EMH Document 2020

 

2020

Wednesday 1^st January, 2020

The first thing that caught my attention this morning was Jesse Child’s review in The Guardian of Paul Lay’s new book, Providence Lost: the Rise and Fall of Oliver Cromwell’s Protectorate published by Zeus Books. Her own writing has been largely upon the Tudor period but she found Lay’s work a highly rewarding discussion of a complex and intriguing period. Oliver Cromwell believed that God’s providence had raised him from the ranks of the lesser gentry in Huntingdonshire and the isle of Ely to Lord Protector of England, Scotland and Ireland in 1653. He was the de facto ruler of all three realms with the fundamental aims of preserving good order, ensuring a high degree of liberty of conscience and of preparing these islands for the return of Christ. These aims entailed repressing royalist insurrections, the moral reformation of the ungodly by banning drunkenness, fornication and gambling, and carrying into effect the assault on the Spanish in the Caribbean that the Providence Island Company had failed to achieve successfully two decades before. But none of these aims were realised before Cromwell’s death in 1658: within a year, his son and successor as Protector, Richard Cromwell, was gone: within two years, the army upon which all regimes had relied since the mid-1640s was gone too and the monarchy had been restored. How Paul Lay had developed his arguments and whether they contained new insights did not attract her attention. It will be interesting to see how more academic figures assess this book.

The other on-line publication of interest to me was provided by Rachel Hammersley (University of Newcastle-upon-Tyne) in a piece entitled Myths concerning Republicanism: Republicanism is simply the Antonym of Monarchy on her blog. It combines points about contemporary monarchies and republics with observations about how the Dutch and English in the sixteenth and seventeenth-centuries made anti-monarchism the touchstone of republican rule. It was, moreover, in England in the mid-seventeenth century that the idea of government grounded in the will of the people was expressed, thereby ruling out in principle all forms of non-elective monarchy and hereditary political privileges. These comments clearly arise from her recently completed and published work on James Harrington. But there were nonetheless issues that remained about republican rule in the early modern period as well as in our present. How, for example, could the public interest be defined and who decided what it was? Was it anything more than what was expedient at the time? Could the views and rights of minorities be ignored? I shall be intrigued to see how she develops her themes in subsequent posts on her blog and what, if any, contemporary allusions she makes.

Marina Valerevna Timofeeva’s 2009 thesis on Christopher Hill’s analysis of the 17^th-Century English Bourgeois Revolution is another matter. It was submitted to the Ural State University at that time and appears not to be available on-line or in print at present. An abstract of the thesis can, however, be found and seems to be the prelude to an analysis of his writings from the start of the Second World War until he stopped writing in the 1990s. To the best of my knowledge, its existence and apparently formidable length have not been known hitherto. Dr Timofeeva’s objective was to emphasise the significant contribution Christopher Hill had made to the development of Marxist historiography in the West drawing on his published works, the tributes of friends and colleagues in the 1978 and 1988 festschrifts dedicated to him and on appreciations that appeared in newspapers and periodical publications. Hill’s own papers now held in the library of Balliol College, Oxford do not appear to have been used.

On the other hand, she does deploy material from authors in the former Soviet Union and its successor states to support her analysis. Until reading her abstract, I was unaware of the works of Pavlova, Sharifzhanov and Meshcheryakova on the historiography of the ‘bourgeois revolution’. Nor did I know about the analysis of Repina on the ambiguities of the Marxist concept of the English Revolution of the seventeenth-century. It is clear that large sections of Hill’s corpus of works had been translated into Russian, Polish and other eastern European languages with official sanction and that they had and still have a measure of influence in those countries that they have lost in the U.K. and other English-speaking countries.

There are also indications that Dr Timofeeva’s sympathies lie with Christopher Hill’s evolving approach to the English Revolution, to issues of class and cultural and intellectual changes up to and after 1640. His reaction to the rise of ‘revisionism’ in the mid-1970s also appears to have elicited her approval. His concept of a ‘revolution from below’ built of social and economic transformations is one she accepted. And she was able to draw upon methodological studies of British and Western historiography, some of them her own, equally unfamiliar to British scholars and historians in North America and elsewhere.

It would be altogether wrong in my view to disregard such a study which, in its full form, must be a work of formidable length. It would be a mistake too to dismiss the other sources upon which she has drawn as misguided or not as well-informed as they might have been. But Dr Timofeeva like her fellow historians in Russia is clearly a person of intelligence and with an admirable degree of diligence. What she appears, prima facie, to have lacked is the contact with academic historians of the period in Britain and elsewhere whose work has taken the study of mid-Stuart England and Wales, Ireland and Scotland along way forward since Christopher Hill was in his prime. She does not seem to have heard of the problems of multiple kingdoms or, if she has, it does not figure in the abstract of her thesis. There have been major historians in the field since the days of Conrad Russell. Inevitably, the influence of historians fades after their deaths. This is what has happened to Christopher Hill. But attempts to preserve his memory and to acknowledge his contribution have begun here in the U.K. Perhaps, her work will come to be acknowledged here too.

Thursday, 2^nd January, 2020

I started a slightly desultory day by going down to the Albert Sloman Library (University of Essex) to renew my passes for the ASL and for the library of the Essex Archaeology and History Society which it contains. Having done so, I went up to the second floor to look at the History periodicals section only to find that its refurbishment is not yet complete and that it may be open in another week or two. This part of the ASL has been closed since the autumn which must have made things rather difficult for students of history. However, this problem should be resolved by the start of the new term.

The most interesting piece to be found online today is by Keith Livesey following up his comments last week on Norah Carlin’s forthcoming book on petitions in the period before Charles I’s execution late in January, 1649. He identifies her book as one produced as the result of deep research – mining the archives, in fact – and praises it for creating something new and highly interesting. Her conclusions contradict the claims of conservative historians that these petitions had little effect and were no more than a propaganda campaign mounted by a small group of military and political leaders. Rank and file activitists, i.e. plebeians, produced the majority of these texts, some sixty or so in number. There is then a long passage cited by Keith Livesey from the works of Leon Trotsky about the defeat of the Royalists in the English Civil War by the Presbyterian bourgeoisie who then found themselves opposed by the pious and resolute petty bourgeoisie in the shape of the New Model Army and its radical supporters. The army subsequently purges the Long Parliament and its leadership frustrates the left wing of the revolution to establish a new but by no means stable political equilibrium. Norah Carlin is commended for being enough of a Marxist to believe that these tumultuous events had been decades in the making and were semi-conscious about what they were doing.

This encomium is followed by an analysis of her previous works on the English Revolution which, if properly appreciated, should have produced a reaction against the revisionist historians seeking to denigrate any Marxist understanding of the revolution. Her 1988 study, The Causes of the English Civil War for the Historical Association, falls into this category. She certainly believed in a bourgeois revolution and in the need for a more precise understanding of the class nature of groups like the Levellers. But she was not comfortable with the deference that the Socialist Workers Party offered to the body of Christopher Hill’s work and unhappy about his apparent failure to leave a group of followers to carry on his project. Even so, Keith Livesey concluded by maintaining that the English Revolution was a bourgeois revolution and that there had been a gap between its protagonists’ ideals and their real social and economic purpose. But it did pave the way for the expansion of capitalism and the creation of the first capitalist nation state.

Neither Norah Carlin nor Keith Livesey will be surprised to learn that I find none of this convincing. These arguments project backwards a form of economic and social analysis which was and is anachronistic. English society (like the societies of Ireland, Scotland and Wales) was predominantly agricultural, one dominated by its landowning groups even though urban centres had grown in the century before 1640 and one of them, London, was the major mercantile centre in these islands. These societies had absorbed a significant rise in population, major religious and cultural changes, rising literacy and the development of overseas trading links including the start of colonisation principally in the Caribbean and North America. Contemporaries were indeed aware of important social distinctions but there were no “classes” in the Marxist sense. On the contrary, there were well-developed mechanisms for bargaining and conciliation between individuals, families, groups and interests at villages at local, county and national levels. What upset this balance was the retreat of successive Stuart rulers, particularly King Charles I, from the politics of bargaining and conciliation. Authoritarian rule in Churches and States inevitably elicited resistance from disaffected subjects culminating in the events of the 1640s which exacted a terrible price in human and animal lives and in the destruction of property. It may seem uncomfortable to point this out again but, if the conflagrations that brought down the Caroline regimes were inevitable as Carlin and Livesey appear to maintain, the Restoration of 1660 should logically fall into the same determinist category.

The historiography in which this account is embedded is erroneous too. A significant number of historians working on the early modern period in the 1950s and 1960s were Marxists of one shade or another. Perhaps twenty five or thirty per cent fell into that category. There were rather more who viewed the tensions of the pre-1640 years as emanating from the process of modernisation going on under the auspices of a conservative regime. Lawrence Stone was one such figure. And there were still others who took a thoroughly sceptical view of the nostrums of Marxists and modernisers alike. It is a profound mistake to overlook the influence of major figures like Hugh Trevor-Roper and J.P.Cooper on the work of postgraduates undertaking research. There never was a golden age in which Marxist historians were predominant or when the Whig-Marxist synthesis was universally accepted.

Revisionism is, in any case, a misleading term. But, if it has to be used, it had been incubated for a decade or more prior to 1975 in the history schools of Oxford and Cambridge and had largely run its course by 1990. The academic journals of the time testify to the efforts of adherents of older views, whether Whig or Marxist, to reject revisionist claims: the efforts of Hexter and Hill, Rabb and Stone spring to mind. But the guard had changed and a new generation of scholars after 1990 got on with the task of assimilating and modifying the agenda and insights of the so-called revisionists. It does not help to call for a return to the views of just one section of the population of working early modern historians from the 1950s or 1960s. The profession has rightly moved on and has developed all sorts of new agendas since then.

The other blog piece that attracted my attention was by Brodie Waddell of Birkbeck College on The Many-Headed Monster on the subject of mince pies, jollity and witchcraft. It deals with the refusal of Sarah Byrd of Luppitt in Devon to give alms to a poor woman, Dorothy East, at Christmas in 1693 and the subsequent misfortunes and sickness that afflicted the cattle of John Byrd, Sarah’s husband. Not surprisingly, Sarah Byrd came to believe that they had been bewitched by Dorothy East and took her claims to the Devon Quarter Sessions. Unfortunately, the outcome is not known.

Norah Carlin will be reprising her Christopher Hill Memorial Lecture in London on 27^th February.

Friday, 3^rd January, 2020.

One of the most interesting features of the internet and of social media arises from the surprises one or other offers when searching for information. Each morning I look on Twitter for new information on the activities and connections of early modern historians. Almost every morning I come across scholars I had not previously known about and books or articles on interesting topics of which I had been ignorant. I was particularly interested this morning to look at the links between some of them and to see what their connections are. Sean Kelsey has an especially wide circle of followers and of people he is following but there are others too.

David Appleby is one historian about whom I know a little and whose father I had met during my time on the Council of the Essex Archaeology and History Society. A summary of his contribution to the book he and Andrew Hopper edited, Battle-Scarred: Mortality, Medical Care and Military Welfare in the British Civil Wars (Manchester University Press, 2018) came to my notice for the first time. I was intrigued to see how large an issue desertion from the armies of the English Civil War was. William Waller apparently lost between three and four thousand men to desertion after his defeat at Cropredy in 1643 while the New Model Army shed about six and a half thousand men after its victory at the battle of Naseby in June, 1645. These losses may have been due to the cathartic nature of the physical conflicts themselves or to the psychological trauma suffered by the combatants but other factors may have been at play as well.

What is even more interesting is David Appleby’s analysis of the response of parish officers to the phenomenon of ‘wandering soldiers’. They had to distinguish between men who had been demobilised or who had been released from imprisonment as well as recognising which of them posed a health-threat. Some were obviously harmless while others were inured to violence and blodd-letting. As David Appleby points out, deserters and others were not necessarily making their way to their homes: many of them were unmarried and unskilled males to whom their places of origin had little to offer. Even so, it appears that the Long Parliament proved relatively successful in dealing with this problem or, at least, in mitigating its potential effects. ‘Wandering soldiers’ did not jeopardise the stability of civilian communities however much this might have been feared by the authors of rogue literature in Elizabethan and Jacobean times.

I must say how much this short precis made me think anew about this matter and how it encourages me to read the fuller work in which David Appleby’s case appears in more detail.

I was supposed to be starting to write some small pieces today on various aspects of the activities of the companies engaged in the settlement of Virginia and Bermuda in the second decade of the seventeenth century. Having read through the original sources and much of the secondary literature on these companies and their colonies in the last couple of years, my interest has been revived for the first time since the second half of the 1960s. I am also conscious of the fact that a wider range of research strategies is now available than when I was a postgraduate and that I overlooked some key issues. These revised approaches will, I hope, be followed in the weeks and months ahead.

The Problem of Argall Yeardley

Argall Yeardley’s name is not one that figures prominently in the history of his native Virginia. He has only a brief entry in the standard biographical dictionary for immigrants to and adventurers in Virginia between 1607 and 1635. This suggests that he was born in about 1620 and was residing in Jamestown with his parents, Sir George and Lady Temperance Yeardley, in February, 1624. ¹ His first name suggests that he was named after Samuel Argall, the deputy Governor of Virginia from 1617 and 1619, who was later the subject of the Virginia Company’s ire about his conduct in office and of an investigation into his alleged misconduct conducted in the colony by his successor as Governor, Sir George Yeardley. The quarrels that this process stimulated in London make it difficult to believe that Argall Yeardley could have been so named once Sir George Yeardley reached the colony in April or May, 1619. There is, however, one possible line of explanation, namely, that he was so named before Sir George left Virginia for England in 1618 where he is known to have been by November, 1618. A later piece of evidence from c.1623 at the height of the quarrel for control of the Virginia Company suggests that Sir George Yeardley was approached (whether in England or Virginia) by Sir Edwin Sandys to assume the role of Governor ² and presumably then charged with responsibility for investigating Argall’s conduct. If Argall had been warned of this manoeuvre while he was still in Virginia, this would explain why his own charges against Yeardley reached the company in London in January, 1619 and why Yeardley considered abandoning the task he had been allotted. It would also explain why the company’s incumbent Treasurer at that time, Sir Thomas Smith, apparently chose to attack Yeardley over his unduly procured knighthood at that time.³ This suggestion is not a definitive assertion but an hypothesis to be considered.

Corrections to J.H.Lefroy, Memorials of the Discovery and Early Settlement of the Bernudas or Somers Islands 1515-1685 (2 Volumes. The Bermuda Historical Society. The Bermuda National Trust. 1981)

In his invaluable nineteenth-century edition of the papers relating to the colonisation of Bermuda, J.H.Lefroy identified a general letter sent by the ship, the Seaflower, to Captain Tucker in Bermuda as having been sent in 1616. (Memorials, Volume 1, p.119) One of the signatories was “John ffarrar, deputie” (ibid., p.121). But this date must be incorrect. John Ferrar was Deputy of the Somers Island Company between 1621 and 1623. (Henry C.Wilkinson, The Adventurers of Bermuda. Oxford University Press. 2^nd Edition. 1958, p.398)

He also reproduced a list of the names of the adventurers in the Somers Island Company to whom shares had been granted and dated this list to 1618. (Volume I, Pp.140-143). But this date must be wrong since it identifies Robert, Earl of Warwick, as one of the shareholders. Sir Robert Rich was certainly a shareholder until early in August, 1618 when his father became 1^st Earl of Warwick and he was susbsequently known as Robert, Lord Rich. His father was not an investor in the company, so this reference cannot be to him. The 1^st Earl of Warwick died on 24^th March, 1619 when his son became the 2^nd Earl of Warwick. (Oxford Dictionary of National Biography) The document Lefroy reproduced must date from some time after that day.

Saturday, 4^th January, 2020.

Today’s edition of The Times newspaper carries a review by Leanda de Lisle in its Saturday Review section of Paul Lay’s book, Providence Lost: the Rise and Fall of Cromwell’s Protectorate. ⁴ It is highly complimentary in its comments on this work which she describes as “full of surprises” and a “delight of storytelling” but, surprisingly, she devotes almost all the space at her disposal in a recapitulation in broad terms of the “Personal Rule” of Charles I in the 1630s, the conflicts of the 1640s in England, Ireland and Scotland and how God’s providence required the king’s execution in 1649. It was not until after Oliver Cromwell became Lord Protector in 1653 that God withdrew his benevolent hand and the disastrous expedition to the Caribbean in 1655 took place. Redeeming England from its failings required the suppression of vice in all its forms and the military rule of the Major-Generals to repress royalism. Cromwell’s sympathy for religious liberty for Protestant sects was clear but he feared that accepting the Crown would split the ‘good old cause’ and leave him with fractious Parliaments of the kind he had experienced in 1653, 1654 and 1656. When he died in the autumn of 1658, the legacy of his regime crumbled and, by 1660, the Stuart monarchy had been restored. England really was a deeply conservative country as Leanda de Lisle concludes. It would have been helpful if she had said rather more about the ways in which Paul Lay had organised his material and about how far his arguments were new. Like Jesse Childs in The Guardian last week, she does neither. This is unfortunate, especially since the new edition of Oliver Cromwell’s correspondence prepared by the team led by John Morrill is approaching completion.

In June last year (2019), the four hundredth anniversary of the creation of the Virginia Assembly, the first representative assembly created in North America, was celebrated in that state and by historians.⁵ In a few months’ time, it will be the four hundredth anniversary of the establishment of Bermuda’s Assembly. The principle of consent by means of a representative legislative body is one that is vital to Anglo-American traditions. But there is a partly overlooked example of representative selection in Bermuda that has not attracted serious notice. When the Somers Island Company issued its instructions to Daniel Tucker as Governor in its colony in Bermuda in February, 1615, it included directions to Tucker and two of the island’s preachers upon his arrival to choose forty “honest and sufficient men among the generalities”, i.e the male inhabitants, who were to be responsible for selecting eight of their number as Bailiffs of the tribes into which Bermuda had been divided. These eight Bailiffs were to be part of Tucker’s Council “to appeare att their owne pleasures, or when urgent occasion is upon Summons from you, and to sitt with you always at yor severall dayses of generall sessions, to assist you there in cases of iustice and in all other matters of weight”. Later in the same document, Tucker was told that he should “cause the foresaid 40 electors to choose out by theire most yoyces sixe of the discreetest and fittest men of the generalitie remaining to be also of your sett councell, and soe your counsel consisting of 26 psons by there aduice or the most voices of them assembled, upon publique warning, given, you shall passe and determine all matters of moment that shall daylie or weeklie happen as alsoe to sitt in cases of iustice at your generall sessions”. The exact number of members of this Council to be chosen in this fashion appears to have been fourteen plus the Governor, who was to have a casting vote, and the two preachers but the surviving text suggests twenty six. It is unfortunately not clear what the “matters of weight” or “matters of moment” to be decided by this Council were supposed to have been although they seem to have extended beyond straightforward judicial issues. But it can be argued that it was in Bermuda that the first experiment in securing a measure of representation in the management of the colony’s affairs was tried.⁶

Sunday, 5^th January, 2020

At last, a really helpful review of Paul Lay’s new book on the Commonwealth and Protectorate. John Adamson’s assessment in the Culture section of The Sunday Times ⁷ provides the information I had been seeking about Lay’s arguments. These stress the energy and ambition of the post-1649 regimes in government, in finance and in the world of ideas. With revenues many times those of the Crown two decades earlier, England could afford to project its power abroad on a scale previously unknown and to build the mercantile and naval fleets necessary to do so. Expansion in America and the Caribbean as well as to India was now practicable. But, as Lay explains, the military origins of the new regimes could not disguise the illegitimacy of their creation. Executing Charles I, expelling Members of the House of Commons, abolishing the House of Lords and, in theory, the Church of England left the supporters of the Commonwealth and its successor, the Protectorate, short of the level of consent needed to stabilise such rule. The workings of God’s providence may have convinced Oliver Cromwell that such actions were justified but he came to understand that the people of England could not be “reformed” in a godly sense nor could they be allowed to exercise the franchise freely in elections to Parliaments however such assemblies were constituted. The 1650s, moreover, were not such an age of cultural austerity as they had been portrayed: choral music flourished at the Protector’s court ceremonies and there were erotic hangings in his apartments at Hampton Court. What Paul Lay had done was to introduce his readers to this world of contradiction and paradox in briskly paced, elegant prose. Thanks to John Adamson I now appreciate why the book is worth buying.

7^th January, 2020

Tawney, Trevor-Roper and the ‘Storm over the Gentry’

The dispute over the fortunes of the aristocracy and gentry in England in the period before the Civil War was one of the features of academic life in the 1950s. The protagonists were in their different ways historians of fame and distinction, figures like R.H.Tawney, Lawrence Stone, Hugh Trevor-Roper, J.P.Cooper, J.H.Hexter and others. Their exchanges are still used to illustrate the problems of linking economic and social changes to the explanation of political and religious events. Needless to say, academic history has moved on a long way since then but it is interesting to read the views of Natalia Stanislavovna Krelenko in a thesis submitted to Saratov State University in 2010.⁸ She had clearly read the bulk of the secondary works on this subject in English and also used the verdicts of Russian works on the period. Most of the latter – people like M.A.Barg, M.I.Bazer and T.A.Pavlova – were not known or, at best, barely known to their U.K. counterparts although Krelenko offers them a good deal of respect.

Krelenko begins with an analysis of the Whig explanation of the English Revolution adopted by S.R.Gardiner before shifting her attention to the rise of economic history in the history departments of provincial universities and thus to the kind of analysis favoured by Marx and Weber. R.H.Tawney, although an Oxford man as an undergraduate, exemplifies this transition with his work on agrarian problems in the sixteenth century, on the significance of Protestantism for the rise of capitalism and the consequences in the rise of the gentry who were committed to the efficient management of their estates in contrast to the wasteful methods of the nobility. This development was consistent with Marxist ideas about the origins of the English bourgeois revolution, ideas which could be sustained by Tawney’s examination of the arguments of James Harrington in Oceana (1656) that the form of government in the state depended on the distribution of land: changes in that distribution necessitated changes in England’s government, hence the Civil Wars. Tawney’s case was buttressed by statistics covering the period up to 1640 showing that major changes of this kind had occurred with the nobility losing manors and the gentry gaining them. It did, however, take the support of Lawrence Stone for Tawney’s thesis to precipitate Hugh Trevor-Roper’s counter-assault.

Her account of Trevor-Roper’s analysis of the weaknesses in Tawney’s calculations and his assertions about the capacity of large landlords to re-organise their estates whether they were aristocrats or gentry was fair enough. So, too, was her description of Trevor-Roper’s claims about the importance of the Court as a sources of income for rising landowners, lawyers and officials and of the reaction of the lesser gentry denied these perquisites. But when she came to J.H.Hexter’s famous essay of 1958 which gave its title to the whole dispute, she considered that he had taken much too critical a view of Tawney’s case and had treated Trevor-Roper much more lightly. That said, she then moved on to a brief survey of the historiography of the next two or three decades. Ideas about continuity and stability in English society, about the importance of religious quarrels in stimulating the crisis of the 1640s came to the fore displacing an understanding of the English Revolution as a seminal moment in the creation of a new world.

It is not altogether surprising that the author’s sympathies appear to have lain with Tawney even if he was a Christian Socialist rather than a Marxist. That, after all, was the view of Christopher Hill and the broad conclusion of studies of historians in the Soviet Union and in Russia after the collapse of Communism. These findings show how the views of one generation in one country can be echoed decades later in another because they appeal to its inherited intellectual traditions.

Wednesday, 8^th January, 2020

Yesterday, whilst looking through some old papers in my study, I came across two pieces from May, 2002 on the BBC website dealing with the life and reign of King Charles I. They were by Richard Cust and Ann Hughes, the first of them analysing the personality and political style of that monarch and the second discussing his execution at the end of January, 1649. I must say how much I enjoyed reading them and how succinctly they expressed their authors’ views.

Richard Cust has some interesting initial points to make about the early years of Charles’s life, about his speech impediment and the lack of affection shown to him. He was overshadowed in these years by his older brother, Prince Henry, and by his sister, Princess Elizabeth but Henry’s death and Elizabeth’s marriage to the Elector Palatine and departure to the continent gave him the opportunity to play a more prominent role. Cust makes it clear that, through an effort of will power and self-control, Charles learnt how to play the role of a king and, critically, to exercise the vital public functions of a ruler. Unlike some previous historians, he emphasised the degree of control Charles exercised over his government, over the appointment of its senior figures and the policies of war and peace. In the Church of England, William Laud was an essential servant in turning the king’s anti-Puritan and ceremonial preferences into reality. Anthony van Dyck was no less vital in depicting Charles as a regal, authoritative figure despite his short stature and immature appearance.

Even so, the king lacked the essential skills in man-management and the judgment of human character needed by an early modern ruler. He had strong feelings about those who supported him and equally strong antagonisms towards his critics. In a country where the capacity to bargain and negotiate with his subjects were so important in ruling successfully, Charles was notably unwilling to do so: he expected, once his wishes were made known, to be obeyed – hence his difficulties with his Parliaments in the 1625-1629 period and with the Scottish Covenanters after 1637. More, indeed, might have been made of this point. It was no surprise that his hostility to Calvinism and to Parliaments evoked bitter hostility. Charles’s own predilection for the masques performed at his Court represented not a flight from reality but rather a world in which the sovereign and his intimates overcame the rebellious instincts of the multitude. In fact, as Cust explains, the king had a very limited understanding of the hopes and fears of his peoples and was thus profoundly out of touch with them. When he was defeated in the Bishops’ Wars of 1639-1640 and forced to make concessions to the Long Parliament, he reacted by treating his critics as conspirators and by failing to reach any kind of settlement with them. The Civil Wars that ensued were his responsibility more than that of any other individual.

Ann Hughes had a different approach to the trial and execution of the king in 1649. She began by contrasting the views of contemporaries and later historians to the execution itself. Many contemporaries were reluctant to support the trial, let alone the king’s execution: no one would or could claim that these events were supported either by the political elite or that they met with popular acclaim. Nonetheless, it was important not to represent their occurrence as a serious aberration from the normal course of English history but rather to consider it as conceivable in terms of longer-term aspects of the country’s political culture and history.

As a result, she turned to the contents of the Bible where there were not only examples of obedience to rulers being enjoined but also instances of unjust kings being overthrown by God’s people. Psalm 149 provided one such instance. Many of Charles’s religious policies like the Book of Sports which encouraged lawful recreations on a Sunday or the railing in of Church altars looked alarmingly like a return to Popery while the Irish Rebellion of 1641 aroused profound fears about the complicity of the king and his Catholic wife, Henriette Marie. Charles came to be seen in the late-1640s as a man of blood by many of the New Model Army’s soldiers: his death was therefore necessary to cleanse the land.

This biblical frame of reference was coupled with the lessons drawn from Classical history about the rule of tyrannical Roman Emperors. Such rulers had allowed their regimes to decline as a result of corruption and decay without the checks and balances that wide participation in the government of the realm ensured. Queen Elizabeth had presided over a polity in which ordinary men played a large number of roles as constables, jurors, parish officers and those higher up the social hierarchy had been Justices of the Peace, Deputy Lieutenants, Members of the House of Commons and, at the apex, peers of the realm. Charles had never embraced this wider kind of political community: on the contrary, he was hostile to it. The civil wars that ensued after 1642 in England were profoundly destructive but also, for minorities amongst the population and, more importantly, in the army, a radicalising experience. It was their conviction that the king should be tried for his crimes against the Lord’s cause and the kingdom. He was, they claimed, a tyrant, a man hostile to the welfare of his people and to the fundamental constitution of the realm.

Ann Hughes thought that this was a plausible conclusion from English traditions (and an attempt to settle a bitter conflict) even if it was unlikely to have had the approval of most people who would have repudiated both the trial and the Rump’s abolition of the kingly office. Here, at least, her argument raises doubts: there was no English tradition for trying rulers for their lives, let alone executing them. Furthermore, the supporters of the trial and execution of Charles I do not appear to have anticipated either that he would be viewed in retrospect as a martyr or that it would leave a political mark on England and his other realms that could not be expunged. Just as Charles had failed to appreciate the importance of bargaining with his subjects, so the rulers of these islands under the Commonwealth and Protectorate failed to understand that their regimes required a wider degree of consent than they ever secured in order to survive.

Thursday, 9^th January, 2020

I only came across the article by Aglaia Kasdagli, Medieval History and Marxism in England, 1950-1956, on Past and Present’s website two days ago. I had been looking for material on Christopher Hill’s links with the Soviet Union and its historians when my search located this article by one of the medievalist, Rodney Hilton’s former pupils. Kasdagli reproduces with the help of Hilton’s widow and Pauline Perrie, an emeritus Professor of Russian history at the University of Birmingham, two previously unpublished texts and some material from Russian newspaper articles, all from the early-1950s. The author’s respect for his former mentor shines through.

This evidence clearly dates to the period of the Cold War when the Soviet Union and the democratic countries of Western Europe were engaged in a struggle for dominance. The authorities in the Soviet Union, whether political or historical, expected their allies in the U.K. and elsewhere to join them in denouncing their ‘bourgeois enemies’, hence the surprise expressed by Hilton and Hill when they were denied visas to visit Moscow in the summer of 1955.

There is a revealing passage in Hilton’s 1951 account of the work of English Marxist historians in which he describes how historians in the U.K. had been brought up in a bourgeois society and how even those who had fully assimilated the political aims of Marxism still needed a lengthy process of re-education. Inevitably, outlets for the expression of Marxist historiography were limited and, in bourgeois journals, had to be phrased in ways comprehensible to their readers.

It was in the analysis of the post-1640 English Revolution that most progress had been made. Conservative critics of Christopher Hill had maintained that feudalism had been abolished by the Tudors and that the events of the 1640s involved the defeat of a feudal counter-revolution. This ignored Marxist teaching that the forms of the state had remained feudal and the development of capitalist relations in industry and agriculture. The publication, moreover, of the collection of documents edited by Edmund Dell and Hill, The Good Old Cause, had illustrated the history of the revolutionary movement. Its appearance provoked vitriolic attacks in the bourgeois press from reviewers who disputed claims that the documents had been fairly selected, that objective history was a weapon in the class struggle and had only succeeded in revealing their class prejudices.

These incidental remarks testify to the aims of the Historians’ Group of the Communist Party of Great Britain to spread their Marxist ideas across the academic networks of the U.K. and into the country’s schools and local history societies. But the CPGB and its historians were handicapped, fatally handicapped, by their association with the Soviet Union and by their antique terminology and analytical failures. No matter what the fulminations of historians in the Soviet Union at the behest of their political masters, the study of the English Revolution and of other periods of the history of this island escaped their control.

Sunday, 12^th January, 2020

M.J.Cullen, Lawrence Stone and Manorial Counts

Almost fifty years ago, M.J.Cullen of the University of Edinburgh published an article in The Economic History Review criticising Lawrence Stone’s statistical analysis of the manorial holdings of the English peerage in the latter’s book, The Crisis of the Aristocracy, 1558-1641 first published in 1965. Cullen’s case rested on two technical points about the samples from the Stone had used Valor Ecclesiasticus of 1535 and from the Close Rolls between 1597 and 1608, neither of which constituted a “random sample” because there was no possibility of either including a truly representative sample of all manors and, secondly, because neither calculation indicated what the value of other manors might have been. The values disclosed by his putative samples were widely dispersed and the coefficients of variation were very high and made it imperative to exercise extreme care. Stone’s response was characteristically vigorous: he denied that he had been guilty of statistical naivety or terminological confusion and claimed that, for all practical purposes, the Valor Ecclesiasticus and Close Rolls samples offered as close an approximation to truly “random samples” as an historian was likely to get. He therefore challenged Cullen to explain why the 1535 sample might have differed from a random sample of lay property at that date and why the 1597-1608 figures using the letter ‘S’ in the index of first parties were likely to have differed from a genuinely random sample. He ended his reply by stressing the obligation of an historian to examine his sources with the greatest care to facilitate the examination of their validity: they had to deal with historical probabilities in the real world rather than trying to score debating points and to answer the question whether the samples were a reasonable approximation to mathematically random ones.

These were challenges M.J.Cullen never answered or, perhaps, never got the opportunity to answer. Nonetheless, for the reasons to be explained below, they are challenges which can be met. It can and will be shown from Stone’s own calculations in 1965 that the manorial holdings of the peerage in 1558-1559, 1602 and 1641 differed significantly in value from those disclosed by his manorial samples when measured against the Phelps-Brown Price Index for consumables, his chosen method of calculating changes in prices and that his description of the way in which he calculated the Close Rolls sample in his reply to Cullen is fictitious.

It is perfectly possible to work out what the average annual value of a manor was supposed to be from Stone’s Valor Eccesiasticus sample of 1535 and from his Close Rolls sample of 1597-1608 and to adjust both as Stone himself had done to movements in the Phelps-Brown price index for consumables. The estimates thus obtained can then be compared to estimates of the average annual values of manors held by the peerage in 1558-1559 and 1602 calculated at those dates by dividing Stone’s figures for the total landed income of the peerage by the number of manors then held: in 1641, however, it is necessary to calculate the average annual value of a manor held by the peerage either by dividing the peerage’s total gross rental by the number of manors then estimated to have been held or by dividing its total landed income including casualties (according to Stone) by the number of manors he calculated to have been in the peerage’s possession.

The results for the Valor Ecclesiasticus sample are:

Date Price Index Average Annual Value

1535 60 £ 29.9

1559 100 £ 49.83 rec.

1602 179 £ 89.20

1641 219 £109.13

The results for the Close Rolls sample are:

Date Price Index Average Annual Value

1535 60 £ 28.99

1559 100 £ 48.32

1602 179 £ 86.50

1641 219 £105.82

Stone’s estimates for the landed incomes and manorial holdings of the peerage indicated:

Date Estimated Average Annual Value

1558-1559 £ 39.82

1602 £ 78.83

1641 £163.96 (excluding casualties)

£204.55 (including casualties)

Comparing these results suggests that his two manorial samples and his estimates of the landed incomes and manorial holdings of the peerage differ significantly.

Date Valor Ecclesiasticus Sample Close Rolls Sample Stone’s estimates

1559 £ 49.83 rec £ 48.32 £ 39.82

1602 £ 89.20 £ 86.50 £ 78.83

1641 £109.13 £105.82 £163.96 (excluding casualties)

£204.55 (including casualties)

If Stone’s estimates of the average annual values of manors held by the peerage are compared to his two samples, these suggest that in 1559, such manors lay between

79.91 per cent of the Valor Ecclesiasticus sampla and 82.24 per cent of the Close Rolls sample.

In 1602, the value of manors held by the peerage lay between 88.37 per cent of the Valor Ecclesiasticus sample and 91.13 per cent of the Close Rolls sample.

In 1641, excluding casualties, the average value of manors held by the peerage lay between 150.24 per cent of the Valor Ecclesiasticus sample and 154.94 per cent of the Close Rolls sample.

If casualties were to be included in 1641, then the average value of manors held by the peerage laye between 187.44 per cent of the Valor Ecclesiasticus sample and 193.30 per cent of the Close Rolls sample.

It is true that the average annual values suggested by the two samples move roughly in line with one another once adjusted to the Phelps-Brown Price Index for consumables. But, if as Stone observed, the valuations in the Valor Ecclesiasticus were an underestimate of between ten and twenty per cent, then the gap between its valuation of manors and his estimates for 1558-1559 and 1602 would have been wider still. It is worth pointing out too that his claim that manorial values were falling behind rises in prices between 1558-1559 and 1602 is belied by his own figures. Furthermore, his contention that it was “inherently improbable that the dispersion of manorial values relative to the mean changed over the years … [and that] since it remained so stable in the … sixty-seven years [between 1535 and 1602] there is a strong prima facie case for supposing that it did not alter very much in the next thirty-nine” is untenable on his own showing. There was nothing anywhere in his analysis to indicate how sharply the average annual value of a manor increased on the basis of his own figures between 1602 and 1641. If anything like this did occur, it must have been one of the most remarkable improvements in the landed fortunes of the peerage in English history.

All of M.J.Cullen’s comments in 1971 can thus be seen to have been prescient and sound. All of Stone’s defence proved to be insecure and unsound.

But this is not the most remarkable feature of Stone’s reply. When The Crisis of the Aristocracy, 1558-1641 was published, Stone made clear how his second sample had been calculated. “The second sample”, he wrote, “is taken from the Close Rolls over a period of thirteen and a half years from 39 Elizabeth to 6 James I, which give the prices at which manors were actually sold. Mortgages, sales which also included non-manorial items such as rectories, and sales of two or more manors together have all been excluded. As this operation involved the scanning of some six miles of Roll it is certain that a number of items have been missed. Nevertheless, there remains a residue of 345 manors whiose price is known, manors situated all over the country and bought and sold by all classes of people.” That is clear enough. Nothing whatever was said in the book about using the letter ‘S’ in the index of first parties in the Close Rolls to make this calculation. So Stone’s reply to Cullen on the validity of the Close Rolls sample was completely unfounded.

Where Stone had adopted this procedure was, in fact, in his attempt to measure the turnover of land between 1560 and 1640 and from 1660 to 1699. He had described the use of the letter ‘S’ as “a random sample” just as he had mistakenly done for his two manorial samples. He clearly did not understand the difference between his figures for the mobility of land and his second manorial sample. Surprisingly, the Economic History Review did not pick up on this elementary mistake before publication. But whatever way one views Stone’s reply, it was unfounded in its entirety and illustrative of his statistical naivety.

Tuesday, 21^st January, 2020

History Today article

I was very surprised this morning to receive an e-mail from Paul Lay, the editor of History Today, informing me that, subject to my agreement, the article I had sent to his magazine three or four years ago would be published in its edition next April. Of course, I consented and am looking forward to its publication with anticipation. I also have a degree of concern about its reception. It deals with the crises in the Stuarts’ realms in the late-1620s and again in the late-1630s. I first had the idea about a proto-revolutionary crisis in England at the close of the 1620s back in 1980 or 1981 and recall hinting at it to John Morrill as he drove me back to the railway station in Cambridge after I had spoken to his seminar on the problems arising from Conrad Russell’s work on the Parliaments of that decade. More recently, I have suggested that England experienced a religious and secular crisis at that time while Scotland and Ireland had predominantly secular grievances. It was only in the succeeding decade that those two countries added religious crises to long-standing political problems, hence the revolt of the Covenanters in 1637 and the Irish Rebellion of 1641. Even so, it was in England that the most ferocious reaction against Caroline rule came because the tensions of the late-1620s had been reanimated by the mistakes and policies of the regime. I shall be very interested to see what the response to this argument turns out to be. In principle, it is the most radical re-thinking about the origins of the conflicts of the 1640s since the rise of ‘revisionism’ in the mid-1970s; on the other hand, I suspect that it may not be entirely welcome to adherents of the ‘three kingdoms’ hypothesis into which so much intellectual capital has been invested. We shall see what response it gets.

The Distribution of Manors held by Peerage families from 1559 to 1641

An important part of the late Lawrence Stone’s argument in his book, The Crisis of the Aristocracy 1558-1641, about the landed problems faced by the peerage in those years rested on his manorial counts set out in his text and the work’s appendices. He offered figures for the overall holdings of the peerage at the end of December, 1558; at the end of December, 1602; and at the end of December, 1641 (subject to an overall margin of error of plus or minus 10 per cent) and for the number of families holding 40 or more manors or 10 or less manors at those dates. Stone also provided estimates for the number of families holding 70 or more manors in 1559 (18 out of 62) and in 1641 (6 out of 121). Surprisingly, however, in a work of 841 pages, no explanation in detail was offered about how these calculations had been made or, critically, on the precise sources used for each family. The reputed loss of his papers in the 1990s makes it impossible to check on either matter. In effect, his readers in and after 1965 were asked to take his figures on trust.

However, an indirect approach may throw some light on the issue of the distribution of manors within the ranks of the peerage. Stone offered with due caution in 1965 estimates of the gross rentals of peerage families in 1558, 1602 and 1641 in his Appendix VIII. In broad terms, these estimates ought to reflect the distribution of manors amongst these families if his estimates are divided by the average annual value of a manor held at these dates but minus casualties. Some issues of interest may, perhaps, arise.

As far as Stone’s manorial figures for 1558/9 were concerned, he indicated that 18 out of 62 families held 70 or more manors in 1559. Elsewhere, he argued that 39 peerage families held more than 40 or more manors while 2 families held 10 or less. If the estimates for the peerage’s gross rentals in Appendix VIIIA are divided by the average annual value of a manor minus casualties in 1559, the results are:

Appendix VIIIA

Average annual value of a manor (£39.82 divided by 120.54) X 100=£33.03

Group Gross Rental Number of families Estimated Number of Manors Average

I £ 6,000 1 181.65 181.85

II £ 5,500 1 166.51 166.51

III £14,000 3 423.86 141.29

IV £10,500 3 317.89 105.96

V £37,500 15 1153.33 75.69

VI £22,500 15 681.19 45.41

VII £14,000 19 423.88 28.26

VIIII £ 2,000 6 60.55 10.09

Holding 70 or more manors: 23 families

Holding 40 to 69 manors: 15 families

Holding 11 to 39 manors: 19 families

Holding 10 or less manors: 0

Alternatively, the figures can be shown as:

Holding 40 or more manors: 38 families

Average holding of a family with 40 or more manors: 2924.43 divided by 38 = 76.96

Average holding of a family with less than 40 manors: 484.43 divided by 25 = 19.38

These indicative calculations suggest that 23 rather than 18 families held 70 or more manors and that 38 rather than 39 families held over 40 manors. It is possible that the peerage might have been divided in terms of manorial holdings into two or three groups, one of really large landowners with an average of c.77 manors each and a second group with c.20 manors each, which make such families difficult to distinguish from the upper ranks of gentry landowners. Alternatively, it might be right to think in terms of a ‘magnate’ group holding over 70 manors each, a group of large middle-ranking peers with holdings in the mid-40s on average, and a third group of peers with relatively small manorial holdings of around 20. But this exercise does raise questions about whether Stone was right to place the dividing line between larger and small manorial landowners in the peerage at the level of 40 manors.

If this exercise is repeated for 1602, the results are:

Appendix VIIIB

The average annual value of a manor was (£77.83 divided by 5) X 4= £63.06

Group Gross rental Number of families Estimated number of manors Average

I

II

III £ 7,500 1 118.93 118.93

IV £17,500 3 or 4 277.50 92.50

V £43,000 10 681.84 68.18

VI £38,000 15 602.56 40.17

VII £31,000 24 491.56 20.48

VIII £ 3,000 5 47.57 9.51

Families holding 70 or more manors: 4 or 5

Families holding 40 to 69 manors: 25

Families holding 11 to 39 manors: 24

Families holding 10 or less manors: 5

Alternatively, the figures can be shown as:

Families holding 40 or more manors: 28 or 29

Average holding of families with 40 or more manors: 1680.83 divided by 29 = 57.60 manors

Or: 1680.83 divided by 30 = 56.03 manors

Average holding of families with fewer than 40 manors: 539.13 divided by 29 = 18.59 manors

These figures suggest a very sharp fall in the number of families holding 70 or more manors from a putative 23 in 1559 to 4 or 5 in 1602. It is possible that this explains why Stone omitted to provide such an estimate for 1602 in his text since this would have required him to explain why the number of such families holding 70 or more manors grew by 1641. There is, however, a hint here that the average number of manors held by peerage families with more than 40 manors each fell from c.77 in 1559 to c.56 to c.58 in 1602. If this was what happened, most peerage families, i.e. those with over 40 manors, would still have been very substantial landowners on his criteria in 1602. It was, prima facie, at the bottom of his table for gross rentals in 1559 and 1602 that there had been a growth from 25 to 29 families in the lowest two income groups. In 1559, the 25 families had held an average of 19.38 manors: in 1602, the average for the 29 comparable families was 18.59 manors. Legitimate questions may be asked about how far contemporaries inside and outside the peerage may have viewed this situation as a financial crisis.

If the same procedure is adopted for 1641, the results are:

Appendix VIIIC

The average annual value of a manor (excluding casualties) was: £163.96

Group Gross rental Number Estimated Number of manors Average

I £ 74,500 5 454.38 90.88

II £ 44,000 4 268.39 67.09

III £ 10,500 1 64.04 64.04

IV £100,000 13 609.90 46.92

V £104,000 19 634.01 33.39

vi £117,000 36 713.59 19.82

VII £ 38,000 21 231.76 11.04

VIII £ 17,000 22 103.68 4.71

Families holding 70 or more manors: 5

Families holding 40 to 69 manors: 18

Families holding 11 to 39 manors: 76

Families holding 10 or less manors: 22

Alternatively, the figures can be shown as:

Families holding 40 or manors: 23

Average holding of families with 40 or more manors: 1396.71 divided by 23 = 60.73

Families holding less than 40 manors: 98

Average holding of families with fewer than 40 manors: 1683.04 divided by 98 = 17.17

It looks at first glance as though the number of families holding 70 or more manors had barely altered since 1602, i.e. from 4or 5 in 1602 to 5 in 1641, although Stone thought there were 6 at the latter date. The number of families holding over 40 manors had apparently dropped from 28 or 29 in 1602 to 23 in 1641 although there had been a modest growth in the number of manors each such family held from c.56 or 58 to c.61. At the apex of Stone’s tables for gross rental, there had been a contraction from 32 families with more than 40 manors in 1602 to 23 in 1641. But there had also been a spectacular increase in landed income per manor when measured by the Phelps-Brown price index for consumables which had more than compensated for any putative contraction in manorial holdings over that period. In the bottom two categories for gross rental, the number of families holding between 11 and 39 manors had risen from 24 to 76 and of those with 10 or fewer manors from 5 in 1602 to 22 in 1641. It was the expansion of the peerage since King James’s accession in 1603 and the concentration of newly-created peers in the bottom categories for gross rental that lent plausibility to Stone’s claims about the impoverishment of the peerage in relative terms. His statistics for gross rentals and the tentative inferences that may be drawn from them suggest that his arguments may need to be modified.

Thursday, 23^rd January, 2020

Vanishing periodicals in the Albert Sloman Library

I went down to the Albert Sloman Library on the University of Essex’s campus just after lunch to discover whether its history section had re-opened and, if it had, to examine the latest article on the academic journals. To my pleasure, Floor 2 was now open and I was able to look at a slightly larger selection of books than had been the case last October. Unfortunately, no periodicals were in evidence at all. I duly enquired after them at the reception desk on the ground floor and was greatly disappointed to discover that not a single historical journal was anywhere other than in store. (It takes a day to order them from the library’s stores.) Undergraduates, postgraduates and staff can use the library’s on-line resources to examine the latest editions but, as an external reader, I cannot do so. That means I shall have to go to the Cambridge University Library in future or to the library of the Institute of Historical Research in London instead.

The other issue I have to resolve by tomorrow is whether to pay 180 Canadian dollars to get access for three months to the State Papers Online via the Tanner-Ritchie site. Financially, it may be worth it to avoid having to travel out to Kew to visit the National Archives but, on the other hand, I should probably have to spend most of my days working through this source to get the most out of it. Decision day must be tomorrow.

Adam Ring, Religionen I Den Engelske Borgerkrigs Historiografi – Konflikt Eller Konsensus (Religion in the English Civil War – Conflict or Consensus)⁹

This thesis deals with the question of the role of religion in the English Civil War or Revolution that led to the fall of King Charles I and the abolition of the monarchy in 1649. Its focus is primarily historiographical drawing on secondary works in English to explain the differing significance given to the role of religious quarrels in leading to this outcome. Some like S.R.Gardiner in the nineteenth century had seen it, according to Ring, as a revolution leading to the creation of constitutional freedom, the supremacy of Parliament and religious toleration while the social historians of the mid-twentieth century like Christopher Hill, Brian Manning and Lawrence Stone sought to offer economic and social explanations for these upheavals. Later Revisionists have, by contrast, emphasised the stability of the Caroline regime and the accidents which led to its fall and then overthrow before finding themselves overtaken by post-Revisionists keener to stress the importance of cultural and religious divisions from the mid-1620s onwards. Like many historians of the period, Ring was impressed by the variety of terms used to analyse events in the British Isles and Ireland in this period and the discussions which had arisen from this work.

One of the surprises to be found in this work is the analytical framework adopted by Adam Ring. He draws upon a number of historians, all of them continental, of whom I had not previously heard or was only just aware of, figures like Bernard Eric Jensen, Jens Henrik Tiemroth, Jens Christian Manniche and George Iggers. More importantly still, he has made use of two articles by Anders Holm Thomsen on the preconditions for the English Revolution and the ideological struggle in which Puritanism was involved. In fact, it is difficult to find the articles and works he cites in this country or, indeed, on the internet. But it does demonstrate the different analytical frameworks applied by intelligent postgraduates in other European countries.

The selection of R.C.Richardson’s synoptic overview of the English Revolution and of Ann Hughes’s study of the causes of the English Civil War is more conventional. Nonetheless, it is possible to have some reservations about these choices. Richardson’s sympathy for the approaches taken by R.H.Tawney and Christopher Hill underplays the impact of the scepticism expressed by major figures like Hugh Trevor-Roper and J.H.Hexter about the economic and social determinism to which Tawney and Hill, like Lawrence Stone, subscribed. This also allows the significance of David Underdown’s attempt to argue that there were regional and local social factors underlying the choice of sides in the 1640s to pass unmentioned. None of this applies to Ann Hughes’s observations but it is not clear from Ring’s account how her post-revisionist views were formulated. I also have doubts about whether Robert Ashton can accurately be described as a revisionist or William Hunt as a post-revisionist. What is certainly significant is the omission of any reference to Nicholas Tyacke’s ground-breaking analysis of the reaction within the Church of England to the rise of Arminianism and, more significantly still, the relatively perfunctory treatment of John Morrill’s argument about the events of the 1640s being the last of the European ‘wars of religion’. Glenn Burgess and W.A.Prior’s book, England’s Wars of Religion Revisited, might have been more systematically exploited in this respect.

These comments may seem unfair, especially if I were to be asked to give an analysis of the historiography of seventeenth-century Scandinavia. I could not do so. But Adam Ring’s thesis does testify to a wider interest on the continent in the history of these islands and in the work of historians based here. That is to be welcomed and is, one hopes, an exercise that will continue.

11^th February, 2020.

Gaby Mahlberg on ‘Writing books as an independent scholar’

Gaby Mahlberg is a German historian specialising in the seventeenth century who has studied and worked in universities in her home country and in the U.K. for many years. She is also a person who has moved between the worlds of scholarship and journalism on more than one occasion. At present, she is working as a journalist in Berlin having given up her academic post in the U.K. a little while ago. Her recent comments (27^th February, 2020) on her website about the difficulties of writing history books as an independent scholar are, therefore, of interest, particularly to people without the academic infrastructure of university libraries, regular conferences and seminars, friendly and helpful colleagues to talk to and whose help may be sought.

Some of what she says about the difficulties of writing such books is obvious. Time must be found in the evenings and at weekends to do the necessary work of composing one’s text. Social life suffers. Not all of one’s friends are quite as sympathetic as they might be. Reading half a chapter of an academic book over lunch in one’s lunch break is not as easy as one might suppose, especially if there is a noisy group nearby or a mobile telephone call to be answered.

Even so, there are possibilities. Archives searched in the past, books and journals read at that time, remain available. The writing skills practiced as a journalist, which require regular exercise, help to ensure that writer’s block is unlikely to occur. An honorary post like that of an associate professor at Warwick University, which Gaby Mahlberg has held for three years, allowed her access to the available on-line databases even if she could no longer browse on a university library’s shelves. On the other hand, there was less possibility of finding a peer in your field willing to read a chapter of her book in return for her proof-reading their latest article. Similarly, the chances of gaining a book contract from a published or of launching your book in the University’s bookshop or lecture theatre were diminished as indeed were the opportunities to promote such a work at international conferences. But, whatever the difficulties, Gaby Mahlberg encouraged her readers to go ahead with their hopes of publishing even if they were not working in academia. Some of the best works she had read were written by civil servants or history enthusiasts who did not have to take the next research assessment into account.

Gaby Mahlberg has articulated what many people in academic life feel. The demands of administration, teaching, research and publishing have grown more intense within universities in this country. An old friend of mine from the 1970s told me less than a decade later about his frustration at the pressure he felt and how his time for his won research and writing had been whittled away to a degree he had never anticipated whilst a postgraduate. Had his choice of a career been worth it? A slightly younger friend expressed the view to me two years ago that history in the universities in this country was unlikely to survive given the iron hand of administrators and accountants in the sector. I hope he will not be proven correct. But there is a need, which I have expressed before, for the discipline of history to exploit the opportunities the world of the internet has created to form new networks, novel linkages, contacts, forms of publication and interaction outside the control of bureaucrats and politicians. The sooner these opportunities are taken, the better.

1^st March, 2020

1Martha W.McCartney, Virginia Immigrants and Adventurers 1607-1635: A Biographical Dictionary. Genealogical Publishing Company. Baltimore, Maryland. 2007.p.775.

2The Records of the Virginia Company of London. Edited by Susan Myra Kingsbury (Government Printing Office. Washington, U.S.A. 1935), Volume IV, p.211. The source of this information was a man called “Rostingham”, who was probably Sir George Yeardley;s nephew Edmund Rossingham. See McCartney, op.cit., p.611.

3The Records of the Virginia Company of London. Edited by Susan Myra Kingsbury (Government Printing Office, Washington, U.S.A. 1933), Volume III, p.119. Ferrar Papers (Magdalene College, Cambridge), 100, 106 and 127.

4Leanda de Lisle, When we went woke in 1655. Saturday Review, p.11.

5See James Horn, 1619 Jamestown and the Forging of American Democracy (Basic Books. New York, U.S.A. 2019), Pp.65-81.

6J.H.Lefroy, ed., Memorials of the Discovery and Early Settlement of the Bermudas or Somers Islands 1515-1685 (The Bermuda Historical Society. The Bermuda National Trust. University of Toronto Press. Canada. 1981), Pp.107-108, 110.

7The Sunday Times: Culture Section. Not a killjoy after all. Pp.30-31.

8Krelenko, Natalia Stanislavovna, R.Tawney – Hugh Trevor-Roper: ‘storm over the gentry’, Saratove State University 2010.

9Roskilde University thesis (2013).