I’m planning to finish my Winter in Windsor series of posts while it’s still winter, but in the meantime here are some links:

• Skulking in Holes and Corners is a relatively new blog by Jamel Ostwald, who has written a book about Vauban and is writing another about Marlborough. The blog ‘hopes to facilitate communication between the rarest of beasts, early modern European military historians (EMEMHians – but please give me a better idea for a name)’. He’s made a very good start, so go and read it, comment on it and link to it.
• My book is going to be published on 21 August 2012, and you can already read the blurb. Just proofreading and indexing to go.
• Andrew Hickey has written a brilliant short story about Shakespeare which skewers the snobbery of Oxfordian conspiracy theories.
• Ben Brumfield reports on the 2012 American Historical Association conference from a software developer’s perspective.
• History SPOT has a podcast of Ben Worthy’s IHR seminar paper on the impact of the Freedom of Information Act.
• Zotero 3.0 has been released. It can now run as a standalone program as well as a Firefox extension and has lots of new features. I couldn’t have written my book as quickly (or at all?) without Zotero to manage my bibliography and citations.
• The latest version of the Spotify client crashes whenever I search for Kim Carnes. Bug or feature?

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.

Lawrence draws on a lot of recent work about print culture to show the links between military theory and practice. Although he doesn’t use the phrase “communication circuit”, he does pay a lot of attention to the people (well, men mostly, although Christine de Pizan does get a mention) who wrote, printed, sold, bought, owned, read, used and commented on military manuals. That there were so many military books suggests that there was enough demand to make printing them commercially viable.

The first two chapters set the scene by giving an overview of English military culture in the late 16^th and early 17^th centuries. Lawrence builds on the work of people like Mark Fissel and David Trim which shows that England was not isolated, peaceful or militarily backward in this period. Many English professional soldiers served on the continent, especially in the Netherlands. Lawrence adds to this picture by showing that books were an important part of the military profession. The insult “paper soldiers” was applied selectively to those who either lacked practical experience or were disliked for some other reason. It took combat experience and book learning to make a complete soldier. One was not considered an adequate substitute for the other. Lawrence shows that books were an important part of the military circles which revolved around the Earl of Leicester, the Vere brothers, and Henry Prince of Wales. The multi-talented John Dee was heavily involved in this culture. He was interested in fortifications and sieges, had many military books in his library, and was a tutor to the Earl of Leicester.

In 1607 Jacob de Gheyn published the first ever drill book to include step by step engravings of the postures for pikemen and musketeers. Gervase Markham, not known for originality, became the first author to use copies de Gheyn’s engravings in an English drill book. Although professional soldiers considered books to be important, the English militia was slow to catch on. The first printed drill instructions were not issued until 1623. Infantry were the main users of drill books in the first half of the 17^th century. Lawrence has identified 94 military books published in England after 1603 and before the outbreak of civil war in 1642, of which 41 covered infantry combat. Many of these were written by experienced soldiers. They were based on practical experience, and in turn influenced the practice of those who used them. The Honourable Artillery Company in London was at the centre of English military culture. Company members were highly proficient in infantry drill and several of them wrote books on the subject. Nearly all of the infantry drill books published in England before the Civil Wars followed de Gheyn in describing Dutch drill. The newer Swedish drill developed by Gustavus Adolphus in the 1630s appears to have had very little influence in England before 1642. This backs up everyone who says that Prince Rupert was wrong to insist on Swedish infantry formations at Edgehill, and that the Earl of Lindsey was right to defend the Dutch drill which would have been more familiar to English soldiers.

Things could hardly have been more different for cavalry. Of the 94 early Stuart military books only one, Cruso’s Militarie instructions for the cavallrie, was solely about cavalry. A few more covered cavalry as well as infantry, but these were a tiny minority. None of them bore much relation to reality. Gervase Markham is well known as a prolific hack who would publish ill-informed opinions about anything if there was any money in it. Although he had some military experience, it apparently did not inform his drill books, which were mostly copied from other books. They included obsolete and useless formations taken from ancient history which were almost certainly not used by early-modern cavalry. Lawrence seems to have cleared up some of the confusion over Cruso’s biography. Although he served in the Norfolk militia, he almost certainly hadn’t served overseas and probably had no combat experience. His book was an academic work which mostly copied from and commented on other books. It devoted too much space to ancient history and other obsolete things, such as heavy lancers. Despite this, his book was quite popular and often recommended, perhaps because there was nothing else available. Robert Ward also lacked combat experience, copied from other authors, and included obsolete ancient formations. Lawrence does consider Ward to be better than Markham, and believes that his book was reasonably consistent. I think that a careful reading of Ward reveals some serious inconsistencies, probably as a result of carelessly copying bits from multiple sources, but this isn’t a major point as I think we both agree that Ward’s work was unrealistic.

John Vernon, who published a new cavalry drill book in 1644, was different in that his work was more practical and might have been based on personal experience. Lawrence repeats the story that Vernon was a parliamentarian cavalry officer but gives no reference. I’m a bit sceptical because I’ve never seen any definite evidence of an officer by this name. He certainly didn’t hold the rank of captain or above in Essex’s or Manchester’s army. The best John Tincey could show was that there might have been another Captain Vernon in addition to the better documented Captain Francis Vernon, treasurer of Essex’s army. Lawrence points out that some parts of Vernon’s book are derived from Cruso and others, but suggests that the original parts are probably fairly realistic. The biggest weakness of the cavalry chapter is that it doesn’t really compare theory with practice. There are no detailed quotes from eyewitness accounts of battles. Instead Lawrence relies on some lazy clichés, using the phrase “decayed serving men and tapsters” not once but twice. At least he doesn’t buy into the myth of shock. Although he sometimes uses the word “shock” he seems to mean sword fighting rather than “equine battering rams”.

The shortage of cavalry drill books leaves space for a look at a wider selection of horsemanship manuals. The increasing popularity of haute ecole/dressage/manege in the late 16^th century was regarded with suspicion by English soldiers and military theorists because they thought it would distract from more warlike pursuits such as jousting. Citing many modern and early-modern authorities, Lawrence concludes that manege would have had little military value. I’d say that it might have been marginally useful in the close combat between individuals and small groups which usually ensued if neither side ran away during a cavalry charge, but very few horses and men would have had the necessary training. Even the gentleman Sir Richard Bulstrode had to admit that he couldn’t control his horse at Powicke Bridge.

(There’s also a chapter on sieges which I haven’t read, but it’s probably good.)

One thing that slightly annoys me is that, like too many historians, Lawrence uses the word “evolution” to mean gradual change rather than random variation and natural selection. Maybe it’s just my scientific pedantry, or maybe it’s Darwin’s fault for borrowing an existing word instead of making up a new one, but I wish they wouldn’t do it. To me evolution versus revolution is a false dichotomy.

Overall this is a really good book. It’s much more sophisticated than Barbara Donagan’s work on drill books. Lawrence has not assumed that drill books either were or were not related to practice, but has worked hard to find evidence and considered different possibilities. His conclusion that infantry drill books were closely related to practice and that cavalry drill books were not blows away the false dichotomy of sceptics versus enthusiasts and shows that things were more complicated than anyone previously suggested. Because of the outrageous price I can’t really recommend that you rush out and buy it, but if you’re interested in early-modern military history or print culture it’s worth getting out of the library if they’ve got it.

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.

The book is mostly about female strippers, although it does include a bit on male stripping. Male and female stripping seem to be vastly different cultures with hardly any overlap. Knowing about one doesn’t tell you much about the other, but comparing them says a lot about gender ideology in general. From here on you can assume that when I used the words “stripper” or “dancer” I’m talking about a woman, not a man.

Strippers subvert and resist patriarchal norms at the same time as replicating them. The whole book is about rejecting false dichotomies and recognising that something can be two or more contradictory things at the same time. “Is stripping empowering or demeaning?” is a stupid question. The only answer is “it’s more complicated than that”.

The seats right at the front of the stage near the tipping rail are often called “pervert row” by the dancers. I’m fascinated by the ways that the concept of perversion can used to delegitimize almost any form of sexuality or interest in sex, no matter how unperverted it is. What could be more heteronormative than a man looking at a naked woman? And yet this can commonly be labelled as “perving”. Men generally get a much better deal out of sexual double standards than women do, but their sexual freedom is still limited by those standards.

Susan Griffin’s Woman and Nature (which I’m going to have to read – I got a copy off Amazon for only 1p!) includes a chapter on woman as show horse, which is very relevant to some of my ideas about how patriarchy blurs boundaries between women and horses. Roach contrasts this with a burlesque song called “Pony Girl”, in which the dehumanizing misogyny is ironically subverted by being both reduced to absurdity and reclaimed as a source of submissive pleasure. I’m not sure if Roach realized that this is an actual fetish which people really do, but its existence only strengthens her point. Men and women actually do find freedom and fulfilment by roleplaying ponies, and they can swap gender as well as species. I’ll probably have to write more posts about pony play at some point because it’s really interesting in terms of gender, sexuality, animal-human boundaries, subversion, resistance etc.

Pole dancing requires serious upper body strength. This is interesting because even Joshua Goldstein considered upper body strength to be one of the main limiting factors on women in combat roles. But some dancers prefer not to train in advanced pole tricks because the muscles they develop can be perceived as unfeminine and even intimidating by male clients. Just another way that patriarchal ideology makes women’s bodies conform to stereotypical ideals. Culture influences not only perceptions of reality, but reality itself. The stripper’s body is “clearly not natural, but is a construction and artefact of the culture” (p. 45).

Many dancers say they like wearing dangerously high heels because the shoes make them feel sexy, confident and powerful. (But could there be a difference between feeling powerful and actually being powerful? How does their experience compare with other women who are required to wear high heels at work?) This feeling seems to come mostly from the added height that they gain. Most women are shorter than most men (Goldstein’s figures, based on American 18 year olds, show that on average men are 8% taller than women, and that only 15% of women are taller than the shortest man). Being able to look down on them is a new and exciting experience. This ties in with Peter Edwards’s point that in early-modern England horses helped to reinforce authority because a man on a horse could literally look down on people on foot. Dancers would only ever wear their stripper shoes at work, and consider it “sluttish” for non-strippers to wear them in other contexts. Double standards manifest themselves in unexpected ways. Strippers can be patriarchal collaborators at the same time as challenging patriarchy by looking down on men. The dancers interviewed generally tend to define themselves in opposition to prostitutes. One of them describes a foot fetishist as “sick”. Not much sex-positive solidarity here, but this shows how patriarchy puts strippers in a position where they have to distance themselves from other kinds of sex workers, and from non-mainstream sexualities, in order to claim some legitimacy for stripping. It looks like a win-win situation for patriarchy. Closing down strip clubs isn’t going to end patriarchal equilibrium, but keeping them open isn’t either.

The need for dancers to play a role while interacting with clients can be alienating, leading to a false self. Having read Stephen Greenblatt, I’m not convinced that there is such a thing as an authentic self against which a “false” self can be judged. Following Judith Butler, Roach does emphasise that gender is always a performance, and that the gender performed by strippers is a hypersexualised, hyperfeminine version of an ideal woman. Stripping does seem to have an emotional/psychological cost, but is this caused by the ideology of authenticity and sincerity as much as by the falseness of the performance? Might Holden Caulfield have been happier if he admitted that “we are all phoneys”? If a performance in a strip club can be as good as the real thing, why not everywhere else too? And how can we know the difference? Is it that the stripper’s performance is too hyperreal to be real?

The “popular culture” in the title refers to the way that stripping has gone mainstream as what Roach calls “stripper culture”. Poledancing lessons are popular with lots of women, the stripper look is all over mainstream fashion, and stripper thongs are being marketed to pre-teen girls. One thing that struck me about this, which Roach doesn’t go into much detail about, is that by appropriating some aspects of stripping and taking them out of their previous context, the mainstream has effectively made stripper culture more patriarchal and misogynistic. Girls can go out dressed like strippers, but they don’t get the benefit of tips, bouncers, or no touching rules. They assume the semiotics of hypersexualized hyperfeminine availability, but without the protection, empowerment or profit that some strippers can get in well run clubs. Maybe that’s another reason why the real strippers call them sluttish.

Consent to work in the sex industry can be compromised by poverty. Consent is less meaningful when there is a limited range of choices on offer. Sex-positive feminism is not about complacently saying that sex work is OK, but about increasing the range of choices available and improving working conditions for those who do choose to do sex work. Carol Leigh: “the problems of prostitution don’t get solved until the problems of poverty get solved” (p. 131). Maybe the problem of patriarchy should be added to that, but patriarchy and poverty go together.

As a final thought, I wonder what would happen if a man went to a strip club in drag? How would it affect the gender dynamics? How would the dancers and other clients react? Would he even be allowed in?

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.

As I said in my previous post, Goldstein’s book didn’t pay enough attention to cultural differences within the west over the last several hundred years. This is understandable in such an ambitious and wide-ranging book. To cover so much ground he necessarily had to abstract things and omit lots of details. Previously I pointed out that the ideal of the warrior as the epitome of masculinity doesn’t seem to hold for 17th century England. Since then I’ve become more aware that although women have nearly always been excluded from combat roles, this exclusion hasn’t always been the same. In contrast to the Whig idea of progress, there might actually have been more opportunities for women to participate in combat in the past. Brilliana Harley and the Countess of Derby were both elite women who effectively commanded garrisons when their houses were besieged by the enemy during the English Civil War. In these cases their social status, and particularly their position of authority over the household in the absence of their husbands, overrode normal gender roles. In practice there isn’t necessarily that much difference between commanding servants and commanding soldiers. As I said in my last Horses, War and Gender post, in War in England Barbara Donagan mentions that codes of conduct from the English Civil War protected women from violence unless they took up arms, which suggests that it was considered to be a real possibility. One of the excuses the New Model Army gave for the massacre of the “Irish whores” at Naseby in 1645 was that they were carrying knives, and were therefore seen as a threat (although the women who were killed and mutilated there probably weren’t Irish or whores or likely to kill anyone). In Warrior Women and Popular Balladry (pp. 128-8), Diane Dugaw pointed out that boundaries between combat and non-combat roles got very blurred by the presence of women on board Royal Navy ships in the 18th and early 19th centuries. Although women were eligible for campaign medals for service at the battles of the Nile and Trafalgar, they were denied them on the grounds that it would leave the army and navy “exposed to innumerable applications” from women! Dugaw also showed that the cross-dressing warrior woman wasn’t just a fictional character in ballads. In the early-modern period many women actually did disguise themselves as men and join the army or navy. That they got away with it suggests that perceptions of gender were very different in that period, and that clothes were probably more important than the body. Although the ballads make breasts (often lily white) an important signifier of gender, they also suggest that it was easy to keep them hidden. Later ballads from the 19th century show an increasing preoccupation with the slenderness of waists and fingers, which suggests that perceptions of the body were changing.

Things had changed even more by the First World War. There was a new obsession with biology: new recruits to the British Army had to undergo a thorough medical examination and were graded on a scale of fitness for combat. This would have made it pretty much impossible for someone with female genitals to pass as a man. But despite this new fashion for empirical scientific measurements of the soldier’s body, the idea that women were weak and unsuitable for combat was much more dominant than it had been 100 years earlier. Remembering the evidence presented by Goldstein, this is the opposite of what you might expect. It’s easy to imagine a Whiggish narrative of the progress of science and reason, where a “medieval” superstition that women are “the weaker vessel” gives way in the face of hard empirical evidence, allowing women to achieve equality and men to congratulate themselves on how progressive they are. No such thing in reality, of course. During the First World War the idea that women might serve in combat roles in the British Army was not even on the cards. It was just assumed that they couldn’t and shouldn’t. This is despite the fact that the British Army was in a desperate situation. The pre-war regular army was very small, while the Territorial Force was under strength and hardly trained to fight at anything above company level. During the war the army suffered unprecedented casualties and expanded at an unprecedented rate to an unprecedented size. In 1916 Britain introduced universal conscription for the first time ever. Things got so bad that the minimum height requirement was reduced from 5’3” to 5’1”. Short men were initially recruited into special “bantam battalions”, and later mixed in with normal battalions. Men who were unfit for front line combat were still retained by the army when possible, often for manual labour or home service. For example, the service record of my ancestor Thomas Wenham shows that he was only 5’2” tall, and so wasn’t called up for service immediately. When he did get into combat he was wounded in the head, which rendered him unfit for further combat, so he went on to serve with the Royal Defence Corps in Britain, then went back to France with the Labour Corps to guard prisoners of war. It’s quite likely that some of the women who went to work in factories as part of the war effort (something which is often seen as a Whiggish step forward) would have been at least as able to fight as many of the men who served in the army.

So the exclusion of women from combat roles in Britain is constant at a certain level of abstraction, but if we look closer we can see that it changed quite a lot. The way that it fluctuates reminds me of Judith Bennett’s concept of patriarchal equilibrium. Bennett used the wage gap to illustrate this: in medieval England the average woman’s wage was about 75% of the average man’s wage, and it’s about the same now. The wage gap hasn’t always stayed the same, but it has fluctuated within a certain range: women’s wages have always been between 50% and 75% of men’s wages. Equal opportunities legislation hasn’t fundamentally changed this situation. The exact size of the gap often changes, but it’s always true that women’s wages are less than men’s wages. Bennett came up with patriarchal equilibrium to describe, and start to explain, this situation. Although some things might improve for women in some ways, the system always manages to readjust so that women never quite achieve equality. This idea is exactly what we need to allow us to move beyond Goldstein’s model of universal exclusion of women from combat. Things can change, but in a more fundamental way they stay the same. The gendering of combat roles isn’t just analogous to patriarchal equilibrium: it’s part of the same thing, and possibly a very important part. Historiann is right on the money when she says:

Mark my words:  the U.S. won’t give up on sex segregation in the military so easily and quietly as the officers quoted in the New York Times say they have, because military service, and in particular combat service, is the one thing that differentiates men from women citizens.  Of course, this difference is for the most part theoretical, since the vast majority of Americans don’t in fact serve in the military, but a whole aircraft carrier’s worth of assumptions and privileges rests on this slender thread.

The exclusion of women from combat roles justifies male privilege. The really neat ideological trick here is that being exempt from combat duty can be portrayed as a privilege itself, but it’s a false privilege. The male British soldier can say, “we have to go off and fight in the muddy trenches and get killed and wounded, while you get to sit at home and enjoy unprecedented freedoms and have sex with American sailors and airmen”. The perception that men suffer in wars for the benefit of women, and that women are spared the suffering, is not true and has all sorts of dangerous consequences. The rhetoric of remembrance says that we’re all (men and women alike) supposed to be grateful to the men (and a few women, but fewer than there could have been) who fought for our freedoms, but in Britain during the First World War women were not allowed to vote, abortions were illegal, and marital rape was not illegal. The men who joined up in 1914 were probably not fighting for gender equality (and any argument that British victory led to greater equality logically depends on Whiggish assumptions about inevitable progress). It could be argued that the outbreak of war in 1914 was a setback for the suffragettes, because everyone “knew” that women couldn’t fight, therefore why should they be given the same rights as the men who were fighting?

There must be plenty more scope to look for examples of how the exclusion of women from combat roles is used to justify male privilege. I’m not claiming that war is the key to patriarchal equilibrium, but it has to be one of the things which contributes to long term gender inequality.

1. Judith M. Bennett, History Matters (University of Pennsylvania Press, September 2007).
2. Barbara Donagan, War in England 1642-1649 (OUP Oxford, February 2008).
3. Dianne Dugaw, Warrior Women and Popular Balladry, 1650-1850 (University of Chicago Press: Chicago, 1996).
4. Joshua S. Goldstein, War and Gender (CUP: Cambridge, 2003). 
   

[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.

In my first post I naively expected animals to be a state of nature where there was only biological sex and no gender. I don’t think this is viable now. I’m increasingly following Judith Butler and Thomas Laqueur in the view that gender versus sex is a false dichotomy. Perceptions of the body are always gendered. Furthermore it now looks hopelessly wrong to assume that non-human species have no culture or gender. Dominance hierarchies can be heavily gendered. Chimpanzees have patriarchal societies in which disputes are often settled by violence, but Bonobos have matriarchal societies in which disputes are often settled by lesbian sex, despite the genetic similarities between the two species (see Joshua Goldstein, War and Gender).

This actually leads to a simpler way of putting the question: if humans always perceive each other in gendered ways, why wouldn’t they also perceive animals in gendered ways? In fact there is scientific evidence that humans even perceive inanimate objects in gendered ways! A post at Babel’s Dawn mentions an experiment which showed that the grammatical gender of a noun affects how people perceive and describe the physical object which the noun refers to. Genus and sexus are not separate in people’s minds. They bleed into each other in a way which can interfere with perception. This could also have major implications for metaphors. Saying that one thing is like another might cause people to perceive them as the same thing, with serious consequences for how they get treated in reality (we all know about early-modern misogynists who said women were more like animals than men).

As I started to read more about early-modern gender I realized that some of my own assumptions about the relationship between gender and biology were specifically modern. While perceptions of the body (and especially the genitals) have always played a part in gender ideology, modern science has made the reproductive organs appear more important than they did before. In early-modern England clothes were probably more important than bodies. This opened up many possibilities for gender swapping. In Agnes Bowker’s Cat, David Cressy looked at the case of a young man who passed as a woman for long enough to gatecrash a lying-in party (one of the few kinds of all female spaces in England at this time). Diane Dugaw wrote a whole book about warrior woman ballads which featured women dressing as men in order to join the army or navy. She showed that this behaviour was possible and not even particularly uncommon in real life (although I now think the differences between ballads and reality might be significant – in ballads the woman was always found out eventually, usually by exposure of the body, although usually not specifically the genitals; in real life they weren’t always found out and sent home; how many more were never discovered at all? Were the ballads a way of dealing with anxiety about this possibility?). If people could change gender by changing their clothes (and since the female soldiers were perceived and treated as male, their gender effectively was male) where does this leave horses?

When I read Dugaw I thought that this was a problem because horses didn’t wear clothes, but then at the Roehampton horse conference Erica Fudge reminded us that horses did wear clothes. I had a quick chat with Erica afterwards, and the point I should have got straight to is that although horses did sometimes wear clothes, sometimes they didn’t. Horses sometimes had their genitals on display in public in a way which would have been very unusual for humans. So where does that leave us? Horses can wear clothes, but don’t have to, which seems to open up even more possibilities and raise even more questions. Why don’t displays of horse genitals cause the same anxieties that displays of human genitals cause? (Or do they? Did William Prynne have issues with this?) Is a stallion with big balls on display the epitome of masculinity? Do the trappings of a medieval war horse signify masculinity? Or does covering up the body (especially the genitals) make a horse less masculine? Can a mare in trappings masquerade as a stallion? Does a more masculine horse make the rider look more masculine? How male are geldings? How does the creation of an artificial third sex through routine castration complicate the ideas of male and female? This is why I was asking strange questions about testicles at the conference.

As Jennifer Flaherty reminded us at the Roehampton conference, there are lots of representations of war and horses in Shakespeare’s history plays, and lots of interesting ways that they intersect with gender. She told us about the substitution of horses for women, and how horsemanship contributed to masculinity. I think there’s a lot more potential for looking at how the horses themselves are gendered, and especially how their roles in war are gendered. I’m hoping that Jennifer or someone else will have done this, or will be doing it, but I just have a few observations on Henry V:

Good war horses usually seem to be referred to as steeds. This is a very masculine word, coming from the Old English for stallion (as does stud) according to the OED.

Bad horses are referred to as jades. The OED is vague on the etymology: it might come from a Norse word for mare, but there doesn’t seem to be much definite proof. Jade meaning bad woman seems to appear later than jade meaning bad horse, but the relationship between them isn’t very clear from the OED. In any case one might still connote the other. In the light of the experiment about grammatical gender that I mentioned above, it wouldn’t be surprising if two unrelated meanings of the same word can bleed into each other in people’s minds. After all, this is how puns work.

Shakespeare seems to assign a lot of agency to horses. They threaten each other, they neigh for present service, they seem to want to keep fighting when their riders are dead. Does this suggest that horses were imagined to be active participants in combat, and not just transport for their riders? How widespread was this idea? Does it require the horses to be male because only men were supposed to fight?

When I started out on this project I was heavily influenced by Joshua Goldstein’s hypothesis that war, gender, and the exclusion of women from combat roles all appear to be more or less universal, and that war and gender shape each other. The more I think about it the more problems I can see with his model. As I pointed out here, his assumption that the point of gender roles is to create warriors doesn’t seem to hold for early-modern England, where (according to Alexandra Shepard) manhood was defined mostly by domestic paternalism (where age, wealth, marital status and other things intersected). War and soldiers were often viewed with ambivalence, and it seems to me that a career in the military was no more than a second best kind of masculinity. As Bruce Boehrer pointed out in Shakespeare Among the Animals, the third Earl of Essex turned to soldiering after the failure of his marriages and his humiliation as an impotent cuckold.

Goldstein acknowledged that although some form of gender is found in every culture, there are wide variations in the forms it takes and the meanings it has. I suspect that if we look closer we might find similar variations in the forms and meanings of war. Although women have mostly been excluded from combat roles in most cultures at most times, I’m not sure that this translates to a universally rigid boundary between active male and passive female roles. The boundary might sometimes be more or less rigid or in a slightly different place, and there might be very different justifications for it. The exclusion of women from combat roles in early-modern England might not have been as exclusive as in later periods. For example, in War in England Barbara Donagan mentions that codes of conduct from the English Civil War protected women from violence unless they took up arms. One of the excuses the New Model Army gave for the massacre of the “Irish whores” at Naseby was that they were carrying knives.

That’s all for now. There’s still obviously a lot to do, and I’m still not entirely sure what that is, so it’ll be a long time before I have anything publishable. There’s a whole world of possibilities for looking into gendered perceptions of animals. I’m limiting myself to horses in war to keep it manageable, so there’s plenty of scope for other people to do horses in other situations, and every other species.

1. Bruce Thomas Boehrer, Shakespeare among the animals (Palgrave: New York, 2002).
2. David Cressy, Agnes Bowker’s Cat (Oxford Paperbacks, February 2001).
3. Barbara Donagan, War in England 1642-1649 (OUP Oxford, February 2008).
4. Dianne Dugaw, Warrior Women and Popular Balladry, 1650-1850 (University of Chicago Press: Chicago, 1996).
5. Joshua S. Goldstein, War and Gender (CUP: Cambridge, 2003).
6. Thomas Walter Laqueur, Making Sex (Harvard University Press: Cambridge, Mass., 1992).
7. Alexandra Shepard, Meanings of Manhood in Early Modern England (Clarendon Press: Oxford, 2006).

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.

The book starts with the story that as a baby Oliver was carried onto the roof by his grandfather’s pet monkey. I have no idea if this is true but I don’t really care because it’s just so cool. He was nearly dropped off a roof! By a monkey! I don’t think there’s any biography which couldn’t be improved by the protagonist nearly being dropped off a roof by a monkey. Apart from anything else, the cause of death “kild by a monkey” would make the best parish register entry ever. As the author says “it is impossible to imagine what England might have been like to-day if the monkey had dropped him”. It is pretty hard to imagine what England might have been like in 1963 if Cromwell had been killed by a monkey as a baby. But try to imagine it anyway. Maybe you could write a story about it…

The story on the next page almost certainly isn’t true:

Oliver’s uncle, Sir Oliver Cromwell, was an important man, and lived on an estate much larger than the farm belonging to Oliver’s father. He was in fact so important in the county that on more than one occasion he was visited by the King, James I. On one of these visits the King was accompanied by his son Charles, and whilst Sir Oliver was entertaining the King, the two boys, Oliver Cromwell and Prince Charles, were sent into the garden to play. According to the story, the boys quarrelled and fought, and Oliver was the winner.

If this had actually happened I like to think that Oliver would have got his ass kicked by Prince Henry, who is strangely absent from the story. Maybe he was off somewhere being a good protestant.

The same page states that: “Oliver had six sisters but no brothers, so his friends were the boys of the little town, who were his schoolmates”. God forbid that he would ever be friendly with his sisters. That could have made him effeminate and stopped him from becoming A Great Man. You’ll also notice that his sisters don’t have names. In fact no woman is ever named anywhere in the book. Even Elizabeth Cromwell is just introduced as “the daughter of Sir James Bouchier”. Once they’re married she’s just “his wife”.

At this time in England there were in England a large number of people known as Puritans. We have come to think of these people as disliking any sort of happiness and always going about with gloomy faces, intent on preventing others from enjoying themselves. This is wrong. They were not all like that.

Unfortunately no-one told the artist, as the accompanying picture features the gloomiest puritans ever:

Unless the people dancing round the maypole are supposed to be non-gloomy puritans.

Oliver Cromwell was a Puritan, but he liked music and dancing and was fond of going to horse races. There were many like him.

This is true. Cromwell and others like him were perfectly able to combine music, dancing and horse racing with an obsessive hatred of altar rails, transubstantiation and the Book of Common Prayer. No wonder that “when James I followed Elizabeth, he demanded that all Puritans be driven out of the country”!

But on the next page the stereotypes come right back:

If we had lived in England in Cromwell’s time we would have noticed that there was a wide difference between the clothes worn by the Puritans and those who were on the side of the King and the Church. It was a time when wealthy people mostly dressed in coloured velvets and silks, with lace collars and cuffs, and rich embroidery on their coats and dresses. Many of the men wore lace or coloured ribbons at their knees, and all wore their hair very long. The King and his court must have been a very gay and colourful sight.

No laughing at the word “gay” please. It’s just the emptiness of the signifier.

The Puritans did exactly the opposite. They wore simple clothes in dull colours, with plain white collars. The women wore dark dresses and no jewellery. What chiefly distinguished the Puritan men from the Royalists, as the King’s men were called, was the fact that the Puritans cut their hair shorter. Because of this, they were later known as Roundheads. The Puritans were quiet and sober in their speech and habits, and always strictly observed the Sabbath day.

Oh yes, all those quiet and sober speeches about Shibboleths, and curse ye Meroz, and to your tents O Israel. Let’s face it, puritan preachers were what John Sinclair would have been like if he abandoned the radical counter-culture and became a right-wing christian fundamentalist.

Anyway, “Many things were happening in England during the eleven years of the King’s government without a Parliament”. (Apparently not in Scotland or Ireland, but we’ll get to that later.) This is one of those things:

It’s William Prynne in the pillory. Surely the most famous thing about Prynne’s ordeals at the hands of Star Chamber is that in addition to being pilloried, whipped, and branded, he had his ears cut off. Twice. But in this picture he’s surprisingly unmutilated. I know it’s a children’s book, but surely children love all that stuff. I feel cheated that we never had Horrible Histories when I was little. The text describes Prynne as “Another brave Englishman… who had written against the illegal taxes”. That and saying actresses were whores. Such a brave man. Misogynistic above and beyond the patriarchal standards of his time, but brave nevertheless.

Cromwell’s involvement in the enclosure dispute around St Ives in the 1630s gets a mention. His role is exaggerated way beyond the evidence, but there’s another problem: it’s described as “another battle for freedom in Lincolnshire”. This is the start of a weird obsession with Lincolnshire. Later we’re told that Cromwell raised his first cavalry troop in Lincolnshire, and that after that “he was put in charge of the whole of Lincolnshire”, where he had to search the house of his uncle Sir Oliver Cromwell. Look L. du Garde Peach, Huntingdon just isn’t in Lincolnshire and never has been.

After eleven years, during which the King had governed the country as he pleased, he found that even the illegal taxes did not bring in enough money. So he was forced again to summon a Parliament.

No mention of the Scots Covenanters or the Bishops Wars. Anglocentrism is pretty standard for the time this was written, but it’s taken to a really absurd degree here. At the battle of Marston Moor “The Parliament army had been joined by some Scottish soldiers”. Either this is a serious understatement, or it’s an unorthodox counting system in which “some” means “about 20,000″. But they weren’t there for long: “The Cavaliers on the right scattered the Scots and thinking that the battle was won, rode after them as they ran away”. That would be the right wing commanded by well-known Scotsman Sir Thomas Fairfax, with his Scottish Yorkshire cavalry. Meanwhile David Leslie and his cavalry, who actually were Scottish, were on the left helping Cromwell and didn’t run away. “Many brave Englishmen were killed on both sides at the battle of Marston Moor”. No, the Scots weren’t brave. They ran away, remember? And you might be surprised to learn that they changed sides as early as 1646. When Charles I escaped from Oxford “He finally reached Newark, which was held for him by a Scottish army”.

But if you think the Scots have it bad, spare a thought for the Irish.

Cromwell was also a good man. He was deeply religious, and neither greedy nor – except in Ireland – cruel. He was a good father to his children and the friend of all honest men.

See, he was only cruel in Ireland. And that doesn’t count.

In Ireland, Cromwell was the most hated of all. There were still men in Ireland who were ready to fight for King Charles II after Charles I had been executed. In order to crush them Cromwell crossed to Ireland with an army. The Irish were no match for trained and experienced soldiers. The two towns of Drogheda and Wexford, which tried to hold out against them, were besieged and quickly captured. All the defenders were killed without mercy. To this day the people of Ireland hate Cromwell’s memory. They have never forgotten Drogehda and Wexford.

They’re so unreasonable. Can’t they see what a Great Man he was? And it was only Ireland. But surely the Irish armies were also trained and experienced soldiers. Maybe it was just their essential Irishness that made them lose.

But the greatest Anglo-bombast comes in the 1620s with a description of Cromwell’s journey to London to study at the Inns of Court (which have no record of him, according to the DNB): “Although the English roads were bad, English inns were at that time among the best in the world”.

I’m probably oversensitive to cavalry myths, but you have to admit this is pretty stupid:

The foot soldiers of the seventeenth century had not got the weapons to stand up to a charge by soldiers on horseback. Prince Rupert, the King’s nephew, commanded the Royalist cavalry and often charged right through the Parliament army of foot soldiers.

Yeah, those 18 foot long wooden poles with big metal spikes on the end. What were they called again? Pikes? I don’t think those would have been any use for fending off horses. Or maybe they didn’t really exist. But the Great Man knew exactly what to do about this:

So Cromwell and Hampden decided after the battle of Edgehill, that they must have more mounted soldiers to fight Prince Rupert’s cavalry. Cromwell immediately set to work to raise more troops of horse soldiers. These men were known as the New Model Army.

Just forget about the Self-Denying Ordinance,  Sir Thomas Fairfax, Philip Skippon, Robert Scawen, the Army Committee, the monthly assessment and all that crap. The New Model Army was created by Cromwell and Hampden. Just after Edgehill. And it was all cavalry. It is true.

Cromwell was so good that he didn’t really want to execute the king or expel the rump. He just had to. Maybe it was his destiny as a Great Man.

Cromwell now found himself obliged to do what King Charles had done earlier: he went to the House of Commons with a regiment of soldiers at his back. But where Charles had failed Cromwell succeeded.

See, the real problem with Charles wasn’t that he went into the Commons with soldiers, it was just that he did it wrong. As we’re told on the page about the Five Members: “King Charles was a very stupid man”. That might sound harsh but it’s not so very different from what lots of proper historians have said.

The book ends:

It is a blot on the history of our country that when Charles II returned, Cromwell’s body was taken from the tomb and his head set upon a pike [you know, those things that didn't exist] for all to see. It was a mean and unworthy revenge on the part of those whom he had beaten in a fair fight, whose country he had preserved from tyranny, and whose freedom he had ensured.

Bastards. They’re almost as bad as the Irish. But for a final thought, let’s go back to the very first paragraph:

Oliver Cromwell is one of the most important figures in English history. In the time in which he lived, a great man was needed to lead the people of England in their fight for freedom, and to-day we still enjoy freedoms which he won for us.

There’s a cookie for anyone who can name a freedom we enjoy today (sorry I mean to-day) which Cromwell won for us. Come on, there must be at least one. And don’t forget to thank the monkey for not dropping him.