Investigations of a Dog

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]

The Great Supply Chain of Being: Horses, People, and Networks of Authority in Civil War Essex

Delivered at Bishop Grosseteste University College, Lincoln, 14th November 2007

This paper is now available as a PDF.

The World Turned Upside Down is a very well-known pamphlet which crops up in many books about the English/British Civil War(s)/Revolution (“or whatever we are to call the blasted thing” – John Morrill). In fact it occurs so often that it’s a bit of a cliche. Despite/because of that, I’m going to use it in my forthcoming seminar paper on animals, authority and property rights. Although the image is very familiar, I didn’t know very much about the pamphlet until recently, and once I looked at it in detail it defied my expectations in some ways (this kind of relates to Rachel’s post about making the implicit explicit).

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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.

1. Daniel C. Beaver, ‘The great deer massacre : animals, honor, and communication in early modern England’, Journal of British Studies, 38 (1999), pp. 187-216.
2. 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.

Yesterday I went to the Institute of Historical Research to hear Peter Burke talking about “Strengths and Weaknesses of Cultural History 1980-2006″. Judging by how full the Pollard room was this was a major event. I thought I might be out of my depth there, but as it turned out I didn’t hear anything that surprised me or that I couldn’t understand. The paper was a very general overview of cultural history which did pretty much what the title suggests. I can’t remember all the points because I wasn’t taking notes, but most of the suggested strengths and weaknesses were fairly obvious. I didn’t take part in the discussion at the time because it was already going on long enough and I wanted to get away (and also didn’t want to embarrass myself by asking stupid questions of course!), but other people asked some interesting questions. This post was going to be an attempt to summarise the paper, but it went off on various tangents.

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This is a brief introduction to one of my more experimental works in progress. Most people seem to think it’s a bit strange, and it could easily be a complete failure. The idea is to combine my interests in military history, gender, and eco-criticism by looking at a subject I’m familiar with (horses in early-modern war) from an unfamiliar angle.

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Some observations on two bestiality cases in the Old Bailey Proceedings.

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