Investigations of a Dog

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).

Last week I finally got round to reading Joshua Goldstein’s War and Gender. Goldstein argues that gender shapes war, and that war shapes gender. The evidence for the first is very strong. War would be different if its conduct wasn’t dominated by gender ideology. War has occurred in nearly all cultures, but nearly all cultures in nearly all periods have excluded women from active combat roles. The argument that this is because women are biologically unsuited to combat does not stand up. Goldstein shows that although women are smaller and weaker than men on average individuals are distributed along bell curves which overlap. The top 10 to 15% of women are bigger and stronger than then bottom 10 to 15% of men. Therefore under some historical circumstances armies could have had more and better soldiers if they recruited women as well as men.

The second argument, that war shapes gender, isn’t so strong. It’s true that gender is at least as universal as war, but Goldstein acknowledges that gender roles vary widely across cultures in almost every respect other than combat roles and hunting. It seems hard to explain how all of this diversity could be directed towards the same purpose: to produce warriors or potential warriors. Goldstein is very much the voice of rational liberal 20th century America. Although he makes good use of anthropology and recognises the huge diversity of gathering-hunting cultures I think he underestimates the strangeness of medieval and early-modern European cultures.

As an alternative to the warrior, Goldstein suggests the provider as a new ideal of masculinity which American men might aspire to in future. The big problem here is that this model is suspiciously similar to the ideals of early-modern English patriarchy studied by Anthony Fletcher and Alexandra Shepard. There was more to the early-modern patriarch than just providing, but he was certainly more of a provider than a warrior. To be a man was to be the head of a household. Boys were toughened up, but this was mainly so that they could control their own bodies, their wives, their children, and their servants. The ordered household was seen as the basis of an ordered society. In contrast, the warrior was not much of a normative ideal. Grievances over billeting suggest that even before the civil wars English civilians saw English soldiers as dangerous outsiders. Stereotypes of professional soldiers had more in common with the disobedient anti-patriarchal forms of masculinity which Shepard identified among students and apprentices. War was disorder: the very thing that early-modern patriarchy most feared.

I’m still in awe of Goldstein’s ambitious scholarship, and I think we need more historians (particularly military historians) to show this kind of imagination. But I also think his work shows some of the weaknesses of broad comparative studies: they risk abstracting and generalising to such an extent that a lot of important differences can be lost.

1. Anthony J Fletcher, Gender, Sex and Subordination in England 1500-1800 (Yale University Press: New Haven, 1995).
2. Joshua S. Goldstein, War and Gender (CUP: Cambridge, 2003).
3. Alexandra Shepard, Meanings of Manhood in Early Modern England (Clarendon Press: Oxford, 2006).

While trawling (not trolling) for more posts that I can include in the next MHC, I found something interesting via Muhlberger’s Early History:

The Soldier in Later Medieval England is a major research project directed by Anne Curry (who was my personal tutor when I was an undergraduate at Reading). They now have a pilot database online (with free access) with details of thousands of soldiers who fought in the Hundred Years War. This should be really useful for anyone interested in medieval military history, not least because the financial records that the data comes from give much more accurate figures for army sizes than the estimates in chronicles.

Anyone with online access to War In History can now download my debut article which is about horses and the New Model Army. I haven’t got my hands on a hard copy yet, but it’s quite exciting to see it on the website. Now I just need to finish the Difficult Second Article…

1. Gavin Robinson, ‘Horse Supply and the Development of the New Model Army, 1642-1646’, War In History, 15 (April 2008), pp. 121-140.

Yesterday I tried uploading some material to the Great War Archive (which I previously posted about here). I’m pleased to say that it was very easy to do and that the site works very well. It took me less than one hour to upload about 27 items, so about 2 minutes per item, but that would vary depending on how many pages each item has. These were all letters and postcards with only two images per item. Most of the time was spent waiting for the files to upload, which depends on the speed of your connection (my ADSL is 8Mb downstream but only 500Kb upstream). Although there are several pages to click through during the submission process they all load very quickly, and there is an option to remember your personal details so you only have to enter them once.

There’s surprisingly little opportunity to enter structured metadata, but I think the idea is to make the submission process as easy as possible for people with no technical skills. This is likely to be a big advantage – I’ve previously mentioned that the UK National Archives wiki Your Archives requires an unusual combination of skills and experience which probably limits the number of people who can contribute. The important thing with the Great War Archive is to get hold of previously unseen material and make it accessible to the public (access to the archive will definitely be free for everyone). This means not making too many demands on the people who hold this material. It’s important to recognise that even uploading photos can be difficult for some people – many new users on the Great War Forum have problems with this, although that’s partly down to the 100K file size limit. The GWA allows each file to be up to 25MB, which should mean that contributors don’t have to worry about resizing or compressing images.

The submission form asks for as much information as possible in a human readable form. It will then be down to the project staff to convert this into structured metadata. It looks like they have the time, budget and expertise to do this – project director Stuart Lee said in a comment on my previous post that 60% of the timetable is devoted to cataloguing, and that the Centre for First World War Studies is involved in the project. The result should be very different from Ancestry’s sloppy indexing of service records. Now we’ll just have to wait until November to see how it turns out.

Malcolm Wanklyn, Decisive Battles of the English Civil War, (Barnsley, Pen and Sword, 2006); ISBN: 1844154548.

I’m just going to get straight to the point: this is the best book ever written about English Civil War battles. I’m not being sarcastic or damning it with faint praise. It really is that good. Wanklyn argues that previous methodology of battle reconstruction is inadequate, that familiar sources need to be reassessed, and that we really know far less than we thought we did about what really happened.

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90 years ago today Private Charles Wenham of 10th Lincolnshire Regiment died. He was almost certainly the brother of my great-grandfather William A. Wenham (I’ve posted about William’s experiences in the Great War here and here).

Charles Wenham was born in Grimsby in 1887. In 1901 he was living with his family in Rutland Street and working as an errand boy. In 1912 he married Ethel Lovejoy, who was recorded as living at 24 Neville Street during the war.

Charles served as a private in 10th Battalion Lincolnshire Regiment (Grimsby Chums). His service number 28180 means he is unlikely to have been an original chum, and so probably wasn’t with them at the Somme. He served overseas after the end of 1915, qualifying for the War and Victory medals (see medal card). At some point he was wounded in action, but so far we have no details of when or where. William’s letters imply that he might have been wounded in March or April 1917, possibly at the first battle of the Scarpe. He was brought back to England and died of wounds at Leicester Military Hospital on 17th November 1917. His body was brought home and buried in Cleethorpes cemetery on 21st November. This is how his death was reported in the Grimsby Daily Telegraph on 20th November:

WENHAM. On 17th inst., at Leicester Military Hospital, Pte. C. Wenham, of the Lincolns, the dearly loved husband of Ethel Wenham, 24, Neville Street. Military funeral at Cleethorpes Cemetery, Wednesday afternoon, 2 o’clock. Died of wounds.

The grave is still maintained by the Commonwealth War Graves Commission. We have no photos of Charles and no idea what happened to his medals and death plaque. Ethel remarried in 1918 and does not appear to have had any children with Charles.

The Great Supply Chain of Being: Horses, People, and Networks of Authority in Civil War Essex

Delivered at Bishop Grosseteste University College, Lincoln, 14th November 2007

This paper is now available as a PDF.

Over the last week I’ve been exploring the possibilities of Your Archives, the wiki based site set up by the UK National Archives where users can contribute their own knowledge and transcripts of documents. The site has huge possibilities, and so far I feel like I’ve only scratched the surface. To start with I’ve been mostly concentrating on First World War records, as the Great War Forum provides both an immediate audience and lots of potential contributors. Getting these people involved could make a very big difference to the project. I think it’s going to take to get a critical mass of GWF regulars using Your Archives regularly, but I’m trying to lead by example. It turns out that I’m not the first forum member to contribute to YA as another member had submitted some information about Labour Corps medal rolls a few months ago. However, that didn’t lead to lots of other people contributing. Can we change that?

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Michael Howard, Liberation Or Catastrophe? Reflections on the History of the Twentieth Century, (London, Hambledon Continuum, 2007; ISBN: 9781847251596).

Before I start this review I have to point out a couple of things. This is the first time that I’ve been sent a review copy of a book rather than reviewing something that I’ve bought myself. For some bloggers this situation is an ethical dilemma, but I’ve had enough experience of PR from the other side (the thankless task of sending CDs to fanzines who ignore you or slag you off) that I wouldn’t hesitate to kick the author and publisher in the teeth if I thought that the book was a load of rubbish. I know that I’m doing them a favour even by mentioning the book on a highly Google ranked blog, and that no review is ever so bad that you can’t get a good selective quote out of it.

Second, this book is by Michael Howard the eminent military historian and founder of the War Studies department at Kings College London, not Michael Howard the former Tory leader.

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