Investigations of a Dog

The 350th anniversary of the death of Oliver Cromwell is coming up soon (even if you’re pedantic enough to commemorate it on 3rd September Old Style it’s not that far off!) so Ted Vallance is organizing a one-off Cromwell themed blog carnival. It’s probably no surprise that I’ve decided to look at Cromwell’s early career as a cavalry officer in the First Civil War. Cromwell is more famous for becoming commander of the New Model Army, and then Lord Protector. Although these things didn’t happen until much later they have seriously skewed perceptions of Cromwell’s military career from 1642-46. For a long time there was a strong Whiggish tendency to look for signs of future greatness in his earlier actions (much as I love C. H. Firth he was one of the major offenders here). This hasn’t been helped by Cromwell’s own self-mythologizing or parliamentarian/Independent propaganda in the Thomason Tracts. I’m going to try to disregard all that and compare Cromwell as a cavalry commander with one of his contemporaries, Sir William Balfour. By 1644 Cromwell and Balfour had similar rank and responsibilities, but Balfour didn’t go on to be Lord Protector and so has been largely forgotten.

[I wrote this off the top of my head and never got round to checking all the facts or putting in references. It doesn’t matter too much because it’s mostly just about my personal opinion, but be aware that some of it might be wrong. The best source for Balfour is Edward Furgol’s article in the DNB]

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…and then I found a job. But I am not in any way miserable now. In fact I’m quite pleased and excited. I now have a contract to do freelance data entry work for the Life in the Suburbs project. This will involve working from home transcribing parish registers of St Botolphs Aldgate (where the saddler Thomas Harrison lived) and Holy Trinity Minories. I’ll be under the supervision of Gill Newton, who has done some really exciting work developing a phonetic algorithm to match similar sounding names. The hours are short and flexible, the pay is really good, and the work is very well suited to my skills, experience and interests. This should make my life much easier in lots of ways.

Obviously I won’t be blogging about anything that goes on in the project, or posting any of the data, so you’ll just have to wait until the results have been published to see what the researchers have found. Apart from that there probably won’t be much change to my blogging - or at least my posts won’t be any less frequent than they already are.

The new edition of the Military History Carnival is now up at Osprey Publishing blog. It’s a special Olympic themed edition - Mike has done an excellent job of putting it together.

Next month’s MHC will be hosted by Alex Clark at History of Warfare on the 14th September. You can e-mail submissions to alexanderclark999 [at] gmail [dot] com or use the submission form.

We also need hosts for October onwards.

And the latest early-modern edition of Carnivalesque is up at Early Modern Notes. From my experience of carnivals I’d guess that “more nominations than any other post” means about two nominations…

Today I made my sidebar widget aware, made some other changes to my theme, and replaced my categories with tags. It’s all looking pretty good, and the tag cloud is quite an interesting representation of what I’ve been writing about (although it’s possibly ruined my feminist credentials).

The only problem is that I forgot to turn off pingbacks while I was going through my archives to add new tags to every post, so lots of blogs will have been pinged by very old posts of mine when I saved them. (Also Wordpress seems to have eaten a lot of COiNS metadata - so much for the editor that doesn’t mess with your code!)

Way back in October 2006 (when this blog was all shiny and new) I wrote about female saddlers in London during the English Civil War. My work on saddlers and harness makers (male as well as female) is quite open-ended. I don’t know exactly where I’m going with it, so I’m just tying to find out as much as I can about these individuals and their families when I get the chance. A while ago I searched the records of the Prerogative Court of Canterbury for wills of people I was interested in. These are available through DocumentsOnline, but I found it cheaper to print out copies while I was at the PRO (20p per sheet as opposed to £3.50 per will). I didn’t find a will for everyone (some might have had their wills proved in other courts) but I came up with a lot of hits. Recently I finally got round to transcribing them (which was good palaeography practice) and publishing the transcripts on Your Archives.

Although wills tend to come in a standard form, that structure can contain a lot of variety. They can tell us about people’s wealth, business activities, and families, and contain all kinds of incidental details which shed some light on their lives. Below is a selection of some of the more interesting things I found, with links to the full transcripts.

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The next Military History Carnival will be at the Osprey Publishing blog on 18th August. Please e-mail submissions to blog at ospreypublishing dot com or use the submission form. Remeber the definition of military is very broad, but only wars before 1 January 2001 can be included. See the Military History Carnival homepage for more details of what is eligible.

We also need hosts for October onwards.