Investigations of a Dog

I’m still ploughing through The Noble Revolt, but luckily I still have some posts saved up. I originally got a copy of Dan Beaver, ‘The Great Deer Massacre’ (Journal of British Studies, 1999, pp. 187-216) because of my interest in animals, but it turned out to be highly relevant for my work on the historiography of the causes and outbreak of the English Civil War. Like John Walter’s work on the Stour Valley riots, this article takes a detailed look at an outbreak of popular violence in 1642. In this case it’s the massacre of several hundred deer in a Gloucestershire chase belonging to the Earl of Middlesex in October 1642. Also like Walter, Beaver convincingly refutes revisionist arguments that popular violence in this period was apolitical and unconnected to the civil war. Although there are similarities to the situation at Colchester, there are also significant differences, which warn us against making generalisations.

The massacre was the result of a dispute between the Earl of Middlesex and some of his neighbours and tenants. Beaver includes lots of detail about the social and cultural significance of hunting and venison in order to emphasise that the slaughter was a calculated insult to the Earl and an attack on his status. This was revenge for the Earl’s aggressive pursuit of poachers and woodcutters. As some of these poachers, who led the massacre, were gentlemen, the action is clearly different from the Stour Valley, although this makes it even less of a class war. But as with Colchester, the local feud combined with anger at Charles I’s policies in the 1630s. In this case, his exploitation of the forest laws had aroused a lot of grievances, while the Earl of Middlesex had prosecuted both poachers and woodcutters in Star Chamber. Beaver sees this as a crucial mistake as it forced two disparate groups together and encouraged them to take collective action against the Earl. Anti-Catholicism also played a role. As well as attacking the Earl’s deer, they attacked his house at Forthampton, a former monastic property retaining decorations which the crowd found offensively idolatrous. However, there isn’t much evidence of popular parliamentarianism inspired by Ordinances of Parliament as there was at Colchester, when the main aim was to disarm Sir John Lucas before he could join the King.

This has got me wondering if there are more incidents of popular action which need to be looked into without any Marxist or revisionist blinkers. It certainly suggests that we need more microhistories to find out what was really going on in England in 1642 and why.

1. Daniel C. Beaver, ‘The great deer massacre : animals, honor, and communication in early modern England’, Journal of British Studies, 38 (1999), pp. 187-216.
2. John Walter, Understanding Popular Violence in the English Revolution (Cambridge University Press: Cambridge, 1999).

My review of English Civil War historiography shoots forward 30 years (I’m not doing it any particular order) with a 2006 special issue of History Workshop Journal (issue 61) on ‘Rethinking the English Revolution’. The introduction by Lyndal Roper and Laura Gowing briefly discusses the significance of terminology, noting that while Marxists assumed that there was a revolution in the 1640s, revisionists questioned that assumption and preferred to talk about the English Civil War. It would be naive to assume that “English Civil War” is any more neutral or objective than “English Revolution”, so I should write another post explaining why I habitually use the former. Whatever you call this period, I think Roper and Gowing are right that now is an exciting time to study it. The following essays, by Quentin Skinner, John Walter, Rachel Weil, and Ann Hughes, show how historians are breaking out of the Marxist vs revisionist dialectic by taking imaginative approaches which recognise diversity and complexity.

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I’ll be giving a paper to the research seminar at Bishop Grosseteste University College, Lincoln, on Wednesday 14th November at 4pm. The paper is entitled “The Great Supply Chain of Being: Horses, People, and Networks of Authority in Civil War Essex”. I’m still not sure whether that’s a good title, but it’s a reaction against my “stuckist” phase when I hated puns and tried to make my paper titles as boring and descriptive as possible! The paper will be a fairly brief and accessible overview of some work in progress, which takes in military supply systems, authority, property rights, and the human/animal boundary. Abstract below, although the focus keeps changing as I rewrite it:

The right of humans to control and exploit the non-human was justified by the concept of the Great Chain of Being, which also reflected the hierarchical ideal of early-modern government and society. Much recent work has shown that this concept is inadequate as a model for analysing realities which were far more complex than the ideal. Grids and networks are now seen as better analogies for understanding what Michael Braddick and John Walter termed a “complex of hierarchies”. As King and Parliament raised armies, created new administrative structures, and sought legitimation, these hierarchies multiplied and the relationships between them became even more complex.

Horses were a vital resource for armies and economies, leading to conflicts over ownership. These conflicts can not simply be seen in terms of binary oppositions between military and civilian, or local and central. There were many different ways in which soldiers, administrators, and civilians negotiated power and property rights. Material contributions to the war effort ranged from voluntary contributions to requisitioning through military force. Even when arbitrary force was used, there was scope for choice and agency in strategies for seeking redress. Ultimately forced requisitioning proved to be inefficient and counter-productive. Parliament found that the consent and co-operation of property owners was vital. The war could only be won by resolving conflicts of interest and maintaining enough consensus for long enough to overcome the royalists.

While isolated from the main theatres of military operations, the county of Essex was a major contributor of horses, men, and money to the parliamentarian war effort. This was not simply determined by the dominance of pro-parliament puritans in county government. Authority still had to be negotiated both within and outside the county. This paper will explore experiences of war in Essex in 1642-45, demonstrating the complexity of networks of power, and how conflicts could arise within them and be resolved. The pressures of war revealed that even the distinction between man and beast was not as clear as the chain of being might suggest.

Over at Victoria’s Cross, Gary Smailes posted a link to an article about the history of memorialisation from the Imperial War Museum. The article includes a photo of the memorial to the royalist officers Sir Charles Lucas and Sir George Lisle, who were executed on the orders of Sir Thomas Fairfax after the siege of Colchester in 1648. The article presents English Civil War memorials in terms of “deeds of heroism”, and by omitting the background to their execution perhaps unintentionally implies that Lucas and Lisle were victims or even martyrs. It’s worth pointing out that they were both executed for breaking their parole — they had previously surrendered to Parliament and promised not to fight again. Even so, this is quite an unusual case, and might be explained by the bitterness and frustration engendered by the siege of Colchester. Another interesting aspect which the article doesn’t mention is that there was a long running feud between the Lucas family and the borough of Colchester, which makes it ironic that the town now has a memorial to Sir Charles.

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Review of Diane Purkiss, The English Civil War: A People’s History (2006; ISBN: 000715061X).

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This is a brief look at some of my work in progress about women in the London saddlery trade in the English Civil War. It’s based on part of my PhD research, but I’m taking it further now. I’ve tried to make this post as accessible as possible, so it goes into background information about London history and explains some basic things. I’ve also included links to the map of early modern London where I know a saddler’s address (if you follow the link, the place will be marked by a blue star on the map). The map dates from the 1560s, but the City inside the walls hadn’t changed too much by the 1640s.

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