I’ve just finished writing an essay for a collection called The Horse as Cultural Icon: the Real and Symbolic Horse in the Early Modern World, edited by Peter Edwards and Elspeth Graham, which will be published by Brill (I’m not sure exactly when, but probably within the next twelve months). My chapter is called ‘The military value of horses and the social value of the horse in early-modern England’. It’s quite eclectic, mixing numbers from empirical research with words like semiotics and simulacrum, ranging from Milton and Shakespeare to anonymous scatological poems and cheap woodcuts. I took Bruce Boehrer’s essay ‘Shakespeare and the Social Devaluation of the Horse’ as a starting point and worked outwards, looking at how the middling sort appropriated the horse and how the elite tried to make it more exclusive. Although it’s mostly about the 16th and 17th centuries I went back into the middle ages and forward to the First World War to show how the social and cultural roles of horses aren’t necessarily related to the reality of war. I’ve cited Stephen Badsey and David Kenyon for proof that cavalry were still useful in the 20th century and that there was and is an awful lot of prejudice against them; and I’ve cited Michael Prestwich and Anne Curry to show that 14th and 15th century men-at-arms were flexible all-rounders and that only a minority of them were knights. By taking a longer view than most previous works on early-modern horses I’m trying to break out of a vaguely Marxist master narrative in which The Transition From Feudalism To Capitalism and the increasing use of gunpowder doomed the knight on his charger and gave the aristocracy an identity crisis, and in which social, economic and military base determines cultural superstructure. Rather than marking a turning point, Shakespeare’s treatment of horses and chivalry in Henry V seems to be part of a debate which was already going on in the 14th century, was still going on throughout the 17th century, and is perhaps still going on now. Cultural beliefs that cavalry were useless seem to be independent of how useful cavalry actually were.

The best thing is that I’ve used the phrase “order of magnitude” correctly and appropriately. I shouldn’t feel so pleased about this, but I get so annoyed by other historians misusing it to mean “quite a lot”.

Meanwhile I’m taking a break from posting here for a month or two (or maybe three) while I finish the first draft of my book. Before too long I’ll have made the inevitable transition from “oh no, I won’t be able to write enough” to “oh no, I’ve written too much”.

1. Bruce Boehrer, “Shakespeare and the social devaluation of the horse,” in The Culture of the Horse, ed. Karen L. Raber and Treva J. Tucker (New York; Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005). 
   

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.

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.

My seminar paper went really well yesterday, especially considering the fact that I haven’t done one for six years. Below is a version of the paper. This is a draft of what I wrote, but what I actually said came out a bit different – you had to be there. If I was doing it again I’d probably change it even more. The maps here are slightly different from the ones in the presentation as I can’t work out how to link to two or more Google Maps overlaid on each other at the same time. Maybe you can’t. For the presentation I just took screenshots of them. For the other illustrations, click the thumbnails to see full size pictures. And if you’re from Lincoln you might like to try and identify all of the animals. I wonder if Stewart Lee could correctly identify all of them…

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

We’ll start with the great chain of being. This was a big idea in medieval and early modern theology and philosophy, which goes back to Plato. Everything in the world formed a hierarchy in order of how perfect it was. You can see god at the top – he’s totally perfect. Then angels, they’re not quite perfect. People are below god and angels but above everything else. People were in a unique position of being spiritual and physical at the same time. Angels were purely spiritual. Animals were only physical – it was generally believed that they didn’t have souls. The animals are divided into 3 levels. Below humans there are birds, then fish, then land animals. It looks like a strange idea now, but it tells us a lot about early-modern beliefs.

This picture is a simplified version with only a few links in the chain. The full blown idea was hard to represent visually because the number of links in the chain was infinite. Everything that could possibly exist had to exist, and each being was only slightly different from the one above or below it. In this form the idea of the Chain of Being probably didn’t mean much to most people as it’s quite hard to understand. There might have been a few intellectuals who spent their time worrying about whether a bird was better than a fish, but in practice the phrase “chain of being” doesn’t seem to crop up very often in early modern England. I actually had trouble finding a picture of it, so this one isn’t from 17th century England! [it's originally from Rhetorica Christiana by Didacus Valades, reproduced in Anthony Fletcher's Gender, Sex and Subordination in England] But the idea of a natural order of things was very widespread, even if it wasn’t as sophisticated as the things that Leibniz or Spinoza came out with. Most people would have known from the book of Genesis that God put man in charge of all the animals. It was generally believed that animals only existed for the use of humans. In practice that power wasn’t shared equally. Class hierarchies gave rights over animals to some people and not others. For example, the right to hunt deer was limited to the upper classes. Rights over animals were heavily gendered, because domestic animals were treated as property, and in theory (but not always in practice) married women weren’t allowed to own property.

Hierarchies of class and gender were related to the Chain of Being, but again this was a less sophisticated version. Instead of an infinite number of grades, the early modern elite tended to lump society into three levels:

• The peerage
• The gentry
• And everyone else!

The common people who made up everyone else were actually more diverse than the elite liked to think. Historians have been increasingly interested in the middling sort, who were yeoman farmers, craftsmen and tradesmen. They were below the gentry but above the poor. Although they weren’t really rich they were reasonably well off, and they were particularly concerned with property rights. Marxist historians like to see them as a proto-bourgeoisie. Marxism is also based on an oversimplified three class model, but for the purposes of this paper I’m going to follow that to a certain extent, dividing people roughly into the elite, the middling sort, and the commoners, just because it’s convenient.

In practice the early modern elite simplified things even more than this. They didn’t always make a distinction between the everyone else and the animals! It wasn’t unusual for the patriarchal elite to portray women, foreigners, and the lower classes as bestial. This is what Bruce Boehrer called “relative anthropocentrism”. People are better than animals, but some people are more human than others. Steve Hindle’s work on enclosure riots has thrown up quite a few examples of the gentry comparing rioters to sheep, and of rioters complaining because they were being treated like sheep or worse than sheep.

The link between the Chain of Being and class hierarchies was made very obvious in the Homily of Obedience. This was from the book of sermons that were supposed to be preached in church on Sundays. The law said that everyone had to go to church every Sunday, so most people should have been familiar with these sermons. The Homily of Obedience put a huge stress on order:

Almighty God hath created & appointed all things, in heaven, earth, and waters, in a most excellent and perfect order.

In heaven, he hath appointed distinct orders and states of Archangels and Angels.

In earth he hath assigned kings, princes, with other governors under them, all in good and necessary order.

The water above is kept and raineth down in due time and season.

The sun, moon, stars, rainbow, thunder, lightning, clouds, and all birds of the air, do keep their order.

The earth, trees, seeds, plants, herbs, corn, grass, and all manner of beasts, keep them in their order.

All the parts of the whole year, as winter, summer, months, nights and days, continue in their order.

All kinds of fishes in the sea, rivers and waters, with all fountains, springs, yea, the seas themselves, keep their comely course and order.

Every degree of people, in their vocation, calling, and office, hath appointed to them, their duty and order.

Some are in high degree, some in low, some king’s and princes, some inferiors and subjects, priests, and layman, masters and servants, fathers and children, husbands and wives, riche and poor, and every one have need of other:

This is obviously how the elite would like things to be, not how they actually were. It’s hard to believe that rain, thunder and lightning are perfectly ordered! And the months in the Christian calendar aren’t actually natural. You have to suspect that under the surface there was a lot of anxiety. This obsession with keeping things in order could suggest a fear that things were not really stable and ordered.

The Homily of Obedience makes it very clear what would happen if the natural order was upset:

For where there is no right order, there reigneth all abuse, carnal liberty, enormity, sin, and Babylonicall confusion.

Take away kings, princes, rulers, magistrates, judges, and such states of Gods order, no man shall ride or go by the high way unrobbed, no man shall sleep in his own house or bed unkilled, no man shall keep his wife, children, and possessions in quietness:

all things shall be common, and there must needs follow all mischief and utter destruction, both of souls, bodies, goods and commonwealths.

There’s a paradox here. You’d think that it would be quite difficult to overthrow the natural God given order, but there seems to be a huge anxiety that it could happen very easily.

But this idea is still very useful to the elite, as long as they can keep everyone believing it, because it justifies the political system. Class, property, age and gender were all lumped into the supposedly natural order. If these hierarchies were part of God’s natural order, then it was assumed that they’d never changed and never could or should change. If the lower classes are dominated by that kind of conservative ideology it limits their freedom. But the same thing also limits the freedom of the elite. They might be quite comfortable in their position, but it’s difficult for them to improve it. If they go too far in changing things the people below them in the chain might start to resist the changes to preserve what they thought was the natural order.

The other big problem with this world view is that although linking all the different hierarchies together might help them to reinforce each other, it can also increase anxiety. If one hierarchy comes under threat then they’re all under threat. Any changes in the established order might threaten property rights.

Both of these problems were apparent in the Civil Wars.

Some historians have argued that it was Charles I who was being radical and that parliamentary opposition was a conservative reaction to preserve the traditional order. Not everyone agrees with that, but we can be certain that this kind of conservative view dominated the debates at the time. Whatever opponents of Charles I were really trying to do, their public rhetoric was usually framed in terms of tradition. Both sides claimed to be defending tradition against the other’s innovations. That suggests that conservative ideology was very dominant.

Once the war started, it turned out to be very disruptive. Both sides had to compromise on maintaining order and tradition where it wasn’t compatible with winning the war. And war created opportunities for people who weren’t happy with traditional hierarchies.

This famous quote from Sir John Oglander is suspiciously similar to the Homily of Obedience:

Thou wouldest think it strange if I should tell thee there was a time in England when brothers killed brothers, cousins cousins, and friends their friends.

Nay, when they conceived it was no offence to commit murder.

To murder a man held less offence than to kill a dog, and they would glory in their actions as if they had done a pious deed.

When thou wentest to bed at night, thou knewest not whether thou shouldest be murdered afore day.

To take away other men’s goods was held as lawful as to sell thy own, although the former owners went a-begging.

Sacrilege was a virtue, and to rail against sovereignty esteemed a high piece of piety.

Again this shows the belief that hierarchies were linked. The order’s been upset so badly that men are being treated worse than dogs, and property rights aren’t being respected.

This pamphlet is another very well known response to the civil war:

This was published in January 1647 – that’s a couple of years before the king was executed and the monarchy was abolished, but even so you can see a lot of anxiety about the natural order being upset. It seems to be the work of a moderate conservative who wanted everything to go back to how it was under Elizabeth I, especially the Church of England.

Most of it’s about religion and Ireland. He’s complaining that the Irish rebellion still hasn’t been put down, and that people aren’t respecting the order and authority of the Church of England. So he’s got lots of nasty things to say about Catholics and about radical protestant sects. You can see the religious themes directly represented by the upside down church at the top of the picture, but most of it uses animals to illustrate how hierarchies have been inverted. You can see a rat chasing a cat; a rabbit chasing a dog. Even worse, the cart’s before the horse. It wasn’t unusual for printers to use an off the shelf woodcut to illustrate pamphlets, but in this case the text explicitly refers to some of the things shown in the picture.

The animal pictures are obviously metaphors. I don’t think anyone really believed that horses were driving carts. But it shows a belief that hierarchies were all connected and were all part of the natural order. The Catholic Irish rebelling against the king, and separatists forming their own congregations outside the Church of England, were all supposedly as unnatural as putting the cart before the horse.

Even before the war started a lot of the gentry were worried about what would happen if king and parliament started fighting each other. There’s a lot of evidence that most people didn’t want a war. When it happened anyway they tried to stay out of it as far as they could. But some members of the elite were prepared to fight. If they weren’t then there wouldn’t have been a war. John Adamson’s recent book, The Noble Revolt, argues that the war was the result of a conspiracy by a small group of barons to take over the government. That’s OK as far as it goes, but it doesn’t explain everything.

It wasn’t inevitable that a dispute between the elite about the government would lead to a full-blown civil war. If the war was limited to peers and MPs it would have been very different. The Wars of the Roses are a good example of what that kind of war might have been like. The first battle of St Albans in 1455 was basically a few noblemen and their retainers beating each other up. The first major battle of the civil war, at Edgehill in October 1642, involved 20 or 30,000 soldiers.

To get from one to the other, the elite factions needed wider support. They needed thousands of men from the lower ranks of society to serve as soldiers. They needed money, weapons, and equipment. And they needed horses.

Like these…

On the left there’s a war horse. Horses were vitally important for early modern armies. Cavalry needed horses to ride, and the whole army needed horse drawn wagons. The army that parliament raised in 1642 probably included around 7 or 8,000 horses. It was all too easy for an army to lose horses. They could be killed or captured by the enemy; they could die of disease, exhaustion or starvation; they could be stolen and sold by deserters; they might have to be left behind if they went lame. It wasn’t unusual for armies in this period to lose 60 or 70 per cent of their horses in a year.

And on the right there’s a mill horse, representing working horses, because horses were a major part of the economy. They were used for transport, agriculture, and industry. They were also status symbols. Peter Edwards says that a man on a horse could literally look down on other people. This meant that there were huge numbers of horses in England which could potentially be used by the armies. But it also meant that their owners could be reluctant to part with them. The horses themselves didn’t get much choice. Horses were generally seen as property more than beings in their own right. One side effect of that is that horse supply gives some interesting insights into property rights. It’s harder to get at the reality of animals as animals, but that comes through sometimes even when their owners were determined to treat them as objects.

There were more than enough horses in England to satisfy the demands of both sides. The problem was how to get hold of them.

The county of Essex was a major source of horses for parliament. Things can get confusing here because the Lord General of parliament’s armies was the Earl of Essex, but he wasn’t really connected with the county of Essex. His estates were mostly in Staffordshire. The most important lord in the county of Essex was the Earl of Warwick.

The first system that Parliament used to raise an army for the Earl of Essex was known as the “propositions”. In June 1642 they invited people to contribute money, horses and arms to help defend parliament and the protestant religion from the King and the Catholics. Most royalists weren’t actually Catholics, but parliament’s propaganda said that there was a Popish conspiracy. The contributions were supposed to be a loan. The full value was going to be paid back at some unspecified point in the future from some unspecified source.

Contributions started with MPs and peers in parliament itself. As you’d expect from committed members of the elite, they brought in quite a lot. For example the Earl of Essex listed 20 horses valued at £560. But if it was only down to their contributions the forces would still have been very small. To get the army which fought at Edgehill they needed wider support. The records of the propositions show that they got it.

The system was very centralized and left detailed records – so detailed that it took me about 2 weeks to type the lists into a database! These lists include descriptions and values of all the horses that were brought in, the names of their owners, and often the owner’s address and occupation (but not always). It just happens that the records from Essex are really good.

This is the total number of cavalry horses that were brought in each month, from everywhere.

It took a while for the system to get going. Only a few hundred horses in June and July. Most of them came from London. Then in August it goes right up. This is when lots of horses started to come in from other places. Then it starts to go down in the autumn. Up to October the contributions were supposed to be voluntary. By the end of October people were being put under more pressure to contribute. Non-contributors were to be treated as “delinquents”, meaning they could be disarmed and imprisoned. In November a tax was imposed on anyone who hadn’t contributed according to their ability. That was obviously a response to the fact that contributions were going down. But it didn’t work. They kept going down even when people were under threat of being taxed or put in prison. That suggests that parliament’s authority wasn’t very strong. Ordinances of parliament couldn’t make people give up their property if they didn’t want to give it up.

So the contributions in the summer weren’t forced, but they weren’t spontaneous either.

This chart shows how many horses came in from the county of Essex every day in August and September. There’s a fairly steady background level but some very big spikes.

Where I can identify the place names I’ve plotted them on a map.

View Larger Map

This is the contributions for the 17th of August, which was one of the busiest days. They’re all concentrated in the west and in the south-east of the county. There’s a big gap in the north-east around Colchester.

View Larger Map

This one is for the 9th of September. It’s almost the exact opposite. A few horses from the south and west but not many. Most of them are from the area around Colchester which was empty in the last map.

This suggests that contributions were highly organised at county level. People waited for the local authorities to come round and ask them for horses. When they were asked some people were happy to give up their horses. But they didn’t all rush down to London in the middle of June. If the local authorities were putting pressure on people it only worked so far. Otherwise you’d expect much higher contributions.

There was wider support for the parliamentarian cause than just the peers and MPs, but we’re still dealing with quite a small minority of the population. No more than 3,000 individuals in the whole kingdom listed cavalry horses in 1642. That’s not many when you consider that there were 9,000 parishes in England, so on average that’s about a third of a horse per parish! The population of London is reckoned to be about 300,000, and the population of Essex was about 85,000. Compared to that 3,000 is a very small number.

That’s partly because the lists only show people who had horses to spare. Although lots of people owned horses, horses were very valuable and not everyone could afford to give them away. The average value of a cavalry horse in these lists is £14. That includes weapons and equipment because it’s not possible to separate them, but it shows that we’re dealing with wealthy people. Where the occupations or social status are given they show that the vast majority of the donors were from the gentry or the middling sort. Even so, the donors probably represent a minority of their classes. There must have been other people who also had plenty of horses but who didn’t donate any.

Donations of money might show different patterns. People who couldn’t afford to give a whole horse might still be able to give a small amount of money, so that could go further down the social scale. We also have to take into account the men who joined the army as soldiers. But even putting together all the people who served in the army and all the people made material contributions to the war effort, it took a relatively small minority of the population to start the war. Later the scope of the war expanded to involve a majority of the population in one way or another, but that’s not how it was in 1642. The battle of Edgehill came about because of relatively small numbers of committed activists. It was far more than just a Noble Revolt, but it was nothing like a mass popular movement either. That doesn’t mean that participation was limited by class. People from all levels of society were involved in one way or another.

Because we’re dealing with wealthy property owners the lists are dominated by men, but there are some women too. They were nearly all widows because it was easier for widows to own property in their own right. You can see gender ideology at work in the lists, because men are listed by occupation or social status, but women are listed by marital status – that wasn’t unusual for the time.

The creation of the Earl of Essex’s army in 1642 demonstrates people from nearly all levels of society exercising agency. The masses also exercised agency in other ways which were outside parliament’s formal military and administrative structures.

In 1642 the majority of horse owners in England weren’t committed to either side. While supporters of parliament were donating horses to the Earl of Essex’s army, royalist supporters were doing the same for the King. Parliament was trying to stop them. In the summer of 1642 parliament developed a system of disarming people identified as ‘delinquents’. The definition of ‘delinquent’ included all Catholics as well as active royalists, and the definition got wider as the year went on. The propositions system was implemented from the top down, but the disarming of delinquents was not so centralized. In May and June 1642 local officials, such as mayors, began impounding horses and arms which were being taken to join the King at York. These actions weren’t always ordered in advance by parliament, but were usually authorised afterwards. By August, parliament was giving specific instructions to local authorities to disarm all delinquents in their counties. As well as denying horses and arms to the royalists, this was an extra source of supply for parliament. It was also an opportunity for popular participation in the war.

A major riot broke out in Colchester in August 1642, and spread through the Stour valley, resulting in several days of violence and destruction over a wide area of Essex and Suffolk. Marxists have seen this as an example of class war. Revisionists have claimed that the riots were not political. They’re both wrong. John Walter studied the riots in detail and found that they were probably motivated by popular parliamentarianism. Horses played a vital role.

Sir John Lucas was a wealthy gentleman who lived just outside the walls of Colchester. There was a long running feud between his family and the town. There were disputes over land going back to the dissolution of the monasteries, but some new problems appeared in the reign of Charles I. Sir John was an enthusiastic supporter of the personal rule – he collected ship money and supported religious changes by appointing clergy who were sympathetic to Archbishop Laud. By the summer of1642 he was a committed royalist and was getting together horses and arms for the king’s army.

In response to this a crowd of men and women from Colchester attacked his house and impounded the horses. The details of the attack and the identities of the rioters are difficult to discover, but it’s very significant that the mayor of Colchester was involved in impounding the horses. As John Walter points out (and this also agrees with my own work on horse seizing) this is a familiar pattern. It fits in with other examples of local officials stopping horses on their way to the King. The actions of the crowd at Colchester were almost certainly inspired by parliament’s policy of disarming delinquents. Parliament even authorized their actions after the event and thanked them for their services.

But things went much further than parliament intended. Rioting spread through Essex and Suffolk, with crowds attacking the houses of Catholic gentry and Laudian clergy. Again this fits in with parliament’s definition of delinquents at this time, but parliament and the local elites were uncomfortable with the way things seemed to be getting out of hand. While the crowds were inspired by parliament’s official policies and anti-catholic propaganda, they were clearly exercising agency, not following orders.

That was a double edged sword for parliament. It was useful to have mobs keeping the local royalists down, but crowd violence worried the local gentry. As you’d expect, they were anxious about disorder and disruption – what if the rioters decided to overthrow the social order? Just like in the homily of obedience, they thought they might lose their lives and property. They wanted to call out the militia to put down the riots by force. That put parliament in a difficult situation because they didn’t want to alienate the gentry, and because popular disorder was great for royalist propaganda. When it came to attracting the support of people who wanted to maintain the traditional order, the king already had an advantage because he was the king. Parliament was rebelling against him and had already taken on unprecedented powers. Being associated with mobs of common people only made things look worse. In the end, parliament sent a message to the rioters saying that they’d done well but that they should go home in case they made things look bad.

As long as parliament had enough voluntary contributions from their committed supporters the property of the uncommitted majority was reasonably safe, except where the army quartered soldiers on them. That didn’t happen much in Essex because it was a long way from the fighting. Royalists and catholics were a clearly defined Other. Their property could be taken without arousing too much anxiety or opposition from non-delinquents. In fact it could be immensely popular, as we’ve just seen in Colchester. According to parliamentarian propaganda it was the King, with his arbitrary government and popish army, who was threatening liberty and property. In late 1642 voluntary contributions were drying up, and the boundaries between “us” and “them” were shifting. Because the activists on both sides were a minority they couldn’t provide enough resources to sustain the war themselves. That wouldn’t have been a problem if the war had finished quickly, which it might have done if things had gone a bit differently at the battle of Edgehill. As it turned out, there was no quick decision. That meant that both sides needed access to the resources of the uncommitted majority to keep on fighting. Parliament’s government became more arbitrary, moving towards the view that “if you’re not with us you’re against us”. This put parliament on a collision course with the very rights it claimed to be defending.

In November 1642 a new measure was introduced to supply horses for the army. Several men, including Thomas Browne, Maximilian Bard, and the horse dealer John Stiles, were given arbitrary powers to seize any horses within 5 miles of London which had not already been listed. This was not limited to royalists or even non-contributors. Only peers and their servants were exempt. Although they secured several hundred horses for the army, there were so many complaints that parliament revoked their power in January 1643. That shows that parliament was prepared to listen to the concerns of property owners: it wasn’t arbitrary government yet.

By this time there was no adequate system in place to supply horses for parliament’s armies, especially the Earl of Essex’s army. Voluntary contributions had dropped off drastically by the end of 1642 and were probably lower than the army’s attrition rate. There was not enough money in the treasury to buy horses. Therefore the army had no alternative but to take horses wherever they could be found. Throughout the first half of 1643, the Lord General issued warrants to his officers authorizing them to seize horses for their troops. Although it was usually specified that they should take horses from delinquents they weren’t always very careful in practice. In any case, the supply of horses from active royalists had been almost entirely exhausted by mid-1643, if not before. In May 1643 parliament passed the sequestration ordinance, which deprived royalists of all their property. Inventories of goods seized by the sequestrators only mention a few horses, and most of them were unfit for military service. Most of the serviceable horses had already been taken during the disarmament of delinquents which began in the summer of 1642. This meant that even committed parliamentarians could have their horses taken by soldiers. Although allowing soldiers to take horses was necessary because there was no other way of getting them, it led to abuses and breakdowns of discipline. Once you let soldiers take civilian property, it was harder to stop them taking more than they needed. There were also many cases of extortion, where soldiers returned horses to their owners in return for a bribe, which they kept themselves.

Obviously, there was a lot of horse seizing in the areas where the army was quartered. In the spring and summer of 1643, the Earl of Essex’s army was mostly operating in the Thames valley, so that area suffered quite badly. It was difficult for civilians to resist armed soldiers, but they sometimes prosecuted the soldiers for theft later on. Some army officers were pursued through the courts for years by people whose horses they’d taken. So to the extent that power grew from the barrel of a gun, it was actually quite limited.

This kind of requisitioning wasn’t just limited to the areas where the army was operating. The county of Essex was a long way from the fighting but had already proved to be an important source of horses. In the spring of 1643, the Lord General sent Colonel Walter Long into Essex to take horses for the army and collect tax arrears. Long was very unpopular, was accused of abusing his powers, and was eventually recalled by parliament. Clive Holmes wrote an article about this in the early 1970s. He saw the incident in terms of binary oppositions between military and civilian, and between local and central: the local gentry resented an outsider army officer interfering in their affairs. There was an element of this, but it doesn’t tell the whole story.

There was another group of horse takers operating in Essex at the same time as Colonel Long. He claimed that they were committing the abuses that he’d been accused of: taking horses from well-affected people, taking bribes to return horses to their owners. He even went as far as arresting them and seizing the horses that they’d seized! Colonel Long could now portray himself as protecting the civilians of Essex against the plundering of soldiers. To emphasise his claim to legitimacy, Long examined his prisoners in the presence of some local officials, and sent the evidence to the county committee and to parliament. The men Long had arrested were local men, and claimed to have a warrant authorising them to take horses. This warrant was from Lord Grey, major-general of the Eastern Association, an organisation set up in December 1642 for the mutual defence of the East Anglian counties, including Essex. In practice Lord Grey was mostly independent of the Earl of Essex. So this is not just military versus civilians. There was rivalry between two different armies which were competing for resources. They were also competing for legitimacy because they needed the co-operation of local communities, or at least the local elites, in order to extract those resources. Colonel Long was seeking to enhance his own legitimacy by denying legitimacy to Lord Grey’s horse takers. In his letter to parliament he questioned whether the warrant was genuine. He also claimed that the men named in the warrant had exceeded their authority by appointing deputies. The other horse takers were also trying to claim legitimacy. One of their strategies was to tell people that they were authorised by the Earl of Warwick. As I said before, he was the most powerful Lord in the county and seems to have been very popular.

Ultimately Long failed to get the Essex gentry on his side. They preferred to see him as a scapegoat and continued complaining to parliament. Parliament was in another tricky situation, but they got out of it by playing the factions off against each other. Colonel Long was withdrawn from Essex to placate the local gentry. But the horses he took were never given back to their owners. They were taken up to London to recruit the Earl of Essex’s army.

That’s just one of the ways that the issue of horse seizing caused major problems in 1643. It wasn’t just a case of local against central. Parliament was divided against itself. There were different factions in both houses, and it’s not always easy to distinguish who was in which faction, or what motivated the factions. The journals of the houses don’t give any details of debates, they only tell us the results of what was decided. Judging by these results, in general the House of Commons pushed for more aggressive measures to secure a supply of horses, and the House of Lords tried to protect private property. In July 1643 the Commons came up with a bill to requisition all horses within several miles of London, and the Lords came up with a bill to ban the seizure of horses in a similar area. Somehow they reached a compromise to raise a new flying army of cavalry to be commanded by the Earl of Manchester. It was originally planned to be an independent army that could operate anywhere, but that soon changed. In August Manchester replaced Lord Grey as commander of the Eastern Association. Later parts of the forces raised for the flying army were transferred to the Earl of Essex and other armies.

To raise this new army, parliament imposed quotas of horses on each county and let the county committee decide how to get them. The county of Essex had to supply 500 cavalry and 1,000 mounted infantry. The committee achieved this very quickly, which suggests that they weren’t narrow minded localists. It’s even more impressive when you consider that several other counties failed to meet their quota. Surrey and Kent hadn’t even started in September. Hertfordshire, Buckinghamshire and Middlesex had arrears which weren’t collected until the following year, if at all. The Essex committee set a quota tax on the parishes of the county but they didn’t wait for the tax to be collected before they supplied the horses to the army. They bought at least 100 horses from the Smithfield horse dealer John Stiles. He demanded part payment in advance. The Essex committee were able to pay him, probably by taking out a loan against future tax revenues.

The remainder of the horses for the quota were seized from civilians by army officers and county committee members, but this caused surprisingly little trouble compared to the activities of Colonel Long. This was possibly because the new requisitions were seen as more legitimate. They were authorised by an ordinance of parliament and by the county committee. One of the officers in charge of the seizures was Captain Nathaniel Rich. He was from a local gentry family and distantly related to the Earl of Warwick. Horse owners who were identified as well-affected to parliament were promised repayment for their horses, and this seems to have been made from the tax revenues when they had been collected. This was a more benign system than being plundered by the army, but it still amounted to people’s property being taken away. They had less scope to resist when local and central government were united against them, whereas the local elites had been willing to support horse owners against Colonel Long. It was this alignment of forces that made all the difference. Individual property owners found it hard to resist.

The flying army quota was a one-off measure. Like the propositions it wasn’t a long term solution. It created new forces and reinforced existing ones but didn’t make any provision for replacement horses.

Things changed in 1644. By this time parliament had enough regular tax revenues to buy horses on a large scale. People seem to have been reasonably happy with paying regular taxes. That doesn’t mean they really wanted to give their money away. There was still resistance and evasion, but most of the taxes were collected successfully. It looks like predictable taxation was seen as more convenient and more legitimate than soldiers taking what they needed at raondom. When there was a reliable supply of horses, soldiers were less likely to take them from civilians, although it still happened sometimes. In the spring of 1645 parliament’s 3 main armies were amalgamated into the New Model Army, and administrative changes of the previous year were taken further. Most of the New Model Army’s horses were bought from a small group of dealers based in Smithfield market, but at first they only supplied horses for cavalry and dragoons. Draught horses were still supplied by the old system of putting quotas on counties. The difference this time was that the horses were paid for out of the monthly assessment tax.

The ordinance of parliament which put quotas of draught horses on the counties also required them to impress soldiers for the army. Impressment wasn’t new. It had been used to recruit the armies since 1643, and had been used even earlier to raise forces to fight in Ireland. This ordinance is the perfect example because it includes quotas of men and horses. You can see the distinction between human and animal breaking down, because men were being treated like animals: rounded up and sent to the army.

There were riots and rebellions against impressment in some places but apparently not in Essex. That suggests that it could be a contentious issue, but didn’t have to be. It might have depended on who the chosen victims were. Rounding up marginal people like vagrants and beggars would be unlikely to provoke much protest from the rest of society. These men could still exercise some agency: they often ran away from the army at the first opportunity. They had to be guarded en route to stop them from escaping. Because of this the county committees often spent more on impressing men for the New Model Army than on supplying its draught horses. But horses could exercise agency too. Although their owners treated them as property, they were alive and had their own aims. Whether these were based on free choice or biological instinct, the fact is that horses didn’t always do what humans wanted them to. Like impressed soldiers, they sometimes tried to escape. In October 1642, a group of draught horses being taken from London to join the Earl of Essex’s army broke down a fence and ran away. The conductors in charge of the horses had to claim extra expenses for paying men to help catch them and for repairing the fence.

The royalist officer Richard Bulstrode recalled in his memoirs that he lost control of his horse at 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

A recent study of the battle of Edgehill has suggested that the cavalry charges were more like stampedes. The parliamentarians ran away, and the royalists couldn’t stop chasing them, because their horses were out of control.

When you’re riding a horse you can influence it, but you can’t ever be in complete control of it. It’s even harder to control a society. It’s too big and complex.

Maybe elite anxiety about disorder was understandable – they realised that they weren’t really in control. But the consequences of their lack of control weren’t necessarily as bad as they imagined. Changes in the social order weren’t really against nature and didn’t lead to changes in animal behaviour. So things weren’t really like this the Great Chain of Being, or the World Turned Upside Down.

Authority and property rights weren’t natural or fixed, but they couldn’t always be influenced by brute force either. They had to be negotiated. Parliament’s war effort could only keep going with at least some co-operation from property owners. Parliament had to respect the rights of the gentry and the middling sort as far as was necessary to win the war, but there was no incentive to respect lower class people or animals.

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).

The first thing to note is that it was published in January 1647, long before the regicide and setting up of the republic. The text of the pamphlet is a poem which is mainly about religion and Ireland. Although related constitutional and social issues are hinted at, they aren’t the main focus of attention. However, the idea that hierarchies are all related and that disturbing one necessarily leads to the disturbance of others dominates the whole thing.

It wasn’t unusual for 17th century printers to use stock woodcuts to illustrate pamphlets, but in this case the text and picture are very closely related. The poem opens by explicitly referring to the picture:

THe Picture that is printed in the front
Is like the Kingdom, if you look upon’t:
For if you well do note it as it is,
It is a Transform’d Metamorphosis.
This monstrous Picture plainely doth declare
This Land (quite out of order) out of square:

Although the text is mostly about religion, the inverted church in the top left corner is the only direct representation of the inversion of ecclesiastical hierarchies. What’s more noticeable is that several animals are used to represent inversion of the “natural” order. Flying fish, a rat chasing a cat, and rabbit chasing a dog, and a horse driving a cart are all the opposite of what people would normally expect.

The Cony hunts the Dogge, the Rat the Cat,
The Horse doth whip the Cart, (I pray marke that)
The Wheelbarrow doth drive the man (oh base)
And Eeles and Gudgeons flie a mighty pace.

The Great Chain of Being is broken! Oh no! So far I haven’t found much evidence of people mentioning the chain of being by name in 17th century England, but this pamphlet is good evidence that the idea was around, even if most people didn’t think about it as deeply as the likes of Leibniz and Spinoza (the English elite don’t seem to have grasped the subtleties of gradation, preferring to see everyone and everything below themselves as being pretty much the same). In fact it’s artificial to separate ecclesiastical hierarchies from hierarchies of animals (or any other hierarchies). The idea was that all hierarchies had been made by god, and that upsetting any of them was going against god’s natural order. The homily of obedience, one of the sermons to be given in church on Sundays (originally attributed to Thomas Cranmer but continuously reprinted well into the 17th century) made this idea explicit: god had put everything from the weather and animals to kings and subjects in perfect order. Therefore nature, religion, and authority were all inextricably linked.

The World Turned Upside Down supports this ideology, but in a moderate conservative way which seems to have little sympathy for Arminianism or absolutism. If only things could go back to how they were before, but “before” is the reign of Elizabeth I, not the 1630s:

And if ’twere possible our fathers old
Should live againe, and tread upon this mould,
And see all things confused, overthrowne,
They would not know this Countrey for their own.
For England hath no likelihood or show
Of what it was but seventy years ago;
Religion, manners, life, and shapes of men,
Are much unlike the people that were then,

There is no obvious hostility to parliament. The poem professes loyalty to both king and parliament, and represents the role of parliament as putting things right. The most pressing thing which needs putting right is Ireland. More than a whole page is devoted to pouring scorn on the Irish rebels.

From Hells blacke Pit, begirt with Romish Armes,
Thousands of Locusts are in Troups and Swarmes,
More barbarous then the Heathens, worse then Iewes,
Nor Turkes or Tartars would such tortures use,
Sure that Religion can no waies bee good,
That so inhumanely delights in Blood:
Nor doth that Doctrine from the Scriptures spring,
For to rebell against God and the King.

So there’s a racial hierarchy here, and the Irish are at the bottom- even worse than the Jews! Demonstrating what Bruce Boehrer called “relative anthropocentrism” (that is,the belief that humans are better than animals, but some humans are more human than others), the Irish are said to be like locusts, and are explicitly denounced as inhuman. And they’ve broken the chain of being by rebelling against the king, which by breaking the “natural” order is also rebelling against god (this conveniently ignores the view that the English parliament had also rebelled against the king!). But it isn’t just the Irish who are like animals. The same also applies to separatist sects and lay preachers who have overthrown the “natural” order of the church:

The Felt-maker, and sawcie stable Groome
Will dare to pearch into the Preachers roome;
Each Ignorant, doe of the Spirit boast,
And prating fooles brag of the Holy Ghost,
When Ignoramus will his Teacher teach,
And Sow-gelders and Coblers dare to preach,

…

When men more bruitish then the Horse or Mule,
Who know not to obey, presume to rule,

Again, hierarchies are being inverted. The poem makes it clear that the Church of England, with the king at its head, is the true church and that it is equally under threat from sects and papists. The church needs hierarchy and ceremony, and these are not to be confused with popery (as they commonly were):

When as the Lords Prayer is almost neglected,
And all Church. Government is quite rejected,
When to avoid a Romish Papists name,
A man must be unmannerly, past shame,
When he that doth shew reverence, doth offend,
And he seemes best, that will not bow or bend,
When he that into Gods House doth not come,
As to a Stable, or a Tipling Roome,
Is counted for a Popish Favorite,

So far so Laudian, but a few lines later there’s some surprising sympathy towards church puritans:

When he that (of his waies) doth conscience make,
And in his heart doth world, flesh, feind forsake,
Loves God with all his soule; adores no pelfe,
And loves his Neighbour, as he loves himselfe;
This man is rare to finde, yet this rare man
Shall have the hatefull name of Puritan:

This seems to hint at Calvinist doctrine (although it’s a bit vague, and I’m not exactly an expert on theology!):

We seeke our Pardons from our heavenly hope,
And not by workes or favour from the Pope;

Overall this pamphlet seems to be a moderate conservative call for king and parliament, high church and low church, to unite against sects and papists and restore god’s natural order, returning to the Elizabethan consensus (whether that consensus was real or imagined). These lines sum up a conservative fear of change, and the comfort of order and ritual:

And from those duties I will never vary,
Till death, or order do command contrary.

1. Bruce Thomas Boehrer, Shakespeare among the animals (Palgrave: New York, 2002).
2. T. J, John Taylor, and Thomas Jordan, The world turn’d upside down (London: : Printed for John Smith., 1647., 1647).

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).

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.

Perhaps the best point that Peter Burke made was about cultural construction: the idea that many things which have been assumed to be natural (eg gender, sexuality) are really cultural phenomena. He asked: who is doing the constructing and what material are they using for the construction? This is an important question that too often goes unasked. The constructing in “cultural construction” is very rarely an active verb. We might know that the object is constructed, but who or what is the subject doing the constructing? There might not be an easy answer to that question, but that’s no reason to avoid it. The Marxist answer would be either that the construction of culture is determined by the economic base, or that culture is manipulated by the ruling elite through “repressive structures” in order maintain their power. Recent work by social historians on power and authority tends to show that it’s much more complicated than that (for early modern England see various works by Michael Braddick, John Walter, Steve Hindle, and Andy Wood). In Marxist terms, a conservative cultural ideology which maintains the status quo would be seen as serving the interests of the ruling classes and working against the interests of the lower classes. However, that ideology would also limit the freedom of the elite. If they try to change things too much they might face opposition from the lower orders who want things to stay as they are. If the elite go too far they can compromise their own legitimacy and ultimately bring about their own downfall. Enclosure riots are a good example of non-elite action to enforce conservative ideology, and even the English Civil War can be seen in these terms: conservative parliamentarians reacting against the innovations of Charles I.

This is not to say that ideology necessarily serves the interests of the lower classes either. It would be more accurate to say that cultural ideologies place some limits on all members of a society (but those limits are not usually equal), and that they do not entirely or constantly serve the interests of any easily identifiable group or individual. Even something as overt, artificial, and seemingly simplistic as fascism might not always do what its inventors want it to. I remember hearing a paper (several years ago) by Dave Gould about his research on football hooligans in fascist Italy. It’s easy for liberal intellectuals to assume that fascist thugs and football hooligans are the same thing, but their aims and motivations were not always the same. While Mussolini’s fascist vision encouraged nationalism and violence, it also emphasised order and discipline. The disorder and parochialism of football crowds did not fit in with this vision, and the embarrassment of major trouble at international matches undermined rather than reinforced national pride.

If historical evidence doesn’t suggest any obvious candidates for the mysterious constructors of culture, then where is it coming from, and can we really talk about it being constructed? It might be more appropriate to talk about cultural phenomena “emerging”, but we still have to ask what or where are these things emerging from and how? Evolutionary psychologists want to reduce it all to selective pressures but I think that’s an oversimplification. Even Richard Dawkins recognises that some aspects of culture (such as religious restrictions on sex, particularly celibate clergy) don’t serve any purpose for “the selfish gene”. It’s interesting to note that there’s some tension between militant atheism and evolutionary reductionism here: if religion is evil and needs to be destroyed then it can’t also be natural and useful.

Some followers of Dawkins believe that while culture is not biologically determined, it does develop in a way which is closely analogous to biological evolution: the meme is the basic cultural unit in the same way that the gene is the basic biological unit. As I’ve said before (and will probably say again) I’m not convinced by that. At best the meme is an arbitrary unit of information with no inherent meaning. It might help us to map what happens to some bits of culture, but I can’t see it helping to explain anything. Bill Benzon‘s work on the evolution of culture is much more subtle and interesting, but we still need to know more about language, meaning, and above all the human brain. The physical characteristics of the brain must have some influence on culture, if only by placing some limits on thoughts and memories, but culture creates an artificial environment with its own selective pressures.

While Peter Burke acknowledged the danger of reducing all history to cultural explanations at the expense of other causes, and pointed out the difficulty of defining such a large and fluid field as cultural history, he didn’t say much about the more fundamental problems of defining and explaining culture itself. What is culture? How does it work? I’d like to see more cultural historians tackling these problems. We also need to look at culture in less anthropocentric terms. In the discussion Robert Burns made a good point that all human history is cultural history, because most things that humans do which are of interest to historians are unique to human culture. However, we need to be careful to avoid a binary opposition between human and animal. There is increasing evidence of animals using tools (chimps have been in the news recently). There is also some experimental evidence that monkeys have mental concepts of the predators signified by alarm calls and can critically evaluate the calls rather than automatically responding to them (see review of Why We Talk at Babel’s Dawn). This is looking more like language and culture than instinctive behaviour.

If animals do have their own rudimentary culture, it would be impossible for historians to study it because of the lack of evidence. However, the same problem arises with early humans. It has been common to suppose that the appearance of symbolic material culture, evidenced by surviving artefacts, marks the beginnings of human language, but Edmund Blair Bolles takes the view that speech is likely to be much older than symbolic culture. By emphasising speech as a tool for directing joint attention, he implies that focusing too heavily on symbolic culture is jumping the gun. Early speech might have had a closer relationship with the real than later symbolic representations would have.

It now looks difficult to define “human”. Is it all about genes, or is it our unique culture which makes us human? While surviving evidence cannot prove the existence of symbolic culture more than 200,000 years ago, EBB suggests that homo habilis could have been speaking a few words 2 million years ago and that homo erectus could have had a sophisticated spoken language 1 million years ago. At what point did the few words of homo habilis become different enough from monkey alarm calls to count as something unique or special? The first words might even have been adapted from monkey alarm calls!

Maybe we don’t always have to worry about what happened 2 million years ago to understand the more recent past, but it’s important to remember that nothing is fixed or permanent. During the discussion, the person on my left asked a brilliant question: how far back and how far afield do you have to go to provide a sufficient and necessary explanation of the cultural phenomenon of the bottle of mineral water on the table in front of you? It was disappointing that Peter Burke was completely unable to deal with that question. To me, the obvious answer would be: it depends on how much explanation you want. There is no self-evident optimum amount of explanation. There isn’t even any minimum or maximum. It all depends on how much the historian and audience agree to take for granted as not needing to be explained. The purpose of doing history, whether you admit it or not, is to make other people agree with you. Therefore, you need enough explanation to convince the people you’re trying to convince. How much that is depends on who they are and what their expectations are. I’m becoming increasingly aware that the audience is a central part of history: what you write or say is necessarily influenced by the target audience. It’s possible to take the explanation of a bottle of mineral water back to homo habilis 2 million years ago, or even further, and there is no reason why you shouldn’t. Deciding what is and isn’t relevant to a historical enquiry is an arbitrary decision. We have to make those arbitrary decisions in order to make research and writing manageable, but we must never forget that they are arbitrary.

Oh no! Bill Turkel has tagged me for a meme! Is this the end of civilisation as we know it? When I started this weblog I was determined to stick to substantial original content. There would be no room for memes or other self-indulgent timewasting — I already have a LiveJournal for that. However, Bill managed to turn this particular meme into some interesting analysis of memetics and the blogosphere. That’s inspired me to move even further away from the original meme and post some random thoughts about memes. I won’t be tagging anyone at the end, because I hope to demonstrate that history bloggers don’t need to tag each other.

I first encountered the concept of the meme in 2004 after I started my LiveJournal. Back then I didn’t know anything about the theory behind it or that the term had been invented by Richard Dawkins. I didn’t even know how to pronounce the word and came up with my own folk etymology that it must be derived from the word “me” because the whole thing was an outlet for egotism and self-indulgence (this is almost as good as my folk etymology for “emo bands”, which I thought referred to their singers’ whiny nasal voices sounding like Emo Philips). As far as I could see it was a piece of harmless fun, but potentially addictive enough to turn into a serious waste of time. (At this point it’s worth noting that I’m falling back on a familiar plot device for this blog: the autobiographical journey of discovery, beginning with “look how ignorant I used to be” and teleologically progressing to “but I got better”.)

But I got better. Some of my friends know about science and write about it in their LiveJournals, so eventually I realised what memes were really about. The meme could potentially be useful idea to explain how human culture spreads and changes. The Marxist model in which economic base determines cultural superstructure is now realised to be completely inadequate (the passive voice there: I’m not just standing alone and saying I think it’s completely inadequate, but it would be tempting fate to assert that everyone thinks it’s inadequate). More subtle Marxist thinkers like Althusser and Gramsci moved away from simple economic determinism but still assumed that ideological hegemony served the interests of the elite.

Feminist and queer approaches to history and literature focus on gender ideology. In some ways gender fits the Marxist model, being widely assumed to be natural even though the feminist distinction between sex and gender exposes how unnatural gender can be. In other ways, gender ideology brings out the limitations of a model of cultural change based on social and economic class. Although gender ideology can’t be directly linked to an economic base, it has changed over time, and historians need to account for those changes somehow (mainly because explaining change is part of historians’ claim to importance, and therefore explanations have to be produced somehow or other; I’m having increasing doubts about whether we, the historians, can ever explain why anything happened, since even finding out what happened gives us more than enough methodological problems).

Dror Wahrman has suggested that England experienced a “gender panic” in the 1780s caused by the American Revolution (‘Percy’s Prologue‘, Past and Present, 159, 1998). The dates match up well enough, but we (as in everyone, I hope) all know that correlation doesn’t prove causation. Americans rejecting British government can easily be seen as a blow to patriarchy which might have had knock-on effects for British women. I’m actually really impressed by Wahrman’s article, but I’m just not entirely convinced by the conclusion. We (as in absolutely everyone in the world) don’t know enough about how culture works to be able to draw this kind of conclusion. We can’t even arrive at an adequate definition of what culture is. John Tosh was also sceptical of Wahrman’s conclusions, suggesting that cultural change might be independent of other factors (in Tim Hitchcock and Michele Cohen eds. English Masculinities, 1660-1800, 1999, ISBN: 0582319226). We might even have to consider the possibility that changes in economies, societies, and politics are driven by culture. After all, if cultural assumptions say that economy and society should be a certain way, and if those assumptions are so hegemonic that nobody ever thinks of questioning them, how can economy and society actually change? Doesn’t the idea of change have to come first?

The problem with this line of thinking is that it makes it much harder to explain cultural change. This is where Richard Dawkins comes in. These days he’s widely perceived as the angry red-faced militant atheist who can’t tolerate anyone who thinks differently from him, and as the leader of a pack of extreme reductionists who see absolutely everything as serving an evolutionary purpose (someone will probably comment that Dawkins isn’t a militant because he doesn’t use weapons or physical violence, and I’ll probably reply condescendingly that reductionists don’t understand metaphors). But it wasn’t always like this. In fact Dawkins recognised that biological evolution can’t account for everything in human history. There are some aspects of culture which don’t have any obvious connection with natural selection, or which even work against it. His proposed solution was the meme. Although this model was based on the transmission of DNA it can’t be dismissed as simple biological determinism. The meme is roughly analogous to the gene, but it’s really a cultural solution to a cultural problem.

When Dawkins came up with the idea of memes it was just a hypothesis, and one which wasn’t particularly important for the main arguments in The Selfish Gene. Dawkins himself doesn’t take his hypothesis very seriously (Bill Benzon said this somewhere on The Valve but I can’t find it now). Other people have enthusiastically taken it up and run with it. Does this prove that the hypothesis is true (memetics is a successful meme itself), or is it just a self-fulfilling prophecy?

One of my LiveJournal friends, who is a scientist, posted a succinct and eloquent summary of meme theory. We had an informed debate in the comments, and although it petered out just as it was getting more interesting, it at least showed me where I stand on the issue. I don’t think the meme lives up to the hype because it doesn’t really help to explain anything about culture. As far as I can see, the meme is just an arbitrary unit of information (in the strict sense of Shannon’s Information Theory, in which information and meaning are separate). Focusing on the transmission of a piece of information might be interesting up to a point but doesn’t necessarily tell us anything about how or why it spreads or whether its propagation has any significance.

Ultimately memetics doesn’t help us to avoid or solve the problem of meaning. What is meaning? How is it made? Can it be fixed? How far and how fast can it slip? These are fundamental questions which can’t be answered yet, and might never be answered. Structuralism suggests that language can be fixed in relation to itself, and that meaning derives from the differences between words, which still leaves us with the problem of how language relates to reality. Post-structuralism suggests that the meanings of words can slip rapidly and unpredictably. Few people who have given the matter any thought are naive enough to believe that words have direct and unproblematic relationships with objects. That mental concepts come somewhere in between isn’t a particularly controversial statement, but there’s plenty of room for controversy about how far those mental concepts influence perception and communication. I’m hoping that cognitive science will give us some more definite answers (although it shouldn’t be assumed that those answers will necessarily be reductionist or realist) but right now the jury is still out.

If memes rely on meaning then they are as problematic as anything else which relies on meaning, but if we exclude meaning from memetics then it doesn’t seem to be much use. We still need to work out some basic things about language, culture, and the human brain (to a certain extent that “we” is really “I”, because I know far too little about the current state of cognitive science, but there is almost certainly more work to be done). Until then, explaining human culture is likely to remain beyond the scope of memetics.

On the other hand, the model might be usefully applied to the propagation of information independently of human language and culture. Computer viruses are self-replicating information, but they can only replicate if some of that information has meaning within the context of a computer’s operating system. This fits perfectly into the structuralist paradigm while avoiding some of the difficult questions raised by post-structuralism. A computer language is an arbitrary system which is fixed in relation to itself but which does not have a fixed relationship with reality. Unlike human language, computer languages don’t normally slip. We can clearly see a synchronic moment between changes in a language specification (compare that to human language, where a complete picture of a language system in a synchronic moment is unattainable in practice). Non-standard implementations could be classed as slippage, but they could just as well be classed as different language systems in their own synchronic moments. I’m not sure whether this gets us anywhere since memes aren’t necessary to explain computer languages or operating systems.

While I reject the meme as a tool for explaining human culture there clearly are ideas circulating in the blogosphere through copying from one blog to another. In this context, there are memes, but when they’re explicitly called memes they’re often pretty much what I first thought: fun but pointless. However, since I graduated from LiveJournal to WordPress last October and joined the history blogosphere I’ve been able to take part in a much more interesting exchange of ideas than just telling the world which dysfunctional Care Bear I am (you can probably guess that it was Nihilist Bear anyway). Until today this blog has officially been a meme free zone, but I’ve written several posts that were inspired by reading other people’s blogs. In fact around a quarter of my posts so far have been responding to something on another history blog. For example, my post on Grand Narratives of Global War was originally going to be posted as a comment on Airminded until it got so long and complicated that it had to be a post in its own right . In the light of this, I don’t think there’s any need for history bloggers to tag each other with memes, because we’re already interacting in a more interesting and productive way.

Bibliography

1. Tim Hitchcock and Michele Cohen (eds.), English masculinities, 1660-1800 (Addison Wesley: London, 1999).
2. Dror Wahrman, ‘Percy’s prologue’, Past and Present, 159 (1998), pp. 113-60.

Review of Diane Purkiss, The English Civil War: A People’s History (2006; ISBN: 000715061X).

Diane Purkiss has built up a reputation for bringing new ideas and approaches to early-modern history. One side effect of this was that Richard J. Evans identified her as one of the “postmodernists” from whom history supposedly needed defending (In Defence of History, 2001; ISBN: 1862073953). Knowing all this, my expectations were confounded by the first few pages of A People’s History:

We owe our state of government to the English Civil War, but most of its beneficiaries have little idea who fought whom or when or why. Nor do most of us care; what little we know seems remote and difficult to grasp, with stiff figures on battlefields and stiffer constitutional debates. Yet actually, the English Civil War was the making of our country. It made us the nation we are, the countries we are, the people we are. It also created those more permanent revolutions by influence: Thomas Jefferson and George Washington recalled and revered the Good Old Cause against the king’s tyranny, and the French revolutionaries had read their Milton. The glories and liberations of that long-ago conflict still benefit us today; so too its failings and limitations are with us, part of our blood, setting the horizon of our expectations. And to understand ourselves, we have to understand the people we were, the people who fought in the war.

Essentialism? Nationalism? Whiggish metanarratives of progress? What’s going on here? Don’t worry, there’s a perfectly good explanation.

In the preface Purkiss addresses three types of reader: first, general readers who know little or nothing about the civil war; second, enthusiasts who know an awful lot of detail about the military aspects of the war; and third, academics (which is the group I fall into). The book will look very different to each group. I expect many of the second type of reader will hate it, but there are more than enough books which cater for their interests. The first type of readers are likely to be most numerous and are the real target audience. Since this is popular history, it necessarily has to follow at least some of the conventions of the genre. Ignoring or challenging too many of those conventions is likely to alienate both publishers and readers. Purkiss gives them enough to make them feel comfortable. Her prose is entertaining and easy to read. Some academics might find some of it irritating and patronising, but that would be missing the point. Underneath the chatty and sometimes novelistic style, and the anachronistic analogies, Purkiss shows that she really knows what she’s talking about.

Soon enough, the soldiers of up to date academic studies slip out of the Trojan horse, but they come to seduce rather than conquer by force. The first chapter opens in new-historicist style with a fascinating anecdote rather than a dry historiographical survey. Although Freud is the only theorist mainstream enough to be mentioned by name, there are obvious traces of many kinds of critical theory at work here despite the complete (and welcome) absence of intimidating jargon. Purkiss offers a constructivist explanation of the formation of protestant identity in which Catholics were identified as a binary opposite Other. Her examination of the Cornish, drawing on recent work by Mark Stoyle, also hints at postcolonial concerns. Women’s stories recovered by feminist historians are told alongside the more well known stories of men, with childbirth and childhood figuring prominently. Queer theory meets psychoanalysis in Archbishop Laud’s homoerotic dreams. Eco-criticism is represented by the inclusion of the suffering of horses in battles, iconoclastic animal baptisms, and the cultural symbolism of hunting representing man’s control of nature, as well as the King’s control of a hierarchical society. Masculinity studies are brought in to explain some of the behaviour of soldiers. Although the word “epistemology” doesn’t appear anywhere in the book, the problems of knowing what really happened are illustrated with examples such as conflicting accounts of John Smith’s recapture of the standard at Edgehill. Propaganda is examined for what it tells us about cultural beliefs rather than to get at the reality it distorts.

This isn’t to say that the book is just another outpost of theory’s empire. Purkiss has also kept up with all the latest empirical research, such as Ben Coates on the economy of London, and Eric Gruber von Arni on the care of wounded soldiers. Not all of this is explicitly mentioned in the further reading, but that’s understandable since few general readers will be willing and able to pay £55 for these. Meanwhile, if the cutting edge of humanities research abandons French philosophy in favour of cognitive science, Purkiss’s work will still not look too dated, since she uses experimental psychology to illustrate the effects of hunger on soldiers.

While the main focus is on England, Purkiss makes plenty of room for the “Three Kingdoms” approach which has dominated civil war historiography since the 1990s. I like the way parliamentary opposition to Charles I in the arly 1640s is presented as more reactionary than progressive. This is something that is often missed in popular oversimplifications which still haven’t escaped from the Whig view. The diversity of protestant opposition to Laud’s reforms is also emphasised, as is the modernity of both Arminianism and Catholicism. It’s all too easy to be taken in by puritan propaganda which portrayed Catholics as backwards and ignorant, but both the Protestant reformation and Catholic counter-reformation were linked to the renaissance ideology of rejecting the medieval and getting back to something imagined to be older and purer. Bonus points should be awarded for highlighting the Earl of Essex’s reputation as an impotent cuckold, and for not being unfairly critical of his leadership. There’s certainly plenty of room for speculation about why most other (predominantly male) historians of the civil wars have done the exact opposite!

Above all, this book is about diversity, complexity, ambiguity, and the chaos of war. Purkiss shows that everyone had their own unique experiences of the civil wars. While giving enough of a broad outline of events for newcomers to get their bearings, she tries to bring out varied and engaging stories of individual experience. We get to hear the voices of ordinary men and women, but no class is privileged here because kings and aristocrats were people too. Familiar figures such Charles I and Henrietta Maria still figure prominently in the narrative, but they are seen from unfamiliar angles, demonstrating that the personal and the political were inextricably linked. Purkiss sympathetically explains the hopes and fears of people on both sides (while making it clear that a simple binary opposition doesn’t do them justice) in a way which is emotionally engaging but never biased. I haven’t seen this done so well since Ken Burns’s (much sneered at by some academics) documentary on the American Civil War.

Nearly everyone who reads this book will find something new and surprising in it, whichever of the three groups they belong to. Some of the stories, like the soldier with his face shot off, seem like familiar old friends to me, but many other people will find it as shockingly new as Natalie Bennett did. Even with my experience of researching the civil war, I found things which I didn’t know about, and new ways of looking at things I did know about. I knew the name Jeremiah Abercromby from its frequent occurrences in the military records, but I had no idea that he married one of the occupants of Hillesden house shortly after capturing it!

Sometimes details can be a bit vague, but since even I’m turning against books which are packed with masses of empirical facts I can see how other readers would be bored by too much clarification. I found a few outright errors, but not too many. Charles I impeached Lord Mandeville for high treason along with the five members of the Commons in January 1642, so it isn’t quite right to say that “his shortlist of ringleaders omitted many key figures, including all Pym’s supporters in the Lords” (p. 123). Denzil Holles’s foot regiment, with which Nehemiah Wharton marched out of London in the summer of 1642, was a regular regiment raised for Essex’s army, and wasn’t part of the London Militia, so “trained bands” isn’t an accurate description (p. 185). I seem to remember that David Underdown made the same mistake in Revel, Riot and Rebellion (1985; ISBN: 0198227957), but only the second group of readers will really care about it. According to Conrad Russell in the Oxford DNB, John Hampden was mortally wounded at Chalgrove on 18th June 1643, but died of his wound six days later at Thame, so the statement that “on 17 June 1643, John Hampden lay dead on Chalgrove field” is doubly wrong. That Sir Charles Lucas was executed by firing squad in 1648 is correctly stated on page 541, so there isn’t any excuse for page 311′s assertion that he was hanged. These are all minor points, and in the interests of balance I promise to post some of the embarrassing mistakes from my PhD thesis. Ultimately, someone as pedantic as me couldn’t have made a 600 page book so readable.

The English Civil War: A People’s History is an experimental work, and I think it mostly succeeds. I found Tim Hitchcock’s similarly experimental Down and Out in Eighteenth Century London (2004; ISBN: 185285281X) more suited to my taste, but that’s more about style than substance. Both books encourage people to think differently about the past and both do it very well. Some of the people who are drawn into The English Civil War: A People’s History by the stirring metanarrative of national identity at the beginning might well be questioning such a simplistic and exclusionary view by the end of the book. While the confrontational style of popular revisionism works all too well at generating publicity and sales, I doubt that it really changes anyone’s mind about anything. Purkiss shows how the conservatism of seventeenth-century English people led them to think, say, and do some surprisingly radical things. Her own writing might work in the same way, gently and subtly leading conservative readers into more radical ways of thinking about the past. There are many more stories to be told about the civil wars, and other ways we can test the boundaries between academic and popular history, but The English Civil War: A People’s History is a big step in the right direction and a worthy successor to Charles Carlton’s Going To The Wars (1992; ISBN: 0415032822).

Bibliography

1. Charles Carlton, Going to the Wars (Routledge: London, 1992).
2. Ben Coates, The impact of the English Civil War on the economy of London, 1642-50 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004).
3. Richard J. Evans, In Defence of History (Granta: London, 2001).
4. Eric Gruber von Arni, Justice to the maimed soldier (Ashgate: Aldershot, 2002).
5. Tim Hitchcock, Down and out in eighteenth-century London (Hambledon: London, 2004).
6. Diane Purkiss, The English Civil War (Harper Collins: London, 2006).
7. David Underdown, Revel, riot, and rebellion (Clarendon Press: Oxford, 1985).