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. 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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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.
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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Since my last post I’ve been doing some more experiments to see how Zotero can be used for cataloguing previously uncatalogued administrative records from the English Civil War. I’ve now put some more of my ideas into practice in demo form and they seem to work. Linking images to Zotero items and adding metadata went very smoothly. The idea of adding extra data by putting XML tags in notes also works, although this is just a stopgap until they implement custom fields. Once you have data in Zotero it’s very easy to export it as XML and do whatever you want with it. More details below, but it gets a bit technical and even includes some sample code (formatting code in Wordpress is hard, and it’ll probably screw up the layout for some people). If you’re not A. Nerd and you’re not doing the shopping for your mum you might want to stop reading now.
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In a previous post I mentioned experimenting with taking photos at the Public Records Office/National Archives. Getting good photos is only part of the problem. The real work starts when you get them home. How do you organise them and make sense of them? It should be no surprise that Zotero is really useful for this, but I’ve discovered a few tricks to make it even better.
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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]
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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Like Alan Harris’s marking, the background reading must be done. English Civil War causes and allegiance posts now have their own category, and this is the latest addition. This week I’ve been reading Anthony Fletcher’s The Outbreak of the English Civil War, published in 1981. This is a very detailed look at what happened in England from 1640 to 1642. In some ways it’s a product of its times, as it’s very heavily influenced by the revisionism of Conrad Russell and John Morrill, but Fletcher added a lot of new evidence and some ideas of his own.
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This post has been removed as it was offensive and wrong. I apologize for any offense it might have caused.
