[cross-posted at The horse in history and culture]

When I started my comeback as a historian in 2006, after a 5 year career break, I wanted to push myself in new directions. Therefore I challenged myself to come up with the most way-out research question possible. What I came up with was: do people construct gender for horses? I decided to look specifically at the roles of horses in war, partly because I’m a military historian, and partly because war is one of the most heavily gendered things in history. I first wrote a blog post about the project in October 2006, but since then I’ve changed my mind about lots of things. I followed up with two posts about how cavalry drill books specified criteria for good war horses. While the books I looked at didn’t always explicitly say that stallions were always best, there was a definite male bias, and mares were never mentioned. This post is a look at where I’ve got to now, and where I need to go next.

In my first post I naively expected animals to be a state of nature where there was only biological sex and no gender. I don’t think this is viable now. I’m increasingly following Judith Butler and Thomas Laqueur in the view that gender versus sex is a false dichotomy. Perceptions of the body are always gendered. Furthermore it now looks hopelessly wrong to assume that non-human species have no culture or gender. Dominance hierarchies can be heavily gendered. Chimpanzees have patriarchal societies in which disputes are often settled by violence, but Bonobos have matriarchal societies in which disputes are often settled by lesbian sex, despite the genetic similarities between the two species (see Joshua Goldstein, War and Gender).

This actually leads to a simpler way of putting the question: if humans always perceive each other in gendered ways, why wouldn’t they also perceive animals in gendered ways? In fact there is scientific evidence that humans even perceive inanimate objects in gendered ways! A post at Babel’s Dawn mentions an experiment which showed that the grammatical gender of a noun affects how people perceive and describe the physical object which the noun refers to. Genus and sexus are not separate in people’s minds. They bleed into each other in a way which can interfere with perception. This could also have major implications for metaphors. Saying that one thing is like another might cause people to perceive them as the same thing, with serious consequences for how they get treated in reality (we all know about early-modern misogynists who said women were more like animals than men).

As I started to read more about early-modern gender I realized that some of my own assumptions about the relationship between gender and biology were specifically modern. While perceptions of the body (and especially the genitals) have always played a part in gender ideology, modern science has made the reproductive organs appear more important than they did before. In early-modern England clothes were probably more important than bodies. This opened up many possibilities for gender swapping. In Agnes Bowker’s Cat, David Cressy looked at the case of a young man who passed as a woman for long enough to gatecrash a lying-in party (one of the few kinds of all female spaces in England at this time). Diane Dugaw wrote a whole book about warrior woman ballads which featured women dressing as men in order to join the army or navy. She showed that this behaviour was possible and not even particularly uncommon in real life (although I now think the differences between ballads and reality might be significant – in ballads the woman was always found out eventually, usually by exposure of the body, although usually not specifically the genitals; in real life they weren’t always found out and sent home; how many more were never discovered at all? Were the ballads a way of dealing with anxiety about this possibility?). If people could change gender by changing their clothes (and since the female soldiers were perceived and treated as male, their gender effectively was male) where does this leave horses?

When I read Dugaw I thought that this was a problem because horses didn’t wear clothes, but then at the Roehampton horse conference Erica Fudge reminded us that horses did wear clothes. I had a quick chat with Erica afterwards, and the point I should have got straight to is that although horses did sometimes wear clothes, sometimes they didn’t. Horses sometimes had their genitals on display in public in a way which would have been very unusual for humans. So where does that leave us? Horses can wear clothes, but don’t have to, which seems to open up even more possibilities and raise even more questions. Why don’t displays of horse genitals cause the same anxieties that displays of human genitals cause? (Or do they? Did William Prynne have issues with this?) Is a stallion with big balls on display the epitome of masculinity? Do the trappings of a medieval war horse signify masculinity? Or does covering up the body (especially the genitals) make a horse less masculine? Can a mare in trappings masquerade as a stallion? Does a more masculine horse make the rider look more masculine? How male are geldings? How does the creation of an artificial third sex through routine castration complicate the ideas of male and female? This is why I was asking strange questions about testicles at the conference.

As Jennifer Flaherty reminded us at the Roehampton conference, there are lots of representations of war and horses in Shakespeare’s history plays, and lots of interesting ways that they intersect with gender. She told us about the substitution of horses for women, and how horsemanship contributed to masculinity. I think there’s a lot more potential for looking at how the horses themselves are gendered, and especially how their roles in war are gendered. I’m hoping that Jennifer or someone else will have done this, or will be doing it, but I just have a few observations on Henry V:

Good war horses usually seem to be referred to as steeds. This is a very masculine word, coming from the Old English for stallion (as does stud) according to the OED.

Bad horses are referred to as jades. The OED is vague on the etymology: it might come from a Norse word for mare, but there doesn’t seem to be much definite proof. Jade meaning bad woman seems to appear later than jade meaning bad horse, but the relationship between them isn’t very clear from the OED. In any case one might still connote the other. In the light of the experiment about grammatical gender that I mentioned above, it wouldn’t be surprising if two unrelated meanings of the same word can bleed into each other in people’s minds. After all, this is how puns work.

Shakespeare seems to assign a lot of agency to horses. They threaten each other, they neigh for present service, they seem to want to keep fighting when their riders are dead. Does this suggest that horses were imagined to be active participants in combat, and not just transport for their riders? How widespread was this idea? Does it require the horses to be male because only men were supposed to fight?

When I started out on this project I was heavily influenced by Joshua Goldstein’s hypothesis that war, gender, and the exclusion of women from combat roles all appear to be more or less universal, and that war and gender shape each other. The more I think about it the more problems I can see with his model. As I pointed out here, his assumption that the point of gender roles is to create warriors doesn’t seem to hold for early-modern England, where (according to Alexandra Shepard) manhood was defined mostly by domestic paternalism (where age, wealth, marital status and other things intersected). War and soldiers were often viewed with ambivalence, and it seems to me that a career in the military was no more than a second best kind of masculinity. As Bruce Boehrer pointed out in Shakespeare Among the Animals, the third Earl of Essex turned to soldiering after the failure of his marriages and his humiliation as an impotent cuckold.

Goldstein acknowledged that although some form of gender is found in every culture, there are wide variations in the forms it takes and the meanings it has. I suspect that if we look closer we might find similar variations in the forms and meanings of war. Although women have mostly been excluded from combat roles in most cultures at most times, I’m not sure that this translates to a universally rigid boundary between active male and passive female roles. The boundary might sometimes be more or less rigid or in a slightly different place, and there might be very different justifications for it. The exclusion of women from combat roles in early-modern England might not have been as exclusive as in later periods. For example, in War in England Barbara Donagan mentions that codes of conduct from the English Civil War protected women from violence unless they took up arms. One of the excuses the New Model Army gave for the massacre of the “Irish whores” at Naseby was that they were carrying knives.

That’s all for now. There’s still obviously a lot to do, and I’m still not entirely sure what that is, so it’ll be a long time before I have anything publishable. There’s a whole world of possibilities for looking into gendered perceptions of animals. I’m limiting myself to horses in war to keep it manageable, so there’s plenty of scope for other people to do horses in other situations, and every other species.

1. Bruce Thomas Boehrer, Shakespeare among the animals (Palgrave: New York, 2002).
2. David Cressy, Agnes Bowker’s Cat (Oxford Paperbacks, February 2001).
3. Barbara Donagan, War in England 1642-1649 (OUP Oxford, February 2008).
4. Dianne Dugaw, Warrior Women and Popular Balladry, 1650-1850 (University of Chicago Press: Chicago, 1996).
5. Joshua S. Goldstein, War and Gender (CUP: Cambridge, 2003).
6. Thomas Walter Laqueur, Making Sex (Harvard University Press: Cambridge, Mass., 1992).
7. Alexandra Shepard, Meanings of Manhood in Early Modern England (Clarendon Press: Oxford, 2006).

Back in October 2006 I posted about my speculative (and slightly mad?) project about gendered perceptions of war horses. In a follow-up post I looked at a selection of four early seventeenth-century cavalry drill books to see what they said about requirements for war horses. Only Gervase Markham explicitly stated that a war horse should be a stallion, but all four authors habitually referred to the war horse as “he”. There was a particularly intriguing passage in Robert Ward’s Animadversions of War about using cats and hedgehogs to encourage lazy horses. He specifically mentioned the horse’s testicles, which shows that he had a stallion in mind. At the time I wondred why he referred to the horse and hedgehog as male but the cat as female. Now I think I have a possible answer: it could be connected with the gender of the equivalent Latin nouns. Equus (horse) and echinus (hedgehog) are masculine but feles (cat) is feminine. That doesn’t entirely solve the problem, it just moves it further back. Now I want to know why the Romans thought horses should be masculine and cats should be feminine.

Since that first post I’ve discovered that my assumptions about non-human species not having culture or gender were wrong. Joshua Goldstein’s War and Gender has lots of examples of culturally specific learned behaviour and gendered dominance hierarchies among animals. But I think I’m onto something with looking at whether human gender ideology led to gendered roles being imposed on other species. Samantha Hurn has found evidence of gendered roles being imposed by breeders of Welsh cobs. I haven’t been able to get hold of a copy of her article yet, but it looks very relevant.

Meanwhile, I’ve been reading Shakespeare’s Henry V again as there are plenty of mentions of war horses in it. But I still can’t work out what’s going on with the Dauphin and his horse. Bestiality? Idolatry? Just the general arrogance and ridiculousness of the French?

1. Joshua S. Goldstein, War and Gender (CUP: Cambridge, 2003).
2. Samantha Hurn, ‘What’s Love Got to Do With It?’, Society & Animals, 16 (March 2008), pp. 23-44.
3. Robert Ward, Anima’dversions of vvarre; (London : Printed by Iohn Dawson [, Thomas Cotes, and Richard Bishop], and are to be sold by Francis Eglesfield at the signe of the Marigold in Pauls Church-yard, 1639., 1639).

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.)

Social-Political Animals: Humans and Non-Humans in Early-Modern Society

Presented at FORWARD Symposium, Nottingham Trent University, 28th May 2008.

This is from the homepage of a history department. “History: the human experience.” To represent the human experience, there’s a bit of the Bayeux tapestry. But right there in the middle there’s a horse. This shows that animals are always there in history even if you try to ignore them. But it’s been all too easy to avoid mentioning them.

Non-human animals were a major part of early modern society and economy. That’s so obvious that it tends to be taken for granted. Taking things for granted is a necessary evil in writing history. We can’t write about everything all the time. Every work has to exclude more than it includes. But it’s not healthy if everyone takes the same things for granted. There was a time when most historians weren’t interested in race, class, gender, or sexuality. Those things supposedly didn’t need explaining because “that’s just how it was”. Now lots of researchers are interested in how differences between people were constructed.

The next step is to look at how differences between humans and non-humans were constructed. These differences aren’t necessarily obvious or natural. They can be just as ideological as race, class or gender. Different cultures in different times have had very different views of the relationship between humans and animals. In early-modern Europe all non-human species tended to be lumped together into one big category. They were different from humans, and inferior to humans.

The most sophisticated form of this idea was the Great Chain of Being, which a lot of you are probably familiar with.

This doesn’t logically lead to a rigid physical boundary between human and non-human. There was supposed to be a scale of infinitely small gradations. The big division is between physical and spiritual beings. Everything above the line [you can't see the red line here because I'm lazy!] has a soul. Everything below the line doesn’t. Humans are in a unique position because they’re physical and spiritual at the same time. They just happened to draw the line below spiritual and not above physical, which is quite convenient. It’s debatable whether most people thought about the Chain of Being much or understood the philosophy behind it. But most people would have known from Genesis that god put man in charge of all the animals.

This opposition between human and animal was dominant in Europe, but things were different in other parts of the world. Virginia Anderson has written a really good book on animals in early America. She suggests that Native Americans didn’t lump all non-human animals into one category. They don’t even seem to have had a word for “animal”. They made more of a distinction between different species but less distinction between the material and the spiritual. They still exploited animals. But their exploitation had different meanings and justifications. Some animals and their spirit guardians might be seen as equal or superior to humans. The biggest difference was that they had no concept of animals as private property. None of this is any more strange or wrong than what Europeans thought at the same time.

Cultural historians and literary critics have been increasingly interested in how the idea of the human was constructed. That fits in well with studies of how differences between humans were constructed. It’s not unusual to find every other kind of Other being compared to animals. In early modern England, women, children, foreigners, Catholics, and the lower classes could all be described as bestial. This is what Bruce Boehrer called relative anthropocentrism: that is humans are better than animals, but some people are more human than others. At the most extreme this becomes pseudospeciation: out-groups are treated as a completely different species. It’s not really unusual to find different kinds of Others being mixed up. But mixing up animals and humans is arguably the most powerful form of Othering: they are not just different or inferior kinds of human, they’re not really human at all.

In early modern society the lower classes weren’t just described as animals or compared to animals. They were often treated like animals in practice. People of low status were subjected to corporal punishments like whipping. High status people usually weren’t. The gentry were very keen to exempt themselves from whipping. So poor people were being treated more like animals than like rich people.

Some punishments were very heavily gendered. The scold’s bridle symbolized the idea that women were like animals, because horses were made to wear bits and bridles. But there was also the practical effect that the bridle stopped a woman from speaking. Speech was said to be one of the main things that set humans apart from all other animals. By taking away her power of speech the bridle made a woman more bestial in practice as well as in theory.

In the chain of being, animals were used as symbols to represent order and hierarchies. It was used to justify human hierarchies as much as difference between humans and animals. The Chain of Being wasn’t necessarily talked about a lot in England. This picture is actually from Italy. But there are similar arguments about natural hierarchies in the homily of obedience. The differences between kings and subjects, rich and poor, husbands and wives, were supposedly just as natural and god-given as the difference between humans and animals. If the natural order was broken the consequences would be disastrous. Nobody’s life, family or property would be secure.

To some people that seemed to have come true in the civil wars.

Here we can see animals being used to represent disorder. But there’s more to this than symbols and metaphors. Karl Steel recently published an article called “How to Make a Human”. It’s mostly about medieval texts but there’s a really important idea in it that we might be able to apply to other periods: the human wasn’t just constructed by imagining differences between humans and animals. Humans needed to prove their humanity by dominating animals in reality. Karl mostly focused on hunting: the right to hunt animals defines humans. If people are denied the right to hunt, their humanity is being taken away from them.

We can apply this model to property rights as well as hunting. Owning and controlling animals was part of what it meant to be human. Focusing on animals helps us to see property rights as something arbitrary. It opens up questions about how they were constructed. Property is an important part of social-political history. Competition for resources has a big influence on societies.

Animals were part of this competition in three ways:

• First, they were exploited as resources themselves. Domestic animals were owned as property. Wild animals were hunted and killed.
• Second, their labour helped humans to produce and transport resources. Horse power was a huge part of agriculture and industry. Someone has even argued that animals are part of working class.
• Third, they competed for resources because animals needed to eat too. Domestic animals had to be fed. Wild animals and birds might eat crops or kill domestic livestock.

Because of this competition for resources, animals were often at the centre of disputes over enclosure. There were different ways it could work, depending on what kind of enclosure it was.

Often common pastures were enclosed to make private arable fields for the benefit of wealthier farmers. Poorer cottagers and their animals lost their grazing rights. One way that enclosure rioters could strike back was by driving their animals onto the enclosed fields. Steve Hindle provides some good examples of this from the dispute over Caddington Common in Bedfordshire in the 1630s. In this case some fairly large farmers were opposed to the enclosure. At times they drove over 100 sheep onto the fields. This signified the idea that these fields should be common pastures. It also had a serious material impact. Grazing animals destroyed growing crops. Losing crops had a financial impact on the landowners. But there’s also the fact that these sheep needed to eat. Disputes over rights and tradition were also disputes over resources. The rioters gained by feeding their sheep on resources which the landlords claimed ownership of. So it’s not just semiotics: the fields effectively had been turned back into common pastures for a short time.

Another way that rioters attacked landowners was by cutting the harnesses of their plough horses. That denied the owners control of their horses in real and symbolic terms. And it made it more difficult for them to plough the land.

In other places things were different. Landlords sometimes enclosed common arable fields and turned them into pastures. Land that was previously used to grow food for people was now being used to feed sheep. Steve Hindle’s work on the Midland Rising suggests that the rioters resented being treated worse than sheep. There was obviously a symbolic dimension to this: privileging sheep over people upset the Chain of Being and dehumanized the commoners. But it was closely linked with material things. There were real sheep occupying the land and literally taking food out of the commoners’ mouths.

Wild animals could also be at the centre of disputes. The right to hunt deer was restricted to the elite in theory. Inviting people to hunt on their land or giving gifts of venison were special favours. That reinforced social networks and hierarchies. Hunting was the very thing which Karl Steel points to as defining humanity. So it could be said that by controlling access to their deer the elite assumed the authority to make people more human or less human. But controlling deer was easier said than done. In practice it was very hard to stop poachers. Poaching was an obvious competition for resources. Elite landowners tried to deny lower class people access to venison, but poachers took it anyway. Some incidents were much more destructive than normal poaching. Dan Beaver’s article on the Great Deer Massacre is all about a feud between the Earl of Middlesex and his neighbours. The feud culminated with the killing of hundreds of deer on the Earl’s land. This was a calculated insult to the Earl. Deer and hunting were linked with honour and status. So attacking the deer was a way of undermining the Earl’s status. As part of this symbolic attack, the deer were rounded up and slaughtered en masse like cattle instead of being hunted. On the material side, the deer were dead and the Earl couldn’t benefit from them any more. That undermined his position in a very real way by reducing his wealth and power.

It’s important to note that although there was a lot of disorder in early-modern England, it was quite rare for rioters to physically attack members of the elite. They might say they wanted to, but they very rarely did it. There are lots of possible reasons for that but I’d like to suggest an extra one. It could be that by attacking the landlord’s animals but not the landlord himself, rioters were trying to shift the animal-human boundary back in their favour. I don’t want to push that idea too far. There are lots of examples of gentry taking the lead in poaching and deer massacres. Native Americans carried out revenge attacks on colonists’ livestock even though they probably had very different concepts of animals. But just maybe when poor people in England did it, part of the message was “we’re just as human as you”.

The civil wars added an extra dimension to the competition for resources. Now there were rival armies trying to get resources from civilians.

Horses were a big part of the struggle. On the left there’s a war horse. Armies needed horses to mount cavalry and dragoons. And they needed draught horses to pull artillery and wagons. For example, the establishment of the New Model Army in 1645 included over 8,000 horses.

And on the right there’s a mill horse, because horses were a major part of the civilian economy. Horses were linked with status as well as wealth. Peter Edwards pointed out that a person on a horse could quite literally look down on other people.

There were lots of horses in England, but getting hold of them was potentially a big problem.

In the summer of 1642 the English parliament invited voluntary contributions of horses and money to help build an army. That was very successful at first as you can see from this graph:

But then it dropped off quite drastically in the autumn. In October and November parliament started putting pressure on people to contribute by taxing, disarming and imprisoning them. But as the graph shows, that didn’t have much effect. The contributions kept going down. I think that proves that it was actually very difficult to force people to give up their property if they didn’t want to.

This is when competition between military and civilians really got going. As voluntary contributions went down armies had to resort to taking horses by force. But they found that power didn’t grow from the barrel of a gun. There were lots of ways that civilians could try to protect their property rights. Some soldiers were taken to court for horse theft during or after the civil war. Members of the elite sometimes got their horses back by appealing to parliament or the county committees.

In 1643 the MP Henry Marten was commissioned to raise a cavalry regiment. He caused a lot of trouble by taking horses from the Countess Rivers. She complained to the House of Lords, which ordered Marten to give the horses back. But the House of Commons said that he should keep them. They said that the Lords had breached privilege by giving orders to a member of the Commons. Countess Rivers was Catholic. She was one of the main targets of the Stour Valley riots in 1642. Henry Marten and his allies in the Commons saw her as an enemy of the state. But the majority in the Lords seems to have still seen her as one of their own because she was a Countess. The Lords maintained that it was a breach of privilege to take horses from peers, and their wives and servants, even if they were Catholics or supporters of the King. It looks like there were elements of class, religion, high politics, and maybe gender in this dispute. And horses were right at the centre of it. There was competition for resources: Henry Marten needed horses to mount his troopers. The Countess needed her coach horses to get around. Her coach and horses also symbolized her social status. By taking them away, Marten was insulting her and the House of Lords.

Getting enough soldiers could be just as difficult as getting enough horses. Armies often had to resort to impressment. In 1645 parliament imposed quotas of impressed men and draught horses on counties to build up the New Model Army. When men were rounded up and sent to the army they were being treated like animals.

One way that soldiers could exercise agency was by deserting. But horses could run away too. In October 1642, a group of draught horses was being taken from London to join the Earl of Essex’s army. They broke down a fence and ran off. The conductors in charge of the horses had to claim extra expenses for men to help catch them and for repairing the fence.

Horses added an extra unpredictable element to battles. This is what the royalist officer Sir Richard Bulstrode wrote about the battle of Powicke Bridge:

“This was the first Action I was ever in, and being upon an unruly Horse, he ran away with me amongst the Enemy”

Even in peace time out of control animals could cause problems. An extra motive for deer massacres was that deer sometimes escaped from parks and damaged people’s crops. Rabbit warrens were another source of friction. It was hard to keep the rabbits from escaping and eating up other people’s fields. Again, this is about competition for resources.

At this point you have to ask whether animals can really exercise agency in the same way as humans. That brings us up against the question of free will: what is it? Does it exist? This is a huge philosophical and scientific problem which us historians shouldn’t really be tackling on our own. Just to sum up various positions in the debate, decisions might be:

• free, whatever that might mean
• They might be simply determined by external stimuli or biological instinct
• They might be determined in a more complex way in the unconscious mind
• Or they might be totally random

For the purposes of history we don’t necessarily need to worry about this. Repressive structures and dominant ideologies are supposed to restrict any and all of these things. Biological instincts, conscious decisions, unconscious decisions, randomness. They’re all enemies of order and hierarchy. We know that sometimes people do and say things that they’re not supposed to, even if we don’t know why.

Looking at things that way, animals are no different. They don’t always do what they’re supposed to do. Their minds are just as unknowable as human minds.

The big problem with studying animals in the past is that we can only see them through traces left by humans. Whatever we find is always going to tell us more about human culture than about the animals themselves. There isn’t much answer to that except that it’s a problem with all history. We always have to use imperfect traces that are full of the cultural assumptions of the people who created them. Women’s history, and history from below show us that the dominant elite can’t ever erase all the traces of disobedience.

Even if history ultimately is just The Human Experience, we need to know what it meant to be human. Identities are often formed through opposition, so we need to know as much about both sides of the opposition. We can’t understand the human without understanding the non-human. But binary opposition between human and animal might be too simple. Gender isn’t just a male-female binary. Alexandra Shepard found that masculinity was constructed from a combination of gender, class, age and marriage. We can’t understand it by taking any one of those things on its own, because they interact. Histories of identity used to specialize in one identity and privilege it over others. For Marxists it was class. For feminists it was gender. Now the parts are all coming together. Animals are at least another part of the problem. It could be that what all identity histories are working towards is the construction of the human. It’s about who gets to be human and who doesn’t. It’s about which kinds of human get the power and resources. That affects everything.

1. Virginia DeJohn Anderson, Creatures of Empire (OUP: Oxford, 2004).
2. Daniel C. Beaver, ‘The great deer massacre : animals, honor, and communication in early modern England’, Journal of British Studies, 38 (1999), pp. 187-216.
3. Bruce Thomas Boehrer, Shakespeare among the animals (Palgrave: New York, 2002).
4. Peter Edwards, Horse and Man in Early Modern England (Hambledon Continuum, March 2007).
5. Erica Fudge, Perceiving animals (University of Illinois Press: Urbana, 2002).
6. Erica Fudge (ed.), Renaissance Beasts: of animals, humans, and other wonderful creatures (University of Illinois Press,: Urbana :, 2004).
7. Steve Hindle, ‘Persuasion and Protest in the Caddington Common Enclosure Dispute 1635-1639’, Past and Present, (February 1998), pp. 37-78.
8. Andrew James Hopper, ‘The Wortley Park Poachers and the Outbreak of the English Civil War’, Northern History, 44 (2007), pp. 94-114.
9. Jason Hribal, ‘”Animals are part of the working class”’, Labor History, 44 (2003), pp. 435-453.
10. Arthur Oncken Lovejoy, The Great Chain of Being (Harvard UP, 1972).
11. Brian Manning, The English People and the English Revolution, 1640-1649 (Heinemann Educational: London, 1976).
12. Alexandra Shepard, Meanings of Manhood in Early Modern England (Clarendon Press: Oxford, 2006).
13. Karl Steel, ‘How To Make A Human’, Exemplaria, 20 (2008), pp. 3-27.
14. Keith Thomas, Man and the Natural World (Allen Lane: London, 1983).

Over at Medieval Cripples, Crazies and Imbeciles Pope Bonkface VIII (call him by his name) posted about a memorial plaque to a “dumb” astronomer which highlights the potential absurdities when “dumb” can mean unable to speak or just stupid. This made me realise that disability is yet another thing that intersects with my work on animals. In early-modern England (and presumably in other pre-modern cultures too) speech and reason were supposed to go together, and were supposed to set humans apart from animals. Therefore it might not be a coincidence that “dumb” has those two meanings: in early-modern culture they were very closely related. People who couldn’t speak might not just be seen as stupid, they could potentially have been seen as not entirely human. So Bruce Boehrer’s concept of relative anthropocentrism could apply to disability as well as race, gender, age, class etc.

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:

Non-human animals were a vital part of early-modern society. There has been increasing interest in the non-human in cultural history but less attempt to include animals in social history. Animals were used to symbolize and justify “natural” hierarchies through ideas such as the Chain of Being, but there is more to this than abstract ideas. Karl Steel has recently suggested that the human was constructed not just through imagining differences between humans and animals, but also through very real domination of animals. When people were deprived of the right to hunt, or had their animals taken away, they were effectively being deprived of their humanity.

Competition for finite and unequally distributed resources is a basic part of social and political history. Animals were part of this competition because they were used as resources by humans, because they helped humans to produce and transport resources, and because they competed with humans for access to resources. In some places landlords enclosed open fields into sheep pastures; in others enclosure rioters drove their animals onto enclosed arable land. Symbolic protest combined with the fact that animals and people needed to eat. The authority and wealth of social superiors could be undermined by attacking their animals.

Civil war increased competition for resources. Horse ownership was particularly contested since horses were vital to armies and to the economy. Voluntary contributions from minorities of militant men and women could not sustain armies for long. In 1642-43 the English parliament faced increasing problems in getting enough horses and found that attempts to take them by force were inefficient and counterproductive. Property rights had to be negotiated. But horses were not inanimate objects and would not always do what humans wanted them to do. The pressures of civil war revealed how unstable the animal-human boundary could be.

Chris at Mixing Memory posted an amazing video of Joshua Klein talking about crows. He isn’t just talking about how clever crows are (they’re really clever) but about how we can find new kinds of relationships between humans and other species which aren’t based on domination or extermination. I think he’s achieved that most difficult of things: a view of the non-human which avoids anthropocentrism and anthropomorphism (interesting that Firefox’s spellchecker recognizes the second of those words but not the first – what does that tell us about dominant ideologies?). This is also another problem for the old anthropocentric view that speech and reason go together and that both define the human. There is overwhelming empirical evidence that crows are very good at thinking, but their communication system is very rudimentary. That suggests that thinking isn’t, or doesn’t have to be, linguistic (although there is also plenty evidence that once language enters the picture it does influence thought, even at the level of perceiving differences between colours). The example of crows also suggests that culture doesn’t depend on language: crows can exhibit learned behaviour which varies between groups. Where’s the animal/human boundary now?

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.

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.

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.

At first sight the title of the book might seem a bit anachronistic. Manning explains that he defines conservatives as the right and radicals as the left, and that he is particularly interested in the most radical people, who went further than mainstream anti-royalists in advocating such things as redistribution of wealth. He is obviously imposing an arbitrary taxonomy onto the past which wouldn’t have been understood at the time, but aren’t we all? Perhaps lumping all of the most radical groups and individuals into a single category labeled “the far left” partly undermines his argument that people shouldn’t be put into boxes and that class and beliefs were fluid rather than fixed (p. 47).

This book is a general survey rather than the result of detailed original research. The sources cited are mostly secondary works, along with some contemporary pamphlets. As far as I can tell the footnotes do not mention any manuscripts at all. You don’t have to be a document fetishist to see this as a limitation. The archives are full of unexplored opportunities. Concentrating only on what has been published in print closes down an awful lot of possibilities. For example, early-modern court records are full of poor people saying things that they weren’t supposed to say, and the fact that they were punished afterwards can’t erase the fact that they said it. The most glaring omission is when Manning mentions that plans for a Fifth Monarchist revolt were carefully recorded in a manuscript journal, but doesn’t cite the manuscript.

While this book shares Christopher Hill’s weaknesses when it comes to archival research, Manning’s style of writing is very different, being much more analytical than Hill. This makes his work more sensible but less enjoyable to read. Overall the book is very useful as a succinct summary of what had been written about class and radical ideas up to 1999.

The main focus is on the later 1640s and the 1650s, so much of it is not very relevant to the project I’m working on, which is mainly about how war broke out in 1642. Manning sees the revolution as a long process rather than a single event. Although he puts the most important changes in 1648-49, he also considers the First Civil War to be the beginning of the class struggle which led to revolution. He has relatively little to say about allegiance because he seems to assume that there was nothing to it other than class consciousness (although he sees class as fluid rather than fixed). Therefore he completely fails to explain how Charles I got together armies which could fight against the oppressed masses for nearly 4 years and come close to defeating them. Pointing out that revolutions often begin with alliances between different classes (pp. 14-15), Manning insists that the presence of members of all classes on the parliamentarian side does not disprove the idea that the First Civil War was a class war. It’s not clear how he would deal with the possibility of members of all classes being present on the royalist side too, because he doesn’t mention it at all.

On the parliamentarian side there is plenty of evidence of temporary alliances between different groups with different aims, and of conflicting interests between groups and individuals of different social and economic status. For example, my work on horse requisitioning suggests that the House of Lords was much more interested in protecting the status and property rights of peers than the House of Commons. The real problem is that none of these groups can be shown to represent an entire class, or even a majority of a class (and in the Marxist interpretation classes are very big and general things). Manning says that “opposition to Charles I and the royalists brought together a few aristocrats, some gentry and merchants, numerous farmers and artisans as well as labourers”. That’s likely to be true if you look at the absolute numbers of each group who were active in the parliamentarian war effort, but possibly not as a proportion of their classes. This could be restated as “a minority of peers, a minority of gentry and merchants, a minority of farmers and artisans”. Manning has done nothing to refute John Morrill’s argument that most people didn’t want to fight in 1642. He hasn’t even mentioned it.

That’s about all there is that’s directly relevant to what I’m working on, but I also want to discuss some more general problems with Marxist approaches to this period.

Gender is a big problem which Marxism doesn’t seem to be very well equipped to deal with. Women are likely to be one of the biggest oppressed groups in most societies in most periods. While poor people of both genders would make up the biggest oppressed group in 17th century England, women of all classes would probably come in second (yes, these groupings are very arbitrary and hide a lot of diversity, but I’m trying to engage with Marxism here). Manning doesn’t seem very interested in gender relations, briefly citing De Ste Croix, who wonders whether women should be counted as a class but decides that they shouldn’t, before sweeping the whole issue under the carpet (p. 19). I think counting women as part of their class misses an awful lot. Elite women might have had more wealth and power than poor women, but they were hardly equal with their husbands, fathers or brothers.

Manning’s denial that the Marxist distinction between base and superstructure leads to economic determinism isn’t very convincing (p. 36):

The Marxist conception of an economic base and an ideological superstructure may slip into, or be misinterpreted as, a crude economic determinism, but this is due to omitting the crucial intervening factor of class relations, which are formed by economic conditions but which give rise to ideology via the medium of class consciousness and class struggle

Isn’t this the same thing? Adding more jargon might make it harder to understand, but it still ultimately seems to mean that economy leads to ideology. If the economic base forms class relations which are based on economic inequality, and if class consciousness is an awareness of that inequality, and class struggle is an attempt to eliminate inequality, how does ideology arise from anything other than economic conditions?

I think Manning is right to argue that religion and politics can’t be separated because the Bible provided inspiration and justification for radical ideas such as redistribution of wealth. However, I’d go further and suggest that religion and political ideology are just parts of culture, and that all parts of culture are inseparable. I don’t think we should ignore class consciousness, but maybe we need to look at it as a cultural construct which isn’t necessarily determined by the economic base. If, as Trotsky said, revolutions are caused by changes in states of mind (p. 32) then maybe we need to pay more attention to culture. Although Manning fails to defend the base/superstructure model (perhaps because it can’t be defended?), he does seem to be sincere about not being an economic determinist. The meat of this book is very much about what people thought (or at least about what they wrote). I think paying attention to radical ideas is definitely a good thing. Manning makes a good case for not ignoring radicals just because they were an unsuccessful minority. We need to remember that even the most dominant ideologies can never be totally hegemonic. The “far left” failed to destroy the patriarchal order, but they could still imagine, talk about, and attempt its destruction. I think Manning is right to rescue the Levellers from the sanitization of other historians and recover their potential for violence.

I also think he’s spot on when he calls Margaret Spufford “myopic” for insisting that there is no radical political subtext in the popular story of Thomas Hickathrift (p. 72). The symbolism could hardly be more heavy-handed if the giant had a sign around his neck saying “I represent the upper classes”. Some revisionist historians went out of their way to deny agency and political consciousness to the poor. Their focus on consensus and deference was suspiciously similar to the seventeenth-century elite’s protesting-too-much insistence on the naturalness of the established order. It seems strange that Conrad Russell pursued such a conservative agenda in his historical writing when he was so progressive in real life. However, Brian Manning seems to occupy an opposite extreme, desperate to find the origins of socialism in the 1640s. He’s half right when he says that concern of the oppressed is the “seedbed of socialism” (p. 37) but concern for the oppressed is also a characteristic of liberal humanism and postmodernism. All three ideologies take very different directions from that starting point. For example, Manning argues that “a ruling class which was self selected on the basis of birth and wealth was more undemocratic than one self selected on the principle of ‘godliness’ without respect to birth or wealth” (pp. 120-1). The prospect of an undemocratic self selected theocracy would be truly horrifying to most liberals and postmodernists, and probably to most socialists too! The attempt to find embryonic socialism also leads to a privileging of some points of view over others which seem to have been equally (un?)popular at the time. He cites examples of poor people fantasizing about inverting the social order and ruling over the former elite as well as visions of true equality, but tends to focus on the latter (p. 38).

Ultimately we don’t have to worry about Marxism too much any more, because the best historiography from Revel, Riot and Rebellion onwards has broken out of the Marxist vs Revisionist dialectic. Historians as diverse as David Underdown, John Adamson, Andy Wood, John Walter, and Jason Peacey are not just synthesizing false extremes to arrive at a false centre. They have found completely different ways of looking at things.

Finally I want to point out another false dichotomy: that between socialism and capitalism. From a green perspective they don’t look very different because they both assume that man (and woman, to a lesser extent) has a natural right exploit all non-human animals, vegetables and minerals. While some millenarians saw an end to devouring fellow creatures (p. 118), most of the radical tracts which Manning cites are unquestioningly anthropocentric. For example, one Leveller tract asserted that “All men being alike privileged by birth, so all men were to enjoy the creatures alike” (p. 50). The Quakers believed that god had given the earth “to the sons of men in general” (p. 53). Winstanley imagined a time when “there shall be no barrenness in the earth or cattle, for they shall bring forth abundantly” and even that there would be no more “unseasonable storms and distempers” (p. 58). This is in direct contrast to the homily of obedience which insisted (perhaps a bit too desperately) that god had put thunder and lightning into “a most excellent and perfect order”. Seventeenth-century England was so far from consensus that even the weather was ideologically contested.

1. Brian Manning, The far left in the English Revolution 1640 to 1660 (Bookmarks, London, 1999).
2. David Underdown, Revel, riot, and rebellion (Clarendon Press: Oxford, 1985).

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?”.

1. Tracy Fullerton, Jacquelyn Ford Morie, and Celia Pearce, ‘A Game of One’s Own: Towards a New Gendered Poetics of Digital Space’, Fibreculture, (2008).
2. Esther MacCallum-Stewart, ‘Real Boys Carry Girly Epics: Normalising Gender Bending in Online Games’, Eludamos, 2 (2008).
3. Karl Steel, ‘How To Make A Human’, Exemplaria, 20 (2008), pp. 3-27.