Investigations of a Dog

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.

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 week I’m going through some anthologies of important articles about the English Civil War, still looking at definitions of war/revolution and approaches to allegiance. This post is a brief summary of some of the articles in Peter Gaunt’s The English Civil War: The Essential Readings (2000). Despite the title, Gaunt acknowledges in the introduction the problems of defining and naming whatever it was that happened in the 1640s and 1650s. However, he doesn’t pay much attention to the problems of defining when in 1642 war broke out, just asserting that it was the raising of the standard at Nottingham in August which marked the official start of the war. It’s interesting that Gaunt pays some attention to the neglected question of how and why the First Civil War ended as it did, attempting to redress the balance in the historiography which has been far more concerned with why it started.

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Yet more English Civil War historiography. The Nature of the English Revolution (1993) is a collection of essays by John Morrill, mostly published over the previous 20 years, with some previously unpublished or hard to find material, and new essays to introduce each section. This work gives a different perspective from both the original 1976 Revolt of the Provinces and the 1998 rewrite Revolt in the Provinces (here he gives a different story about the original title, claiming that it was entirely his own fault – presumably it still wasn’t safe to blame Geoffrey Elton in 1993!). The most obvious difference is given away by the title: in 1993 Morrill had come round to thinking that there was a revolution. He placed it in 1649, considering that the regicide and republic brought about the change in consciousness which he had made the defining characteristic of a revolution. However, he maintains that the First Civil War was more a war of religion than a revolutionary war, and that it was the strains of war which led to revolution rather than any long term social or economic changes. Claiming that his model has been misrepresented as monocausal by his critics, Morrill offers plenty of qualification. He does not claim that religion was the only source of division in England in 1642 but that it was the one factor above all others which made the militant minorities want to fight each other. The rest of this post will focus on the issues of allegiance, particularly with Morrill’s critiques of David Underdown and B. G. Blackwood.

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This is my second post on R. C. Richardson’s edited collection The English Civil War: Local Aspects (1997), but it’s really just about B. G. Blackwood, ‘Parties and Issues in the Civil War in Lancashire and East Anglia’, first published in Northern History in 1993. That date is quite surprising as Blackwood’s approach seems very old fashioned even for the early 90s.

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The English Civil War historiography goes on and on. This week I’ve been looking at R. C. Richardson (ed.) The English Civil War: Local Aspects (1997), a collection of articles on local history previously published between 1969 and 1994. Not all of these are directly relevant to the questions I’m focusing on: how is the problem of the civil war/revolution defined? How is “allegiance” conceptualised? How many people did it take to start the war?

Richardson’s introduction to the collection is mostly a straightforward descriptive survey of the historiography (much like his Debate on the English Revolution). He suggests that the approaches used by local historians have become increasingly important to our understanding of the period. In some ways this depends on how you define “local history”. Is microhistory always a subset of local history, or can it be something entirely different? Richardson seems to be assuming that anything less than national history is necessarily local. Maybe this was more or less true at the time he was writing, although even then he lumped in a couple of books which sought to reconstruct the experiences of one individual (Alan MacFarlane on Ralph Josselin and Paul Seaver on Nehemiah Wallington). You can argue that such a narrow focus is necessarily local, but you could just as easily argue that it’s both more and less than local history. Things have only got more complicated in the last ten years. For example, John Adamson’s recent work The Noble Revolt is hardly local history (even though most of the action takes place in Westminster) but its narrow focus is hardly national either.

I’m not going to go through the rest of the collection in order, as I haven’t looked at all the essays, and some needed more comment than others. B. G. Blackwood is getting a whole post to himself tomorrow. Below are some thoughts on John Webb ‘The Siege of Portsmouth in the Civil War’, and Alan Everitt, ‘The Local Community in the Great Rebellion’.

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So I’ve finally finished reading John Adamson’s The Noble Revolt (2007). Mercurius Politicus has already posted a review of the book, having read it twice. That’s quite an achievement as it’s huge: an extremely detailed narrative of English and Scottish politics from May 1640 to January 1642. The main text alone is over 500 pages, and there are nearly 200 pages of endnotes after that! Fortunately Adamson’s style is very readable, making the story atmospheric and exciting, and the outstanding colour plates provide some much needed eye-candy as well as adding to the atmosphere. Whether or not Adamson’s argument stands up, this is a very nice book to own (and I’m not normally into book porn!), and since it’s the most recent major contribution to the debate on the origins of the English Civil War, it can’t be ignored.

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Mark Stoyle’s Soldiers and Strangers: An Ethnic History of the English Civil War (2005) offers a very new and different perspective of the war in England between 1646. Stoyle shows how the separateness of Welsh and Cornish identities, and the involvement of soldiers from Scotland, Ireland and many other European countries makes the name “English Civil War” potentially misleading, but also argues that the New Model Army’s reconquest of England was a reassertion of Englishness. This work has important implications for my current project, as it offers a new interpretation of allegiance and the outbreak of war in 1642 (the question of whether there was a revolution is completely outside its scope, but Stoyle dates the outbreak of war roughly to the spring and summer of 1642). While Stoyle doesn’t claim that ethnic divisions or nationalism were long term causes of the civil war, he argues that along with the anti-Scottish sentiment identified by Conrad Russell, Welsh and Cornish concern to protect their own traditions from an aggressively English parliament made a major contribution to the emergence of a royalist party which made it possible for the king to fight in 1642.

Considering the importance of the concept of allegiance to this work, it isn’t very clearly defined (perhaps I need to go back to Stoyle’s earlier work Loyalty and Locality to get a better idea of what he means by allegiance). He seems to use the royalist and parliamentarian boxes which John Morrill complained of and doesn’t identify any neutralism in Cornwall or Wales in 1642. Maybe that’s because there genuinely wasn’t any, but I still find the claims that Welsh support for the king in 1642 was “near unanimous” (p. 13) to be a bit hyperbolic on the strength of the evidence offered. Stoyle mostly uses signing petitions and volunteering for the army as signs of allegiance. These do show that Welsh royalist sentiment was unusually strong and appeared unusually early compared to England, and that compared to the population the military participation rate was very high (the population of the whole of Wales was roughly similar to the population of London!). Stoyle acknowledges that there were pockets of parliamentarian support but gives the impression that everyone chose one side or the other. If there is strong evidence that Wales doesn’t conform to John Morrill’s model of small minorities forcing war onto a reluctant majority, that probably deserves a lot more discussion. I’m just slightly suspicious because Stoyle’s generalisation that south-eastern England was mostly parliamentarian in 1642 doesn’t agree with detailed work on Kent and Essex by the likes of Alan Everitt and John Walter.

Finally I was surprised that Stoyle didn’t make much of the relative anthropocentrism of propaganda which described foreigners as bestial, although this leaves an opportunity for further research. Also on the theme of animals the cover illustration is worth a mention. Like the cover of Carlin’s Causes of the English Civil War it shows a contemporary woodcut with interesting depictions of animals which isn’t discussed in the text and isn’t properly referenced. In this case it shows Prince Rupert, along with his horse and his dog, burning Birmingham (I think this one will be easier to track down). The horse is definitely a stallion (you can see its testicles and what might be an unrealistically small penis!), so that’s another piece of evidence for my project on war horses and gender.

1. Norah. creator Carlin, The causes of the English Civil War (Blackwell Publishers,: Oxford :, 1999).
2. Alan Milner Everitt, The Community of Kent and the Great Rebellion, 1640-60 (Leicester UP: Leicester, 1966).
3. Mark Stoyle, Loyalty and Locality (University of Exeter Press: Exeter, 1994).
4. Mark Stoyle, Soldier and Strangers (Yale University Press, August 2005).
5. John Walter, Understanding Popular Violence in the English Revolution (Cambridge University Press: Cambridge, 1999).

Conrad Russell’s The Causes of the English Civil War (1990) is part of his magnum opus which was intended to be read alongside The Fall of the British Monarchies (1991). The former book is an outline of his argument, while the latter is a detailed narrative containing more evidence to back up the arguments. At this stage I don’t think I’ll be reading FBM as I’m mostly interested in how the problems have been defined rather than whether the evidence supports the arguments, and also because if I have to read a long, detailed narrative John Adamson’s The Noble Revolt is a higher priority (my copy arrived today and I’m truly shocked at how big and thick it is!).

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This week I’ve been looking at some general works of synthesis/survey on the causes of the English/British Civil War/Revolution: R. C. Richardson, The Debate on the English Revolution (1998); Norah Carlin, The Causes of the English Civil War (1999); and Gerald Aylmer, Rebellion or Revolution? (1986). Strangely enough Richardson has the same cover picture as the copy of Aylmer that I owned as an undergraduate, but the copy of Aylmer I have now has a different design. Carlin certainly has the best cover of the three: a contemporary woodcut showing stereotypical roundheads and cavaliers setting their dogs on each other. I’d like to track down the pamphlet it came from as it’s very relevant to my interest in animals, but the book doesn’t give a reference for it so all I know is that it was printed in 1642: not very helpful considering the size of the Thomason collection!

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