Investigations of a Dog

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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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).

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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My review of English Civil War historiography shoots forward 30 years (I’m not doing it any particular order) with a 2006 special issue of History Workshop Journal (issue 61) on ‘Rethinking the English Revolution’. The introduction by Lyndal Roper and Laura Gowing briefly discusses the significance of terminology, noting that while Marxists assumed that there was a revolution in the 1640s, revisionists questioned that assumption and preferred to talk about the English Civil War. It would be naive to assume that “English Civil War” is any more neutral or objective than “English Revolution”, so I should write another post explaining why I habitually use the former. Whatever you call this period, I think Roper and Gowing are right that now is an exciting time to study it. The following essays, by Quentin Skinner, John Walter, Rachel Weil, and Ann Hughes, show how historians are breaking out of the Marxist vs revisionist dialectic by taking imaginative approaches which recognise diversity and complexity.

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An article that I’m working on involves getting on top of the debates over the causes and outbreak of the English Civil War. This is something that I avoided like the plague during my PhD, partly because it wasn’t vital to my study of the development of administrative systems, and partly because it was too big and complicated (and, let’s be honest, too scary – Conrad Russell wasn’t entirely joking when he called it “bloodsport”). Now all that’s changed and I’m getting stuck into the historiography. In a way I feel like I need to prove myself by taking a position on these issues rather than ignoring them, but it’s also necessary to make what would otherwise be some dull empirical data seem exciting and relevant. To help me get things straight in my mind, and also to increase the frequency of my posts, I’m trying to write some thoughts on some of the major works and post them here. Today I’m kicking off with John Morrill’s Revolt in the Provinces, the 1998 edition of his similarly titled 1976 work Revolt of the Provinces, with a new introduction and epilogue assessing the strengths and weaknesses of the book and how subsequent research has changed things.

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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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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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