’ (Journal of British Studies, 1999, pp. 187-216) because of my interest in animals, but it turned out to be highly relevant for my work on the historiography of the causes and outbreak of the English Civil War. Like John Walter’s work on the Stour Valley riots, this article takes a detailed look at an outbreak of popular violence in 1642. In this case it’s the massacre of several hundred deer in a Gloucestershire chase belonging to the Earl of Middlesex in October 1642. Also like Walter, Beaver convincingly refutes revisionist arguments that popular violence in this period was apolitical and unconnected to the civil war. Although there are similarities to the situation at Colchester, there are also significant differences, which warn us against making generalisations.
The massacre was the result of a dispute between the Earl of Middlesex and some of his neighbours and tenants. Beaver includes lots of detail about the social and cultural significance of hunting and venison in order to emphasise that the slaughter was a calculated insult to the Earl and an attack on his status. This was revenge for the Earl’s aggressive pursuit of poachers and woodcutters. As some of these poachers, who led the massacre, were gentlemen, the action is clearly different from the Stour Valley, although this makes it even less of a class war. But as with Colchester, the local feud combined with anger at Charles I’s policies in the 1630s. In this case, his exploitation of the forest laws had aroused a lot of grievances, while the Earl of Middlesex had prosecuted both poachers and woodcutters in Star Chamber. Beaver sees this as a crucial mistake as it forced two disparate groups together and encouraged them to take collective action against the Earl. Anti-Catholicism also played a role. As well as attacking the Earl’s deer, they attacked his house at Forthampton, a former monastic property retaining decorations which the crowd found offensively idolatrous. However, there isn’t much evidence of popular parliamentarianism inspired by Ordinances of Parliament as there was at Colchester, when the main aim was to disarm Sir John Lucas before he could join the King.
This has got me wondering if there are more incidents of popular action which need to be looked into without any Marxist or revisionist blinkers. It certainly suggests that we need more microhistories to find out what was really going on in England in 1642 and why.
- Daniel C. Beaver, ‘The great deer massacre : animals, honor, and communication in early modern England’, Journal of British Studies, 38 (1999), pp. 187-216.
- John Walter, Understanding Popular Violence in the English Revolution (Cambridge University Press: Cambridge, 1999).
Mark Stoyle’s Soldiers and Strangers: An Ethnic History of the English Civil War (2005) offers a very new and different perspective of the war in England between 1646. Stoyle shows how the separateness of Welsh and Cornish identities, and the involvement of soldiers from Scotland, Ireland and many other European countries makes the name “English Civil War” potentially misleading, but also argues that the New Model Army’s reconquest of England was a reassertion of Englishness. This work has important implications for my current project, as it offers a new interpretation of allegiance and the outbreak of war in 1642 (the question of whether there was a revolution is completely outside its scope, but Stoyle dates the outbreak of war roughly to the spring and summer of 1642). While Stoyle doesn’t claim that ethnic divisions or nationalism were long term causes of the civil war, he argues that along with the anti-Scottish sentiment identified by Conrad Russell, Welsh and Cornish concern to protect their own traditions from an aggressively English parliament made a major contribution to the emergence of a royalist party which made it possible for the king to fight in 1642.
Considering the importance of the concept of allegiance to this work, it isn’t very clearly defined (perhaps I need to go back to Stoyle’s earlier work Loyalty and Locality to get a better idea of what he means by allegiance). He seems to use the royalist and parliamentarian boxes which John Morrill complained of and doesn’t identify any neutralism in Cornwall or Wales in 1642. Maybe that’s because there genuinely wasn’t any, but I still find the claims that Welsh support for the king in 1642 was “near unanimous” (p. 13) to be a bit hyperbolic on the strength of the evidence offered. Stoyle mostly uses signing petitions and volunteering for the army as signs of allegiance. These do show that Welsh royalist sentiment was unusually strong and appeared unusually early compared to England, and that compared to the population the military participation rate was very high (the population of the whole of Wales was roughly similar to the population of London!). Stoyle acknowledges that there were pockets of parliamentarian support but gives the impression that everyone chose one side or the other. If there is strong evidence that Wales doesn’t conform to John Morrill’s model of small minorities forcing war onto a reluctant majority, that probably deserves a lot more discussion. I’m just slightly suspicious because Stoyle’s generalisation that south-eastern England was mostly parliamentarian in 1642 doesn’t agree with detailed work on Kent and Essex by the likes of Alan Everitt and John Walter.
Finally I was surprised that Stoyle didn’t make much of the relative anthropocentrism of propaganda which described foreigners as bestial, although this leaves an opportunity for further research. Also on the theme of animals the cover illustration is worth a mention. Like the cover of Carlin’s Causes of the English Civil War it shows a contemporary woodcut with interesting depictions of animals which isn’t discussed in the text and isn’t properly referenced. In this case it shows Prince Rupert, along with his horse and his dog, burning Birmingham (I think this one will be easier to track down). The horse is definitely a stallion (you can see its testicles and what might be an unrealistically small penis!), so that’s another piece of evidence for my project on war horses and gender.
- Norah. creator Carlin, The causes of the English Civil War (Blackwell Publishers,: Oxford :, 1999).
- Alan Milner Everitt, The Community of Kent and the Great Rebellion, 1640-60 (Leicester UP: Leicester, 1966).
- Mark Stoyle, Loyalty and Locality (University of Exeter Press: Exeter, 1994).
- Mark Stoyle, Soldier and Strangers (Yale University Press, August 2005).
- John Walter, Understanding Popular Violence in the English Revolution (Cambridge University Press: Cambridge, 1999).
