You have just a few hours left to get in your nominations for the History Carnival tomorrow. Email me: sharon AT earlymodernweb.org.uk. (Please ensure that you put History Carnival in the title of the email.)
It’s gonna be gargantuan. (Hence little blogging here while I put it together and probably for a few days afterwards while I recover and get some proper work done.)
Update: While you’re waiting around, you can read the Carnival of Bad History.
Last week, Rebecca of (a)musings of a grad student spotted this story of a feud between neighbouring cattle farmers that ended in tragedy.
As Rebecca notes, you don’t need to spend much time in early modern court records to come across disputes over straying livestock. Then too, they could lead to violent encounters. There’s much that’s familiar to me about the terrible story reported in the newspaper. The difference is that in early modern cases, you never get the detailed story of the years of feuding or the origins of disputes that lie behind those occasional court appearances. You get fragments. Sometimes you can guess a little from repeated mentions in archives, especially if you have access to (and the time to delve into) a range of records from different courts. You might find a string of prosecutions for petty misdemeanours: assault, barratry and scolding and other disturbances of the peace. They may be prosecutions by formal indictment, jury presentment, recognizance (Glossary of legal terms), or they might involve extra-curial arbitration (which is even more rarely recorded).
But often you may just have one (sometimes shocking) incident: in 1670, David ap Richard, a yeoman of Llanarmon Dyffryn Ceiriog in Denbighshire, told a JP that
upon ye sixt day of May last he went before sunne rising to some pasture that he had taken to see some cattle of his that grased theare; being come theare he found a horse of one John Robert with his [David’s] cattle which he seized upon with an intent to putt [the horse] in ye pinfold, & brought [the horse] to his owne house while he was goeing unto ye constable for ye key thereof; but as he was bringing of ye key from ye constables towards his owne house ye sayd John Robert runneth to meete him threatneth to kill him for stealing his horse, whereupon this examinant came away from him through a river towards his house cryed out for feare of him; when he came neare his house ye said John turned back through the said river & when this examinant was afterwards goeing with ye horse to ye pinfold ye said John stood in ye way that he was to passe & from ye toppe of a banck that was in ye way hee struck this examinant with a clubbe over both hands to ye effusion of his bloud whereupon this examinant held upp a black bill that he had in his hands to defend himselfe but knoweth not how ye sayd John came by his wound.
John Robert died, and David was convicted of manslaughter.
Accounts of non-lethal violence, meanwhile, can cause considerable difficulties of interpretation. The victim of an assault will nearly always present him/herself as an entirely innocent party, the attacker as out of control, extremely dangerous, with no respect for law and order, and so on. Sometimes this might be true. But sometimes you have accounts from both sides, disputing parties both claiming to be innocent victims of lawless, violent attackers, etc.
Anne Lancelot of the parish of Holt complained about members of the Richardson family at Denbighshire Quarter Sessions in 1685:
That the said John Richardson being bound to the behavior about three weekes agoe fell upon one Robert Rice and William Hughes in the kings highway and rescued the cattle that they had before them which they had found tresspasseing in the said Lancelott ground which they then did drive towards the pinfold & [John Richardson] with a blacke bill that hee had then in his hand handled the same and rescued the cattle and the said William Hughes beleives if hee had withstood him hee would then have don them mischeif and in regard they were afraid hee would then have done them harme with his blacke bill they lett him take the cattle
That the said John Richardson being soe bound to his behavior togeather with John Richardson his sonne being bound to the peace did att another time make another rescue of his said cattle which were found trespasseing in the said Lancelot ground in theire way of driveing them to the pinfold
But John Richardson had a different account of events. He said that he and Ann Lancelott had for some months been co-tenants of the field where she claimed his cattle had been ‘trespassing’ and that she
did out of meere malice & against all law unpound your peticoner John Richardson thelders cattle then pastureing upon the same feild… and your peticoner being informed his said cattle were unpounded, & haveing obteyned the same out of pinfould sent his son John & his said servant with the same cattle into the said feild, where the said Ann Lancelott Urian Weaver William Hughes William Rees with the said Ann Lancelotts servant maide were with staves & pikells & did then & there in a hostile manner withstand & hinder your peticioners said son & servant to turne the said cattle into the said pasture, and William Hughes one of the said widdow Lancelotts servants with a staffe of two yards long did strike your peticioners servant upon the hand & the said widdow Lancelott said ‘Knock him downe’; of which affray word being brought to your peticoner John Richardson thelder he together with the said Roger Richardson & his said daughter repared there and then; the said Richardson thelder being constable in the kings name demanded the peace & that he might turne his cattle into their pasture which the said other persons refused, soe that the said John Richardson thelder was constrayned to breake downe another gapp upon his owne hey to turne in his cattle; and then the said Weaver said to the said Lancelott ‘Wee will bind them all to the peace & then wee may doe wt wee will with them’, and afterwards bound your peticoner to the peace in 4 severall recognizances out of meere malice & without any cause to them given…
There is no simple test of who is most (or least) likely to be telling the truth. These are people of similar social status, moving in the same circles. Comparing their competing accounts carefully is quite revealing though: it can be suggested that they are not really that contradictory. Each party is careful to selectively edit mentions of their own actions, giving a very bare account, whilst detailing (and possibly exaggerating) that of the ‘enemy’, using certain kinds of rhetoric to put their actions and motives in the worst possible light. I suspect that neither side is ‘innocent’ here. (At the same time, I don’t think that they’re simply cynical; the mutual hostility and sense of being wronged are, I think, real enough.)
There are other documents in the files that give glimpses of some kind of ongoing disputes between the Richardsons against Urian Weaver and Ann Lancelott. The Richardsons had previously been bound over to keep the peace towards Lancelott. In 1685, there were complaints against Lancelott from two of her servants, allegations that she had abused them and dismissed them without cause after they caught her and Weaver committing adultery. In return, she prosecuted them, one for theft and both for assault. The charges were all thrown out by the court. The recognizance for one of the two servants’ appearance in court survives: one of his ’sureties’ (guarantors) was another Richardson; surely not a coincidence. And forty years later a Margaret Weaver of Holt parish named the father of her bastard child as one Roger Richardson.
Livestock, in a variety of ways, were often in the middle of early modern quarrels between neighbours. This is not so surprising, especially in a region, like Wales, that was so dependent on livestock husbandry. But it’s likely that the isolated incidents like these that we find in court records were often just one small part of much more serious and ongoing disputes. I suspect that was true of the first case above, which ended in the death of John Robert, too. But I will probably never know.
For the History Carnival at Cliopatria on Wednesday 1 June:
Email your nominations for recently published posts about history and related topics (methods, teaching, doing research: check the Carnival homepage link above for the criteria if you’re unsure), which can be your ownwriting or that of other bloggers, to me: sharon AT earlymodernweb DOT org DOT uk (replace AT with @, DOT with . and close up the spaces), by the end of Tuesday. And please ensure that you put History Carnival in the title of the email. (My email software is being a bit overzealous lately at dumping things in the spam folder, for some reason.)
You should include in your email: the title and permalink URL of the blog post you wish to nominate and the author’s name (or pseudonym) and the title of the blog.
You can submit multiple suggestions, but please try not to submit more than one post by any individual author for each Carnival (with the exception of multi-part posts on the same topic).
I’ve not had too many nominations so far, so please get them to me as soon as possible, and spread the word.
Plus: If you would like to host a History Carnival later this summer or autumn, get in touch with me too. Again, you can get more information about hosting at the carnival homepage.
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Also, don’t forget the Carnival of Bad History, which will be at Science and Politics on 31 May. Submissions to: *coturnix1 AT aol DOT com* or *badhistory AT aol DOT com*.
I have the very beginnings of a new Early Modern Resources. There’s not much there yet (it’s very much a test version; most of the categories, which are far from finalised, are empty!), but if anyone has the time to play with it a little and see what they think of the way it works (and looks), feedback would be welcome.
Learning the real identity of a pseudonymous blogger is a curious experience. I know a few now. One was (oops) outed to me by someone else who (I think) assumed that I already knew. Another actually outed h**self to me (unsolicited and without any fanfare), but perhaps s/he also assumed I already knew. I didn’t, but then I usually make a point of not looking for these things. Well, I do think that it’s important to respect people’s privacy in these matters. I am also surprisingly good at not noticing what’s going on around me. (Long practice since childhood, especially when in book-glued-to-nose mode.)
(Although of course once I did know real names I googled like crazy to see what they were hiding. But it was all very respectable and/or academic. No scandal at all. Most disappointing.)
Childish things, I know. But I finally found the WP List of Emoticons. I’d often wondered how to do more than the basic 
and so on.
I rather like 
But as far as I can tell there isn’t one for :sarcasm:
If you’ve been following lately, you’ll know I’m quite keen on the R4 series Things we forgot to remember. This Monday’s programme will be on the space race. (You can still Listen Again to last week’s edition on the Spanish Armada.)
But you might also want to listen out for Hail to the Harmless Drudge, a short series starting tomorrow to celebrate the 250th anniversary of Samuel Johnson’s Dictionary.
Thanks to the mighty Luker, I just came across Prof Blogger’s Pontifications. (Let’s not go into the subject of weasels’ testicles here, however.)
Well worth a visit (and duly blogrolled). A word of caution to this particular post on an alleged course at Syracuse University about the rapper Lil’ Kim, however. I’ve learned to distrust anything any journalist reports on this kind of topic. A ‘degree’ on some ridiculed topic turns out to be at most a vocational diploma; a ‘course’ is frequently no more than a single class, and one that turns out to be perfectly reasonable in its course context.
And that was clearly the case here, too. What actually took place was a single session in an upper-level undergraduate course on Reading Empire and Nation: Race Traitors in the African World; and within that session, just one of the texts studied was a Lil’ Kim lyric. The professor himself sets it out:
Somewhere along the line, someone decided to simply re-title this course that developed out of my on-going research on race and sex in the context of empire, as if it were now a course on celebrity biography—not lyricism…
Around mid-term, thirty-plus students and I were set to analyze three texts in one session: (1) a song-skit from Lil’ Kim’s sophomore solo album; (2) an article called “Law and Disorder” by Dasun Allah and J.F. Ratcliffe on government surveillance of rappers; and (3) an “open letter” by Sylvia Wynter, a powerhouse intellectual critic…
As historians, we know the basic rules of source-criticism: who’s producing it? for what purpose? And we know the golden rule: go back to the primary sources wherever you can. It took me a few minutes of googling to track down the Syracuse English department website, with its course catalogue that contained not a mention of Lil’ Kim (and even less to find the professor’s own comments). Academics may rightly worry about dumbing down and commercialisation of university education. But we also need to be careful that we don’t feed media distortions of what goes on in universities, by failing to observe basic fact-checking and to practise just a little scepticism of media sources - even when they say what you want to hear.
……..
Update: Prof Blogger responds, and has a very interesting point about the differences between teaching literature and teaching history. My concern was that bloggers often swallow what they read in media stories like this without checking their accuracy (the only ones we really tend to check on are the ones that we disagree with - something of which I’ve been guilty too, I’m sure). In this case, that’s not really relevant to Prof Blogger’s objections. I basically disagree with him that Lil’ Kim has no place whatsoever in an English department. But the post wasn’t intended as an attack on him.
If you don’t yet have a blog or you’ve had it up to here with Blogger, and you really like the look of Wordpress blogs (like this one and this and this and this and…) but you don’t feel ready to take on hosting, installation and the rest of it, you might want to try out Blogsome, a free blog host that uses WP themes.
(I should say that I have no idea how reliable it is, what the support is like, etc. But it looks as though it has the flexibility to tweak themes if you want to and it might be a good way to get the hang of both blogging and WP.)
You remember a few weeks ago everyone was into those South Park avatars?
I’d forgotten I even made one.
I’m not sure it shows me off at my best.
I forgot to mention that the programme is available for the Celtic Studies ‘Milestones’ conference, which is in Aber in late June (download at the webpage).
Quite a few history sessions that I’ll probably gatecrash, especially the one on Iolo Morganwg (think Welsh Romantic-era literary forger, opium addict, ethnographer, poet…) that includes the paper entitled “‘Infamy, infamy, they’ve all got it in for me’ – paranoia and persecution anxiety in Iolo Morganwg”…
Research Assistant, ESRC-funded project on status and worth in early modern England. You get to poke around in church court records! (Well, I’d enjoy it anyway.)
Applications are invited for one full time Research Assistant to work on an ESRC funded project on perceptions of worth and social status in early modern England. The applicant will work with Dr Alexandra Shepard to collect material from church court records held in a number of local record offices, to compile a database from it, and to co-author an article on the distribution of wealth and poverty in early modern England. The appointment will be for 18 months from September 2005, though the start date may be flexible.
Candidates should have a PhD in History or a cognate discipline, familiarity with early modern primary sources and palaeography, and experience of compiling datasets (preferably using a relational database). Experience of working with early modern church court records is desirable but not essential. The post is available initially at spine point 6 on the Research Assistant scale (currently £21,640).
I only need to add that Alexandra Shepard is the author of a book on manhood in early modern England that I like very much indeed.
This morning, there’s a trackback from Alun of Archaeoastronomy (to the ranty Big Words post of the other week. Readers of C18-L will know that they’ve been, quite coincidentally, chatting about this topic for a few days too. It’s been remarkably civilised, for C18-L.)
Anyway, Alun has some very interesting things to say about the big words question, but more than that, this is a blog that’s a welcome addition to my blogroll. You can check out the lovely archaeology posts, lament the declining standards of graffiti in the Classics Library loos, and whet your appetite with the ‘Coming Posts’ section in the sidebar, a novelty to me anyway and a sign of admirable blogging discipline. (Although I can tell you that, if I can actually get it finished, I have a post about disputes between neighbours over straying livestock coming up.)
Plus, it seems that he came across my post in the History Carnival. See, being included does get you noticed. Get your entries in!
*I mean, apart from the ones that the WP software automatically sends to other WP blogs.
1. I am hosting the next History Carnival at Cliopatria on Wednesday 1 June!
Email your nominations - your own blogwriting or that of other bloggers to me: sharon AT earlymodernweb DOT org DOT uk (replace AT with @, DOT with . and close up the spaces), by the end of Tuesday.
Remember, the History Carnival isn’t just intended for academics; entries don’t have to be particularly weighty or scholarly. But I do expect a focus on things historical and reasonable standards of accuracy and fairness in the use of historical sources. If you’re uncertain, check out the carnival’s homepage at the link above. And NB that the host’s decision is final.
You should include in your email: the title and permalink URL of the blog post you wish to nominate and the author’s name (or pseudonym) and the title of the blog.
You can submit multiple suggestions, but please try not to submit more than one post by any individual author for each Carnival (with the exception of multi-part posts on the same topic). (Unless you really can’t bear to choose.) You can submit your own work as well as that of other bloggers.
The posts should have been published recently, certainly within the previous month, and preferably since the date of the last Carnival (15 May).
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2. You may also be interested in the Carnival of Bad History, which will be at Science and Politics on 31 May.
Have you seen lately an egregious example of miunderstanding or misuse of history? Was history botched in a movie or TV show you just saw? Was a book or article trying to rewrite history for artistic or political purposes? Does watching History Channel drive you crazy?
You have until 30 May to send submissions to: *coturnix1 AT aol DOT com* or *badhistory AT aol DOT com*.
……
And please pass on the word!
Today I got my book manuscript off to the editors.
Finally. I have spent weeks making excuses and not getting it finished. (’Just need to do this… Too busy… It can wait a few more days…’) But basically I didn’t want to let go.
I am an idiot.
So I am suitably grateful to the Beeb’s website and RealPlayer for the chance to catch up. Last night, Radio 4 broadcast Part 2 of Things we forgot to remember, on the Spanish Armada (well, Armadas: that’s part of the point). Direct link to the sound file (or go here). And you can get a full transcript too.
Splendid stuff.
Man, there are some seriously posh people in this programme.
It’s Adult Learners’ Week.
Unfortunately, it seems that the government’s current emphasis on getting 16-19 year olds into higher education is likely to mean cuts in support for adult learners. Fewer courses, fewer places, higher fees.
Fulbright awards are being advertised, including a post-doc fellowship at Cardiff University. These are for US citizens only. (Non-US scholars might want to take a peek at the Visiting Scholars Program.)
Mellon post-doc fellowships, University of Pennsylvania. The theme this year is travel.
Another riposte to Andrew Marvell. Thanks to wolfangel, whose post also led me to The Wondering Minstrels. Looks fun for gentle wandering and picking poems at random.
I just couldn’t resist this one
You’ll be greeted
by a nice cup of coffee
when you get to heaven
and strains of angelic harmony.
But wouldn’t you be devastated
if they only serve decaffeinated
while from the percolators of hell
your soul was assaulted
by Satan’s fresh espresso smell?
– John Agard
I’m going through the blog (slowly) and putting various links into the New Links page at Early Modern Resources. Eventually they’ll make their way into the ‘proper’ pages. These have been updated in the last few days:
Crime, law and order
Politics, rebellions, revolutions
Reference section
I’m wondering though, before I go any further, if it’s about time for a real overhaul this summer. EMR is still based on static HTML (and on a set of categories I thought up several years ago when it was much, much smaller), and I think it’s just getting too big for that to be practicable any more. Thanks to Wordpress, the wonderful world of PHP and dynamic web pages is not quite as foreign to me as it was, but it still seems a big step. (Whenever I look at MySQL/PHP tutorials they scare the crap out of me.) Unless anyone can recommend some good (and not ridiculously expensive) software that’s easy to use and would be suitable for doing this kind of thing? Any advice from the more tech-savvy out there?
(I’ve looked at Wordpress itself, but I’m not convinced that it’d be able to do the job I want. Or am I wrong?)
This site is a good example of one that started out as static HTML and converted to a database (a couple of years ago now). It’s bigger than EMR, but I do look at it with some envy. How difficult would it be to build something along those lines?
The next Carnival of Bad History will be at Science and Politics on 31 May.
Have you seen lately an egregious example of miunderstanding or misuse of history? Was history botched in a movie or TV show you just saw? Was a book or article trying to rewrite history for artistic or political purposes? Does watching History Channel drive you crazy?
You have until 30 May to write about what’s been annoying you most lately and submit it, or something you’ve read on another blog, to: *coturnix1 AT aol DOT com* or *badhistory AT aol DOT com*.
And on 1 June I’ll be hosting the History Carnival. Broader remit here; all sorts of ‘good’ history welcome! Email me with nominations: sharon AT earlymodernweb.org.uk
Did you enjoy Hanging not punishment enough? Well, now you can read William Paley’s Reasons for contentment, addressed to the labouring part of the British public (1792), brought to you by Don Herzog of Left2Right.
Thanks to Brandon at Houyhnhnm Land for the tip-off.
Plus:
Hannah More, Cheap repository tracts and Village politics.
Just a quick note about Things we forgot to remember, a website for a new radio series that began last Monday. You can listen to the first episode online, about the Battle of Britain and the Battle of Mers-El-Kebir (update: it’s great). Early modernists, however, will be particularly interested to learn that the upcoming episode (23 May) will be about the Spanish Armada. (And a later one will be about the French Revolution.)
Thanks to Chris Williams of the Open University, who worked on the programme, for the tip-off. Esther McCallum-Stewart of Break of Day in the Trenches also had a hand in it. So I expect much yummy goodness.
Update: If you have any trouble with the direct link to the programme above, this will take you to the main Radio 4 page and you can see the link on the right hand sidebar. (Although I’m hoping it’ll work OK now.)