Investigations of a Dog

CALL FOR PAPERS

Nottingham Trent University FORWARD Early Modern Social History Symposium

This symposium will take place at Nottingham Trent University on Wednesday 12th November 2008 from 1:00pm – 5:00pm

Proposals are invited for 20 minute papers, which explore the latest unique approaches to research in any aspect of Early Modern British and Irish Social History, including but not limited to topics of Family, Order, Reform, Women, Anarchy, Rebellion & Dissent

Abstract proposals should be no longer than 300 words and submitted to RitaWierzbicki_FORWARD@hotmail.com by Wednesday 22nd October 2008

For more information or to book your place for attendance, please direct your inquiries to the above e-mail address

Way back in October 2006 (when this blog was all shiny and new) I wrote about female saddlers in London during the English Civil War. My work on saddlers and harness makers (male as well as female) is quite open-ended. I don’t know exactly where I’m going with it, so I’m just tying to find out as much as I can about these individuals and their families when I get the chance. A while ago I searched the records of the Prerogative Court of Canterbury for wills of people I was interested in. These are available through DocumentsOnline, but I found it cheaper to print out copies while I was at the PRO (20p per sheet as opposed to £3.50 per will). I didn’t find a will for everyone (some might have had their wills proved in other courts) but I came up with a lot of hits. Recently I finally got round to transcribing them (which was good palaeography practice) and publishing the transcripts on Your Archives.

Although wills tend to come in a standard form, that structure can contain a lot of variety. They can tell us about people’s wealth, business activities, and families, and contain all kinds of incidental details which shed some light on their lives. Below is a selection of some of the more interesting things I found, with links to the full transcripts.

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Not really a proper post, just some random things:

Bill Turkel is always right. First because in the first of his excellent posts on analysing the Old Bailey Proceedings he recommended DownThemAll. This is a Firefox extension that lets you download all the files linked to from a web page in one go. You can set up filters to only download certain types of file, or you can select the files by clicking on a list, then download them all with one click. As well as the obvious benefits for digital historians it’s very handy if you want to download a whole album from LastFM.

Second, because in a post on infrastructure he recommended expensive ergonomic chairs. I’m currently waiting for delivery of a new chair so that I can spend a reasonable amount of time working at the computer without my back hurting. Cheap chairs are a false economy.

Over at Glod’n'Epix Esther posted some interesting thoughts on sexual harassment and gender stereotyping in live action role playing, which also led to some discussion of cross-dressing and gender swapping.

Gary Smailes has launched a new website called OneBook which features brief posts from different people recommending a book. Anyone can submit a post and they don’t have to be very long.

The Difficult Second Article is getting there but still needs a lot of work. Once this is out of the way I never want to hear anything about the causes of the English Civil War ever again.

I’ve just finished reading Christopher Hill’s The English Bible and I have to say I really enjoyed it. Apart from lots of useful historical insights it made me think that my generation’s equivalent of the bible is probably Star Wars.

And finally the latest early-modern edition of Carnivalesque is up at jliedl.ca.

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.)

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Next week, on Wednesday 28th May, I’ll be speaking at the FORWARD Network Early Modern Social History Symposium at Nottingham Trent University. I’m going to talk about non-human animals in early-modern society: how we can bring them into social history and why we need to. The keynote speaker will be Lucy Worsley, and they also have what should be a fascinating paper on black dance by Rodreguez King-Dorset.

You can download a leaflet with more details here.

I’m very grateful to Rita Wierzbicki for inviting me to speak at what should be a very exciting event.

Abstract of my paper below: (more…)

When I posted about Brian Manning’s The Far Left in the English Revolution I wondered whether it was worth investigating any of his other works. Mercurius Politicus said it was, so I got a copy of The English People and the English Revolution out of the library. It shouldn’t be too much of a surprise that MP was right as he knows a lot more about civil war historiography than I do. As well as a lot of useful material on the outbreak of war in 1642 there are plenty of examples of poaching, deer massacres, and livestock being driven onto disputed enclosures, which is an unexpected bonus for my work on animals.

The Stour valley riots get good coverage, pre-empting many of the major points of John Walter’s argument, apart from Manning’s determination to see class war everywhere . As Walter pointed out, the victims were all suspected royalists or catholics. Manning took elite perceptions of the mob’s motives too much at face value. Sir Thomas Barrington and Harbottle Grimston might have been alarmed by the many-headed monster, but they weren’t attacked themselves and probably weren’t in much danger compared to Countess Rivers. As Manning acknowledged, the Earl of Warwick’s steward was saved from a mob when someone recognised that he really was the Earl of Warwick’s steward.

The thing I found most interesting was an enclosure dispute in Huntingdonshire in 1641 in which Oliver Cromwell supported the commoners and Lord Mandeville acted on behalf of his father, the Earl of Manchester. This was the same Lord Mandeville who, after succeeding to his father’s title, became general of the Eastern Association. The feud between Manchester and Cromwell in 1644 is very well-known but I had no idea that animosity between them might go back this far. Other people might well have made the connection, but there isn’t any mention of it in Malcolm Wanklyn’s reassessment of Manchester.

1. Brian Manning, The English People and the English Revolution, 1640-1649 (Heinemann Educational: London, 1976).
2. Brian Manning, The far left in the English Revolution 1640 to 1660 (Bookmarks,: London :, 1999).
3. John Walter, Understanding Popular Violence in the English Revolution (Cambridge University Press: Cambridge, 1999).
4. Maclolm D. G. Wanklyn, ‘A General Much Maligned’, War In History, 14 (2007), pp. 133-156.

The latest early-modern edition of the Carnivalesque blog carnival is now up at Walking The Berkshires. Tim has hosted editions of just about every history related carnival and as usual he’s done a fantastic job. There are loads of fascinating posts, but my favourite has to be the one about pissing dogs in the American Revolution.

And now the return of my series of posts about English/British Civil War(s)/Revolution(s) historiography. Today I’m considering Brian Manning’s The Far Left in the English Revolution. Published in 1999, this is one of the most recent examples of old-school Marxism. If you’ve read any of my previous posts on causes and allegiance you’ll know that I’m not really a fan of Marxism, but I’m trying to see the good as well as the bad. I’ll always have a certain amount of respect for him simply because he’s always been prepared to offer a clear, succinct, and empirically testable definition of “revolution”. It’s surprising how unusual that is for a historian of this period.

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The new early-modern edition of the Carnivalesque blog carnival is now up at Cardinal Wolsey’s Today In History.

I’ve just read an anecdote about some Londoners who had never seen a cow before. It was from 1644. Ah! Pull back and reveal! My expectations were confounded…

The anecdote in question comes from Robert Harley, an officer in Sir William Waller’s army. His letter is mostly known as an eyewitness account of the battle of Cheriton, but sandwiched between a matter-of-fact relation of some minor skirmishing is the cow story (HMC, Portland, iii, 107):

The enemy faced us this day with about three thousand horse. Here you should have seen the Londoners runne to see what manner of thinges cowes were. Some of them would say they had all of them hoornes, and would do greate mischiefe with them, then comes one of the wisest of them cryeth ‘Speake softly’. To end the confusion of their opinions they pyled up a counsel of warr, and agreed it was nothing but some kind of looking glasse, and soe marched away. Wee had some light skirmishes but with little hurt on either side.

What’s going on here? Were there really 17th century Londoners who had never seen a cow? Surely Smithfield market was full of them (cows and Londoners!), and cows tended to be slaughtered at the butcher’s shop. Maybe there were some poor areas of the East End where nobody could afford beef so the butchers didn’t buy cows, but if that was the case it would imply that the residents never went very far from home. The countryside, the richer areas of London, and the livestock market at Smithfield should all have been within walking distance.

The alternative is that Harley was making it up or exaggerating for comic effect. In that case it might tell us something about stereotyping. Since he was from a gentry family (son of Sir Robert and Lady Brilliana Harley of Brampton Bryan) it wouldn’t be surprising if he had a negative view of the lower classes. But it could also be a case of rural against urban. Maybe the sterotype of ignorant townies goes back further than I thought.

Another possibility is that “cow” has some special meaning here - perhaps a different breed with bigger horns compared to the ones Londoners were used to seeing. Did the cows bred for the London meat market have their horns removed?
Ultimately I don’t really know what to make of it, but it’s definitely something to think about.  Any suggestions welcome.