So the FORWARD Symposium was a bit of an anti-climax as not many people turned up. Maybe it’ll be like the Sex Pistols at the 100 Club: in a few years time everyone will be saying they were there. Was good to see Martyn Bennett again. It doesn’t seem like 7 years since he examined my PhD thesis. If I wanted to compare the speakers to British indie bands (and why wouldn’t I? It’s a perfectly normal thing to do) I’d say that Lucy Worsley was Velocette, Rodreguez King-Dorset was Radiohead, and I was The Indelicates. Make of that what you will. In the evening we went to Lincoln Drill Hall to see Richard Holmes and Gordon Corrigan talking about the First World War. They were both very good.
Below is my paper, along with a Zotero-able bibliography. It’s slightly different from what I actually said as I ad-libbed some extra bits but it’s near enough. (I had some trouble uploading the pictures through Wordpress so some of them might be too big for some people, but I just couldn’t be bothered to set up thumbnails manually.)
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Last week I finally got round to reading Joshua Goldstein’s War and Gender. Goldstein argues that gender shapes war, and that war shapes gender. The evidence for the first is very strong. War would be different if its conduct wasn’t dominated by gender ideology. War has occurred in nearly all cultures, but nearly all cultures in nearly all periods have excluded women from active combat roles. The argument that this is because women are biologically unsuited to combat does not stand up. Goldstein shows that although women are smaller and weaker than men on average individuals are distributed along bell curves which overlap. The top 10 to 15% of women are bigger and stronger than then bottom 10 to 15% of men. Therefore under some historical circumstances armies could have had more and better soldiers if they recruited women as well as men.
The second argument, that war shapes gender, isn’t so strong. It’s true that gender is at least as universal as war, but Goldstein acknowledges that gender roles vary widely across cultures in almost every respect other than combat roles and hunting. It seems hard to explain how all of this diversity could be directed towards the same purpose: to produce warriors or potential warriors. Goldstein is very much the voice of rational liberal 20th century America. Although he makes good use of anthropology and recognises the huge diversity of gathering-hunting cultures I think he underestimates the strangeness of medieval and early-modern European cultures.
As an alternative to the warrior, Goldstein suggests the provider as a new ideal of masculinity which American men might aspire to in future. The big problem here is that this model is suspiciously similar to the ideals of early-modern English patriarchy studied by Anthony Fletcher and Alexandra Shepard. There was more to the early-modern patriarch than just providing, but he was certainly more of a provider than a warrior. To be a man was to be the head of a household. Boys were toughened up, but this was mainly so that they could control their own bodies, their wives, their children, and their servants. The ordered household was seen as the basis of an ordered society. In contrast, the warrior was not much of a normative ideal. Grievances over billeting suggest that even before the civil wars English civilians saw English soldiers as dangerous outsiders. Stereotypes of professional soldiers had more in common with the disobedient anti-patriarchal forms of masculinity which Shepard identified among students and apprentices. War was disorder: the very thing that early-modern patriarchy most feared.
I’m still in awe of Goldstein’s ambitious scholarship, and I think we need more historians (particularly military historians) to show this kind of imagination. But I also think his work shows some of the weaknesses of broad comparative studies: they risk abstracting and generalising to such an extent that a lot of important differences can be lost.
- Anthony J Fletcher, Gender, Sex and Subordination in England 1500-1800 (Yale University Press: New Haven, 1995).
- Joshua S. Goldstein, War and Gender (CUP: Cambridge, 2003).
- Alexandra Shepard, Meanings of Manhood in Early Modern England (Clarendon Press: Oxford, 2006).
Next week, on Wednesday 28th May, I’ll be speaking at the FORWARD Network Early Modern Social History Symposium at Nottingham Trent University. I’m going to talk about non-human animals in early-modern society: how we can bring them into social history and why we need to. The keynote speaker will be Lucy Worsley, and they also have what should be a fascinating paper on black dance by Rodreguez King-Dorset.
You can download a leaflet with more details here.
I’m very grateful to Rita Wierzbicki for inviting me to speak at what should be a very exciting event.
Abstract of my paper below: (more…)
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…
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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).
I’ll be giving a paper to the research seminar at Bishop Grosseteste University College, Lincoln, on Wednesday 14th November at 4pm. The paper is entitled “The Great Supply Chain of Being: Horses, People, and Networks of Authority in Civil War Essex”. I’m still not sure whether that’s a good title, but it’s a reaction against my “stuckist” phase when I hated puns and tried to make my paper titles as boring and descriptive as possible! The paper will be a fairly brief and accessible overview of some work in progress, which takes in military supply systems, authority, property rights, and the human/animal boundary. Abstract below, although the focus keeps changing as I rewrite it:
The right of humans to control and exploit the non-human was justified by the concept of the Great Chain of Being, which also reflected the hierarchical ideal of early-modern government and society. Much recent work has shown that this concept is inadequate as a model for analysing realities which were far more complex than the ideal. Grids and networks are now seen as better analogies for understanding what Michael Braddick and John Walter termed a “complex of hierarchies”. As King and Parliament raised armies, created new administrative structures, and sought legitimation, these hierarchies multiplied and the relationships between them became even more complex.
Horses were a vital resource for armies and economies, leading to conflicts over ownership. These conflicts can not simply be seen in terms of binary oppositions between military and civilian, or local and central. There were many different ways in which soldiers, administrators, and civilians negotiated power and property rights. Material contributions to the war effort ranged from voluntary contributions to requisitioning through military force. Even when arbitrary force was used, there was scope for choice and agency in strategies for seeking redress. Ultimately forced requisitioning proved to be inefficient and counter-productive. Parliament found that the consent and co-operation of property owners was vital. The war could only be won by resolving conflicts of interest and maintaining enough consensus for long enough to overcome the royalists.
While isolated from the main theatres of military operations, the county of Essex was a major contributor of horses, men, and money to the parliamentarian war effort. This was not simply determined by the dominance of pro-parliament puritans in county government. Authority still had to be negotiated both within and outside the county. This paper will explore experiences of war in Essex in 1642-45, demonstrating the complexity of networks of power, and how conflicts could arise within them and be resolved. The pressures of war revealed that even the distinction between man and beast was not as clear as the chain of being might suggest.
I’d like to welcome The Wapenshaw to the military history blogosphere. Rich will be taking a critical look at late medieval and early modern warfare, and combining military history with his interest in philosophy. His first post debates some of the issues raised by my posts on cavalry charges and raises some more questions about the meaning of the word “shock”.
Meanwhile I went to Cambridge on Saturday for a conference on “The Experience of Authority in Early Modern Britain”. I’m kind of ambivalent about my experience of the conference. While I would have found all of the papers stimulating if I was reading them in a journal, many of them were let down by poor delivery. This wasn’t really a question of volume — I could hear the words and understand them — it was just that they didn’t really grab me because they were spoken in such an uninspiring way. How can you expect anyone to be interested in your work if you don’t sound interested yourself? I completely agree with Bill Benzon that it’s a terrible idea to write your paper in the style of a written article and then read it out word for word. Steve Hindle was competent as you’d expect, and Helen Good and Rhian Wyn-Williams had the personality and stage presence to get their presentations across well, but only Andy Wood sounded really natural and spontaneous.
In summing up, Andy Wood made some good points about the future of political and social history, particularly the need to integrate gender issues more fully, and to take more notice of the experiences of emigrants to America. I was slightly disappointed that he didn’t mention animals (surely the Next Big Thing?) , but maybe it’s good that I’m ahead of the game. I could write a whole post taking issue with his claim that “politics isn’t about bus queues” if I get time.
Edit: I’ve just remembered that I saw a T-34 in a farmyard near Ely. Dan Todman also saw a T-34 recently.
Over at Victoria’s Cross, Gary Smailes posted a link to an article about the history of memorialisation from the Imperial War Museum. The article includes a photo of the memorial to the royalist officers Sir Charles Lucas and Sir George Lisle, who were executed on the orders of Sir Thomas Fairfax after the siege of Colchester in 1648. The article presents English Civil War memorials in terms of “deeds of heroism”, and by omitting the background to their execution perhaps unintentionally implies that Lucas and Lisle were victims or even martyrs. It’s worth pointing out that they were both executed for breaking their parole — they had previously surrendered to Parliament and promised not to fight again. Even so, this is quite an unusual case, and might be explained by the bitterness and frustration engendered by the siege of Colchester. Another interesting aspect which the article doesn’t mention is that there was a long running feud between the Lucas family and the borough of Colchester, which makes it ironic that the town now has a memorial to Sir Charles.
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Review of Diane Purkiss, The English Civil War: A People’s History (2006; ISBN: 000715061X).
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