Investigations of a Dog

A couple of weeks ago I posted about a building (or buildings) called the White Bear in Cornhill, London. This post is about one of the people who lived and worked there. It starts with the same entry in the list of horses contributed to the Earl of Essex’s army (TNA: PRO SP 28/131 part 3 f. 55r, 16 August 1642):

Valentine Stuckly of the white Beare in Cornwall vint[ner] listed one browne bay geldinge, his rider John Courtnye armed wth Carabine a Case of pistolls a buffe Coate and a sword valued in all at £21

I’ve found that his name was spelled lots of different ways, but he seems to have preferred Valentine Stuckey. This narrative of his life is still hypothetical because the record linkage isn’t absolutely certain. I might well have conflated details of two or more men with the same name, but what I’ve written seems probable, and at the very least it makes a good story. (more…)

Nick Poyntz is right about the serendipity of digital searches. This weekend chasing up a fairly minor point for my book took me on a web search adventure with lots of interesting tangents. It all started with an entry in the lists of people who contributed horses to the Earl of Essex’s army, dated 16 August 1642 (TNA: PRO SP 28/131 part 3 f. 55r):

Valentine Stuckly of the white Beare in Cornwall vint[ner] listed one browne bay geldinge, his rider John Courtnye armed wth Carabine a Case of pistolls a buffe Coate and a sword valued in all at £21

I’ve always assumed that it means Cornhill in London, not the county of Cornwall, but some proof would be nice. These days names like the White Bear are associated with pubs, but in the seventeenth century pretty much any kind of business premises could be identified with a sign like this. Kathleen M. O’Brien has compiled a list of sign names from seventeenth century tradesmen’s tokens, including ones which combine a colour and an animal. The list mentions three White Bears, but not in Cornhill. It seems to be a very common name: the horse lists also include White Bears in Bread Street, Fenchurch Street, Distaff Lane and Lombard Street. The one in Lombard Street apparently later became the famous Lloyd’s coffee house.

The earliest record I can find of a White Bear in Cornhill is in the early 1620s, when the printer Thomas Jenner was based there (and he sometimes spelt it Cornewall). By 1624 he had moved to the Royal Exchange, at the west end of Cornhill on the north side of the street. The exchange was destroyed by fire in 1666 and 1838 but the current version was rebuilt on the same site and with the same layout. Jenner still sometimes called his new premises the White Bear, or sometimes just gave his address as the ‘South Entrance of the Royal Exchange’ (perhaps it was on the very spot where Agent Provocateur now stands). Jenner stayed at the exchange until his death in 1673, after which John Garrett took over the business and premises.

The idea that Jenner moved out of the original White Bear could be supported by an Ordinance of Parliament passed in 1649, which lists property confiscated from the dean and chapter of Westminster Abbey. Under Birchin Lane in the parish of St Michael Cornhill it lists:

George Dawson, for the White Bear, Two shillings six pence.

Birchen Lane runs from Lombard street in the south to Cornhill in the north, coming out just to the east of the exchange. Even if this building wasn’t actually on the street called Cornhill, it was in the parish of St Michael Cornhill and in Cornhill ward, so could plausibly be described as ‘the White Bear in Cornhill’. And as I found with George Willingham, early-modern London addresses could be quite fuzzy. The entrance of the exchange would probably have been a more desirable location, which could explain why Thomas Jenner would want to move his business around the corner.

Samuel Pepys wrote in his diary for Saturday 8 October 1664, ‘after dinner abroad, and among other things contracted with one Mr. Bridges, at the White Bear on Cornhill, for 100 pieces of Callico to make flaggs’. From internal evidence it’s not clear whether Bridges had his premises there or whether they met in a tavern to discuss the deal, but it doesn’t seem to be Thomas Jenner’s print shop. Specifying ‘on Cornhill’ could imply that it’s not the same as the White Bear in Birchen Lane (unless it was on the corner), or it could be referring to the actual hill rather than the street named after it.

A collection of documents in the Buckingamshire archives includes a marriage settlement from 1781 which mentions the ‘Pensilvania and Carolina Coffee House (formerly the White Bear) in Birchin Lane, Cornhill, London’.

That’s all I’ve found so far. There could be up to three buildings called the White Bear in the same parish at the same time, and there was almost certainly one other than Jenner’s new address at the exchange. If only they’d had geocoding in the seventeenth century…

Coming soon: a brief biography of Valentine Stuckly, which will raise as many questions as it answers. Also on Sunday 10 July I’ll be posting an interview with Andrew Hickey about his experiences with self-publishing.

[Just had an exhausting week in the archives but I found this old half-finished post on my hard drive:]

This week [actually last November] I’ve been reading Wallington’s World by Paul Seaver (probably no relation to the unknown stuntman). It’s all about Nehemiah Wallington (not to be confused with Nehemiah Wharton), a mid-seventeenth-century London wood turner who wrote lots of notebooks, some of which have survived. The notebooks are mostly about Wallington’s puritan faith, but they also include lots of incidental details of his life and family. Seaver analysed the surviving books to see what they could tell us about London tradesmen, puritanism and the English Civil War. Today his approach looks quite dated, but maybe that’s not surprising for a book published in 1985. In the introduction there’s a lot about “inward thoughts” and Wallington’s “mental world”. Although there’s no direct mention of Collingwood, his idealism seems to be a big influence on Seaver’s assumptions: that historians can and should find out what people in the past “really” thought. Stephen Greenblatt’s Renaissance Self-Fashioning had already been published five years earlier, but I don’t think it was required reading for historians at this time. Greenblatt discussed the difference between inward and outward selves, but also argued that the very idea of the authentic inner man was constructed through writing. Even writing a private diary is an external act which doesn’t necessarily give us access to the author’s mind. Dan Todman pointed out in The Great War: Myth and Memory that a person’s memories can change every time they’re rehearsed. Therefore the act of writing down our experiences can influence our memories of them rather than just neutrally recording them.

In my forthcoming book I’m trying to get away from worrying about what people “really” thought by concentrating almost entirely on external actions (which includes speech and writing). I’m using horses as a case study to show how material objects and actions could be used to construct parliamentarian identities, arguing that it was actions which made the civil wars happen and that opinions without actions aren’t all that important, even if we could find out about them. Wallington makes an interesting case study here because his writings are all about the theory and practice of puritanism. By traditional definitions he was “a Puritan”. But he doesn’t seem to have done very much to help the parliamentary war effort other than paying his taxes. This was partly because he didn’t have much spare money and partly because he seems to have lacked the confidence and social skills to play an active role, but his writings don’t tend to advocate violent revolution. His puritanism seems to have been orthodox, conservative and introspective. While he criticized the cavaliers, he wrote that parliamentary armies were just as bad, and used phrases like “this uncivil war” and “world turned upside down”. His use of the latter phrase and his criticism of Independents and sectaries are surprisingly similar to John Taylor, whose writings were often conservative and favourable to the King. As Nick at Mercurius Politicus points out, trying to classify writers as royalist or parliamentarian can be tricky and counter-productive. Wallington’s writings also suggest that puritanism wasn’t a straightforward cause of the English Civil War. Although Wallington eventually represented himself as assured of elect status, he never represented himself as God’s instrument in the way that Oliver Cromwell did. He took an obsessive interest in God’s punishment of sinners, but apart from a few passive-aggressive letters to his neighbours he didn’t take much direct action against sinners himself. Wallington’s notebooks make quite a contrast with militant preacher Stephen Marshall’s bloodthirsty sermon Meroz Cursed, in which he insisted that everyone had to fight against the enemies of the true church or be cursed.

[Apparently I was going to write something about gender and sexuality here but I can't remember what. Half my readers will be disappointed and the other half will be relieved!]

Party on, Nehemiah…

1. S. Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-fashioning: From More to Shakespeare, New edition. (2005).
2. Stephen Marshall, Meroz cursed, or, A sermon preached to the honourable House of Commons, at their late solemn fast, Febr. 23, 1641 by Stephen Marshall … (London, 1642).
3. Paul S Seaver, Wallington’s World: A Puritan Artisan in Seventeenth-century London (London, 1985).
4. Dan Todman, The Great War: Myth and Memory (London, 2007).

I’ve just started to appreciate another advantage of taking digital photos of documents in the National Archives (a.k.a. PRO): comparing original signatures. That’s not exactly a revolutionary discovery, but I actually used it this week and it was quite exciting. I’ve mentioned John Gower before in posts about my work on saddlers. I had two collections of facts which I thought probably refer to the same person, but I hadn’t conclusively proved it.

The archives of the London Saddler’s Company show that a John Gower was a freeman of the company, and was admitted to the livery in 1640. The will of John Gower, citizen and saddler of London, was written on 18 October 1644 and proved by the Prerogative Court of Canterbury on 9 May 1645. This will mentions that John’s wife was called Jane, and that they lived in the parish of Saint Katherine Creechurch. Jane Gower went on to sell saddles to the New Model Army in 1645.

Financial records of the Essex county committee and the committee of the Eastern Association at Cambridge show that they bought lots of saddles from a John Gower. He is sometimes described as Captain Gower, and in at least one case money was received on his behalf by his ensign. It’s quite likely that this is the same Gower who commanded a company in the Earl of Manchester’s foot regiment.

On the balance of probabilities and assumed that these records all related to the same man but I wasn’t absolutely certain. This week I was sorting out some photos from my last research trip, including warrants issued by the Essex committee (SP 28/227). I noticed that John Gower had signed receipts on some of them. I already had photos of his original will (PROB 10/648) so it was easy to compare them.

This is a receipt for money for saddles bought by the Essex committee:

And this is part of the will:

They look pretty similar to me so now I’m fairly certain that it is the same man. The signature on the will looks very shaky, presumably because he was terminally ill when he wrote it.

As well as the practical benefits of record linkage, this is also a way of connecting with the reality of the past. If the same signature appears on two different documents belonging to different organisations and created at different times, the most parsimonious explanation is that John Gower was a real person who signed the documents in the course of his life. His home must have been destroyed in the great fire, if not before or after, and as far as I know none of the saddles that he made survives today. Saddlers Hall was destroyed by fire on more than one occasion, and nearly all of the company’s 17th century plate was sold or lost. These signatures are probably the only remaining physical traces of John Gower.

Nehemiah Wharton was a servant from London who joined the Earl of Essex’s army at the start of the English Civil War. From August to October 1642 he sent a series of letters addressed to his master, George Willingham, a merchant at the Golden Anchor in St Swithin’s Lane. These letters have survived (although how they ended up in the State Papers is anyone’s guess) and were published in the 19th century (no free online version available, but the British Library has published a reprint as part of their digitization project). I’ve been looking at them for evidence of horses and social status. Wharton mentions another of Willingham’s servants, usually referred to as Davy (or Barry in one place, but I’ve assumed it’s the same man), who was serving in the army with a horse. The letters don’t give any further details of the man and horse, but it seems likely that Willingham had voluntarily contributed a cavalry horse under the scheme known as the Propositions and sent his servant to ride it. The UK National Archives have an account book of cavalry horses listed on the Propositions (SP 28/131 part 3), and as it’s a very important source for my work on horses, I’ve made a transcript of it. There is an entry for George Willingham, on 15 July 1642 (folio 19):

George Willingham of Londonstone painter stainer entred one gray horse, his rider David Avyes armed wth a Carbine, a case of pistolls a buffe coate and a sword all valued by the Commissaryes at 27 – 00 – 00

This is close but there are a couple of potential problems because the address and occupation don’t quite match. This doesn’t rule him out completely. London stone was just around the corner from St Swithin’s Lane in Cannon Street, so they could be referring to the same place (see the Agas map). Although London citizens tended to be identified by occupations, their trades could change, and the company through which they were admitted to the freedom of the city didn’t necessarily have anything to do with the trade they were pursuing. George Willingham could be a freeman of the Painter Stainers Company and trading as a merchant. What we need is another source to confirm or deny the link between Wharton’s letters and the Propositions list.

British History Online has a published list of London citizens from 1638, but it doesn’t cover St Swithin’s parish, which is where St Swithin’s Lane and London stone were. But the National Archives do have a will for a George Willingham, Painter Stainer of Saint Swithin, City of London, proved in 1651. That looked very promising, so I downloaded it (if I’d known I was going to need this last time I was at Kew I could’ve printed out there and saved £3.10). I’ve put a transcript of the whole thing on the Your Archives wiki. In the will, Willingham describes himself as “Cittizen and Paynter stayner of London”, so he was free of the Painter Stainers Company, but not necessarily following that trade. He mentions having children called John, Samuel, Ebenezer, Hannah and an unnamed daughter married to John Colyer. Wharton mentions Elizabeth, Anne, John, and Samuel in his letters, which roughly coincides with the children in the will. According to IGI, George Willingham married Anne Eaton at St Dunstan, Stepney, on 21 September 1624. They had these children baptised at St Swithin’s London Stone:

• John Willingham, 28 February 1629

• Ana Willingham, 24 June 1627
• Ebenezer Willingham,11 October 1642

Therefore Ebenezer wasn’t mentioned in Wharton’s letters because he hadn’t been born yet (the last letter is dated 7 October 1642). I can’t find a baptism for Samuel, but IGI isn’t complete. Given the wild variations in 17th century spelling, Ana and Hannah are probably the same person. The will also includes a bequest to “Mr Abraham Moline my deere and approved freind”, who could be the Mr Molloyne mentioned in Wharton’s letters.

The details in the will are enough to link the letters to the Propositions list and resolve the ambiguities. On the balance of probabilities, all three documents relate to the same person. Without the will it would be hard to link the other two documents together and reconcile the differences between them. This all adds up to proof that David Avyes was a servant and that his horse and arms were supplied by his master. (It doesn’t prove that he was decayed, or that royalist cavalry were any different. See my post about Cromwell and Balfour for some problems with the “decayed serving men and tapsters” myth.) Willingham must have been very rich. He bequeathed £700 to each of his three sons and left the residue of his estate to his daughter Hannah, explicitly stating that he intended her to have at least as much as the boys. That kind of wealth is consistent with trading as a merchant. He could easily afford to give away a horse and arms worth £27. The value of his contribution and the early date (July was a long time before contributions became compulsory) suggests that he was quite enthusiastic about the parliamentary cause. His will has some strong hints of puritanism. He asked for his body to be “decently buried without pompe and ringeing”, and bequeathed a book of sermons and a confession of his faith to his daughter. There’s no mention of any servants in the will, so it doesn’t help to solve the mystery of what happened to Nehemiah Wharton. Since his letters stopped in October 1642 he could have been killed at the battle of Edgehill, but as far as I know there isn’t any definite proof.

…and then I found a job. But I am not in any way miserable now. In fact I’m quite pleased and excited. I now have a contract to do freelance data entry work for the Life in the Suburbs project. This will involve working from home transcribing parish registers of St Botolphs Aldgate (where the saddler Thomas Harrison lived) and Holy Trinity Minories. I’ll be under the supervision of Gill Newton, who has done some really exciting work developing a phonetic algorithm to match similar sounding names. The hours are short and flexible, the pay is really good, and the work is very well suited to my skills, experience and interests. This should make my life much easier in lots of ways.

Obviously I won’t be blogging about anything that goes on in the project, or posting any of the data, so you’ll just have to wait until the results have been published to see what the researchers have found. Apart from that there probably won’t be much change to my blogging – or at least my posts won’t be any less frequent than they already are.

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.

(more…)

This is just a quick roundup of some online resources that I’ve found recently.

Greenwit at Blogging the Renaissance linked to People In Place, the website of a major research project about families and households in early-modern London. As well as background information and details of their methodology, they have made some of the raw data available, including lists of people who lent money to the parliamentarians during the civil war. This is a really exciting development and I hope more projects will be doing this kind of thing in future.

Edward Vallance has compiled a list of online Protestation Returns.

Adam Roberts at The Valve pointed out The Medieval Bestiary, a site devoted to representations of animals in the middle ages. There is a huge amount of interesting information here and the site is also really nice to look at. From this I discovered that the idea that horses actively and enthusiastically take part in war goes back to the 7th century, and that Pliny mentions horses defending their riders in battles.

[Edit: And you can see a selected Weird Medieval Animal from the bestiary every Monday at Per Omnia Saecula]

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.

(more…)

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.

(more…)