Investigations of a Dog

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’.

Webb’s article on the siege of Portsmouth is a straightforward narrative of events, with some analysis of the reasons for Goring’s failure to hold out. The siege of Portsmouth is interesting to me in this context because it was one of the first (arguably the first) examples of formal warfare taking place in England in the summer of 1642 (well before the raising of the standard at Nottingham). Therefore it’s crucial for any account of when, how, and why fighting broke out. I now think I might be able to exclude it from my calculations, but then again I might not. According to Webb, the numbers of soldiers involved in the siege were quite small - two horse troops and one foot regiment from Essex’s army plus the Hampshire trained bands and some sailors, against a garrison of only a few hundred. The involvement of the trained bands is noteworthy here as I’ve tended to assume that they weren’t very important on the grounds that they didn’t form part of Essex’s army in 1642. While Portsmouth and trained bands have no bearing on the battle of Edgehill - a point at which everyone can agree war was happening even if they can’t agree on how long it had been going on - they could be quite important in their own right.

Alan Everitt’s 1969 article comes with a postscript in which he wishes to abandon a couple of over-optimistic paragraphs but says he stands by most of what he said. Although he makes some claims about local communities in general, the core of the article focuses on the very different experiences of Leicestershire and Northamptonshire in the civil war, emphasising that generalisations are difficult because no two counties are the same. He makes an excellent point that the civil war added to the complexity of local government, something confirmed by my own work.

On allegiance, Everitt describes “royalist” and “parliamentarian” as “conventional categories” which only apply to a small minority of gentry (this article only considers the gentry - not unusual for the period when it was written). Everitt finds that the government of Leicester was not strongly committed to either side (suggesting that this contributed to the sacking of the town by the king’s army in 1645) while Northampton “from the outset, was decisively on the side of parliament” (p. 23). This is not a claim about public opinion in Northampton, but about the fact that a puritan minority was in control of the town government, the parish church, and the county committee.

Everitt finds a long running feud between rival families over control of the county government to be a major influence on allegiance in Leicestershire. No explanation is offered as to why the Hastings family chose to support the king and the Grey’s chose parliament, but it seems to be assumed that once they had made their choices it was almost inevitable that their factions would follow them. Sequestration and Compounding records are used quite uncritically here, but Everitt is interested in actions more than inner thoughts and uses the delinquency charges as evidence for localism rather than royalism, contrasting Leicestershire royalists who fought predominantly in local garrisons with Northamptonshire royalists, who were more likely to fight outside their county. He suggests that the Leicestershire royalists included members of the moderate majority who were forced by circumstances to take sides (p. 25), and that abstract ideals had to compete with the complex realities of life when decisions were made (p. 30). However, the reliance on parliamentarian definitions and evidence of delinquency is a potential weakness, particularly as parliamentarians are identified by very different criteria: mainly having served on the county committee. This is not comparing like with like. Therefore the inferences which Everitt makes from the evidence about relative numbers of royalist parliamentarian gentry, concentrations of each in certain parts of the county, and whether they tended to come from older or newer families, are all unsafe.

Finally a couple of interesting points which are not entirely relevant to what I’m working on at the moment. Everitt suggests that there might have been a certain (although not decisive) economic influence on Northampton’s parliamentarianism, because the town supplied large numbers of shoes and horses to parliament’s armies. This is a flawed argument for a couple of reasons. For one thing, Everitt generalises from a couple of examples of horses being bought at Northampton. More recent work by Peter Edwards (confirmed by my own work) has shown that the Eastern Association commissaries visited several places to buy horses and that Northampton was by no means the most important, while Essex’s army and the New Model got thousands of horses from dealers in London. Peter Edwards does support the view that Northampton was the most important centre of shoe making, although this has been questioned by Ben Coates. But above all, it should be obvious that the royalists needed just as many shoes and horses as the parliamentarians (and since they had no access to London they relied even more heavily on provincial towns to supply their needs), so there is absolutely no reason why the town couldn’t have benefited from the war if the corporation had supported the king instead. However, it’s interesting that Everitt is prepared to talk about the potential benefits of war. He also suggests that the war might have had little impact on day to day life in the provinces, and that its effects were nowhere near as bad as harvest failure. This is in strong contrast to John Morrill and others who have seen the war as a major disaster for ordinary people.

There’s also a huge mistake about the New Model Army, but I can’t be bothered to go into that now (and maybe it was just what everyone thought in 1969).

1. John Adamson, The Noble Revolt (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, March 2007).
2. Ben Coates, The impact of the English Civil War on the economy of London, 1642-50 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004).
3. Peter Edwards, Dealing in Death (Sutton, 2000).
4. Ralph Josselin, The Diary of Ralph Josselin 1616-1683, ed. Alan MacFarlane (OUP for the British Academy: London, 1976).
5. Roger Charles Richardson (ed.), The English Civil Wars (Sutton: Stroud, 1997).
6. R. C. (Roger Charles) Richardson, The debate on the English Revolution (Manchester University Press,: Manchester :, 1998).
7. Paul S Seaver, Wallington’s World (Methuen: London, 1985).
8. John Walter, Understanding Popular Violence in the English Revolution (Cambridge University Press: Cambridge, 1999).
9. Andy Wood, ‘Beyond post-revisionism?’, Historical Journal, 40 (1997), pp. 23-40.