Investigations of a Dog

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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Feeding an early-modern army was a major logistical problem. The New Model Army had a centralised supply system to take care of most things (weapons, armour, clothing, horses, saddles) but food was a big exception. Aryeh Nusbacher has noted that the quantities of food supplied through centralised purchasing were far too small to keep the army fed (see “Civil Supply in the Civil War”, English Historical Review (115, 2000, pp. 145-60), which summarises some of the most important points in his PhD thesis). His answer to this problem is that food was mostly supplied by private victuallers who brought food from London and sold it directly to the soldiers. This makes a lot of sense, because compared to the population of London (estimates for the civil war period are usually between 200,000 and 300,000), feeding an army of 20,000 was not such a big deal. In contrast, most of the areas where the army campaigned were unlikely to have enough food supplies to support the army. Ben Coates (The impact of the English Civil War on the economy of London, 1642-50, 2004, ISBN: 0754601048, pp. 91-2) questioned this view, partly because Ian Archer pointed out that it would have been difficult for the victuallers to find the army when it was on the move. Having spent years studying military operations and logistics I would suggest the opposite: it would have been difficult to miss an English Civil War field army.

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This is a brief look at some of my work in progress about women in the London saddlery trade in the English Civil War. It’s based on part of my PhD research, but I’m taking it further now. I’ve tried to make this post as accessible as possible, so it goes into background information about London history and explains some basic things. I’ve also included links to the map of early modern London where I know a saddler’s address (if you follow the link, the place will be marked by a blue star on the map). The map dates from the 1560s, but the City inside the walls hadn’t changed too much by the 1640s.

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