Investigations of a Dog

This is just a quick roundup of some online resources that I’ve found recently.

Greenwit at Blogging the Renaissance linked to People In Place, the website of a major research project about families and households in early-modern London. As well as background information and details of their methodology, they have made some of the raw data available, including lists of people who lent money to the parliamentarians during the civil war. This is a really exciting development and I hope more projects will be doing this kind of thing in future.

Edward Vallance has compiled a list of online Protestation Returns.

Adam Roberts at The Valve pointed out The Medieval Bestiary, a site devoted to representations of animals in the middle ages. There is a huge amount of interesting information here and the site is also really nice to look at. From this I discovered that the idea that horses actively and enthusiastically take part in war goes back to the 7th century, and that Pliny mentions horses defending their riders in battles.

[Edit: And you can see a selected Weird Medieval Animal from the bestiary every Monday at Per Omnia Saecula]

Malcolm Wanklyn, Decisive Battles of the English Civil War, (Barnsley, Pen and Sword, 2006); ISBN: 1844154548.

I’m just going to get straight to the point: this is the best book ever written about English Civil War battles. I’m not being sarcastic or damning it with faint praise. It really is that good. Wanklyn argues that previous methodology of battle reconstruction is inadequate, that familiar sources need to be reassessed, and that we really know far less than we thought we did about what really happened.

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The next Military History Carnival will be at Osprey Publishing Blog on Tuesday 11th December. Send submissions to blog at ospreypublishing dot com or use our carnival submission form. Remember the definition of “military history” is very broad: anything about wars or armed forces or their effect on people/animals/things in any part of the world up to the end of the 20th century.