Investigations of a Dog

My seminar paper went really well yesterday, especially considering the fact that I haven’t done one for six years. Below is a version of the paper. This is a draft of what I wrote, but what I actually said came out a bit different - you had to be there. If I was doing it again I’d probably change it even more. The maps here are slightly different from the ones in the presentation as I can’t work out how to link to two or more Google Maps overlaid on each other at the same time. Maybe you can’t. For the presentation I just took screenshots of them. For the other illustrations, click the thumbnails to see full size pictures. And if you’re from Lincoln you might like to try and identify all of the animals. I wonder if Stewart Lee could correctly identify all of them…

The Great Supply Chain of Being: Horses, People, and Networks of Authority in Civil War Essex

Delivered at Bishop Grosseteste University College, Lincoln, 14th November 2007

We’ll start with the great chain of being. This was a big idea in medieval and early modern theology and philosophy, which goes back to Plato. Everything in the world formed a hierarchy in order of how perfect it was. You can see god at the top - he’s totally perfect. Then angels, they’re not quite perfect. People are below god and angels but above everything else. People were in a unique position of being spiritual and physical at the same time. Angels were purely spiritual. Animals were only physical - it was generally believed that they didn’t have souls. The animals are divided into 3 levels. Below humans there are birds, then fish, then land animals. It looks like a strange idea now, but it tells us a lot about early-modern beliefs.

This picture is a simplified version with only a few links in the chain. The full blown idea was hard to represent visually because the number of links in the chain was infinite. Everything that could possibly exist had to exist, and each being was only slightly different from the one above or below it. In this form the idea of the Chain of Being probably didn’t mean much to most people as it’s quite hard to understand. There might have been a few intellectuals who spent their time worrying about whether a bird was better than a fish, but in practice the phrase “chain of being” doesn’t seem to crop up very often in early modern England. I actually had trouble finding a picture of it, so this one isn’t from 17th century England! [it's originally from Rhetorica Christiana by Didacus Valades, reproduced in Anthony Fletcher's Gender, Sex and Subordination in England] But the idea of a natural order of things was very widespread, even if it wasn’t as sophisticated as the things that Leibniz or Spinoza came out with. Most people would have known from the book of Genesis that God put man in charge of all the animals. It was generally believed that animals only existed for the use of humans. In practice that power wasn’t shared equally. Class hierarchies gave rights over animals to some people and not others. For example, the right to hunt deer was limited to the upper classes. Rights over animals were heavily gendered, because domestic animals were treated as property, and in theory (but not always in practice) married women weren’t allowed to own property.

Hierarchies of class and gender were related to the Chain of Being, but again this was a less sophisticated version. Instead of an infinite number of grades, the early modern elite tended to lump society into three levels:

• The peerage
• The gentry
• And everyone else!

The common people who made up everyone else were actually more diverse than the elite liked to think. Historians have been increasingly interested in the middling sort, who were yeoman farmers, craftsmen and tradesmen. They were below the gentry but above the poor. Although they weren’t really rich they were reasonably well off, and they were particularly concerned with property rights. Marxist historians like to see them as a proto-bourgeoisie. Marxism is also based on an oversimplified three class model, but for the purposes of this paper I’m going to follow that to a certain extent, dividing people roughly into the elite, the middling sort, and the commoners, just because it’s convenient.

In practice the early modern elite simplified things even more than this. They didn’t always make a distinction between the everyone else and the animals! It wasn’t unusual for the patriarchal elite to portray women, foreigners, and the lower classes as bestial. This is what Bruce Boehrer called “relative anthropocentrism”. People are better than animals, but some people are more human than others. Steve Hindle’s work on enclosure riots has thrown up quite a few examples of the gentry comparing rioters to sheep, and of rioters complaining because they were being treated like sheep or worse than sheep.

The link between the Chain of Being and class hierarchies was made very obvious in the Homily of Obedience. This was from the book of sermons that were supposed to be preached in church on Sundays. The law said that everyone had to go to church every Sunday, so most people should have been familiar with these sermons. The Homily of Obedience put a huge stress on order:

Almighty God hath created & appointed all things, in heaven, earth, and waters, in a most excellent and perfect order.

In heaven, he hath appointed distinct orders and states of Archangels and Angels.

In earth he hath assigned kings, princes, with other governors under them, all in good and necessary order.

The water above is kept and raineth down in due time and season.

The sun, moon, stars, rainbow, thunder, lightning, clouds, and all birds of the air, do keep their order.

The earth, trees, seeds, plants, herbs, corn, grass, and all manner of beasts, keep them in their order.

All the parts of the whole year, as winter, summer, months, nights and days, continue in their order.

All kinds of fishes in the sea, rivers and waters, with all fountains, springs, yea, the seas themselves, keep their comely course and order.

Every degree of people, in their vocation, calling, and office, hath appointed to them, their duty and order.

Some are in high degree, some in low, some king’s and princes, some inferiors and subjects, priests, and layman, masters and servants, fathers and children, husbands and wives, riche and poor, and every one have need of other:

This is obviously how the elite would like things to be, not how they actually were. It’s hard to believe that rain, thunder and lightning are perfectly ordered! And the months in the Christian calendar aren’t actually natural. You have to suspect that under the surface there was a lot of anxiety. This obsession with keeping things in order could suggest a fear that things were not really stable and ordered.

The Homily of Obedience makes it very clear what would happen if the natural order was upset:

For where there is no right order, there reigneth all abuse, carnal liberty, enormity, sin, and Babylonicall confusion.

Take away kings, princes, rulers, magistrates, judges, and such states of Gods order, no man shall ride or go by the high way unrobbed, no man shall sleep in his own house or bed unkilled, no man shall keep his wife, children, and possessions in quietness:

all things shall be common, and there must needs follow all mischief and utter destruction, both of souls, bodies, goods and commonwealths.

There’s a paradox here. You’d think that it would be quite difficult to overthrow the natural God given order, but there seems to be a huge anxiety that it could happen very easily.

But this idea is still very useful to the elite, as long as they can keep everyone believing it, because it justifies the political system. Class, property, age and gender were all lumped into the supposedly natural order. If these hierarchies were part of God’s natural order, then it was assumed that they’d never changed and never could or should change. If the lower classes are dominated by that kind of conservative ideology it limits their freedom. But the same thing also limits the freedom of the elite. They might be quite comfortable in their position, but it’s difficult for them to improve it. If they go too far in changing things the people below them in the chain might start to resist the changes to preserve what they thought was the natural order.

The other big problem with this world view is that although linking all the different hierarchies together might help them to reinforce each other, it can also increase anxiety. If one hierarchy comes under threat then they’re all under threat. Any changes in the established order might threaten property rights.

Both of these problems were apparent in the Civil Wars.

Some historians have argued that it was Charles I who was being radical and that parliamentary opposition was a conservative reaction to preserve the traditional order. Not everyone agrees with that, but we can be certain that this kind of conservative view dominated the debates at the time. Whatever opponents of Charles I were really trying to do, their public rhetoric was usually framed in terms of tradition. Both sides claimed to be defending tradition against the other’s innovations. That suggests that conservative ideology was very dominant.

Once the war started, it turned out to be very disruptive. Both sides had to compromise on maintaining order and tradition where it wasn’t compatible with winning the war. And war created opportunities for people who weren’t happy with traditional hierarchies.

This famous quote from Sir John Oglander is suspiciously similar to the Homily of Obedience:

Thou wouldest think it strange if I should tell thee there was a time in England when brothers killed brothers, cousins cousins, and friends their friends.

Nay, when they conceived it was no offence to commit murder.

To murder a man held less offence than to kill a dog, and they would glory in their actions as if they had done a pious deed.

When thou wentest to bed at night, thou knewest not whether thou shouldest be murdered afore day.

To take away other men’s goods was held as lawful as to sell thy own, although the former owners went a-begging.

Sacrilege was a virtue, and to rail against sovereignty esteemed a high piece of piety.

Again this shows the belief that hierarchies were linked. The order’s been upset so badly that men are being treated worse than dogs, and property rights aren’t being respected.

This pamphlet is another very well known response to the civil war:

This was published in January 1647 - that’s a couple of years before the king was executed and the monarchy was abolished, but even so you can see a lot of anxiety about the natural order being upset. It seems to be the work of a moderate conservative who wanted everything to go back to how it was under Elizabeth I, especially the Church of England.

Most of it’s about religion and Ireland. He’s complaining that the Irish rebellion still hasn’t been put down, and that people aren’t respecting the order and authority of the Church of England. So he’s got lots of nasty things to say about Catholics and about radical protestant sects. You can see the religious themes directly represented by the upside down church at the top of the picture, but most of it uses animals to illustrate how hierarchies have been inverted. You can see a rat chasing a cat; a rabbit chasing a dog. Even worse, the cart’s before the horse. It wasn’t unusual for printers to use an off the shelf woodcut to illustrate pamphlets, but in this case the text explicitly refers to some of the things shown in the picture.

The animal pictures are obviously metaphors. I don’t think anyone really believed that horses were driving carts. But it shows a belief that hierarchies were all connected and were all part of the natural order. The Catholic Irish rebelling against the king, and separatists forming their own congregations outside the Church of England, were all supposedly as unnatural as putting the cart before the horse.

Even before the war started a lot of the gentry were worried about what would happen if king and parliament started fighting each other. There’s a lot of evidence that most people didn’t want a war. When it happened anyway they tried to stay out of it as far as they could. But some members of the elite were prepared to fight. If they weren’t then there wouldn’t have been a war. John Adamson’s recent book, The Noble Revolt, argues that the war was the result of a conspiracy by a small group of barons to take over the government. That’s OK as far as it goes, but it doesn’t explain everything.

It wasn’t inevitable that a dispute between the elite about the government would lead to a full-blown civil war. If the war was limited to peers and MPs it would have been very different. The Wars of the Roses are a good example of what that kind of war might have been like. The first battle of St Albans in 1455 was basically a few noblemen and their retainers beating each other up. The first major battle of the civil war, at Edgehill in October 1642, involved 20 or 30,000 soldiers.

To get from one to the other, the elite factions needed wider support. They needed thousands of men from the lower ranks of society to serve as soldiers. They needed money, weapons, and equipment. And they needed horses.

Like these…

On the left there’s a war horse. Horses were vitally important for early modern armies. Cavalry needed horses to ride, and the whole army needed horse drawn wagons. The army that parliament raised in 1642 probably included around 7 or 8,000 horses. It was all too easy for an army to lose horses. They could be killed or captured by the enemy; they could die of disease, exhaustion or starvation; they could be stolen and sold by deserters; they might have to be left behind if they went lame. It wasn’t unusual for armies in this period to lose 60 or 70 per cent of their horses in a year.

And on the right there’s a mill horse, representing working horses, because horses were a major part of the economy. They were used for transport, agriculture, and industry. They were also status symbols. Peter Edwards says that a man on a horse could literally look down on other people. This meant that there were huge numbers of horses in England which could potentially be used by the armies. But it also meant that their owners could be reluctant to part with them. The horses themselves didn’t get much choice. Horses were generally seen as property more than beings in their own right. One side effect of that is that horse supply gives some interesting insights into property rights. It’s harder to get at the reality of animals as animals, but that comes through sometimes even when their owners were determined to treat them as objects.

There were more than enough horses in England to satisfy the demands of both sides. The problem was how to get hold of them.

The county of Essex was a major source of horses for parliament. Things can get confusing here because the Lord General of parliament’s armies was the Earl of Essex, but he wasn’t really connected with the county of Essex. His estates were mostly in Staffordshire. The most important lord in the county of Essex was the Earl of Warwick.

The first system that Parliament used to raise an army for the Earl of Essex was known as the “propositions”. In June 1642 they invited people to contribute money, horses and arms to help defend parliament and the protestant religion from the King and the Catholics. Most royalists weren’t actually Catholics, but parliament’s propaganda said that there was a Popish conspiracy. The contributions were supposed to be a loan. The full value was going to be paid back at some unspecified point in the future from some unspecified source.

Contributions started with MPs and peers in parliament itself. As you’d expect from committed members of the elite, they brought in quite a lot. For example the Earl of Essex listed 20 horses valued at £560. But if it was only down to their contributions the forces would still have been very small. To get the army which fought at Edgehill they needed wider support. The records of the propositions show that they got it.

The system was very centralized and left detailed records - so detailed that it took me about 2 weeks to type the lists into a database! These lists include descriptions and values of all the horses that were brought in, the names of their owners, and often the owner’s address and occupation (but not always). It just happens that the records from Essex are really good.

This is the total number of cavalry horses that were brought in each month, from everywhere.

It took a while for the system to get going. Only a few hundred horses in June and July. Most of them came from London. Then in August it goes right up. This is when lots of horses started to come in from other places. Then it starts to go down in the autumn. Up to October the contributions were supposed to be voluntary. By the end of October people were being put under more pressure to contribute. Non-contributors were to be treated as “delinquents”, meaning they could be disarmed and imprisoned. In November a tax was imposed on anyone who hadn’t contributed according to their ability. That was obviously a response to the fact that contributions were going down. But it didn’t work. They kept going down even when people were under threat of being taxed or put in prison. That suggests that parliament’s authority wasn’t very strong. Ordinances of parliament couldn’t make people give up their property if they didn’t want to give it up.

So the contributions in the summer weren’t forced, but they weren’t spontaneous either.

This chart shows how many horses came in from the county of Essex every day in August and September. There’s a fairly steady background level but some very big spikes.

Where I can identify the place names I’ve plotted them on a map.

View Larger Map

This is the contributions for the 17th of August, which was one of the busiest days. They’re all concentrated in the west and in the south-east of the county. There’s a big gap in the north-east around Colchester.

View Larger Map

This one is for the 9th of September. It’s almost the exact opposite. A few horses from the south and west but not many. Most of them are from the area around Colchester which was empty in the last map.

This suggests that contributions were highly organised at county level. People waited for the local authorities to come round and ask them for horses. When they were asked some people were happy to give up their horses. But they didn’t all rush down to London in the middle of June. If the local authorities were putting pressure on people it only worked so far. Otherwise you’d expect much higher contributions.

There was wider support for the parliamentarian cause than just the peers and MPs, but we’re still dealing with quite a small minority of the population. No more than 3,000 individuals in the whole kingdom listed cavalry horses in 1642. That’s not many when you consider that there were 9,000 parishes in England, so on average that’s about a third of a horse per parish! The population of London is reckoned to be about 300,000, and the population of Essex was about 85,000. Compared to that 3,000 is a very small number.

That’s partly because the lists only show people who had horses to spare. Although lots of people owned horses, horses were very valuable and not everyone could afford to give them away. The average value of a cavalry horse in these lists is £14. That includes weapons and equipment because it’s not possible to separate them, but it shows that we’re dealing with wealthy people. Where the occupations or social status are given they show that the vast majority of the donors were from the gentry or the middling sort. Even so, the donors probably represent a minority of their classes. There must have been other people who also had plenty of horses but who didn’t donate any.

Donations of money might show different patterns. People who couldn’t afford to give a whole horse might still be able to give a small amount of money, so that could go further down the social scale. We also have to take into account the men who joined the army as soldiers. But even putting together all the people who served in the army and all the people made material contributions to the war effort, it took a relatively small minority of the population to start the war. Later the scope of the war expanded to involve a majority of the population in one way or another, but that’s not how it was in 1642. The battle of Edgehill came about because of relatively small numbers of committed activists. It was far more than just a Noble Revolt, but it was nothing like a mass popular movement either. That doesn’t mean that participation was limited by class. People from all levels of society were involved in one way or another.

Because we’re dealing with wealthy property owners the lists are dominated by men, but there are some women too. They were nearly all widows because it was easier for widows to own property in their own right. You can see gender ideology at work in the lists, because men are listed by occupation or social status, but women are listed by marital status - that wasn’t unusual for the time.

The creation of the Earl of Essex’s army in 1642 demonstrates people from nearly all levels of society exercising agency. The masses also exercised agency in other ways which were outside parliament’s formal military and administrative structures.

In 1642 the majority of horse owners in England weren’t committed to either side. While supporters of parliament were donating horses to the Earl of Essex’s army, royalist supporters were doing the same for the King. Parliament was trying to stop them. In the summer of 1642 parliament developed a system of disarming people identified as ‘delinquents’. The definition of ‘delinquent’ included all Catholics as well as active royalists, and the definition got wider as the year went on. The propositions system was implemented from the top down, but the disarming of delinquents was not so centralized. In May and June 1642 local officials, such as mayors, began impounding horses and arms which were being taken to join the King at York. These actions weren’t always ordered in advance by parliament, but were usually authorised afterwards. By August, parliament was giving specific instructions to local authorities to disarm all delinquents in their counties. As well as denying horses and arms to the royalists, this was an extra source of supply for parliament. It was also an opportunity for popular participation in the war.

A major riot broke out in Colchester in August 1642, and spread through the Stour valley, resulting in several days of violence and destruction over a wide area of Essex and Suffolk. Marxists have seen this as an example of class war. Revisionists have claimed that the riots were not political. They’re both wrong. John Walter studied the riots in detail and found that they were probably motivated by popular parliamentarianism. Horses played a vital role.

Sir John Lucas was a wealthy gentleman who lived just outside the walls of Colchester. There was a long running feud between his family and the town. There were disputes over land going back to the dissolution of the monasteries, but some new problems appeared in the reign of Charles I. Sir John was an enthusiastic supporter of the personal rule - he collected ship money and supported religious changes by appointing clergy who were sympathetic to Archbishop Laud. By the summer of1642 he was a committed royalist and was getting together horses and arms for the king’s army.

In response to this a crowd of men and women from Colchester attacked his house and impounded the horses. The details of the attack and the identities of the rioters are difficult to discover, but it’s very significant that the mayor of Colchester was involved in impounding the horses. As John Walter points out (and this also agrees with my own work on horse seizing) this is a familiar pattern. It fits in with other examples of local officials stopping horses on their way to the King. The actions of the crowd at Colchester were almost certainly inspired by parliament’s policy of disarming delinquents. Parliament even authorized their actions after the event and thanked them for their services.

But things went much further than parliament intended. Rioting spread through Essex and Suffolk, with crowds attacking the houses of Catholic gentry and Laudian clergy. Again this fits in with parliament’s definition of delinquents at this time, but parliament and the local elites were uncomfortable with the way things seemed to be getting out of hand. While the crowds were inspired by parliament’s official policies and anti-catholic propaganda, they were clearly exercising agency, not following orders.

That was a double edged sword for parliament. It was useful to have mobs keeping the local royalists down, but crowd violence worried the local gentry. As you’d expect, they were anxious about disorder and disruption - what if the rioters decided to overthrow the social order? Just like in the homily of obedience, they thought they might lose their lives and property. They wanted to call out the militia to put down the riots by force. That put parliament in a difficult situation because they didn’t want to alienate the gentry, and because popular disorder was great for royalist propaganda. When it came to attracting the support of people who wanted to maintain the traditional order, the king already had an advantage because he was the king. Parliament was rebelling against him and had already taken on unprecedented powers. Being associated with mobs of common people only made things look worse. In the end, parliament sent a message to the rioters saying that they’d done well but that they should go home in case they made things look bad.

As long as parliament had enough voluntary contributions from their committed supporters the property of the uncommitted majority was reasonably safe, except where the army quartered soldiers on them. That didn’t happen much in Essex because it was a long way from the fighting. Royalists and catholics were a clearly defined Other. Their property could be taken without arousing too much anxiety or opposition from non-delinquents. In fact it could be immensely popular, as we’ve just seen in Colchester. According to parliamentarian propaganda it was the King, with his arbitrary government and popish army, who was threatening liberty and property. In late 1642 voluntary contributions were drying up, and the boundaries between “us” and “them” were shifting. Because the activists on both sides were a minority they couldn’t provide enough resources to sustain the war themselves. That wouldn’t have been a problem if the war had finished quickly, which it might have done if things had gone a bit differently at the battle of Edgehill. As it turned out, there was no quick decision. That meant that both sides needed access to the resources of the uncommitted majority to keep on fighting. Parliament’s government became more arbitrary, moving towards the view that “if you’re not with us you’re against us”. This put parliament on a collision course with the very rights it claimed to be defending.

In November 1642 a new measure was introduced to supply horses for the army. Several men, including Thomas Browne, Maximilian Bard, and the horse dealer John Stiles, were given arbitrary powers to seize any horses within 5 miles of London which had not already been listed. This was not limited to royalists or even non-contributors. Only peers and their servants were exempt. Although they secured several hundred horses for the army, there were so many complaints that parliament revoked their power in January 1643. That shows that parliament was prepared to listen to the concerns of property owners: it wasn’t arbitrary government yet.

By this time there was no adequate system in place to supply horses for parliament’s armies, especially the Earl of Essex’s army. Voluntary contributions had dropped off drastically by the end of 1642 and were probably lower than the army’s attrition rate. There was not enough money in the treasury to buy horses. Therefore the army had no alternative but to take horses wherever they could be found. Throughout the first half of 1643, the Lord General issued warrants to his officers authorizing them to seize horses for their troops. Although it was usually specified that they should take horses from delinquents they weren’t always very careful in practice. In any case, the supply of horses from active royalists had been almost entirely exhausted by mid-1643, if not before. In May 1643 parliament passed the sequestration ordinance, which deprived royalists of all their property. Inventories of goods seized by the sequestrators only mention a few horses, and most of them were unfit for military service. Most of the serviceable horses had already been taken during the disarmament of delinquents which began in the summer of 1642. This meant that even committed parliamentarians could have their horses taken by soldiers. Although allowing soldiers to take horses was necessary because there was no other way of getting them, it led to abuses and breakdowns of discipline. Once you let soldiers take civilian property, it was harder to stop them taking more than they needed. There were also many cases of extortion, where soldiers returned horses to their owners in return for a bribe, which they kept themselves.

Obviously, there was a lot of horse seizing in the areas where the army was quartered. In the spring and summer of 1643, the Earl of Essex’s army was mostly operating in the Thames valley, so that area suffered quite badly. It was difficult for civilians to resist armed soldiers, but they sometimes prosecuted the soldiers for theft later on. Some army officers were pursued through the courts for years by people whose horses they’d taken. So to the extent that power grew from the barrel of a gun, it was actually quite limited.

This kind of requisitioning wasn’t just limited to the areas where the army was operating. The county of Essex was a long way from the fighting but had already proved to be an important source of horses. In the spring of 1643, the Lord General sent Colonel Walter Long into Essex to take horses for the army and collect tax arrears. Long was very unpopular, was accused of abusing his powers, and was eventually recalled by parliament. Clive Holmes wrote an article about this in the early 1970s. He saw the incident in terms of binary oppositions between military and civilian, and between local and central: the local gentry resented an outsider army officer interfering in their affairs. There was an element of this, but it doesn’t tell the whole story.

There was another group of horse takers operating in Essex at the same time as Colonel Long. He claimed that they were committing the abuses that he’d been accused of: taking horses from well-affected people, taking bribes to return horses to their owners. He even went as far as arresting them and seizing the horses that they’d seized! Colonel Long could now portray himself as protecting the civilians of Essex against the plundering of soldiers. To emphasise his claim to legitimacy, Long examined his prisoners in the presence of some local officials, and sent the evidence to the county committee and to parliament. The men Long had arrested were local men, and claimed to have a warrant authorising them to take horses. This warrant was from Lord Grey, major-general of the Eastern Association, an organisation set up in December 1642 for the mutual defence of the East Anglian counties, including Essex. In practice Lord Grey was mostly independent of the Earl of Essex. So this is not just military versus civilians. There was rivalry between two different armies which were competing for resources. They were also competing for legitimacy because they needed the co-operation of local communities, or at least the local elites, in order to extract those resources. Colonel Long was seeking to enhance his own legitimacy by denying legitimacy to Lord Grey’s horse takers. In his letter to parliament he questioned whether the warrant was genuine. He also claimed that the men named in the warrant had exceeded their authority by appointing deputies. The other horse takers were also trying to claim legitimacy. One of their strategies was to tell people that they were authorised by the Earl of Warwick. As I said before, he was the most powerful Lord in the county and seems to have been very popular.

Ultimately Long failed to get the Essex gentry on his side. They preferred to see him as a scapegoat and continued complaining to parliament. Parliament was in another tricky situation, but they got out of it by playing the factions off against each other. Colonel Long was withdrawn from Essex to placate the local gentry. But the horses he took were never given back to their owners. They were taken up to London to recruit the Earl of Essex’s army.

That’s just one of the ways that the issue of horse seizing caused major problems in 1643. It wasn’t just a case of local against central. Parliament was divided against itself. There were different factions in both houses, and it’s not always easy to distinguish who was in which faction, or what motivated the factions. The journals of the houses don’t give any details of debates, they only tell us the results of what was decided. Judging by these results, in general the House of Commons pushed for more aggressive measures to secure a supply of horses, and the House of Lords tried to protect private property. In July 1643 the Commons came up with a bill to requisition all horses within several miles of London, and the Lords came up with a bill to ban the seizure of horses in a similar area. Somehow they reached a compromise to raise a new flying army of cavalry to be commanded by the Earl of Manchester. It was originally planned to be an independent army that could operate anywhere, but that soon changed. In August Manchester replaced Lord Grey as commander of the Eastern Association. Later parts of the forces raised for the flying army were transferred to the Earl of Essex and other armies.

To raise this new army, parliament imposed quotas of horses on each county and let the county committee decide how to get them. The county of Essex had to supply 500 cavalry and 1,000 mounted infantry. The committee achieved this very quickly, which suggests that they weren’t narrow minded localists. It’s even more impressive when you consider that several other counties failed to meet their quota. Surrey and Kent hadn’t even started in September. Hertfordshire, Buckinghamshire and Middlesex had arrears which weren’t collected until the following year, if at all. The Essex committee set a quota tax on the parishes of the county but they didn’t wait for the tax to be collected before they supplied the horses to the army. They bought at least 100 horses from the Smithfield horse dealer John Stiles. He demanded part payment in advance. The Essex committee were able to pay him, probably by taking out a loan against future tax revenues.

The remainder of the horses for the quota were seized from civilians by army officers and county committee members, but this caused surprisingly little trouble compared to the activities of Colonel Long. This was possibly because the new requisitions were seen as more legitimate. They were authorised by an ordinance of parliament and by the county committee. One of the officers in charge of the seizures was Captain Nathaniel Rich. He was from a local gentry family and distantly related to the Earl of Warwick. Horse owners who were identified as well-affected to parliament were promised repayment for their horses, and this seems to have been made from the tax revenues when they had been collected. This was a more benign system than being plundered by the army, but it still amounted to people’s property being taken away. They had less scope to resist when local and central government were united against them, whereas the local elites had been willing to support horse owners against Colonel Long. It was this alignment of forces that made all the difference. Individual property owners found it hard to resist.

The flying army quota was a one-off measure. Like the propositions it wasn’t a long term solution. It created new forces and reinforced existing ones but didn’t make any provision for replacement horses.

Things changed in 1644. By this time parliament had enough regular tax revenues to buy horses on a large scale. People seem to have been reasonably happy with paying regular taxes. That doesn’t mean they really wanted to give their money away. There was still resistance and evasion, but most of the taxes were collected successfully. It looks like predictable taxation was seen as more convenient and more legitimate than soldiers taking what they needed at raondom. When there was a reliable supply of horses, soldiers were less likely to take them from civilians, although it still happened sometimes. In the spring of 1645 parliament’s 3 main armies were amalgamated into the New Model Army, and administrative changes of the previous year were taken further. Most of the New Model Army’s horses were bought from a small group of dealers based in Smithfield market, but at first they only supplied horses for cavalry and dragoons. Draught horses were still supplied by the old system of putting quotas on counties. The difference this time was that the horses were paid for out of the monthly assessment tax.

The ordinance of parliament which put quotas of draught horses on the counties also required them to impress soldiers for the army. Impressment wasn’t new. It had been used to recruit the armies since 1643, and had been used even earlier to raise forces to fight in Ireland. This ordinance is the perfect example because it includes quotas of men and horses. You can see the distinction between human and animal breaking down, because men were being treated like animals: rounded up and sent to the army.

There were riots and rebellions against impressment in some places but apparently not in Essex. That suggests that it could be a contentious issue, but didn’t have to be. It might have depended on who the chosen victims were. Rounding up marginal people like vagrants and beggars would be unlikely to provoke much protest from the rest of society. These men could still exercise some agency: they often ran away from the army at the first opportunity. They had to be guarded en route to stop them from escaping. Because of this the county committees often spent more on impressing men for the New Model Army than on supplying its draught horses. But horses could exercise agency too. Although their owners treated them as property, they were alive and had their own aims. Whether these were based on free choice or biological instinct, the fact is that horses didn’t always do what humans wanted them to. Like impressed soldiers, they sometimes tried to escape. In October 1642, a group of draught horses being taken from London to join the Earl of Essex’s army broke down a fence and ran away. The conductors in charge of the horses had to claim extra expenses for paying men to help catch them and for repairing the fence.

The royalist officer Richard Bulstrode recalled in his memoirs that he lost control of his horse at the battle of Powicke Bridge:

This was the first Action I was ever in, and being upon an unruly Horse, he ran away with me amongst the Enemy

A recent study of the battle of Edgehill has suggested that the cavalry charges were more like stampedes. The parliamentarians ran away, and the royalists couldn’t stop chasing them, because their horses were out of control.

When you’re riding a horse you can influence it, but you can’t ever be in complete control of it. It’s even harder to control a society. It’s too big and complex.

Maybe elite anxiety about disorder was understandable - they realised that they weren’t really in control. But the consequences of their lack of control weren’t necessarily as bad as they imagined. Changes in the social order weren’t really against nature and didn’t lead to changes in animal behaviour. So things weren’t really like this the Great Chain of Being, or the World Turned Upside Down.

Authority and property rights weren’t natural or fixed, but they couldn’t always be influenced by brute force either. They had to be negotiated. Parliament’s war effort could only keep going with at least some co-operation from property owners. Parliament had to respect the rights of the gentry and the middling sort as far as was necessary to win the war, but there was no incentive to respect lower class people or animals.