Early Modern Notes

Some days, there you are in the archives wondering if it’s time to go home yet (for the 20th time since the coffee break), and then you turn a page and you get something to make you fall off your chair. Even though (for once…) nobody died.

It starts with a letter from a Flintshire JP, Thomas Hanmer, to the Chief Justice of Chester, Sir Richard Lewkenor, who’s about to open proceedings at the October 1607 Great Sessions in Denbighshire.

Now, it seems that a certain William Jones, a surgeon of Chirk (Denbighshire), has been bound over to appear at the Great Sessions (I don’t know what for yet; I’ll see if I can find out later). But Hanmer’s letter is about an apparently unrelated matter in Flintshire.

Jones, says Hanmer, “did undertake the dismembring of a foote from a poore woeman” in Hanmer (in Flintshire), which was paid for by the charity of a number of local people. But “ymediatlye after the finishinge of the said cure the said Johnes gotte the poore woeman wth child, whereof not long since she hath byne delivered”.

Then we have the petition of the woman herself, Elinor Evans of Hanmer, with a fuller version of the story. It really doesn’t get any better. (more…)

The Internet is now in Handy Book Form!

It’s quite funny too. Mac devotees should check out the Schmapple store.

All products available in these shades:
1. Incredible White
2. Fantabulous White
3. Virginal White
4. Snow White
5. Cyphocilus White
6. Black

(They just forgot to mention that Black costs you an extra 200 quid thank-you-very-much-suckers.)

Also, there probably ought to be some mileage in spoofing Wordpress these days. I luv my WP, but is it really necessary to get quite so excited about a new version quite so often? (The last one was in May; there seems to have been a new security update every other week ever since, which doesn’t help that ennui-y feeling.) Is it really that thrilling, Matt dearest? I’m personally raising a shaggy eyebrow at the breathless announcement that they’re dropping a feature (combined link and post categories) that they only introduced nine months ago (and it broke my theme, dammit). And you know, I just can’t get that excited about tags. Am I really the only person left in the universe who doesn’t feel the slightest urge to randomly tag every conceivably significant word or phrase or idea in every bleedin’ post I write? Pfft.

I haven’t actually read Jacques Derrida’s Archive fever (Mal d’archive). But I have read Carolyn Steedman’s Dust, which mentions it (and I think this was at the back of my mind when I began to type the title for my posts about this summer’s research). For Derrida, if I have Steedman right, Archive Fever is really a kind of desire: “the desire to recover moments of inception: to find and possess all sorts of beginnings”… (Steedman, p. 5)

But Steedman takes us into other possible manifestations of Archive Fever.

Typically, the fever - more accurately, the precursor fever - starts in the early hours of the morning, in the bed of a cheap hotel, where the historian cannot get to sleep. You cannot get to sleep because you lie so narrowly, in an attempt to avoid contact with anything that isn’t shielded by sheets and pillowcases. The first sign then, is an excessive attention to the bed, an irresistible anxiety about the hundreds who have slept there before you, leaving their dust and fibres in the fibres of the blankets… (p. 17)

(Oh, that passage brought flooding back the memories of a place where I stayed a few years ago. The problem was not wondering about previous human occupants of the bed, though. It was the much smaller occupants that were still there that were the trouble. I still don’t know precisely what they were, but either they or something else in the bed brought me out in hives, something I’ve never experienced before or since. So, no, I did not get too much sleep.)

Or the feverish anxiety of the penultimate day in the record office:

You know you will not finish, that there will be something left unread, unnoted, untranscribed. You are not anxious about the Great Unfinished, knowledge of which is the very condition of your being there in the first place, and of the grubby trade you set out in, years ago. You know perfectly well that the infinite heaps of things they recorded, the notes and traces that these people left behind, constitute practically nothing at all… Your anxiety is more precise, and more prosaic. It’s about PT S2/1/1, which only arrived from the stacks that afternoon, which is enormous, and which you will never get through tomorrow. (p.18)

Or even the possibility of real, actual fever. It is not particularly reassuring to learn that the archive could be seriously bad for your health (anthrax-related meningitis?!). Exaggeration? Yet I already know that archives (pre-20th-century, anyway) make you sneeze. And that those old papers and parchments leave their black marks on your fingers (unless you bag yourself some gloves) and your clothes (don’t wear white in an archive. There are smudgy blackish fingerprints on my silvery laptop, too). You watch the dust rise; you mark the passing of the researcher by the little scattering of fragments of fragile paper and rotting leather and red sealing wax (those 400-year-old seals on legal documents are often simply crumbling away).

There is always someone just across from you who has a cold, which you hope fervently that you won’t catch this time. And you get the headaches that come from squinting at near-illegible handwriting… and let’s not start on the backache, often helped along by badly designed chairs. Plus, why is it that archives are either freezing cold (good for the documents, but not so much for the humans) or hot and stuffy (the budget didn’t stretch to decent airconditioning, but it did cover all those new computer terminals blowing out hot air… NLW, I’m talking to you here)?

Still, at least this summer I’m at home for my sickness. My own bed and food, no travelling, just a nice brisk walk up the hill (I hated the commuting to the PRO last year!) to settle at a desk and continue the love-hate relationship with what I do.

I say love-hate because it’s an experience of extremes: it swings between utter boredom and an overwhelming desire to pack it in NOW (several times a day, usually), to the rising excitement of the latest find - it can be something entirely unexpected, or corroboration of something you’ve already begun to suspect, or funny, or sad. But it’s never just so-so, never just another job. If it were, who’d put up with all the discomforts and the frustrations and the crappy bits?

And back to Steedman’s book, which is one that should be read by all historians. And since I have work to get back to today (but a little break from the archives; I have to get on with working on some future teaching materials and planning future courses to impress potential employers next year), I’ll just let her sign off for me.

And nothing starts in the Archive, nothing, ever at all, though things certainly end up there. You find nothing in the Archive but stories caught half way through: the middle of things; discontinuities. (p.45)

(I wish I’d remembered that quote when I was posting about disputes over livestock the other week…)

But in actual Archives, though the bundles may be mountainous, there isn’t in fact, very much there. […] The Archive is made from selected and consciously chosen documentation from the past and also from the mad fragmentations that no one intended to preserve and just ended up there. […]

The modern European public archive came into being in order to solidify and memorialise first monarchical and then state power. […] These are the origins of a prosaic place where the written and fragmentary traces of the past are put in boxes and folders, bound up, stored, catalogued …

And: the Archive is also a place of dreams. […]

To enter that place where the past lives, where ink on parchment can be made to speak, still remains the social historian’s dream, of bringing to life those who do not for the main part exist, not even between the lines of state papers and legal documents, who are not really present, not even in the records of Revolutionary bodies and fractions. (pp.68-70)

***

Originally posted June 2005

I like cookery books. A lot. Remember these (from 2004)?

The collection continues to grow. My favourite this year (it was a Christmas present) is Elizabeth Luard’s European Peasant Cookery. I’ve just ordered 1080 Recipes (mmm, Spanish food).

But for the habitually disorganised, faced with a random assortment of potential ingredients and limited time to make something tasty, the internet takes some beating. I tend not to use particular recipe databases anymore: I simply google “recipe [list more or less plausible ingredients]” and let it do its serendipitous thing a few times until something I fancy turns up. It works remarkably well, much of the time.

Now, if only Google could do the washing up as well…

The Old College was the original home of the university in Aberystwyth, opened in 1872 and the first university in Wales (grand total: 26 students; the first female students arrived in 1883). The Penglais campus on the hill (with important outliers at Llanbadarn) is now, with the expansion of the university in the second half of the twentieth century, the main site for teaching. Old College is now largely used for administration, although two major departments, Welsh and Education, still reside there.

In a period of building expansion with the coming of the railway line during the 1860s, it had originally been built as a hotel, but the company went bust before completion and offered it to the recently established university committee. It was a bargain; about £80,000 had already been spent on the building works, and the university got it (though incomplete) for £10,000. But it was still a struggle to get the university up and running. Much of the early funding came from public subscriptions within Wales (it’s clear that getting any aid at all from governments was an extremely difficult task until the mid-1880s), and many of those were very small sums, the “pennies from the people of Wales” as authors (rather sentimentally) put it. But perhaps that had advantages; as a result, they regarded it as their college and were prepared to fight for its survival at the most desperate time after the fire of 1885, and when official policy (and money) would have ignored Aberystwyth in favour of colleges at Cardiff and Bangor.

(more…)

The chief executive of the British Library warns of the potential damage that could be caused by cuts to its budget. (Those are the cuts resulting from overspending on the 2012 Olympics, including, of course, that dire logo.) Not just in terms of acquisitions and access to reading rooms; there is considerable emphasis on digital resources and access too:

If the suggested cuts to the nation’s greatest library go ahead, large parts of the UK’s digital output will be lost. Gaps will open in the intellectual record of the nation. As our global competitors forge further ahead in the digital world, the British Library will be marooned in the analogue era, ceasing to be relevant for future generations.

The proposed BL funding cuts have been well publicised. Meanwhile, the news that the Arts and Humanities Data Service (the UK’s central support and archiving service for humanities digital resources) is about to lose its funding has barely been noticed. It has been warned that we could rapidly go “from having an exceptionally strong system of national infrastructure support for ICT in Arts and Humanities research… [to] almost none at all.”

…the end of the AHDS may be decisive in the history of digital scholarship in the UK as this may be the end of national support. It is national support that has defined digital scholarship in the UK for many years and has helped the nation to become one of the world-leaders in the field. Without a national approach, the field may flounder or return to the dark days of scattered digital scholarship with little coherence or ambitions as a field.

If you ever get the chance to see either of these films at the cinema, just go. They are the only features made by Kevin Brownlow (in collaboration with Andrew Mollo), with whom some of you may be familiar as a historian of silent film and documentary-maker (on Monday we also saw his recent documentary of Cecil B De Mille, which has only been broadcast in the US so far; talk about a story of two halves).

I’m familiar with Winstanley, their beautiful, haunting film about the Diggers, released in 1975 but begun in the late 60s (and it is very much a film of its time), from the video release. But seeing it on the cinema screen was a new experience. The opening battle scene - impressive even when TV-sized - was awesome and deeply moving. Quite different in pace from the rest of the film, but it sets up the trademark loving closeup shots of the human face and figure; it was devastating then to see those individuals cut down in battle. The sacrifices and expectations raised by the wars and overthrow of the monarchical order set the context for the main part of the film, Gerard Winstanley’s attempt to create a self-supporting communitarian society at St George’s Hill.

I don’t think it’s too much of a spoiler to say that you know - even if you don’t know the history - that this is going to be a tragedy, that the attempt is always already doomed (even the environment is their enemy; it’s rare that you will see such a stark, harsh south-eastern England). The film, its making and its subsequent history, in some ways mirrors its subject. It was made on the tightest of budgets, largely reliant on volunteers and almost entirely on non-professional actors (some of the acting can seem very stilted; bear with it). It has subsequently been virtually unknown outside a small circle of worshippers - and early modern historians like me (I doubt I would otherwise ever have encountered it; even lefty devoted film-going friends who knew Brownlow’s documentary work and writing had not seen it before I showed them the video…).

However, I hadn’t seen It Happened Here (1964, but again the release date follows several years of production work) until last week. Fact: most counterfactual history is tosh. This is the real deal: it makes you think afresh about what did happen in history in the light of what might have. It’s dark, disturbing, terrifying, often blackly humorous; and it was made by a pair of teenagers. It is 1944; Britain was invaded by Germany in 1940. We see events from the perspective of a nurse, Pauline Murray (the actress’s real name, and it’s quite astounding to learn that she had never acted before, for her performance is remarkable and largely holds the sometimes very loose-knit fabric of the film together). She becomes a ‘collaborator’ in the belief (with many others) that the war is won and what matters now is to help put her country back together, despite the repugnant ideologies of the Nazis - and the sight of the Jewish ghetto.

The film was controversial when it came out; Brownlow and Mollo were forced to remove the most disturbing section of the film. It’s a sequence in which a group of real English fascists give spontaneous answers to a set of scripted questions. It probably will, and should, make you feel slightly ill. But this is only the most obviously shocking part of what made the film too uncomfortable for this country to stomach at the time: it challenged post-war complacency, the belief that we the British, the ‘bulldog breed’, were somehow different from those other Europeans who gave way to Nazi ideas and invaders so easily. Indeed, there is a superb ‘film within a film’, cleverly imagined and perfectly presented propaganda re-presenting the legendary Christmas Day football game of the First World War within a narrative of the closeness of the historical links between German and British - had it not been for the evil Bolsheviks and Jews causing them to fight each other.

But, for all that, it’s clear that much of the population’s compliance is sullen and fragile; sometimes their real feelings are expressed in terrible, spontaneous violence against collaborators, sometimes in more mundane ways, eggs ‘accidentally’ spilt on Pauline’s smart new uniform on a bus. The facial expressions of the observers give away nothing, and everything in their nothingness. They are the masks of those who live with hated conquerors. They are not rebels; few of us have the courage for that. And besides, the rebels too are hated by many. Pauline sees her closest friends killed, needlessly and senselessly, by them. One character observes grimly that the only way to destroy Fascism is by adopting its own methods. The film is clearly anti-fascist; but it is also, throughout, an indictment of the corrupting, brutalising, sickening effects of war. (Further articles.)

***

Originally posted September 2004

At intervals between August and September 2004 I posted several photos of 17th-century documents from the Chester Great Sessions records (taken during my research trip to the National Archives), which were surprisingly popular. Here they are again, all in one place.

Stephen Fry: Gadget Boy. Luvvies must blog!

In responding to a comment by Kristine on the post about ghosts, I brought up the strategies and choices of witnesses concerned to persuade local officials of the truth of their accounts of events. The use of the supernatural in narratives about murder was just one way, and a relatively unusual one, of doing that. Moving away from homicide (because sometimes I do!) to the more common and mundane area of theft, many witness testimonies in the early modern court records bring quite straightforward evidence of suspects caught in possession of stolen goods shortly after the theft. But not always, and the most interesting detective stories come when this sort of material evidence was unavailable.

Here’s an example from 1688. Hugh Dod was in charge of Mr Edward Brereton’s malting kiln, at Borras (near Wrexham). In his deposition, he explained that on the morning of 27 November he went into the kiln and on entering he noticed some “lyme mortar falln upon the killn floore” and saw that part of the wall was “broaken or crushd”. He asked his underling, John Griffith about the damage and John said that he didn’t know.

Hugh then went up the stairs to view the malt, and found that several measures had been taken out of a pile of dried malt in one corner; he noted that the malted barley that was still in the process of drying (”withering”) “was so spread over ye rest of ye floore & so neare to the heape of dryed malt, that noe stranger might have come to ye dryd malt without passing over ye withering malt”. He asked John Griffith, “What is gon with the malt, have ye sent any to ye mill, & it so lately dryed”, to which John answered, none that he knew of, unless Mrs Brereton had sent some while he was busy. Hugh sent John to ask (the answer came back negative).

Meanwhile, Hugh went round to the back of the kiln where the wall was broken and

found more mortar the outside then ye inside soe that he believes the wall was broak from within meerely out of colour & not to convey ye malt out that way for ye breach was so litle & noe malt spilt or lost within side or without side ye breach, & ye bricks were sett up againe & ye joynts or crevices were stopt up with fearne & grass…

So he concluded that the malt had in fact been taken out of the kiln door… and finished up by noting that “John Griffith had all ye keys belonging to ye said killn with him the begining of ye night that ye said malt was stolne”.

Jonathan Cawdo, a young servant, was the second witness. He told the magistrate that he had gone along with John Griffith into the kiln the previous evening at about 10pm, ostensibly to check that the fire was out. But another servant, Sarah Andrew, came after them and asked them what they were doing there “at that tyme of ye night & tould them that her master was very angry that they were at ye killn at that unseasonable tyme”. Jonathan left the kiln and told John to hurry up after him, “whereupon ye said John came out and lockt ye killn dore as this deponent thought, but left the inner dore that went in to ye withering floore unlock’d and delivered but one key & left ye other key in ye killn”.

John Griffith was charged with the theft at the next Great Sessions. The indictment notes that Hugh appeared as prosecutor. But his careful tracing of his process of observation and deduction, and the account of John’s possibly suspicious (but maybe just careless) behaviour the night before the theft, did not result in a conviction.

The problem was that the evidence against John was entirely circumstantial; what seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Denbighshire juries preferred was evidence directly and physically linking the accused to the stolen property. Prosecutors who could not produce such evidence might well set out in detail the detective work that had focused their suspicion on a particular person (and these narratives are fascinating to me as a historian); but this sort of evidence was much less effective in the court room.

But I rather doubt that John Griffith kept his job for very long.

***

(Originally posted October 2005)

OK, there’s a lot of crap on our TV screens under the title of historical documentary. I particularly dislike the ones that tell us how everyone until now has got subject X all wrong and now this programme will in fifty minutes tell us the TRUTH. Blah blah blah. Or there’s all that heavily-trodden superficial ground of ‘The most evil men in history’ type rubbish (Channel 5, are you listening?). But I’m currently reading History and the media (ed. David Cannadine, Basingstoke, 2004), and I can only agree with Tristram Hunt in ‘How does television enhance history?’:

The question should no longer be, does TV enhance or diminish history?; it should be, how do we produce the highest quality history programming? (p. 99)

To which his answer is that we as academic historians must be involved working with programme makers and that we need to ‘assume as much editorial control as possible’. (Though I didn’t much like Tristram’s style on the box, if I’m honest. Shouty shouty, look at me, aren’t I a pretty blonde boy. Go away, brat. Er, I think I might be showing my age.)

TV history cannot do the same things as carefully, deeply researched and debated written history. Fine. It has other strengths. It can bring to a wide audience the fruits of that scholarship; it can engage the public with their past. It can tell stories about that past in different ways; it can often be more sophisticated in showing the problems of source material and interpretation than it’s given credit for.

One of my recent favourites was a recent Channel 4 programme – part of its Georgian Underworld series (2003) - on the Peterloo Massacre of 1819, which was unusual in being entirely a dramatic reconstruction, based on court records. (Well, we all love a courtroom drama, don’t we?) It was beautifully written and acted, deeply moving and utterly compelling. Or there was Channel 4’s Plague, Fire, War and Treason series (2001); moving away from my period, the BBC’s superb Pompeii: The Last Day (dramatic reconstructions - a great cast - as well as amazing CGI effects); I’ve written (gushingly) before about Meet the Ancestors and Terry Jones’s Medieval Lives; and now there’s Tony Robinson’s Worst Jobs in History (both the latter using humour to convey some serious messages; but there was a lot less piss and shit in Terry’s series…). Simon Schama’s History of Britain series had its faults, but it was nonetheless great viewing, and brought a wide sweep of British history to a vast audience.

There’s always something new and wonderful to watch, a vast array of techniques and a huge range, too, in terms of intellectual depth. And, as many of these links show, the TV programmes are increasingly complemented by high quality websites that provide background, develop their subjects and, at their best, also provide outstanding stand-alone learning resources (Channel 4’s Time Traveller’s Guides are wonderful, though mostly restricted to British history; the BBC’s History website is a wide-ranging treasure trove).

Considering the examples I’ve just given, it strikes me that ‘reconstructions’ of various kinds – by actors, by amateurs in ‘reality’ shows (which can be extremely variable, I agree, but I really liked The 1940s House), using computers – has really come of age in recent years. Reconstruction seems to have been considered deeply inferior as a technique by those who brought us the seminal documentaries of the 1960s to the 80s (The Great War, The World at War, etc).Working mostly in recent history, they created a formula that revolved around archive footage, interviews with participants and talking heads. Reconstructions were a last resort to be used only when ‘primary source’ film footage (which also had the virtue of being cheap) was unavailable, and industriously avoided even when it wasn’t. Jeremy Isaacs in the History and the media volume, comments on making a series about Irish history in the late 70s: ‘We set our face against reconstructions’ (p. 48) – problematic since half of the series covered the period before the invention of film.

Of course, bad reconstructions are really bad things, but good reconstructions bring home the ‘living’ past in a way that nothing else can. That’s why I so loved the Peterloo programme; or in a totally different vein, when Tony Robinson rolls up his sleeves and, trying not to gag – or in a few cases, freeze with fear – gets right in there to show us just what those awful jobs (many of them vital for society’s survival; or filthy tasks that made possible things of sublime beauty) really involved.

And all of that is why I love television history.

***

Originally posted September 2004, this seemed apt following my post the other day. (I haven’t checked that all the links still work.)

Recycling old posts! Why didn’t I think of it before?!

This blog passed its 3rd birthday early in the summer and I didn’t really notice. Tsk. Anyway, I’ve written about 1400 posts in that time, and some of them were quite good. So I’ll re-post a few over the next week or so [requests taken] while I get on with my holiday and important stuff like:

* Reading crime novels.

* Watching Twenty20 cricket (for free on the internet, thanks to P2P). Just don’t mention England.

* Oh, and the Rugby World Cup (christ, ITV’s coverage is crap). Good to see the northern hemisphere doing so well, right? Har har bloody har.

* Watching DVDS: Angel (yay)! Farscape (extra yay, cos’ I didn’t pay anything for it!).

* Heroes on BBC2. Awesome.

* Oh yeah, dealing with the final stages of editing the book manuscript. There is an ominous email in my inbox right now whose title mentions the word ‘index’. I haven’t had the courage to open it yet.

Tristram Hunt criticises recent history TV programming for becoming too cosy and self-indulgent. The first half of this decade was a great time for history programming in the UK; that has probably peaked now and, yes, there have been a few too many poor reality TV shows. And yet I have no problem with family history having a place in the schedules, and I can’t help feeling that Hunt exaggerates.

He couldn’t be trying to drum up publicity for his new show on the Protestant Reformation, could he?

Update: make sure you read Alun’s post, in which he says everything I thought about Hunt’s article but was too lazy to articulate. It’s great. Also, check out the youtube link. WE ARE HISTORY!!!

Woman tries to hide iguana in bra…

Sorry for lack of posting lately - I’ve been enjoying some much needed holiday. Here are some photos from my trip to Aberystwyth last week, anyway. (They’d have been up earlier, but I’m damned if I can find the password for my original Flickr account, so I’ve had to set up a new one, for now. I hate it when that happens…)

(This year is the 100th anniversary of the National Library of Wales.)

This week I’ll hopefully be going down to London to see some terracotta soldiers. There may be blogging, there may not.

I think I’ve written scathingly before about “blogging commandments”. (But I can’t be arsed to look it up.) It’s as though there are people who feel compelled to try to impose their own petty tight-arsed order on the glorious chaos and anarchy that is commonly known as the blogosphere (and who, moreover, always seem to value quantity of traffic over quality of content) with stuff like:

* You must blog often. (Have they never heard of RSS feeds?)

* You must write short posts. (Have they never heard of Tim Burke?)

* You must stick to a topic. (Have they never… oh, nevermind.)

So these (belatedly-discovered) twenty blogging commandments were refreshing as well as funny. Highlights:

1. Yea as you walk in the Shadow of the Valley of Ideas which come not, post ye not for its own Sake, for it is better to have a Week with no Posts than an array of seven Posts about Naught.

2. Compare ye not with other Bloggers; just as their Truth is not your Truth, their Format is not your Format.

5. Therein will ye uncover this simple Truth should ye search for it: it matters not the Size of thy Flock, nor how often they attend thy Sermons; it is in the Care ye show for them, and they for you, that is foremost.

6. Therefore I verily say unto thee, focus ye not on the Number of those reading your Blog, but on the Content to be written therein.

11. Though ye may be of the Opinion that certain Ideas and Posts of other Bloggers be the product of a deranged Mind, be ye kind: lead yourself not into the Temptation of entering the Realm of flame Warfare, for what is written on their Blog in Rage and Fury can return to bite thee in the nether regions.

15. And though ye may enjoy great Amusement and Merrymaking in crafting your favourite Post, be ye not crestfallen should ye discover it quickly lost in the Mists of Time. Just as the News printed yesterday be used today for lining the Cages of Birds and carrying home from Market the Fishes of the Sea, so too will these Posts dwell in the Realm of the Forgotten Blog Posts forever.

19. These Truths are not set in Stone, but pixelated Dust, and will change as surely as the Tide will ebb and flow and the Multitudes will swoon over another Fit of Hissy by the Paris Hilton of Babylon.

Amen.