Investigations of a Dog

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(1993) is a collection of essays by John Morrill, mostly published over the previous 20 years, with some previously unpublished or hard to find material, and new essays to introduce each section.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.

Chapter 9 is a review of B. G. Blackwood’s book The Lancashire Gentry and the Great Rebellion, 1640-1660 (1978). Morrill’s review mentions that this book is an overview of Blackwood’s work but that historians who want to know more about his methodology will need to consult his earlier articles. I’ve already made some criticisms of Blackwood’s quantitative approach to allegiance here. In some ways I agree with Morrill, but there are also important differences between our criticisms.

First of all, Morrill and I agree that Blackwood’s three types of religion obscure an awful lot of diversity and complexity. He also points out that no two county studies are directly comparable because each historian has used different definitions of “gentry” and “allegiance” and different standards of proof. He regrets this and calls for more standardisation so that meaningful comparisons can be made. This now looks incredibly naive, but it’s quite understandable considering that it was written in the 1970s. All of these taxonomies are arbitrary. If everyone agreed to use the same one it wouldn’t necessarily get us any closer to how things really were. I’d cautiously agree with Morrill that Malcolm Wanklyn’s approach of dividing things into sub-categories is more satisfactory because it allows the reader more choice, but Morrill’s admiration of Wanklyn’s grids raises suspicions of a truth effect at work.

In Revolt of/in the Provinces Morrill was quite negative about Blackwood’s approach without suggesting exactly what he’d like to put in its place. In this review he acknowledges some advantages of Blackwood’s work and also offers his own alternative approach to allegiance. This approach is almost the exact opposite of Rachel Weil’s recent work. Morrill suggests ignoring actions and focusing on inner beliefs because actions could be unwilling. He recognises some problems with this approach but I think he massively underestimates them. First there’s the impossibility of getting empirical evidence of what people really thought. While Morrill rejects actions as evidence of intentions, he doesn’t say what he’d use instead. Presumably words, but there are now increasing doubts about whether texts unambiguously reflect authorial intentions. Accepting that there is no evidence of most people’s thoughts, Morrill still argues that if we can find out about the motivation of a few militants and see what they have in common we can make generalisations about the militant minorities of both sides which explain why they wanted to fight. Ultimately this is still just putting people into boxes, but slightly different boxes from the ones Blackwood is using.

(To be fair, this is an old piece and I don’t think Morrill necessarily believes all of it now. I used the present tense because it seemed a bit less awkward than using the past tense but it’s possibly a bit misleading.)

Chapter 11 is a response to David Underdown’s groundbreaking 1985 book Revel, Riot, and Rebellion. Morrill was very excited by this work and considered it the best book of the 1980s, but was ultimately unconvinced by Underdown’s argument that civil war allegiance was determined by two rival cultures which were in turn determined by ecology. I’ll have more to say about Underdown in a future post (I read the book last year but I need to go over it again) but this is a brief summary of Morrill’s criticisms. First, he is not convinced that there really were two easily definable kinds of agricultural region such as Underdown identifies (wood-pasture and sheep-corn) or that this model can easily be applied to any part of the country. Following Martin Ingram’s work he suggests that clothing districts are more directly relevant to parliamentarian allegiance, and that links between economic conditions and Puritanism are more problematic than Underdown assumes. Second, he argues that if we accept that there were two rival cultures, one puritan and one Anglican, it isn’t clear that they led directly to wartime allegiance. Finally, Morrill takes issue with Underdown’s use of pensions paid to maimed soldiers in the 1660s and suspect lists drawn up by the Major-Generals in the 1650s as evidence of popular royalism. The pensions might have been paid for fighting against the Catholic rebels in Ireland rather than fighting for the king in England; the soldiers might have settled in these parishes after the war rather than going back home; some regiments might have seen more action and suffered heavier casualties; some areas might have been more generous with pensions than others. The suspect lists do not necessarily reflect allegiance in the 1640s because so much had changed by then; different Major-Generals had different criteria.

The introduction to the section on allegiance, newly written for this collection, qualifies some of the views expressed in the older essays. Morrill still insists that we need to differentiate between the militants who made the civil war happen and the majority who were drawn into it against their will. However, he no longer assumes that each group was homogenous, concluding that “there would be as many patterns of choice as there were people”.

1. B. G Blackwood, The Lancashire gentry and the Great Rebellion, 1640-60 (Manchester University Press for the Chetham Society,: Manchester :, 1978).
2. John Stephen Morrill, The Revolt of the Provinces (Allen and Unwin: London, 1976).
3. J. S Morrill, The Nature of the English Revolution (Longman: London, 1993).
4. John Stephen Morrill, Revolt in the provinces (Longman: London, 1998).
5. David Underdown, Revel, riot, and rebellion (Clarendon Press: Oxford, 1985).