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.
- Brian Manning, The English People and the English Revolution, 1640-1649 (Heinemann Educational: London, 1976).
- Brian Manning, The far left in the English Revolution 1640 to 1660 (Bookmarks,: London :, 1999).
- John Walter, Understanding Popular Violence in the English Revolution (Cambridge University Press: Cambridge, 1999).
- Maclolm D. G. Wanklyn, ‘A General Much Maligned’, War In History, 14 (2007), pp. 133-156.
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.
Anyone with online access to War In History can now download my debut article which is about horses and the New Model Army. I haven’t got my hands on a hard copy yet, but it’s quite exciting to see it on the website. Now I just need to finish the Difficult Second Article…
- Gavin Robinson, ‘Horse Supply and the Development of the New Model Army, 1642-1646’, War In History, 15 (April 2008), pp. 121-140.
Back in December 2006 I posted about cavalry charges. Inspired by John Keegan and Frank Tallett, I argued that the idea that cavalry horses crashed into each other in a “shock” charge was completely spurious because horses won’t willingly crash into a solid object, and if they could be made to the outcome would be disastrous because they would be killed or seriously injured by the impact. Physics and common sense are both on my side, but empirical evidence of horse collisions is very difficult to get. The best I could do back then was the footage of Anmer hitting Emily Davison in the 1913 Derby.
Now Peter at That’s Pretty Lame has found exactly what I needed: YouTube footage of two horses colliding head-on at a full gallop. According to the commentary this happened at Prescott Downs, Arizona on 26 August 2000. Both horses were killed and jockey Stacy Burton suffered severe brain injury. I shouldn’t be pleased about such a tragedy, but it’s the perfect empirical evidence to prove my point.
If only I’d thought of searching YouTube for horse collisions, but I assumed they were so rare that I wouldn’t find one. In fact that isn’t the only one. This is another - it looks like the collision is at a slower speed than the Prescott Downs accident but both horses are brought down. In this one the collision is at a very slow canter - looks like no-one was hurt but the riders only just stayed on. This is about as close as you can get to knocking the enemy out of the way with your momentum, but I think it supports my point that the effects of a collision are equally bad for both parties (just as Isaac Newton predicted - who’d have thought it?). So the bay barged past the grey and kept going, but if this was a cavalry charge I don’t think you could really say that the bay won. Both sides would be disordered and neither would have gained an advantage.
For the first 9 weeks of this year I didn’t read any books or articles - mainly because I’ve been concentrating on Python programming and XML markup. This weekend I broke the embargo in style by reading two exciting new pieces: Karl Steel’s ‘How To Make A Human’ and Esther MacCallum-Stewart’s ‘Real Boys Carry Girly Epics: Normalising Gender Bending in Online Games’. This might sound like a horrible cliche, but both articles are about the blurring of boundaries.
Karl argues that in the middle ages the animal-human boundary was maintained not just by asserting that animals were different from humans, but by subjugating animals to humans. Owning and killing animals was necessary to maintain the distinction between animals and humans. He concludes with the suggestion that taking away the right of the lower classes to hunt was seen as taking away their humanity. This is something that I’m likely to be quoting a lot in my work on horses in the English Civil War, as it could equally be suggested that when soldiers took away people’s horses they were also taking away their humanity.
Esther suggests that gender swapping in online gaming is likely to be a lot more common than many people think. She points out how common it is for players to ask female avatars whether they’re female in real life. This suggests a certain amount of anxiety about gender bending, but although this anxiety might ostensibly be based on an assumption that playing an avatar of a different gender is deviant, the assumption undermines itself. If the question is asked so often, that leads to the conclusion that gender swapping is quite normal, even if you don’t want to admit it. If it’s supposed to be so unusual why waste time asking every female avatar if she’s really a man?
Esther’s article focuses on an issue which was largely glossed over in the Fibreculture article that I posted about the other day: we really don’t know how many women are playing online games because there’s often no way of knowing who’s behind an avatar. If someone plays a female avatar in game but posts on the forum as a male there’s clearly some gender bending going on, but which way? Is a forum persona necessarily any more real than an avatar in a game? (See also my old post on roleplaying in Livejournal) Therefore Fullerton, Morie and Pearce might be assuming too much (or should I say too little?) about female participation in gaming. Could it be that female gamers adopt male personas when playing stereotypically masculine games? Nobody knows whether they do or don’t. Ultimately Esther shows that even when mainstream gaming is dominated by a narrow range of gender stereotypes many gamers are undermining those stereotypes in ways that are really not that deviant or unusual. As Paul Westerberg said, “tomorrow, who’s gonna fuss?”.
- Tracy Fullerton, Jacquelyn Ford Morie, and Celia Pearce, ‘A Game of One’s Own: Towards a New Gendered Poetics of Digital Space’, Fibreculture, (2008).
- Esther MacCallum-Stewart, ‘Real Boys Carry Girly Epics: Normalising Gender Bending in Online Games’, Eludamos, 2 (2008).
- Karl Steel, ‘How To Make A Human’, Exemplaria, 20 (2008), pp. 3-27.
I’ve just read an anecdote about some Londoners who had never seen a cow before. It was from 1644. Ah! Pull back and reveal! My expectations were confounded…
The anecdote in question comes from Robert Harley, an officer in Sir William Waller’s army. His letter is mostly known as an eyewitness account of the battle of Cheriton, but sandwiched between a matter-of-fact relation of some minor skirmishing is the cow story (HMC, Portland, iii, 107):
The enemy faced us this day with about three thousand horse. Here you should have seen the Londoners runne to see what manner of thinges cowes were. Some of them would say they had all of them hoornes, and would do greate mischiefe with them, then comes one of the wisest of them cryeth ‘Speake softly’. To end the confusion of their opinions they pyled up a counsel of warr, and agreed it was nothing but some kind of looking glasse, and soe marched away. Wee had some light skirmishes but with little hurt on either side.
What’s going on here? Were there really 17th century Londoners who had never seen a cow? Surely Smithfield market was full of them (cows and Londoners!), and cows tended to be slaughtered at the butcher’s shop. Maybe there were some poor areas of the East End where nobody could afford beef so the butchers didn’t buy cows, but if that was the case it would imply that the residents never went very far from home. The countryside, the richer areas of London, and the livestock market at Smithfield should all have been within walking distance.
The alternative is that Harley was making it up or exaggerating for comic effect. In that case it might tell us something about stereotyping. Since he was from a gentry family (son of Sir Robert and Lady Brilliana Harley of Brampton Bryan) it wouldn’t be surprising if he had a negative view of the lower classes. But it could also be a case of rural against urban. Maybe the sterotype of ignorant townies goes back further than I thought.
Another possibility is that “cow” has some special meaning here - perhaps a different breed with bigger horns compared to the ones Londoners were used to seeing. Did the cows bred for the London meat market have their horns removed?
Ultimately I don’t really know what to make of it, but it’s definitely something to think about. Any suggestions welcome.
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]
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…
(more…)
The World Turned Upside Down is a very well-known pamphlet which crops up in many books about the English/British Civil War(s)/Revolution (”or whatever we are to call the blasted thing” - John Morrill). In fact it occurs so often that it’s a bit of a cliche. Despite/because of that, I’m going to use it in my forthcoming seminar paper on animals, authority and property rights. Although the image is very familiar, I didn’t know very much about the pamphlet until recently, and once I looked at it in detail it defied my expectations in some ways (this kind of relates to Rachel’s post about making the implicit explicit).
(more…)
I’m still ploughing through The Noble Revolt, but luckily I still have some posts saved up. I originally got a copy of Dan Beaver, ‘The Great Deer Massacre’ (Journal of British Studies, 1999, pp. 187-216) because of my interest in animals, but it turned out to be highly relevant for my work on the historiography of the causes and outbreak of the English Civil War. Like John Walter’s work on the Stour Valley riots, this article takes a detailed look at an outbreak of popular violence in 1642. In this case it’s the massacre of several hundred deer in a Gloucestershire chase belonging to the Earl of Middlesex in October 1642. Also like Walter, Beaver convincingly refutes revisionist arguments that popular violence in this period was apolitical and unconnected to the civil war. Although there are similarities to the situation at Colchester, there are also significant differences, which warn us against making generalisations.
The massacre was the result of a dispute between the Earl of Middlesex and some of his neighbours and tenants. Beaver includes lots of detail about the social and cultural significance of hunting and venison in order to emphasise that the slaughter was a calculated insult to the Earl and an attack on his status. This was revenge for the Earl’s aggressive pursuit of poachers and woodcutters. As some of these poachers, who led the massacre, were gentlemen, the action is clearly different from the Stour Valley, although this makes it even less of a class war. But as with Colchester, the local feud combined with anger at Charles I’s policies in the 1630s. In this case, his exploitation of the forest laws had aroused a lot of grievances, while the Earl of Middlesex had prosecuted both poachers and woodcutters in Star Chamber. Beaver sees this as a crucial mistake as it forced two disparate groups together and encouraged them to take collective action against the Earl. Anti-Catholicism also played a role. As well as attacking the Earl’s deer, they attacked his house at Forthampton, a former monastic property retaining decorations which the crowd found offensively idolatrous. However, there isn’t much evidence of popular parliamentarianism inspired by Ordinances of Parliament as there was at Colchester, when the main aim was to disarm Sir John Lucas before he could join the King.
This has got me wondering if there are more incidents of popular action which need to be looked into without any Marxist or revisionist blinkers. It certainly suggests that we need more microhistories to find out what was really going on in England in 1642 and why.
- Daniel C. Beaver, ‘The great deer massacre : animals, honor, and communication in early modern England’, Journal of British Studies, 38 (1999), pp. 187-216.
- John Walter, Understanding Popular Violence in the English Revolution (Cambridge University Press: Cambridge, 1999).
