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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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.

Last week I posted about experiments with Python to automatically identify places mentioned in lists of horses donated to parliament’s armies in the English Civil War. The initial results were very encouraging. Using the difflib algorithm to compare a selection of places with a list of Buckinghamshire parishes gave very encouraging results. Since then I’ve scaled it up and also tried some different approaches. The results are less clear cut when comparing bigger lists, but I’ve been able to write a program which should save me a lot of time compared to the manual methods that I used during my PhD.

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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…

1. Gavin Robinson, ‘Horse Supply and the Development of the New Model Army, 1642-1646’, War In History, 15 (April 2008), pp. 121-140.

Never mind the scary theory, here’s some empiricism. And computer programming. The piece I’m working on is an analysis of lists of horses donated to the parliamentarian army in the First Civil War. There are some figures derived from these lists in my forthcoming article in War In History and in the seminar paper that I posted in November, but I’m trying to write an article which examines them in much more detail. This article will be related to debates over allegiance and the causes of the war, which is why I’ve been trying to explore the historiography and think about theoretical issues, but the substance of it will be fairly straightforward empirical stuff with lots of numbers. That’s not to say that this kind of analysis is easy. If it was someone else might have done it all years ago. John Tincey was the first person to try it, but he only did the smallest of the three account books, which is a fraction of the size of the other two. Following his lead I decided to do all of them.

In 1999 I spent about 2 weeks in the PRO typing these lists into an Access database. I’m still using that transcript as the basis of my work now, although I’ve converted it to XML to make it more flexible and checked a selection of the entries against digital photos of the manuscript. I’ve been using the Python classes that I developed for representing uncertainty to calculate totals of horses and values. Some pages are damaged, meaning that exact totals can’t be calculated – this is something that was difficult to deal with in Access but the combination of XML and Python has enough flexibility to cope with it. Getting totals for days and months is fairly easy, but I also want to group by the social status of the donors and the counties that they came from. Before I can group by counties I need to identify place names given in the manuscript as although some entries specify a county in the address, many more give a place name without a county.

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More thoughts relating to my last post on Glenn Burgess on revisionism. I was making what might look like esoteric theoretical points there, and it might not always be immediately obvious how that applies to the existing historiography in practice. Anti-theory polemic often constructs a false dichotomy between all points of view being equally valid on the one hand and only one objective truth being valid on the other. I think things are more complicated than that. Although I reject objectivity I do think that there are many interpretations of history which are invalid for various reasons, including being internally inconsistent, not being very well supported by their own evidence, or even contradicting the laws of physics. But once we’ve dismissed all these interpretations as being impossible, we could potentially be left with many interpretations which are possible. This is where we get the theoretical issues that I wrote about before. It might not be possible, or even necessary, to choose between all these possible interpretations and choose a single correct one.

Applying this to English/British Civil War/Revolution historiography can illustrate the point, but it’s not necessarily obvious because other, more obvious, factors get in the way. For a start, many histories of this period (particularly, but not only, from Whigs and Marxists) have fallen at the first fence because they are internally inconsistent and/or not well supported by their own evidence (these are arguably the same thing, because poor evidence is an inconsistency for any empirical work but possibly irrelevant to non-empirical work). More have fallen at the second fence because other historians have produced evidence which contradicts them. Most, if not all, of the histories written from Gardiner onwards have shared certain basic empirical assumptions, so it’s perhaps surprising that these works have often not lived up to empirical standards of proof. Pointing that out should be alarming, but it might also be misleadingly comforting. Surely if everyone genuinely adhered to proper empirical standards we’d be able to find the one true story, wouldn’t we? I don’t think so. The fact that in practice so many historians have tried to argue for interpretations which are impossible doesn’t do anything to diminish the theoretical possibilities for an abundance of interpretations which can’t be dismissed as wrong but which can’t be chosen between. In practice we’re only just starting to see this.

Following Glenn Burgess’s example, I’ll take two different works and compare them: John Adamson’s The Noble Revolt and John Walter’s Understanding Popular Violence. Both books are meticulously researched to the highest standards (or at least higher than most other books I’ve seen). Their descriptions of what happened would be difficult to challenge on empirical grounds. Both relate to the causes and outbreak of the First Civil War but each has a very narrow focus rather than offering an overarching model which claims to explain everything. It is perhaps this focus that allows the authors to be so meticulous, and therefore avoid falling at the early empirical fences. This is not to say that they are less ambitious than Lawrence Stone or David Underdown (examples of historians who did attempt overarching explanatory models), just that their ambitions might be pointing in a different direction. Neither Adamson nor Walter explicitly claims to be telling the whole story. They have omitted many things and made arbitrary decisions about what to include, as any historian must when writing any history, but they have not attempted to close down other possibilities outside their chosen scope. This is not to say that they think anything goes. Within their chosen scope, both have demolished previous interpretations which now look impossible or at least highly improbable. The most important thing is that these books do not contradict each other much, if at all. It would be quite easy to see them as dealing with different parts of the same thing. Therefore we have two interpretations which differ because their focus and end points differ, but which are not mutually exclusive. However, I suspect that it would be difficult to synthesize both works into a single overarching thesis in the style of Lawrence Stone. They’re just different. Taken together they suggest that the civil war might be too big and complicated to ever be distilled into a single work. I think that this will become increasingly obvious in the future as we see more books like these.

1. John Adamson, The Noble Revolt (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2007).
2. Glenn Burgess, ‘On revisionism: an analysis of early Stuart historiography in the 1970s and 1980s’, Historical Journal, 33 (1990), pp. 609-27.
3. John Walter, Understanding Popular Violence in the English Revolution: The Colchester Plunderers (Cambridge University Press: Cambridge, 1999).

And now the return of my series of posts about English/British Civil War(s)/Revolution(s) historiography. Today I’m considering Brian Manning’s The Far Left in the English Revolution. Published in 1999, this is one of the most recent examples of old-school Marxism. If you’ve read any of my previous posts on causes and allegiance you’ll know that I’m not really a fan of Marxism, but I’m trying to see the good as well as the bad. There has been some criticism of Manning’s work from Rusticus. However, I’ll always have a certain amount of respect for him simply because he’s always been prepared to offer a clear, succinct, and empirically testable definition of “revolution”. It’s surprising how unusual that is for a historian of this period.

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And more adventures with Python programming. One of the trickiest problems in British history is dealing with pre-decimal currency. Until 1971 British currency was a bit strange to say the least. There were 12 pence in a shilling and 20 shillings in a pound (so a pound had 240 pence). This is obviously not something that most off-the-shelf software can deal with, but doing calculations on old money is something that historians need to do quite a lot. During my PhD, when I was using Access databases, I had to decimalize amounts of money before I could do anything with them. That was awkward because some values in the pence column (I seem to remember that 4 and 8 were particularly annoying) gave a recurring fraction. To make things easier I arbitrarily rounded the pence values to the nearest multiple of 3, which meant that my figures were less exact than they could have been, but in practice I could live with it.

These days I can do better. Below are some technical details of how I approached the problem in Python (I like traaaainspotting…).

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