Investigations of a Dog

Things that happened in the British Isles between about 1637 and 1660 have been given lots of different names: Great Rebellion, English Revolution, Puritan Revolution, English Civil War(s), British Civil War(s), War(s) of the Three Kingdoms, and probably some others that I’ve forgotten. Choosing a name implies choosing an ideological position. Anything involving “revolution” tends to be associated with Marxism, whereas revisionists prefer “civil war” to stress what they see as its unrevolutionary character. In this context, “civil war” is no more neutral than “revolution”. However, revisionists have also been increasingly interested in the British dimensions of what was previously know as an English event, leading to the increasing use of “British Civil War(s)” or “War(s) of the Three Kingdoms”. This all makes the titles of books on this period particularly significant, although you can’t necessarily read too much into them about the author’s position, because authors don’t always get the titles they want. For example, it’s now well known that John Morrill didn’t want Revolt of the Provinces to have that title, while Ronald Hutton would have preferred to qualify the title of his The Royalist War Effort.

I am firmly in the habit of using the increasingly old-fashioned and unsatisfactory term “the English Civil War” to describe this period (as you can see from the categories in the sidebar). This is quite an awkward situation as I haven’t chosen that term without thinking, but I don’t want it to imply an ideological position either. It seems like I’m damned if I do and damned if I don’t. The main reason why I still prefer “English Civil War” is that my original research focuses almost exclusively on the civil war in England between 1642 and 1646. That might well be a weakness of my research, but if so I need to be honest about it. I can’t claim to be studying the British Civil Wars when I’m not (although it could be objected that “English Civil War” isn’t much more honest because it makes it look like I’m pretending that the British dimensions didn’t exist or weren’t important). In fact even calling my work “anglocentric” would be making it sound broader than it actually is. My PhD thesis focused mostly on southern and eastern England, with much less on the north, the south-west, and the west-midlands. My post-doctoral works in progress are following in this tradition, and if anything getting narrower (for example I no longer want anything to do with the royalists!). This is partly a recognition of the immense complexity of history and the problems of explanation. Although I’m not entirely planning to move into microhistory, I’m moving closer to it in an attempt to consider a broader range of factors and see how they interacted.

If I really am studying civil war in England, the definite article is still a problem. There was also civil war in England in 1648 and 1651, but my work excludes those wars. What I’m studying is known to specialists as “the First Civil War”, but that doesn’t mean much to non-specialists, and the lack of a nation to qualify it could be particularly confusing (and in the military history blogosphere we can safely assume that when people talk about “the Civil War” they usually mean the American one). Even if it’s correctly understood, “the First Civil War” seems like an odd name because I know enough medieval history to know that there were many other civil wars in England before 1642.

Also, the “English” is a problem because it implies much more than “in England”. Even Conrad Russell, with his interest in the British problem, made the mistake of saying that before the entry of Scots and Irish units in 1643, the war was fought between Englishmen. Even before Mark Stoyle’s groundbreaking work in Soldiers and Strangers I was well aware that there were many non-English soldiers in the “English” armies. With his focus on the Welsh and Cornish, Stoyle has made the very concept of “England” look a lot more problematic than I used to think it was. It’s still useful as an arbitrary geographical boundary, but perhaps not much more than that.

So what I’m studying is not The English Civil War, but a civil war in England. I’m not intending to make any claims about whether there was or wasn’t a revolution before, during, or after that war. I think that mostly depends on how you define “revolution”. Although a war is easier to define than a revolution, it’s not without its problems. Everyone agrees that a war broke out in England in 1642 and more or less ended in 1646 (although some royalist garrisons held out for longer). Exactly when and how it started and ended, and the extent of what was and wasn’t part of the war, seems to have attracted far too little discussion. Again this depends very heavily on definitions, but far from being “sterile”, debates about definitions are crucial for history. Anyway, whatever you call this thing, there are plenty more books about it that I need to read. More historiography coming up soon…

1. John Stephen Morrill, The Revolt of the Provinces (Allen and Unwin: London, 1976).
2. John Stephen Morrill, Revolt in the provinces (Longman: London, 1998).
3. Mark Stoyle, Soldier and Strangers (Yale University Press, August 2005).