Investigations of a Dog

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.

Never mind the scary theory, here’s some empiricism. And computer programming. The piece I’m working on is an analysis of lists of horses donated to the parliamentarian army in the First Civil War. There are some figures derived from these lists in my forthcoming article in War In History and in the seminar paper that I posted in November, but I’m trying to write an article which examines them in much more detail. This article will be related to debates over allegiance and the causes of the war, which is why I’ve been trying to explore the historiography and think about theoretical issues, but the substance of it will be fairly straightforward empirical stuff with lots of numbers. That’s not to say that this kind of analysis is easy. If it was someone else might have done it all years ago. John Tincey was the first person to try it, but he only did the smallest of the three account books, which is a fraction of the size of the other two. Following his lead I decided to do all of them.

In 1999 I spent about 2 weeks in the PRO typing these lists into an Access database. I’m still using that transcript as the basis of my work now, although I’ve converted it to XML to make it more flexible and checked a selection of the entries against digital photos of the manuscript. I’ve been using the Python classes that I developed for representing uncertainty to calculate totals of horses and values. Some pages are damaged, meaning that exact totals can’t be calculated – this is something that was difficult to deal with in Access but the combination of XML and Python has enough flexibility to cope with it. Getting totals for days and months is fairly easy, but I also want to group by the social status of the donors and the counties that they came from. Before I can group by counties I need to identify place names given in the manuscript as although some entries specify a county in the address, many more give a place name without a county.

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Following on from adding an interactive index of people to my digital edition of Sandall’s history of 5th Lincs, I’ve now added a similar feature for place names. It works in exactly the same way as the person index, but it also has a map view. Again this uses the Exhibit API, which makes it very easy to mash up data with Google Maps without even having to know anything about the Google Maps API. The map view is a bit slower than the normal view, especially if the list isn’t filtered, but that’s an inherent limitation of using maps.

One of the many cool things about the map is that it strikingly illustrates the allied advances in the last months of the First World War. If you go into the map view and click “The Beginning of the Great Advance” on the list of chapters, you’ll see the battalion holding the line in Flanders, then moving behind the lines for rest near Amiens, then moving up to the front line at Saint-Quentin. Then click on each of the following chapters in turn and watch the markers surge forward as 46th Division breaks through the Hindenburg Line and pushes towards Belgium.

Adding the place index was mostly similar to adding the person index: I added a unique id to each<placeName> tag using a Python script, pulled out the place names into an SQLite database, identified/disambiguated them and added a regularized name, then used another Python script to pull the regularized names out of the database and put them into the key attributes in the XML file. Identifying the places was easier than identifying people, and took a couple of days, although there are a few that I couldn’t find. As with people I added some code the the XSLT to generate a JSON file of all the places. Then following the map view tutorial I used the Exhibit API to pull latitude and longitude co-ordinates from Google Maps and put them into another JSON file. This turned out to be a bit unreliable as about 10 per cent of the places had their co-ordinates missing. It seems to be random, as running the script again with the same set of data produced a similar error rate but with different places. I had to take the missing places from the output file, put them into another input file and run the script over them again, which produced a similar 10 per cent error rate, but the remaining few co-ordinates could be put in manually. Once I had a JSON file with all the correct geocodes it was easy to copy code from the tutorial to add a map view to the Exhibit page. In a few cases it turned out that Google had given me the wrong co-ordinates. Mostly this was because there are two or more places with the same name and it had picked the wrong one. I thought I’d put in enough information from my manual searches to disambiguate them but it seems that the results of a Google Map search can be a bit unpredictable, and don’t necessarily give you the full address of a place.

I’ve now done most of what I planned to do in this phase. There are still some features that could be added, especially a feedback mechanism, but I’ll be giving this project a rest soon so I can do some English Civil War work.

Some people have been overlaying maps and aerial photos from the First World War onto Google Earth. It all looks really cool but the ensuing discussion revealed a technical problem that I hadn’t thought of: present day maps use a different projection from early 20th century maps so they’re not entirely compatible.

Also on the First World War, you can see the BBC4 documentary “How The Edwardians Spoke” on Google Video. The title is quite misleading as it’s actually about phonograph recordings of British prisoners in Germany during the Great War. It gets a bit sentimental in places and they can’t avoid cliches like “the horror” but it’s still fascinating. I’m just wondering how far the descendants’ responses to the recordings were influenced by popular perceptions of the war as a whole. It’s not obvious or inevitable that a recording of a man reading a bible story would be “harrowing”.

I’ve just sent off the final version of my first article, which will be appearing in War In History in April. I’m really pleased with it but I can’t help wondering if I’ve made a terrible mistake somewhere or missed some very important recent publication.

Next week I’m giving a seminar paper for the first time in about 6 years. I’m also using a PowerPoint presentation for the first time ever. Is that tempting fate?

I’ve just been playing around with the new “My Maps” feature on Google Maps. There are lots of other things I should be doing, but when I saw this post at Mercurius Politicus I just had to try it for myself. So I got out a trench map and came up with this map showing where my great-grandfather was captured by the Germans in December 1916 (I wrote about that in more detail here and here). We’re lucky that the incident was recorded in enough detail to reconstruct it reasonably well. It’s impossible to say exactly where the fight took place, but from the battalion war diary we can narrow it down to a relatively small area (the stretch of road highlighted in green on the map).

My Maps is obviously a very exciting development. It means that anyone can create custom maps with a few clicks rather than having to learn the Google Maps API. It took me less than an hour to make the map. The interface is so intuitive I didn’t need any instructions, I just got on with it. Most of the time was spent trying to trace the trench lines more or less correctly. It was easy for the Germans because their front line is still visible on the satellite photo, and the Z redoubt is a nice distinctive feature. The British trenches were more difficult because they don’t seem to coincide with any visible features. The lines I’ve drawn are only approximate and don’t capture all the twists and turns of the trenches but they give a reasonably good impression of the position.

One improvement that I’d like to see is the ability to place a grid over the map, move it, and change the size of the squares. That would help with tracing lines which don’t follow present day features visible on the map. It’s possible to do this with the line drawing tool but it’s a bit tricky. An automatic grid would make life much easier. Also a tool for measuring distances would be very useful – I found myself holding a ruler up to the screen! – and more fine control over scaling so that it’s easier to get the scale to coincide with a paper map. What would be really good is if someone made a map which overlaid the entire trench map grid onto France and Flanders…

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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