Investigations of a Dog

In the last few weeks lots have bloggers have been discussing whether humanities subjects are in decline and how to protect humanities from spending cuts. It seems obvious to me that independent critical thought, textual analysis and the ability to construct and destroy arguments are all very important skills, not just for individuals but for society as a whole. It’s equally obvious why politicians, businessmen and journalists might be hostile to those skills. When humanities departments ask for funding, they’re effectively saying “please give us your money so we can teach people to see through your lies”. That’s going to be a hard sell, and probably explains why defenders of the humanities tend to use vague euphemisms rather than putting it so bluntly. The paradox is that the humanities have to cover up their main selling point so as not to appear threatening to the people with money and power, but that makes it easy to represent the humanities as useless. It reminds me of the old essay question “Richard II was deposed because of his strength rather than his weakness. Discuss.”

This is what some other people have written:

Brett at Airminded rounds up lots of links, and puts them under the best title ever. (I have no hope of beating it, but still desperately attempted a pun on second rate 80s cartoon series Defenders of the Earth.)

More links from Penelope’s Weavings and Unpickings, showing that academics in the humanities have lots of experience of trying to defend their subjects and that humanities subjects have economic value.

At Crooked Timber Michael Bérubé points out that in the US, humanities subjects (along with most other subjects) declined from 1967 to 1987, but have been stable since then.

Meanwhile it appears that the “omg! military history is dying!” meme still refuses to die, but Mark Grimsley is doing a good job of refuting it. The death of military history is a standard story regularly wheeled out by lazy right-wing journalists, especially in the US. It’s not quite as nasty or frequent as “immigrants are taking all our jobs”, “the PC brigade has banned Christmas”, “computer games are corrupting our children” or “science proves that men are naturally better than women” that we get in the UK, but that’s not saying much. I took on the last one in my article “What Changed Your Mind” in issue 2 of PEP (free PDF), showing how journalists repeat the same misogynistic and homophobic cliches regardless of the facts, and suggesting that they might even help to cause the effects they claim to be reporting. Incidentally, by writing the article I showed that humanities graduates are perfectly capable of writing about science. My textual analysis skills transferred easily to newspaper articles and science papers, and I could see dubious ideological assumptions which the scientists themselves were probably unaware of. The enemies of humanities crumble in fear and confusion!

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.

It’s now four years since I started blogging. Last year I said I might stop today, but I’m not going to now. I need a blog to promote my forthcoming book, I’m not ready to do anything completely different yet, and blogging is still a useful way of trying out new ideas and keeping in touch with people. I’ve somehow gone for nearly three months without posting anything because I’ve been so busy. Before I can even start writing the book I have to work on a chapter for an edited collection and also finish building a roof. And there’s an article which is probably going to get revise and resubmit soon. Posts should get more regular from now on, but in the meantime, here are some links and news:

• Bench Grass is a new military history blog, with some great posts on armoured warfare. One of the few people who really gets cavalry.
• At Airminded Brett Holman has finished (for now) post-blogging the Battle of Britain and the Blitz. One of the many surprises thrown up by his experiment is that there wasn’t a clear division between the two at the time. The press seem to have been more optimistic than the present myth of The Few would suggest (and it was a big shock to discover that Churchill was mostly talking about bombers in that speech), and some people wanted the Germans to try and invade Britain because they knew it would fail. Despite knowing that German bombs wouldn’t defeat them, the British seem to have massively over-estimated the effectiveness of their own bombing of Germany. Meanwhile Daily Mail readers, then as now obsessed with impractical and morally dubious solutions to exaggerated problems, demanded more reprisal bombings of German civilians.
• The Institute of Historical Research has launched a digital consultancy service and announced a digital editing system called ReScript.
• PhDork at The Pursuit of Harpyness looks at “An Anti-Suffrage Monologue”, in which American suffragette Marie Jenney Howe mercilessly exposed anti-feminist hypocrisy by putting contradictory arguments against equal voting rights next to each other, ostensibly so that readers could pick the one they preferred. This kind of hypocrisy hasn’t gone away. Early-modern women’s historians are faced with Lawrence Stone’s objection that elite women are not worth studying because they’re not typical, and David Starkey’s objection that ordinary women are not worth studying because they had no power. Opponents of women serving in combat roles say that a woman wouldn’t be strong enough to drag her wounded male comrades to safety, and that male soldiers would spend too much time looking after their female comrades instead of fighting.
• Pink Parts is a webcomic set in a strip club and written by Katherine Skipper, who used to work as a stripper. It’s intelligent, honest, funny and really has something to say. Good to see a stripper’s point of view being put across in a medium which is far too dominated by privileged white men. It ties in well with Catherine M. Roach’s book about stripping, which I reviewed last year.
• Comic genius Kate Beaton gives her own interpretations of courtly love and King Lear.
• PEP! is a magazine about comics, music, politics, Doctor Who and other things, edited by my friend Andrew Hickey. It even includes some articles by me. I tried to push myself do something different from my blogging and academic writing, which wasn’t entirely successful but I’m all about failing better. In issue 1 (available as free PDF download or expensive print on demand) I gave an argument in favour of political extremism (from a feminist and postmodern angle) which made some good points and one bad point which went up a blind alley to do with Zeno’s paradoxes, but since it provoked a rebuttal from the editor I must have done something right. In issue 2 (PDF; print version available soon) I took a long and exhausting (but nowhere near exhaustive) look at lazy journalism, bad science and gender ideology relating to spatial reasoning abilities. Since I wrote it in March it’s been superseded by some other things (especially Cordelia Fine’s new book Delusions of Gender, and a new report which disproves gender differences in maths ability) but I’m still pleased that I managed to write something outside my comfort zone.
• Andrew has also written a book about the Beatles. I found the blog posts that this grew out of really interesting, even though I don’t like the Beatles.
• And finally, you can have minutes of fun looking for film and TV locations on Google Streetview. Here are Baywatch headquarters near Santa Monica and Baywatch Hawaii headquarters at Haleiwa.

David Lawrence’s The Complete Soldier: Military Books and Military Culture in Early Stuart England, 1603-1645 is the most expensive book I’ve ever bought. At £118 it was more than twice the previous record holder, Barbara Donagan’s War In England, but I really need it and it’s not in any of the libraries I can borrow books from. It turned out to be worth reading because it’s really good and vindicates some of the things I’ve written about drill books and cavalry tactics. (more…)

I’ve been reading Stripping, Sex and Popular Culture by Catherine Roach, which is really good and has made me think about lots of things. These are some random observations about it or inspired by it. (more…)

It didn’t take long before I decided to start a Zotero group. It’s called War and Gender and is dedicated to collecting and sharing any material relating to the intersections of these two very important things. There are no limits on period or place, membership is open, and all members can add to the group library. So if you’re interested, and if you’re using Zotero 2.0, get stuck in.

You can see from my profile that the groups I’m involved with so far are all quite specific and tend towards things that relatively little has been written about yet. I think we’re all still finding our way and sticking to things that are likely to be manageable. In the future it’ll be interesting to see if more general groups appear and whether they work out. I could start a British Civil Wars group, but it would be potentially huge. I already have over 900 items in my library tagged with “english civil war”, and these are mostly biased towards my research interests in England 1642-46. I don’t have very much on Scotland, Ireland, the Second Civil War, the Commonwealth or the Protectorate. Maybe more specialist sub-fields will be the way to go, but we’ll see eventually.

Historiann has posted about a very Whiggish article in the New York Times about how changes in warfare have supposedly improved women’s rights by creating more opportunities for female combat soldiers. As Ann points out, there are lots of things wrong with this article. She concentrates on the fact that similar things were said during the Gulf War in 1991 but that the supposed progress evaporated after the war. As some of the commenters suggest, the idea that women used to be incapable of fighting but that changing technology has made things easier it possible for them is basically a lie. Joshua Goldstein’s book War and Gender (which I’ve posted about before) presented lots of empirical evidence to demolish the assumption that women are smaller and weaker than men. This is true on average, but in practice most people aren’t exactly average. In fact statistics for size and strength for men and women are distributed along bell curves which overlap. The biggest, strongest women are bigger and stronger than the smallest, weakest men. Goldstein estimated that in a major war, if combat soldiers were recruited purely by ability and not by gender then about 10-15% of combat soldiers should be female. This has clearly not been the case in reality. Goldstein found that some form of war exists in almost every culture, and that women have nearly always been formally excluded from active combat roles. There are a few exceptions (eg the Dahomey in West Africa in the 19th century, the Soviet Union in the Second World War) but these just prove that women can fight, and therefore their exclusion in most other cultures must be down to gender ideology. Or not quite. Because Goldstein sees the gendering of combat roles as being too universal to be down to gender ideology, which would be expected to be culturally specific. This is where I part company with Goldstein. While War and Gender is a really important book which needs to be read by anyone interested in either war or gender (or just by anyone), it has its limitations, which we need to move on from. (more…)

[cross-posted at The horse in history and culture]

When I started my comeback as a historian in 2006, after a 5 year career break, I wanted to push myself in new directions. Therefore I challenged myself to come up with the most way-out research question possible. What I came up with was: do people construct gender for horses? I decided to look specifically at the roles of horses in war, partly because I’m a military historian, and partly because war is one of the most heavily gendered things in history. I first wrote a blog post about the project in October 2006, but since then I’ve changed my mind about lots of things. I followed up with two posts about how cavalry drill books specified criteria for good war horses. While the books I looked at didn’t always explicitly say that stallions were always best, there was a definite male bias, and mares were never mentioned. This post is a look at where I’ve got to now, and where I need to go next. (more…)

I could have been writing a serious post for the horse history blog, working on my book proposal, planning an article, sorting out my Zotero collections, uploading PRO documents to Flickr, or lots of other things. But the other day my brother took me on an expedition into the attic to look for old toys and books. We found this:

It’s the Ladybird book Oliver Cromwell: An Adventure from History by the fantastically named L. du Garde Peach. This must surely have been a formative influence on me, and was quite possibly my first ever encounter with the English Civil War. But I can’t remember it at all. That might be just as well because it turned out to be completely insane. Maybe it isn’t fair to laugh at a children’s book first published in 1963 (it wouldn’t have been new when I got it – I’m not that old!), but I’m going to do it anyway. And there’s a serious point here: too many people assume that children are stupid and unimportant, and that therefore it’s OK to give them all sorts of patronising rubbish. (more…)

Back in October 2006 I posted about my speculative (and slightly mad?) project about gendered perceptions of war horses. In a follow-up post I looked at a selection of four early seventeenth-century cavalry drill books to see what they said about requirements for war horses. Only Gervase Markham explicitly stated that a war horse should be a stallion, but all four authors habitually referred to the war horse as “he”. There was a particularly intriguing passage in Robert Ward’s Animadversions of War about using cats and hedgehogs to encourage lazy horses. He specifically mentioned the horse’s testicles, which shows that he had a stallion in mind. At the time I wondred why he referred to the horse and hedgehog as male but the cat as female. Now I think I have a possible answer: it could be connected with the gender of the equivalent Latin nouns. Equus (horse) and echinus (hedgehog) are masculine but feles (cat) is feminine. That doesn’t entirely solve the problem, it just moves it further back. Now I want to know why the Romans thought horses should be masculine and cats should be feminine.

Since that first post I’ve discovered that my assumptions about non-human species not having culture or gender were wrong. Joshua Goldstein’s War and Gender has lots of examples of culturally specific learned behaviour and gendered dominance hierarchies among animals. But I think I’m onto something with looking at whether human gender ideology led to gendered roles being imposed on other species. Samantha Hurn has found evidence of gendered roles being imposed by breeders of Welsh cobs. I haven’t been able to get hold of a copy of her article yet, but it looks very relevant.

Meanwhile, I’ve been reading Shakespeare’s Henry V again as there are plenty of mentions of war horses in it. But I still can’t work out what’s going on with the Dauphin and his horse. Bestiality? Idolatry? Just the general arrogance and ridiculousness of the French?

1. Joshua S. Goldstein, War and Gender (CUP: Cambridge, 2003).
2. Samantha Hurn, ‘What’s Love Got to Do With It?’, Society & Animals, 16 (March 2008), pp. 23-44.
3. Robert Ward, Anima’dversions of vvarre; (London : Printed by Iohn Dawson [, Thomas Cotes, and Richard Bishop], and are to be sold by Francis Eglesfield at the signe of the Marigold in Pauls Church-yard, 1639., 1639).