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.

CALL FOR PAPERS

Nottingham Trent University FORWARD Early Modern Social History Symposium

This symposium will take place at Nottingham Trent University on Wednesday 12th November 2008 from 1:00pm – 5:00pm

Proposals are invited for 20 minute papers, which explore the latest unique approaches to research in any aspect of Early Modern British and Irish Social History, including but not limited to topics of Family, Order, Reform, Women, Anarchy, Rebellion & Dissent

Abstract proposals should be no longer than 300 words and submitted to RitaWierzbicki_FORWARD@hotmail.com by Wednesday 22nd October 2008

For more information or to book your place for attendance, please direct your inquiries to the above e-mail address

Way back in October 2006 (when this blog was all shiny and new) I wrote about female saddlers in London during the English Civil War. My work on saddlers and harness makers (male as well as female) is quite open-ended. I don’t know exactly where I’m going with it, so I’m just tying to find out as much as I can about these individuals and their families when I get the chance. A while ago I searched the records of the Prerogative Court of Canterbury for wills of people I was interested in. These are available through DocumentsOnline, but I found it cheaper to print out copies while I was at the PRO (20p per sheet as opposed to £3.50 per will). I didn’t find a will for everyone (some might have had their wills proved in other courts) but I came up with a lot of hits. Recently I finally got round to transcribing them (which was good palaeography practice) and publishing the transcripts on Your Archives.

Although wills tend to come in a standard form, that structure can contain a lot of variety. They can tell us about people’s wealth, business activities, and families, and contain all kinds of incidental details which shed some light on their lives. Below is a selection of some of the more interesting things I found, with links to the full transcripts.

First of all, another possible female saddler. Sarah Rawlinson was the widow of Nathaniel Rawlinson, who had some huge contracts to supply the New Model Army. I haven’t found a will for him yet, but Sarah’s will says that he left her all his estate. So far I don’t know whether she carried on running the business.

Most saddlers seem to have had good relationships with their wives. It’s not unusual for a testator to name his wife as sole executrix and leave her the residue of his estate. Not William Deacon. He instructed his executors to make sure that his wife didn’t embezzle anything from his estate and to deny her any legacies other than her customary widow’s third if she didn’t co-operate!

William Chevall left only one shilling to his niece, saying that he would have left her more if she hadn’t got married without his permission!

Thomas Harrison, who lived in the parish of St Botolph’s Aldgate, wasn’t a major player in supplying armies with saddles during the First Civil War, but he was very wealthy. His will shows that in 1650 he had shares in two ships, and was due £700 for one of them. He had loaned £300 to parliament to support the war effort, and left £100 towards his own funeral expenses. He also seems to have had a feckless son-in-law. This is the only saddler’s will I’ve come across which actually mentions saddles.

The Pease family were well known in the saddlery trade. William senior and William junior both became master of the London Saddlers Company. They also controlled a property empire in London and the surrounding counties, so their saddlery business might not even have been their largest source of income. William senior had nine children at the time he made his will, and divided his freehold, copiehold, and leasehold lands between his daughters as well as his sons. Many testators were confident of their own salvation, but William junior was more confident than most, expecting “a crowne of glory in the Kingdome of Heaven amongst the elect”.

John Munnings, one of the biggest harness makers, was unusual in that he didn’t bother commending his soul to god at the start of his will. He divided most of his estate, including leases on various property, between his wife and daughter.

Richard Beighton‘s will reveals that he was born in Warwickshire, something which would be almost impossible to find out from other sources. He also held lands in Middlesex and Hertfordshire, and had a cousin called Alice Cooper.

Nicholas Collard wasn’t a saddler but his complete will happened to be on the same page as one that I was interested in so I transcribed it anyway. He died in debt and his executors refused to carry out their duties, so administration was granted to his chief creditor instead. (I’m quite pleased with myself for understanding enough Latin to work that bit out.)

So the FORWARD Symposium was a bit of an anti-climax as not many people turned up. Maybe it’ll be like the Sex Pistols at the 100 Club: in a few years time everyone will be saying they were there. Was good to see Martyn Bennett again. It doesn’t seem like 7 years since he examined my PhD thesis. If I wanted to compare the speakers to British indie bands (and why wouldn’t I? It’s a perfectly normal thing to do) I’d say that Lucy Worsley was Velocette, Rodreguez King-Dorset was Radiohead, and I was The Indelicates. Make of that what you will. In the evening we went to Lincoln Drill Hall to see Richard Holmes and Gordon Corrigan talking about the First World War. They were both very good.

Below is my paper, along with a Zotero-able bibliography. It’s slightly different from what I actually said as I ad-libbed some extra bits but it’s near enough. (I had some trouble uploading the pictures through WordPress so some of them might be too big for some people, but I just couldn’t be bothered to set up thumbnails manually.)

Social-Political Animals: Humans and Non-Humans in Early-Modern Society

Presented at FORWARD Symposium, Nottingham Trent University, 28th May 2008.

This is from the homepage of a history department. “History: the human experience.” To represent the human experience, there’s a bit of the Bayeux tapestry. But right there in the middle there’s a horse. This shows that animals are always there in history even if you try to ignore them. But it’s been all too easy to avoid mentioning them.

Non-human animals were a major part of early modern society and economy. That’s so obvious that it tends to be taken for granted. Taking things for granted is a necessary evil in writing history. We can’t write about everything all the time. Every work has to exclude more than it includes. But it’s not healthy if everyone takes the same things for granted. There was a time when most historians weren’t interested in race, class, gender, or sexuality. Those things supposedly didn’t need explaining because “that’s just how it was”. Now lots of researchers are interested in how differences between people were constructed.

The next step is to look at how differences between humans and non-humans were constructed. These differences aren’t necessarily obvious or natural. They can be just as ideological as race, class or gender. Different cultures in different times have had very different views of the relationship between humans and animals. In early-modern Europe all non-human species tended to be lumped together into one big category. They were different from humans, and inferior to humans.

The most sophisticated form of this idea was the Great Chain of Being, which a lot of you are probably familiar with.

This doesn’t logically lead to a rigid physical boundary between human and non-human. There was supposed to be a scale of infinitely small gradations. The big division is between physical and spiritual beings. Everything above the line [you can't see the red line here because I'm lazy!] has a soul. Everything below the line doesn’t. Humans are in a unique position because they’re physical and spiritual at the same time. They just happened to draw the line below spiritual and not above physical, which is quite convenient. It’s debatable whether most people thought about the Chain of Being much or understood the philosophy behind it. But most people would have known from Genesis that god put man in charge of all the animals.

This opposition between human and animal was dominant in Europe, but things were different in other parts of the world. Virginia Anderson has written a really good book on animals in early America. She suggests that Native Americans didn’t lump all non-human animals into one category. They don’t even seem to have had a word for “animal”. They made more of a distinction between different species but less distinction between the material and the spiritual. They still exploited animals. But their exploitation had different meanings and justifications. Some animals and their spirit guardians might be seen as equal or superior to humans. The biggest difference was that they had no concept of animals as private property. None of this is any more strange or wrong than what Europeans thought at the same time.

Cultural historians and literary critics have been increasingly interested in how the idea of the human was constructed. That fits in well with studies of how differences between humans were constructed. It’s not unusual to find every other kind of Other being compared to animals. In early modern England, women, children, foreigners, Catholics, and the lower classes could all be described as bestial. This is what Bruce Boehrer called relative anthropocentrism: that is humans are better than animals, but some people are more human than others. At the most extreme this becomes pseudospeciation: out-groups are treated as a completely different species. It’s not really unusual to find different kinds of Others being mixed up. But mixing up animals and humans is arguably the most powerful form of Othering: they are not just different or inferior kinds of human, they’re not really human at all.

In early modern society the lower classes weren’t just described as animals or compared to animals. They were often treated like animals in practice. People of low status were subjected to corporal punishments like whipping. High status people usually weren’t. The gentry were very keen to exempt themselves from whipping. So poor people were being treated more like animals than like rich people.

Some punishments were very heavily gendered. The scold’s bridle symbolized the idea that women were like animals, because horses were made to wear bits and bridles. But there was also the practical effect that the bridle stopped a woman from speaking. Speech was said to be one of the main things that set humans apart from all other animals. By taking away her power of speech the bridle made a woman more bestial in practice as well as in theory.

In the chain of being, animals were used as symbols to represent order and hierarchies. It was used to justify human hierarchies as much as difference between humans and animals. The Chain of Being wasn’t necessarily talked about a lot in England. This picture is actually from Italy. But there are similar arguments about natural hierarchies in the homily of obedience. The differences between kings and subjects, rich and poor, husbands and wives, were supposedly just as natural and god-given as the difference between humans and animals. If the natural order was broken the consequences would be disastrous. Nobody’s life, family or property would be secure.

To some people that seemed to have come true in the civil wars.

Here we can see animals being used to represent disorder. But there’s more to this than symbols and metaphors. Karl Steel recently published an article called “How to Make a Human”. It’s mostly about medieval texts but there’s a really important idea in it that we might be able to apply to other periods: the human wasn’t just constructed by imagining differences between humans and animals. Humans needed to prove their humanity by dominating animals in reality. Karl mostly focused on hunting: the right to hunt animals defines humans. If people are denied the right to hunt, their humanity is being taken away from them.

We can apply this model to property rights as well as hunting. Owning and controlling animals was part of what it meant to be human. Focusing on animals helps us to see property rights as something arbitrary. It opens up questions about how they were constructed. Property is an important part of social-political history. Competition for resources has a big influence on societies.

Animals were part of this competition in three ways:

• First, they were exploited as resources themselves. Domestic animals were owned as property. Wild animals were hunted and killed.
• Second, their labour helped humans to produce and transport resources. Horse power was a huge part of agriculture and industry. Someone has even argued that animals are part of working class.
• Third, they competed for resources because animals needed to eat too. Domestic animals had to be fed. Wild animals and birds might eat crops or kill domestic livestock.

Because of this competition for resources, animals were often at the centre of disputes over enclosure. There were different ways it could work, depending on what kind of enclosure it was.

Often common pastures were enclosed to make private arable fields for the benefit of wealthier farmers. Poorer cottagers and their animals lost their grazing rights. One way that enclosure rioters could strike back was by driving their animals onto the enclosed fields. Steve Hindle provides some good examples of this from the dispute over Caddington Common in Bedfordshire in the 1630s. In this case some fairly large farmers were opposed to the enclosure. At times they drove over 100 sheep onto the fields. This signified the idea that these fields should be common pastures. It also had a serious material impact. Grazing animals destroyed growing crops. Losing crops had a financial impact on the landowners. But there’s also the fact that these sheep needed to eat. Disputes over rights and tradition were also disputes over resources. The rioters gained by feeding their sheep on resources which the landlords claimed ownership of. So it’s not just semiotics: the fields effectively had been turned back into common pastures for a short time.

Another way that rioters attacked landowners was by cutting the harnesses of their plough horses. That denied the owners control of their horses in real and symbolic terms. And it made it more difficult for them to plough the land.

In other places things were different. Landlords sometimes enclosed common arable fields and turned them into pastures. Land that was previously used to grow food for people was now being used to feed sheep. Steve Hindle’s work on the Midland Rising suggests that the rioters resented being treated worse than sheep. There was obviously a symbolic dimension to this: privileging sheep over people upset the Chain of Being and dehumanized the commoners. But it was closely linked with material things. There were real sheep occupying the land and literally taking food out of the commoners’ mouths.

Wild animals could also be at the centre of disputes. The right to hunt deer was restricted to the elite in theory. Inviting people to hunt on their land or giving gifts of venison were special favours. That reinforced social networks and hierarchies. Hunting was the very thing which Karl Steel points to as defining humanity. So it could be said that by controlling access to their deer the elite assumed the authority to make people more human or less human. But controlling deer was easier said than done. In practice it was very hard to stop poachers. Poaching was an obvious competition for resources. Elite landowners tried to deny lower class people access to venison, but poachers took it anyway. Some incidents were much more destructive than normal poaching. Dan Beaver’s article on the Great Deer Massacre is all about a feud between the Earl of Middlesex and his neighbours. The feud culminated with the killing of hundreds of deer on the Earl’s land. This was a calculated insult to the Earl. Deer and hunting were linked with honour and status. So attacking the deer was a way of undermining the Earl’s status. As part of this symbolic attack, the deer were rounded up and slaughtered en masse like cattle instead of being hunted. On the material side, the deer were dead and the Earl couldn’t benefit from them any more. That undermined his position in a very real way by reducing his wealth and power.

It’s important to note that although there was a lot of disorder in early-modern England, it was quite rare for rioters to physically attack members of the elite. They might say they wanted to, but they very rarely did it. There are lots of possible reasons for that but I’d like to suggest an extra one. It could be that by attacking the landlord’s animals but not the landlord himself, rioters were trying to shift the animal-human boundary back in their favour. I don’t want to push that idea too far. There are lots of examples of gentry taking the lead in poaching and deer massacres. Native Americans carried out revenge attacks on colonists’ livestock even though they probably had very different concepts of animals. But just maybe when poor people in England did it, part of the message was “we’re just as human as you”.

The civil wars added an extra dimension to the competition for resources. Now there were rival armies trying to get resources from civilians.

Horses were a big part of the struggle. On the left there’s a war horse. Armies needed horses to mount cavalry and dragoons. And they needed draught horses to pull artillery and wagons. For example, the establishment of the New Model Army in 1645 included over 8,000 horses.

And on the right there’s a mill horse, because horses were a major part of the civilian economy. Horses were linked with status as well as wealth. Peter Edwards pointed out that a person on a horse could quite literally look down on other people.

There were lots of horses in England, but getting hold of them was potentially a big problem.

In the summer of 1642 the English parliament invited voluntary contributions of horses and money to help build an army. That was very successful at first as you can see from this graph:

But then it dropped off quite drastically in the autumn. In October and November parliament started putting pressure on people to contribute by taxing, disarming and imprisoning them. But as the graph shows, that didn’t have much effect. The contributions kept going down. I think that proves that it was actually very difficult to force people to give up their property if they didn’t want to.

This is when competition between military and civilians really got going. As voluntary contributions went down armies had to resort to taking horses by force. But they found that power didn’t grow from the barrel of a gun. There were lots of ways that civilians could try to protect their property rights. Some soldiers were taken to court for horse theft during or after the civil war. Members of the elite sometimes got their horses back by appealing to parliament or the county committees.

In 1643 the MP Henry Marten was commissioned to raise a cavalry regiment. He caused a lot of trouble by taking horses from the Countess Rivers. She complained to the House of Lords, which ordered Marten to give the horses back. But the House of Commons said that he should keep them. They said that the Lords had breached privilege by giving orders to a member of the Commons. Countess Rivers was Catholic. She was one of the main targets of the Stour Valley riots in 1642. Henry Marten and his allies in the Commons saw her as an enemy of the state. But the majority in the Lords seems to have still seen her as one of their own because she was a Countess. The Lords maintained that it was a breach of privilege to take horses from peers, and their wives and servants, even if they were Catholics or supporters of the King. It looks like there were elements of class, religion, high politics, and maybe gender in this dispute. And horses were right at the centre of it. There was competition for resources: Henry Marten needed horses to mount his troopers. The Countess needed her coach horses to get around. Her coach and horses also symbolized her social status. By taking them away, Marten was insulting her and the House of Lords.

Getting enough soldiers could be just as difficult as getting enough horses. Armies often had to resort to impressment. In 1645 parliament imposed quotas of impressed men and draught horses on counties to build up the New Model Army. When men were rounded up and sent to the army they were being treated like animals.

One way that soldiers could exercise agency was by deserting. But horses could run away too. In October 1642, a group of draught horses was being taken from London to join the Earl of Essex’s army. They broke down a fence and ran off. The conductors in charge of the horses had to claim extra expenses for men to help catch them and for repairing the fence.

Horses added an extra unpredictable element to battles. This is what the royalist officer Sir Richard Bulstrode wrote about the battle of Powicke Bridge:

“This was the first Action I was ever in, and being upon an unruly Horse, he ran away with me amongst the Enemy”

Even in peace time out of control animals could cause problems. An extra motive for deer massacres was that deer sometimes escaped from parks and damaged people’s crops. Rabbit warrens were another source of friction. It was hard to keep the rabbits from escaping and eating up other people’s fields. Again, this is about competition for resources.

At this point you have to ask whether animals can really exercise agency in the same way as humans. That brings us up against the question of free will: what is it? Does it exist? This is a huge philosophical and scientific problem which us historians shouldn’t really be tackling on our own. Just to sum up various positions in the debate, decisions might be:

• free, whatever that might mean
• They might be simply determined by external stimuli or biological instinct
• They might be determined in a more complex way in the unconscious mind
• Or they might be totally random

For the purposes of history we don’t necessarily need to worry about this. Repressive structures and dominant ideologies are supposed to restrict any and all of these things. Biological instincts, conscious decisions, unconscious decisions, randomness. They’re all enemies of order and hierarchy. We know that sometimes people do and say things that they’re not supposed to, even if we don’t know why.

Looking at things that way, animals are no different. They don’t always do what they’re supposed to do. Their minds are just as unknowable as human minds.

The big problem with studying animals in the past is that we can only see them through traces left by humans. Whatever we find is always going to tell us more about human culture than about the animals themselves. There isn’t much answer to that except that it’s a problem with all history. We always have to use imperfect traces that are full of the cultural assumptions of the people who created them. Women’s history, and history from below show us that the dominant elite can’t ever erase all the traces of disobedience.

Even if history ultimately is just The Human Experience, we need to know what it meant to be human. Identities are often formed through opposition, so we need to know as much about both sides of the opposition. We can’t understand the human without understanding the non-human. But binary opposition between human and animal might be too simple. Gender isn’t just a male-female binary. Alexandra Shepard found that masculinity was constructed from a combination of gender, class, age and marriage. We can’t understand it by taking any one of those things on its own, because they interact. Histories of identity used to specialize in one identity and privilege it over others. For Marxists it was class. For feminists it was gender. Now the parts are all coming together. Animals are at least another part of the problem. It could be that what all identity histories are working towards is the construction of the human. It’s about who gets to be human and who doesn’t. It’s about which kinds of human get the power and resources. That affects everything.

1. Virginia DeJohn Anderson, Creatures of Empire (OUP: Oxford, 2004).
2. Daniel C. Beaver, ‘The great deer massacre : animals, honor, and communication in early modern England’, Journal of British Studies, 38 (1999), pp. 187-216.
3. Bruce Thomas Boehrer, Shakespeare among the animals (Palgrave: New York, 2002).
4. Peter Edwards, Horse and Man in Early Modern England (Hambledon Continuum, March 2007).
5. Erica Fudge, Perceiving animals (University of Illinois Press: Urbana, 2002).
6. Erica Fudge (ed.), Renaissance Beasts: of animals, humans, and other wonderful creatures (University of Illinois Press,: Urbana :, 2004).
7. Steve Hindle, ‘Persuasion and Protest in the Caddington Common Enclosure Dispute 1635-1639’, Past and Present, (February 1998), pp. 37-78.
8. Andrew James Hopper, ‘The Wortley Park Poachers and the Outbreak of the English Civil War’, Northern History, 44 (2007), pp. 94-114.
9. Jason Hribal, ‘”Animals are part of the working class”’, Labor History, 44 (2003), pp. 435-453.
10. Arthur Oncken Lovejoy, The Great Chain of Being (Harvard UP, 1972).
11. Brian Manning, The English People and the English Revolution, 1640-1649 (Heinemann Educational: London, 1976).
12. Alexandra Shepard, Meanings of Manhood in Early Modern England (Clarendon Press: Oxford, 2006).
13. Karl Steel, ‘How To Make A Human’, Exemplaria, 20 (2008), pp. 3-27.
14. Keith Thomas, Man and the Natural World (Allen Lane: London, 1983).

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).

Over at Medieval Cripples, Crazies and Imbeciles Pope Bonkface VIII (call him by his name) posted about a memorial plaque to a “dumb” astronomer which highlights the potential absurdities when “dumb” can mean unable to speak or just stupid. This made me realise that disability is yet another thing that intersects with my work on animals. In early-modern England (and presumably in other pre-modern cultures too) speech and reason were supposed to go together, and were supposed to set humans apart from animals. Therefore it might not be a coincidence that “dumb” has those two meanings: in early-modern culture they were very closely related. People who couldn’t speak might not just be seen as stupid, they could potentially have been seen as not entirely human. So Bruce Boehrer’s concept of relative anthropocentrism could apply to disability as well as race, gender, age, class etc.

Next week, on Wednesday 28th May, I’ll be speaking at the FORWARD Network Early Modern Social History Symposium at Nottingham Trent University. I’m going to talk about non-human animals in early-modern society: how we can bring them into social history and why we need to. The keynote speaker will be Lucy Worsley, and they also have what should be a fascinating paper on black dance by Rodreguez King-Dorset.

You can download a leaflet with more details here.

I’m very grateful to Rita Wierzbicki for inviting me to speak at what should be a very exciting event.

Abstract of my paper below:

Non-human animals were a vital part of early-modern society. There has been increasing interest in the non-human in cultural history but less attempt to include animals in social history. Animals were used to symbolize and justify “natural” hierarchies through ideas such as the Chain of Being, but there is more to this than abstract ideas. Karl Steel has recently suggested that the human was constructed not just through imagining differences between humans and animals, but also through very real domination of animals. When people were deprived of the right to hunt, or had their animals taken away, they were effectively being deprived of their humanity.

Competition for finite and unequally distributed resources is a basic part of social and political history. Animals were part of this competition because they were used as resources by humans, because they helped humans to produce and transport resources, and because they competed with humans for access to resources. In some places landlords enclosed open fields into sheep pastures; in others enclosure rioters drove their animals onto enclosed arable land. Symbolic protest combined with the fact that animals and people needed to eat. The authority and wealth of social superiors could be undermined by attacking their animals.

Civil war increased competition for resources. Horse ownership was particularly contested since horses were vital to armies and to the economy. Voluntary contributions from minorities of militant men and women could not sustain armies for long. In 1642-43 the English parliament faced increasing problems in getting enough horses and found that attempts to take them by force were inefficient and counterproductive. Property rights had to be negotiated. But horses were not inanimate objects and would not always do what humans wanted them to do. The pressures of civil war revealed how unstable the animal-human boundary could be.

When I posted about Brian Manning’s The Far Left in the English Revolution I wondered whether it was worth investigating any of his other works. Mercurius Politicus said it was, so I got a copy of The English People and the English Revolution out of the library. It shouldn’t be too much of a surprise that MP was right as he knows a lot more about civil war historiography than I do. As well as a lot of useful material on the outbreak of war in 1642 there are plenty of examples of poaching, deer massacres, and livestock being driven onto disputed enclosures, which is an unexpected bonus for my work on animals.

The Stour valley riots get good coverage, pre-empting many of the major points of John Walter’s argument, apart from Manning’s determination to see class war everywhere . As Walter pointed out, the victims were all suspected royalists or catholics. Manning took elite perceptions of the mob’s motives too much at face value. Sir Thomas Barrington and Harbottle Grimston might have been alarmed by the many-headed monster, but they weren’t attacked themselves and probably weren’t in much danger compared to Countess Rivers. As Manning acknowledged, the Earl of Warwick’s steward was saved from a mob when someone recognised that he really was the Earl of Warwick’s steward.

The thing I found most interesting was an enclosure dispute in Huntingdonshire in 1641 in which Oliver Cromwell supported the commoners and Lord Mandeville acted on behalf of his father, the Earl of Manchester. This was the same Lord Mandeville who, after succeeding to his father’s title, became general of the Eastern Association. The feud between Manchester and Cromwell in 1644 is very well-known but I had no idea that animosity between them might go back this far. Other people might well have made the connection, but there isn’t any mention of it in Malcolm Wanklyn’s reassessment of Manchester.

1. Brian Manning, The English People and the English Revolution, 1640-1649 (Heinemann Educational: London, 1976).
2. Brian Manning, The far left in the English Revolution 1640 to 1660 (Bookmarks,: London :, 1999).
3. John Walter, Understanding Popular Violence in the English Revolution (Cambridge University Press: Cambridge, 1999).
4. Maclolm D. G. Wanklyn, ‘A General Much Maligned’, War In History, 14 (2007), pp. 133-156.

And now the return of my series of posts about English/British Civil War(s)/Revolution(s) historiography. Today I’m considering Brian Manning’s The Far Left in the English Revolution. Published in 1999, this is one of the most recent examples of old-school Marxism. If you’ve read any of my previous posts on causes and allegiance you’ll know that I’m not really a fan of Marxism, but I’m trying to see the good as well as the bad. I’ll always have a certain amount of respect for him simply because he’s always been prepared to offer a clear, succinct, and empirically testable definition of “revolution”. It’s surprising how unusual that is for a historian of this period.

At first sight the title of the book might seem a bit anachronistic. Manning explains that he defines conservatives as the right and radicals as the left, and that he is particularly interested in the most radical people, who went further than mainstream anti-royalists in advocating such things as redistribution of wealth. He is obviously imposing an arbitrary taxonomy onto the past which wouldn’t have been understood at the time, but aren’t we all? Perhaps lumping all of the most radical groups and individuals into a single category labeled “the far left” partly undermines his argument that people shouldn’t be put into boxes and that class and beliefs were fluid rather than fixed (p. 47).

This book is a general survey rather than the result of detailed original research. The sources cited are mostly secondary works, along with some contemporary pamphlets. As far as I can tell the footnotes do not mention any manuscripts at all. You don’t have to be a document fetishist to see this as a limitation. The archives are full of unexplored opportunities. Concentrating only on what has been published in print closes down an awful lot of possibilities. For example, early-modern court records are full of poor people saying things that they weren’t supposed to say, and the fact that they were punished afterwards can’t erase the fact that they said it. The most glaring omission is when Manning mentions that plans for a Fifth Monarchist revolt were carefully recorded in a manuscript journal, but doesn’t cite the manuscript.

While this book shares Christopher Hill’s weaknesses when it comes to archival research, Manning’s style of writing is very different, being much more analytical than Hill. This makes his work more sensible but less enjoyable to read. Overall the book is very useful as a succinct summary of what had been written about class and radical ideas up to 1999.

The main focus is on the later 1640s and the 1650s, so much of it is not very relevant to the project I’m working on, which is mainly about how war broke out in 1642. Manning sees the revolution as a long process rather than a single event. Although he puts the most important changes in 1648-49, he also considers the First Civil War to be the beginning of the class struggle which led to revolution. He has relatively little to say about allegiance because he seems to assume that there was nothing to it other than class consciousness (although he sees class as fluid rather than fixed). Therefore he completely fails to explain how Charles I got together armies which could fight against the oppressed masses for nearly 4 years and come close to defeating them. Pointing out that revolutions often begin with alliances between different classes (pp. 14-15), Manning insists that the presence of members of all classes on the parliamentarian side does not disprove the idea that the First Civil War was a class war. It’s not clear how he would deal with the possibility of members of all classes being present on the royalist side too, because he doesn’t mention it at all.

On the parliamentarian side there is plenty of evidence of temporary alliances between different groups with different aims, and of conflicting interests between groups and individuals of different social and economic status. For example, my work on horse requisitioning suggests that the House of Lords was much more interested in protecting the status and property rights of peers than the House of Commons. The real problem is that none of these groups can be shown to represent an entire class, or even a majority of a class (and in the Marxist interpretation classes are very big and general things). Manning says that “opposition to Charles I and the royalists brought together a few aristocrats, some gentry and merchants, numerous farmers and artisans as well as labourers”. That’s likely to be true if you look at the absolute numbers of each group who were active in the parliamentarian war effort, but possibly not as a proportion of their classes. This could be restated as “a minority of peers, a minority of gentry and merchants, a minority of farmers and artisans”. Manning has done nothing to refute John Morrill’s argument that most people didn’t want to fight in 1642. He hasn’t even mentioned it.

That’s about all there is that’s directly relevant to what I’m working on, but I also want to discuss some more general problems with Marxist approaches to this period.

Gender is a big problem which Marxism doesn’t seem to be very well equipped to deal with. Women are likely to be one of the biggest oppressed groups in most societies in most periods. While poor people of both genders would make up the biggest oppressed group in 17th century England, women of all classes would probably come in second (yes, these groupings are very arbitrary and hide a lot of diversity, but I’m trying to engage with Marxism here). Manning doesn’t seem very interested in gender relations, briefly citing De Ste Croix, who wonders whether women should be counted as a class but decides that they shouldn’t, before sweeping the whole issue under the carpet (p. 19). I think counting women as part of their class misses an awful lot. Elite women might have had more wealth and power than poor women, but they were hardly equal with their husbands, fathers or brothers.

Manning’s denial that the Marxist distinction between base and superstructure leads to economic determinism isn’t very convincing (p. 36):

The Marxist conception of an economic base and an ideological superstructure may slip into, or be misinterpreted as, a crude economic determinism, but this is due to omitting the crucial intervening factor of class relations, which are formed by economic conditions but which give rise to ideology via the medium of class consciousness and class struggle

Isn’t this the same thing? Adding more jargon might make it harder to understand, but it still ultimately seems to mean that economy leads to ideology. If the economic base forms class relations which are based on economic inequality, and if class consciousness is an awareness of that inequality, and class struggle is an attempt to eliminate inequality, how does ideology arise from anything other than economic conditions?

I think Manning is right to argue that religion and politics can’t be separated because the Bible provided inspiration and justification for radical ideas such as redistribution of wealth. However, I’d go further and suggest that religion and political ideology are just parts of culture, and that all parts of culture are inseparable. I don’t think we should ignore class consciousness, but maybe we need to look at it as a cultural construct which isn’t necessarily determined by the economic base. If, as Trotsky said, revolutions are caused by changes in states of mind (p. 32) then maybe we need to pay more attention to culture. Although Manning fails to defend the base/superstructure model (perhaps because it can’t be defended?), he does seem to be sincere about not being an economic determinist. The meat of this book is very much about what people thought (or at least about what they wrote). I think paying attention to radical ideas is definitely a good thing. Manning makes a good case for not ignoring radicals just because they were an unsuccessful minority. We need to remember that even the most dominant ideologies can never be totally hegemonic. The “far left” failed to destroy the patriarchal order, but they could still imagine, talk about, and attempt its destruction. I think Manning is right to rescue the Levellers from the sanitization of other historians and recover their potential for violence.

I also think he’s spot on when he calls Margaret Spufford “myopic” for insisting that there is no radical political subtext in the popular story of Thomas Hickathrift (p. 72). The symbolism could hardly be more heavy-handed if the giant had a sign around his neck saying “I represent the upper classes”. Some revisionist historians went out of their way to deny agency and political consciousness to the poor. Their focus on consensus and deference was suspiciously similar to the seventeenth-century elite’s protesting-too-much insistence on the naturalness of the established order. It seems strange that Conrad Russell pursued such a conservative agenda in his historical writing when he was so progressive in real life. However, Brian Manning seems to occupy an opposite extreme, desperate to find the origins of socialism in the 1640s. He’s half right when he says that concern of the oppressed is the “seedbed of socialism” (p. 37) but concern for the oppressed is also a characteristic of liberal humanism and postmodernism. All three ideologies take very different directions from that starting point. For example, Manning argues that “a ruling class which was self selected on the basis of birth and wealth was more undemocratic than one self selected on the principle of ‘godliness’ without respect to birth or wealth” (pp. 120-1). The prospect of an undemocratic self selected theocracy would be truly horrifying to most liberals and postmodernists, and probably to most socialists too! The attempt to find embryonic socialism also leads to a privileging of some points of view over others which seem to have been equally (un?)popular at the time. He cites examples of poor people fantasizing about inverting the social order and ruling over the former elite as well as visions of true equality, but tends to focus on the latter (p. 38).

Ultimately we don’t have to worry about Marxism too much any more, because the best historiography from Revel, Riot and Rebellion onwards has broken out of the Marxist vs Revisionist dialectic. Historians as diverse as David Underdown, John Adamson, Andy Wood, John Walter, and Jason Peacey are not just synthesizing false extremes to arrive at a false centre. They have found completely different ways of looking at things.

Finally I want to point out another false dichotomy: that between socialism and capitalism. From a green perspective they don’t look very different because they both assume that man (and woman, to a lesser extent) has a natural right exploit all non-human animals, vegetables and minerals. While some millenarians saw an end to devouring fellow creatures (p. 118), most of the radical tracts which Manning cites are unquestioningly anthropocentric. For example, one Leveller tract asserted that “All men being alike privileged by birth, so all men were to enjoy the creatures alike” (p. 50). The Quakers believed that god had given the earth “to the sons of men in general” (p. 53). Winstanley imagined a time when “there shall be no barrenness in the earth or cattle, for they shall bring forth abundantly” and even that there would be no more “unseasonable storms and distempers” (p. 58). This is in direct contrast to the homily of obedience which insisted (perhaps a bit too desperately) that god had put thunder and lightning into “a most excellent and perfect order”. Seventeenth-century England was so far from consensus that even the weather was ideologically contested.

1. Brian Manning, The far left in the English Revolution 1640 to 1660 (Bookmarks, London, 1999).
2. David Underdown, Revel, riot, and rebellion (Clarendon Press: Oxford, 1985).

My seminar paper went really well yesterday, especially considering the fact that I haven’t done one for six years. Below is a version of the paper. This is a draft of what I wrote, but what I actually said came out a bit different – you had to be there. If I was doing it again I’d probably change it even more. The maps here are slightly different from the ones in the presentation as I can’t work out how to link to two or more Google Maps overlaid on each other at the same time. Maybe you can’t. For the presentation I just took screenshots of them. For the other illustrations, click the thumbnails to see full size pictures. And if you’re from Lincoln you might like to try and identify all of the animals. I wonder if Stewart Lee could correctly identify all of them…

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

We’ll start with the great chain of being. This was a big idea in medieval and early modern theology and philosophy, which goes back to Plato. Everything in the world formed a hierarchy in order of how perfect it was. You can see god at the top – he’s totally perfect. Then angels, they’re not quite perfect. People are below god and angels but above everything else. People were in a unique position of being spiritual and physical at the same time. Angels were purely spiritual. Animals were only physical – it was generally believed that they didn’t have souls. The animals are divided into 3 levels. Below humans there are birds, then fish, then land animals. It looks like a strange idea now, but it tells us a lot about early-modern beliefs.

This picture is a simplified version with only a few links in the chain. The full blown idea was hard to represent visually because the number of links in the chain was infinite. Everything that could possibly exist had to exist, and each being was only slightly different from the one above or below it. In this form the idea of the Chain of Being probably didn’t mean much to most people as it’s quite hard to understand. There might have been a few intellectuals who spent their time worrying about whether a bird was better than a fish, but in practice the phrase “chain of being” doesn’t seem to crop up very often in early modern England. I actually had trouble finding a picture of it, so this one isn’t from 17th century England! [it's originally from Rhetorica Christiana by Didacus Valades, reproduced in Anthony Fletcher's Gender, Sex and Subordination in England] But the idea of a natural order of things was very widespread, even if it wasn’t as sophisticated as the things that Leibniz or Spinoza came out with. Most people would have known from the book of Genesis that God put man in charge of all the animals. It was generally believed that animals only existed for the use of humans. In practice that power wasn’t shared equally. Class hierarchies gave rights over animals to some people and not others. For example, the right to hunt deer was limited to the upper classes. Rights over animals were heavily gendered, because domestic animals were treated as property, and in theory (but not always in practice) married women weren’t allowed to own property.

Hierarchies of class and gender were related to the Chain of Being, but again this was a less sophisticated version. Instead of an infinite number of grades, the early modern elite tended to lump society into three levels:

• The peerage
• The gentry
• And everyone else!

The common people who made up everyone else were actually more diverse than the elite liked to think. Historians have been increasingly interested in the middling sort, who were yeoman farmers, craftsmen and tradesmen. They were below the gentry but above the poor. Although they weren’t really rich they were reasonably well off, and they were particularly concerned with property rights. Marxist historians like to see them as a proto-bourgeoisie. Marxism is also based on an oversimplified three class model, but for the purposes of this paper I’m going to follow that to a certain extent, dividing people roughly into the elite, the middling sort, and the commoners, just because it’s convenient.

In practice the early modern elite simplified things even more than this. They didn’t always make a distinction between the everyone else and the animals! It wasn’t unusual for the patriarchal elite to portray women, foreigners, and the lower classes as bestial. This is what Bruce Boehrer called “relative anthropocentrism”. People are better than animals, but some people are more human than others. Steve Hindle’s work on enclosure riots has thrown up quite a few examples of the gentry comparing rioters to sheep, and of rioters complaining because they were being treated like sheep or worse than sheep.

The link between the Chain of Being and class hierarchies was made very obvious in the Homily of Obedience. This was from the book of sermons that were supposed to be preached in church on Sundays. The law said that everyone had to go to church every Sunday, so most people should have been familiar with these sermons. The Homily of Obedience put a huge stress on order:

Almighty God hath created & appointed all things, in heaven, earth, and waters, in a most excellent and perfect order.

In heaven, he hath appointed distinct orders and states of Archangels and Angels.

In earth he hath assigned kings, princes, with other governors under them, all in good and necessary order.

The water above is kept and raineth down in due time and season.

The sun, moon, stars, rainbow, thunder, lightning, clouds, and all birds of the air, do keep their order.

The earth, trees, seeds, plants, herbs, corn, grass, and all manner of beasts, keep them in their order.

All the parts of the whole year, as winter, summer, months, nights and days, continue in their order.

All kinds of fishes in the sea, rivers and waters, with all fountains, springs, yea, the seas themselves, keep their comely course and order.

Every degree of people, in their vocation, calling, and office, hath appointed to them, their duty and order.

Some are in high degree, some in low, some king’s and princes, some inferiors and subjects, priests, and layman, masters and servants, fathers and children, husbands and wives, riche and poor, and every one have need of other:

This is obviously how the elite would like things to be, not how they actually were. It’s hard to believe that rain, thunder and lightning are perfectly ordered! And the months in the Christian calendar aren’t actually natural. You have to suspect that under the surface there was a lot of anxiety. This obsession with keeping things in order could suggest a fear that things were not really stable and ordered.

The Homily of Obedience makes it very clear what would happen if the natural order was upset:

For where there is no right order, there reigneth all abuse, carnal liberty, enormity, sin, and Babylonicall confusion.

Take away kings, princes, rulers, magistrates, judges, and such states of Gods order, no man shall ride or go by the high way unrobbed, no man shall sleep in his own house or bed unkilled, no man shall keep his wife, children, and possessions in quietness:

all things shall be common, and there must needs follow all mischief and utter destruction, both of souls, bodies, goods and commonwealths.

There’s a paradox here. You’d think that it would be quite difficult to overthrow the natural God given order, but there seems to be a huge anxiety that it could happen very easily.

But this idea is still very useful to the elite, as long as they can keep everyone believing it, because it justifies the political system. Class, property, age and gender were all lumped into the supposedly natural order. If these hierarchies were part of God’s natural order, then it was assumed that they’d never changed and never could or should change. If the lower classes are dominated by that kind of conservative ideology it limits their freedom. But the same thing also limits the freedom of the elite. They might be quite comfortable in their position, but it’s difficult for them to improve it. If they go too far in changing things the people below them in the chain might start to resist the changes to preserve what they thought was the natural order.

The other big problem with this world view is that although linking all the different hierarchies together might help them to reinforce each other, it can also increase anxiety. If one hierarchy comes under threat then they’re all under threat. Any changes in the established order might threaten property rights.

Both of these problems were apparent in the Civil Wars.

Some historians have argued that it was Charles I who was being radical and that parliamentary opposition was a conservative reaction to preserve the traditional order. Not everyone agrees with that, but we can be certain that this kind of conservative view dominated the debates at the time. Whatever opponents of Charles I were really trying to do, their public rhetoric was usually framed in terms of tradition. Both sides claimed to be defending tradition against the other’s innovations. That suggests that conservative ideology was very dominant.

Once the war started, it turned out to be very disruptive. Both sides had to compromise on maintaining order and tradition where it wasn’t compatible with winning the war. And war created opportunities for people who weren’t happy with traditional hierarchies.

This famous quote from Sir John Oglander is suspiciously similar to the Homily of Obedience:

Thou wouldest think it strange if I should tell thee there was a time in England when brothers killed brothers, cousins cousins, and friends their friends.

Nay, when they conceived it was no offence to commit murder.

To murder a man held less offence than to kill a dog, and they would glory in their actions as if they had done a pious deed.

When thou wentest to bed at night, thou knewest not whether thou shouldest be murdered afore day.

To take away other men’s goods was held as lawful as to sell thy own, although the former owners went a-begging.

Sacrilege was a virtue, and to rail against sovereignty esteemed a high piece of piety.

Again this shows the belief that hierarchies were linked. The order’s been upset so badly that men are being treated worse than dogs, and property rights aren’t being respected.

This pamphlet is another very well known response to the civil war:

This was published in January 1647 – that’s a couple of years before the king was executed and the monarchy was abolished, but even so you can see a lot of anxiety about the natural order being upset. It seems to be the work of a moderate conservative who wanted everything to go back to how it was under Elizabeth I, especially the Church of England.

Most of it’s about religion and Ireland. He’s complaining that the Irish rebellion still hasn’t been put down, and that people aren’t respecting the order and authority of the Church of England. So he’s got lots of nasty things to say about Catholics and about radical protestant sects. You can see the religious themes directly represented by the upside down church at the top of the picture, but most of it uses animals to illustrate how hierarchies have been inverted. You can see a rat chasing a cat; a rabbit chasing a dog. Even worse, the cart’s before the horse. It wasn’t unusual for printers to use an off the shelf woodcut to illustrate pamphlets, but in this case the text explicitly refers to some of the things shown in the picture.

The animal pictures are obviously metaphors. I don’t think anyone really believed that horses were driving carts. But it shows a belief that hierarchies were all connected and were all part of the natural order. The Catholic Irish rebelling against the king, and separatists forming their own congregations outside the Church of England, were all supposedly as unnatural as putting the cart before the horse.

Even before the war started a lot of the gentry were worried about what would happen if king and parliament started fighting each other. There’s a lot of evidence that most people didn’t want a war. When it happened anyway they tried to stay out of it as far as they could. But some members of the elite were prepared to fight. If they weren’t then there wouldn’t have been a war. John Adamson’s recent book, The Noble Revolt, argues that the war was the result of a conspiracy by a small group of barons to take over the government. That’s OK as far as it goes, but it doesn’t explain everything.

It wasn’t inevitable that a dispute between the elite about the government would lead to a full-blown civil war. If the war was limited to peers and MPs it would have been very different. The Wars of the Roses are a good example of what that kind of war might have been like. The first battle of St Albans in 1455 was basically a few noblemen and their retainers beating each other up. The first major battle of the civil war, at Edgehill in October 1642, involved 20 or 30,000 soldiers.

To get from one to the other, the elite factions needed wider support. They needed thousands of men from the lower ranks of society to serve as soldiers. They needed money, weapons, and equipment. And they needed horses.

Like these…

On the left there’s a war horse. Horses were vitally important for early modern armies. Cavalry needed horses to ride, and the whole army needed horse drawn wagons. The army that parliament raised in 1642 probably included around 7 or 8,000 horses. It was all too easy for an army to lose horses. They could be killed or captured by the enemy; they could die of disease, exhaustion or starvation; they could be stolen and sold by deserters; they might have to be left behind if they went lame. It wasn’t unusual for armies in this period to lose 60 or 70 per cent of their horses in a year.

And on the right there’s a mill horse, representing working horses, because horses were a major part of the economy. They were used for transport, agriculture, and industry. They were also status symbols. Peter Edwards says that a man on a horse could literally look down on other people. This meant that there were huge numbers of horses in England which could potentially be used by the armies. But it also meant that their owners could be reluctant to part with them. The horses themselves didn’t get much choice. Horses were generally seen as property more than beings in their own right. One side effect of that is that horse supply gives some interesting insights into property rights. It’s harder to get at the reality of animals as animals, but that comes through sometimes even when their owners were determined to treat them as objects.

There were more than enough horses in England to satisfy the demands of both sides. The problem was how to get hold of them.

The county of Essex was a major source of horses for parliament. Things can get confusing here because the Lord General of parliament’s armies was the Earl of Essex, but he wasn’t really connected with the county of Essex. His estates were mostly in Staffordshire. The most important lord in the county of Essex was the Earl of Warwick.

The first system that Parliament used to raise an army for the Earl of Essex was known as the “propositions”. In June 1642 they invited people to contribute money, horses and arms to help defend parliament and the protestant religion from the King and the Catholics. Most royalists weren’t actually Catholics, but parliament’s propaganda said that there was a Popish conspiracy. The contributions were supposed to be a loan. The full value was going to be paid back at some unspecified point in the future from some unspecified source.

Contributions started with MPs and peers in parliament itself. As you’d expect from committed members of the elite, they brought in quite a lot. For example the Earl of Essex listed 20 horses valued at £560. But if it was only down to their contributions the forces would still have been very small. To get the army which fought at Edgehill they needed wider support. The records of the propositions show that they got it.

The system was very centralized and left detailed records – so detailed that it took me about 2 weeks to type the lists into a database! These lists include descriptions and values of all the horses that were brought in, the names of their owners, and often the owner’s address and occupation (but not always). It just happens that the records from Essex are really good.

This is the total number of cavalry horses that were brought in each month, from everywhere.

It took a while for the system to get going. Only a few hundred horses in June and July. Most of them came from London. Then in August it goes right up. This is when lots of horses started to come in from other places. Then it starts to go down in the autumn. Up to October the contributions were supposed to be voluntary. By the end of October people were being put under more pressure to contribute. Non-contributors were to be treated as “delinquents”, meaning they could be disarmed and imprisoned. In November a tax was imposed on anyone who hadn’t contributed according to their ability. That was obviously a response to the fact that contributions were going down. But it didn’t work. They kept going down even when people were under threat of being taxed or put in prison. That suggests that parliament’s authority wasn’t very strong. Ordinances of parliament couldn’t make people give up their property if they didn’t want to give it up.

So the contributions in the summer weren’t forced, but they weren’t spontaneous either.

This chart shows how many horses came in from the county of Essex every day in August and September. There’s a fairly steady background level but some very big spikes.

Where I can identify the place names I’ve plotted them on a map.

View Larger Map

This is the contributions for the 17th of August, which was one of the busiest days. They’re all concentrated in the west and in the south-east of the county. There’s a big gap in the north-east around Colchester.

View Larger Map

This one is for the 9th of September. It’s almost the exact opposite. A few horses from the south and west but not many. Most of them are from the area around Colchester which was empty in the last map.

This suggests that contributions were highly organised at county level. People waited for the local authorities to come round and ask them for horses. When they were asked some people were happy to give up their horses. But they didn’t all rush down to London in the middle of June. If the local authorities were putting pressure on people it only worked so far. Otherwise you’d expect much higher contributions.

There was wider support for the parliamentarian cause than just the peers and MPs, but we’re still dealing with quite a small minority of the population. No more than 3,000 individuals in the whole kingdom listed cavalry horses in 1642. That’s not many when you consider that there were 9,000 parishes in England, so on average that’s about a third of a horse per parish! The population of London is reckoned to be about 300,000, and the population of Essex was about 85,000. Compared to that 3,000 is a very small number.

That’s partly because the lists only show people who had horses to spare. Although lots of people owned horses, horses were very valuable and not everyone could afford to give them away. The average value of a cavalry horse in these lists is £14. That includes weapons and equipment because it’s not possible to separate them, but it shows that we’re dealing with wealthy people. Where the occupations or social status are given they show that the vast majority of the donors were from the gentry or the middling sort. Even so, the donors probably represent a minority of their classes. There must have been other people who also had plenty of horses but who didn’t donate any.

Donations of money might show different patterns. People who couldn’t afford to give a whole horse might still be able to give a small amount of money, so that could go further down the social scale. We also have to take into account the men who joined the army as soldiers. But even putting together all the people who served in the army and all the people made material contributions to the war effort, it took a relatively small minority of the population to start the war. Later the scope of the war expanded to involve a majority of the population in one way or another, but that’s not how it was in 1642. The battle of Edgehill came about because of relatively small numbers of committed activists. It was far more than just a Noble Revolt, but it was nothing like a mass popular movement either. That doesn’t mean that participation was limited by class. People from all levels of society were involved in one way or another.

Because we’re dealing with wealthy property owners the lists are dominated by men, but there are some women too. They were nearly all widows because it was easier for widows to own property in their own right. You can see gender ideology at work in the lists, because men are listed by occupation or social status, but women are listed by marital status – that wasn’t unusual for the time.

The creation of the Earl of Essex’s army in 1642 demonstrates people from nearly all levels of society exercising agency. The masses also exercised agency in other ways which were outside parliament’s formal military and administrative structures.

In 1642 the majority of horse owners in England weren’t committed to either side. While supporters of parliament were donating horses to the Earl of Essex’s army, royalist supporters were doing the same for the King. Parliament was trying to stop them. In the summer of 1642 parliament developed a system of disarming people identified as ‘delinquents’. The definition of ‘delinquent’ included all Catholics as well as active royalists, and the definition got wider as the year went on. The propositions system was implemented from the top down, but the disarming of delinquents was not so centralized. In May and June 1642 local officials, such as mayors, began impounding horses and arms which were being taken to join the King at York. These actions weren’t always ordered in advance by parliament, but were usually authorised afterwards. By August, parliament was giving specific instructions to local authorities to disarm all delinquents in their counties. As well as denying horses and arms to the royalists, this was an extra source of supply for parliament. It was also an opportunity for popular participation in the war.

A major riot broke out in Colchester in August 1642, and spread through the Stour valley, resulting in several days of violence and destruction over a wide area of Essex and Suffolk. Marxists have seen this as an example of class war. Revisionists have claimed that the riots were not political. They’re both wrong. John Walter studied the riots in detail and found that they were probably motivated by popular parliamentarianism. Horses played a vital role.

Sir John Lucas was a wealthy gentleman who lived just outside the walls of Colchester. There was a long running feud between his family and the town. There were disputes over land going back to the dissolution of the monasteries, but some new problems appeared in the reign of Charles I. Sir John was an enthusiastic supporter of the personal rule – he collected ship money and supported religious changes by appointing clergy who were sympathetic to Archbishop Laud. By the summer of1642 he was a committed royalist and was getting together horses and arms for the king’s army.

In response to this a crowd of men and women from Colchester attacked his house and impounded the horses. The details of the attack and the identities of the rioters are difficult to discover, but it’s very significant that the mayor of Colchester was involved in impounding the horses. As John Walter points out (and this also agrees with my own work on horse seizing) this is a familiar pattern. It fits in with other examples of local officials stopping horses on their way to the King. The actions of the crowd at Colchester were almost certainly inspired by parliament’s policy of disarming delinquents. Parliament even authorized their actions after the event and thanked them for their services.

But things went much further than parliament intended. Rioting spread through Essex and Suffolk, with crowds attacking the houses of Catholic gentry and Laudian clergy. Again this fits in with parliament’s definition of delinquents at this time, but parliament and the local elites were uncomfortable with the way things seemed to be getting out of hand. While the crowds were inspired by parliament’s official policies and anti-catholic propaganda, they were clearly exercising agency, not following orders.

That was a double edged sword for parliament. It was useful to have mobs keeping the local royalists down, but crowd violence worried the local gentry. As you’d expect, they were anxious about disorder and disruption – what if the rioters decided to overthrow the social order? Just like in the homily of obedience, they thought they might lose their lives and property. They wanted to call out the militia to put down the riots by force. That put parliament in a difficult situation because they didn’t want to alienate the gentry, and because popular disorder was great for royalist propaganda. When it came to attracting the support of people who wanted to maintain the traditional order, the king already had an advantage because he was the king. Parliament was rebelling against him and had already taken on unprecedented powers. Being associated with mobs of common people only made things look worse. In the end, parliament sent a message to the rioters saying that they’d done well but that they should go home in case they made things look bad.

As long as parliament had enough voluntary contributions from their committed supporters the property of the uncommitted majority was reasonably safe, except where the army quartered soldiers on them. That didn’t happen much in Essex because it was a long way from the fighting. Royalists and catholics were a clearly defined Other. Their property could be taken without arousing too much anxiety or opposition from non-delinquents. In fact it could be immensely popular, as we’ve just seen in Colchester. According to parliamentarian propaganda it was the King, with his arbitrary government and popish army, who was threatening liberty and property. In late 1642 voluntary contributions were drying up, and the boundaries between “us” and “them” were shifting. Because the activists on both sides were a minority they couldn’t provide enough resources to sustain the war themselves. That wouldn’t have been a problem if the war had finished quickly, which it might have done if things had gone a bit differently at the battle of Edgehill. As it turned out, there was no quick decision. That meant that both sides needed access to the resources of the uncommitted majority to keep on fighting. Parliament’s government became more arbitrary, moving towards the view that “if you’re not with us you’re against us”. This put parliament on a collision course with the very rights it claimed to be defending.

In November 1642 a new measure was introduced to supply horses for the army. Several men, including Thomas Browne, Maximilian Bard, and the horse dealer John Stiles, were given arbitrary powers to seize any horses within 5 miles of London which had not already been listed. This was not limited to royalists or even non-contributors. Only peers and their servants were exempt. Although they secured several hundred horses for the army, there were so many complaints that parliament revoked their power in January 1643. That shows that parliament was prepared to listen to the concerns of property owners: it wasn’t arbitrary government yet.

By this time there was no adequate system in place to supply horses for parliament’s armies, especially the Earl of Essex’s army. Voluntary contributions had dropped off drastically by the end of 1642 and were probably lower than the army’s attrition rate. There was not enough money in the treasury to buy horses. Therefore the army had no alternative but to take horses wherever they could be found. Throughout the first half of 1643, the Lord General issued warrants to his officers authorizing them to seize horses for their troops. Although it was usually specified that they should take horses from delinquents they weren’t always very careful in practice. In any case, the supply of horses from active royalists had been almost entirely exhausted by mid-1643, if not before. In May 1643 parliament passed the sequestration ordinance, which deprived royalists of all their property. Inventories of goods seized by the sequestrators only mention a few horses, and most of them were unfit for military service. Most of the serviceable horses had already been taken during the disarmament of delinquents which began in the summer of 1642. This meant that even committed parliamentarians could have their horses taken by soldiers. Although allowing soldiers to take horses was necessary because there was no other way of getting them, it led to abuses and breakdowns of discipline. Once you let soldiers take civilian property, it was harder to stop them taking more than they needed. There were also many cases of extortion, where soldiers returned horses to their owners in return for a bribe, which they kept themselves.

Obviously, there was a lot of horse seizing in the areas where the army was quartered. In the spring and summer of 1643, the Earl of Essex’s army was mostly operating in the Thames valley, so that area suffered quite badly. It was difficult for civilians to resist armed soldiers, but they sometimes prosecuted the soldiers for theft later on. Some army officers were pursued through the courts for years by people whose horses they’d taken. So to the extent that power grew from the barrel of a gun, it was actually quite limited.

This kind of requisitioning wasn’t just limited to the areas where the army was operating. The county of Essex was a long way from the fighting but had already proved to be an important source of horses. In the spring of 1643, the Lord General sent Colonel Walter Long into Essex to take horses for the army and collect tax arrears. Long was very unpopular, was accused of abusing his powers, and was eventually recalled by parliament. Clive Holmes wrote an article about this in the early 1970s. He saw the incident in terms of binary oppositions between military and civilian, and between local and central: the local gentry resented an outsider army officer interfering in their affairs. There was an element of this, but it doesn’t tell the whole story.

There was another group of horse takers operating in Essex at the same time as Colonel Long. He claimed that they were committing the abuses that he’d been accused of: taking horses from well-affected people, taking bribes to return horses to their owners. He even went as far as arresting them and seizing the horses that they’d seized! Colonel Long could now portray himself as protecting the civilians of Essex against the plundering of soldiers. To emphasise his claim to legitimacy, Long examined his prisoners in the presence of some local officials, and sent the evidence to the county committee and to parliament. The men Long had arrested were local men, and claimed to have a warrant authorising them to take horses. This warrant was from Lord Grey, major-general of the Eastern Association, an organisation set up in December 1642 for the mutual defence of the East Anglian counties, including Essex. In practice Lord Grey was mostly independent of the Earl of Essex. So this is not just military versus civilians. There was rivalry between two different armies which were competing for resources. They were also competing for legitimacy because they needed the co-operation of local communities, or at least the local elites, in order to extract those resources. Colonel Long was seeking to enhance his own legitimacy by denying legitimacy to Lord Grey’s horse takers. In his letter to parliament he questioned whether the warrant was genuine. He also claimed that the men named in the warrant had exceeded their authority by appointing deputies. The other horse takers were also trying to claim legitimacy. One of their strategies was to tell people that they were authorised by the Earl of Warwick. As I said before, he was the most powerful Lord in the county and seems to have been very popular.

Ultimately Long failed to get the Essex gentry on his side. They preferred to see him as a scapegoat and continued complaining to parliament. Parliament was in another tricky situation, but they got out of it by playing the factions off against each other. Colonel Long was withdrawn from Essex to placate the local gentry. But the horses he took were never given back to their owners. They were taken up to London to recruit the Earl of Essex’s army.

That’s just one of the ways that the issue of horse seizing caused major problems in 1643. It wasn’t just a case of local against central. Parliament was divided against itself. There were different factions in both houses, and it’s not always easy to distinguish who was in which faction, or what motivated the factions. The journals of the houses don’t give any details of debates, they only tell us the results of what was decided. Judging by these results, in general the House of Commons pushed for more aggressive measures to secure a supply of horses, and the House of Lords tried to protect private property. In July 1643 the Commons came up with a bill to requisition all horses within several miles of London, and the Lords came up with a bill to ban the seizure of horses in a similar area. Somehow they reached a compromise to raise a new flying army of cavalry to be commanded by the Earl of Manchester. It was originally planned to be an independent army that could operate anywhere, but that soon changed. In August Manchester replaced Lord Grey as commander of the Eastern Association. Later parts of the forces raised for the flying army were transferred to the Earl of Essex and other armies.

To raise this new army, parliament imposed quotas of horses on each county and let the county committee decide how to get them. The county of Essex had to supply 500 cavalry and 1,000 mounted infantry. The committee achieved this very quickly, which suggests that they weren’t narrow minded localists. It’s even more impressive when you consider that several other counties failed to meet their quota. Surrey and Kent hadn’t even started in September. Hertfordshire, Buckinghamshire and Middlesex had arrears which weren’t collected until the following year, if at all. The Essex committee set a quota tax on the parishes of the county but they didn’t wait for the tax to be collected before they supplied the horses to the army. They bought at least 100 horses from the Smithfield horse dealer John Stiles. He demanded part payment in advance. The Essex committee were able to pay him, probably by taking out a loan against future tax revenues.

The remainder of the horses for the quota were seized from civilians by army officers and county committee members, but this caused surprisingly little trouble compared to the activities of Colonel Long. This was possibly because the new requisitions were seen as more legitimate. They were authorised by an ordinance of parliament and by the county committee. One of the officers in charge of the seizures was Captain Nathaniel Rich. He was from a local gentry family and distantly related to the Earl of Warwick. Horse owners who were identified as well-affected to parliament were promised repayment for their horses, and this seems to have been made from the tax revenues when they had been collected. This was a more benign system than being plundered by the army, but it still amounted to people’s property being taken away. They had less scope to resist when local and central government were united against them, whereas the local elites had been willing to support horse owners against Colonel Long. It was this alignment of forces that made all the difference. Individual property owners found it hard to resist.

The flying army quota was a one-off measure. Like the propositions it wasn’t a long term solution. It created new forces and reinforced existing ones but didn’t make any provision for replacement horses.

Things changed in 1644. By this time parliament had enough regular tax revenues to buy horses on a large scale. People seem to have been reasonably happy with paying regular taxes. That doesn’t mean they really wanted to give their money away. There was still resistance and evasion, but most of the taxes were collected successfully. It looks like predictable taxation was seen as more convenient and more legitimate than soldiers taking what they needed at raondom. When there was a reliable supply of horses, soldiers were less likely to take them from civilians, although it still happened sometimes. In the spring of 1645 parliament’s 3 main armies were amalgamated into the New Model Army, and administrative changes of the previous year were taken further. Most of the New Model Army’s horses were bought from a small group of dealers based in Smithfield market, but at first they only supplied horses for cavalry and dragoons. Draught horses were still supplied by the old system of putting quotas on counties. The difference this time was that the horses were paid for out of the monthly assessment tax.

The ordinance of parliament which put quotas of draught horses on the counties also required them to impress soldiers for the army. Impressment wasn’t new. It had been used to recruit the armies since 1643, and had been used even earlier to raise forces to fight in Ireland. This ordinance is the perfect example because it includes quotas of men and horses. You can see the distinction between human and animal breaking down, because men were being treated like animals: rounded up and sent to the army.

There were riots and rebellions against impressment in some places but apparently not in Essex. That suggests that it could be a contentious issue, but didn’t have to be. It might have depended on who the chosen victims were. Rounding up marginal people like vagrants and beggars would be unlikely to provoke much protest from the rest of society. These men could still exercise some agency: they often ran away from the army at the first opportunity. They had to be guarded en route to stop them from escaping. Because of this the county committees often spent more on impressing men for the New Model Army than on supplying its draught horses. But horses could exercise agency too. Although their owners treated them as property, they were alive and had their own aims. Whether these were based on free choice or biological instinct, the fact is that horses didn’t always do what humans wanted them to. Like impressed soldiers, they sometimes tried to escape. In October 1642, a group of draught horses being taken from London to join the Earl of Essex’s army broke down a fence and ran away. The conductors in charge of the horses had to claim extra expenses for paying men to help catch them and for repairing the fence.

The royalist officer Richard Bulstrode recalled in his memoirs that he lost control of his horse at the battle of Powicke Bridge:

This was the first Action I was ever in, and being upon an unruly Horse, he ran away with me amongst the Enemy

A recent study of the battle of Edgehill has suggested that the cavalry charges were more like stampedes. The parliamentarians ran away, and the royalists couldn’t stop chasing them, because their horses were out of control.

When you’re riding a horse you can influence it, but you can’t ever be in complete control of it. It’s even harder to control a society. It’s too big and complex.

Maybe elite anxiety about disorder was understandable – they realised that they weren’t really in control. But the consequences of their lack of control weren’t necessarily as bad as they imagined. Changes in the social order weren’t really against nature and didn’t lead to changes in animal behaviour. So things weren’t really like this the Great Chain of Being, or the World Turned Upside Down.

Authority and property rights weren’t natural or fixed, but they couldn’t always be influenced by brute force either. They had to be negotiated. Parliament’s war effort could only keep going with at least some co-operation from property owners. Parliament had to respect the rights of the gentry and the middling sort as far as was necessary to win the war, but there was no incentive to respect lower class people or animals.