Investigations of a Dog

This is the 14th Military History Carnival, with a special theme of Contested Boundaries. Today is also the day that Bloggers Unite encourages bloggers to write about human rights (hat tip: Mark Stoneman). I might post something on that theme later today if I have time (and I probably won’t have time), but this carnival edition gives plenty of attention to human rights issues.

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While trawling (not trolling) for more posts that I can include in the next MHC, I found something interesting via Muhlberger’s Early History:

The Soldier in Later Medieval England is a major research project directed by Anne Curry (who was my personal tutor when I was an undergraduate at Reading). They now have a pilot database online (with free access) with details of thousands of soldiers who fought in the Hundred Years War. This should be really useful for anyone interested in medieval military history, not least because the financial records that the data comes from give much more accurate figures for army sizes than the estimates in chronicles.

The 14th Military History Carnival will be here next week on Thursday 15th May. We still need more submissions: you can submit your own posts or someone else’s, relating to the Contested Boundaries theme or anything else within MHC’s usual remit. Please e-mail submissions to fallon.young@4-lom.com or use the the submission form.

More details of the Contested Boundaries theme:

This can cover disputed territories and borders, which are a big part of many wars. It can also cover cultural boundaries. How does war complicate, question or shift the boundaries between races, genders, classes, and sexual orientations, between able and disabled, or between human and animal? Above all, how is the boundary between war and peace constructed and contested? Just use your imagination.

You can submit your own posts or posts written by someone else. If you feel inspired to write something on this theme, then go for it. Considering the number of submissions we normally get it’s unlikely that your post will be rejected unless it’s outside the scope of the carnival or fails to meet basic standards of factual accuracy. Submissions don’t have to be limited to the theme. As usual, anything about armed forces and conflicts in any part of the world is eligible. Only wars that happened after 1 January 2001 are excluded. See the Military History Carnival page for more details of the carnival’s aims and scope.

Last week I read:

1. Michael Braddick, God’s Fury, England’s Fire (Allen Lane, February 2008).
2. Ian Gentles, The English Revolution and the Wars in the Three Kingdoms, 1638-1652 (Longman, March 2007).

Both are very good books. And the Dauphin’s horse “is a most absolute and excellent horse”. That is, they’re as good as books which attempt to synthesize the state of the field at the time of writing can be. But can we do better than that? There are at least two problems with this genre which might be solved by using the web instead of print.

First, it’s impossible to keep a printed book up to date. As both authors acknowledge, there will always be something more to be said. It’s inevitable that other people will be saying some of it while the book is going through the process of typesetting, proofreading, printing and distribution. Just one example: Gentles and Braddick both take a traditionally hostile view of the Earl of Manchester. In April 2007 Malcolm Wanklyn published an article which reassessed Manchester’s generalship and concluded that the traditional view is largely based on lies that Cromwell told after the events. I’m convinced by Wanklyn’s arguments, but even if other people aren’t, it’s obvious that this new interpretation needs to be discussed. It wasn’t possible for Gentles or Braddick to discuss it because the article came out too late. If books were published on the web instead of print this wouldn’t be a problem. There would be no physical limit on updating them like there is with printed books.

Second, history books, especially ones intended to be accessible to non-experts, generally need a coherent linear narrative. But this conflicts with the need to explain things to non-experts. This is a general problem with all history books. A more specific problem that Braddick and Gentles have to deal with is explaining complex interrelated events in three kingdoms. Both authors are good at dealing with these challenges, but there’s no reason why these things even need to be challenging. Hypertext can free us from the constraints of linear narrative to a certain extent. A web page which contains a basic outline of some events can also contain links to other pages giving background details of people, places, and related events. Just look at the internal links in Wikipedia, and the way that blogs often link to Wikipedia.

This isn’t just fantasy or wild speculation about the future. It’s happening now. Bill Turkel and Alan MacEachern have published The Programming Historian on the web instead of in print, and are making full use of the opportunities that web publishing offers. Let’s hope more people try it soon.

The next edition of the Military History Carnival will be here at Investigations of a Dog on Thursday 15th May. As always we need as many submissions as possible. To make it more interesting I’ve decided to give this edition a special theme: Contested Boundaries.

This can cover disputed territories and borders, which are a big part of many wars. It can also cover cultural boundaries. How does war complicate, question or shift the boundaries between races, genders, classes, and sexual orientations, between able and disabled, or between human and animal? Above all, how is the boundary between war and peace constructed and contested? Just use your imagination.

You can submit your own posts or posts written by someone else. If you feel inspired to write something on this theme, then go for it. Considering the number of submissions we normally get it’s unlikely that your post will be rejected unless it’s outside the scope of the carnival or fails to meet basic standards of factual accuracy. Submissions don’t have to be limited to the theme. As usual, anything about armed forces and conflicts in any part of the world is eligible. Only wars that happened after 1 January 2001 are excluded. See the Military History Carnival page for more details of the carnival’s aims and scope.

Please e-mail submissions to fallon.young@4-lom.com or use the the submission form.

If this is a success there might be more themed editions in future.

When I posted about Brian Manning’s The Far Left in the English Revolution I wondered whether it was worth investigating any of his other works. Mercurius Politicus said it was, so I got a copy of The English People and the English Revolution out of the library. It shouldn’t be too much of a surprise that MP was right as he knows a lot more about civil war historiography than I do. As well as a lot of useful material on the outbreak of war in 1642 there are plenty of examples of poaching, deer massacres, and livestock being driven onto disputed enclosures, which is an unexpected bonus for my work on animals.

The Stour valley riots get good coverage, pre-empting many of the major points of John Walter’s argument, apart from Manning’s determination to see class war everywhere . As Walter pointed out, the victims were all suspected royalists or catholics. Manning took elite perceptions of the mob’s motives too much at face value. Sir Thomas Barrington and Harbottle Grimston might have been alarmed by the many-headed monster, but they weren’t attacked themselves and probably weren’t in much danger compared to Countess Rivers. As Manning acknowledged, the Earl of Warwick’s steward was saved from a mob when someone recognised that he really was the Earl of Warwick’s steward.

The thing I found most interesting was an enclosure dispute in Huntingdonshire in 1641 in which Oliver Cromwell supported the commoners and Lord Mandeville acted on behalf of his father, the Earl of Manchester. This was the same Lord Mandeville who, after succeeding to his father’s title, became general of the Eastern Association. The feud between Manchester and Cromwell in 1644 is very well-known but I had no idea that animosity between them might go back this far. Other people might well have made the connection, but there isn’t any mention of it in Malcolm Wanklyn’s reassessment of Manchester.

1. Brian Manning, The English People and the English Revolution, 1640-1649 (Heinemann Educational: London, 1976).
2. Brian Manning, The far left in the English Revolution 1640 to 1660 (Bookmarks,: London :, 1999).
3. John Walter, Understanding Popular Violence in the English Revolution (Cambridge University Press: Cambridge, 1999).
4. Maclolm D. G. Wanklyn, ‘A General Much Maligned’, War In History, 14 (2007), pp. 133-156.

Mercurius Politicus linked to Gilbert Mabbott, a new blog about print culture in the English Civil Wars and Interregnum. From this blog I discovered that Calendar of State Papers Domestic is starting to appear on Google Books. There’s a James I volume available with full access. I’m hoping that the rest of the series, particularly the Charles I volumes, will follow soon. There’s no reason why they shouldn’t as they’re all in the public domain. Since the original documents were under Crown Copyright and the calendars were published by HMSO in the 19th century the copyright must have expired by now. Despite that, British History Online are trying to charge money for access to digital versions of the calendars for the reigns of James I and Charles I. I always thought that was a bad decision. If all of the volumes end up being freely available on Google it’s going to look even more stupid.

The latest early-modern edition of the Carnivalesque blog carnival is now up at Walking The Berkshires. Tim has hosted editions of just about every history related carnival and as usual he’s done a fantastic job. There are loads of fascinating posts, but my favourite has to be the one about pissing dogs in the American Revolution.

The 13th MHC is now up at The Cannon’s Mouth. In this case 13 isn’t unlucky at all as Ken has done an excellent job.

The next edition will be coming home to Investigations of a Dog on 15th May. This is a special edition with a theme of Contested Boundaries. As well as territorial disputes, we’d like to see posts about how war complicates boundaries of race, class, gender, sexuality, species etc. Above all we want to question the boundary between peace and war. If you see anything on these themes, please submit it. Or you could even write something if you feel inspired.

Submissions don’t have to be on these themes - you can still submit posts about any aspect of military history, war and armed forces. The usual limits apply: posts mainly about wars that happened after 1 January 2001 are not eligible.

E-mail submissions to fallon.young@4-lom.com or use the the submission form.

And we still need hosts for June and July - I’m not doing it two months in a row! If you’d like to try hosting please get in touch.

I’m starting to think that calling a post “Am I a proper historian now?” might have been a bad idea. It really wasn’t meant to be as self-pitying as it might have seemed, but of course text doesn’t always obey its authors intentions. There have been some interesting responses from Christopher Thompson and Oxoniensis on the problems and opportunities of pursuing academic history outside universities.

First of all I want to stress that I don’t feel inferior or excluded just because I don’t have a job in a university (or anywhere). The publication of my first article shows that I can get work published in peer reviewed academic journals as long as what I write is good enough, and that I can write pieces which are good enough. I don’t really have any problems getting speaking engagements either. I’ll be giving a paper on animals and early-modern society at the FORWARD symposium at Nottingham Trent University on 28th May. To the extent that I am excluded from things, many of these are things that people inside history departments might wish they were excluded from too: admin, meetings, petty rivalries, marking semi-literate essays etc. I’ve never really been interested in teaching, which limits the kind of jobs I can get. Concentrating on research is likely to mean a continuing cycle of short-term jobs and unemployment, but I thrive on adversity.

There are obviously some disadvantages to being independent and unemployed, and not just lack of money. I don’t have very easy access to a good academic library. Although I have graduate membership of Leeds University library, which is outstandingly good, it’s a 2 hour/£25 train journey away. Membership of the IHR gives me online access to some journals but not all the ones I need. With no ATHENS password most of the resources archived by the AHDS are off limits to me. The last two problems could be overcome by greater commitment to Open Access in the humanities. Oxoniensis suggests looking for some way of helping historians outside the academy, but a formal organisation might just shift the boundary between historians and everyone else rather than destroying it. I want resources which are currently limited to academics to be freely available to everyone, regardless of who they are or what they want to do with them.

Mercurius Rusticus responds to Oxoniensis by saying “Just let people do their own thing”. I completely agree. Self-publishing on the web, whether through blogs or other kinds of website, gives almost complete freedom (within the law of course). You don’t need anyone’s help to start a blog. You don’t need funding or qualifications or any kind of formal legitimation. You can just do it. I think this freedom is important. It would be terrible if blogs were formally peer reviewed and counted towards RAE. Instead of enthusiasm and risk the blogosphere would be full of safe but dull posts by people who didn’t really want to do it. Investigations of a Dog is my personal space where I can live under my own law and say “so I willed it”. As the Beckett paraphrase in the sub-title suggests, this is a place where I can try to fail in more interesting ways. I don’t always manage it. Sometimes I’ve embarrassed myself with an ill-considered post which could have done with more editing, and some of my posts have just been mediocre, but the possibility of getting something good makes it worth taking these risks.