Early Modern Notes

Well, I was a little cryptic the other week, but tomorrow it all goes public (and we kind of expect it to crash at some point - I’ll be almost disappointed if it doesn’t…),* and today there is a pretty nice feature in the Observer.

[Monday update… creak… groan… thud… Sorry, folks. It should get back to normal in a day or two…]

So here it is: the Proceedings of the Old Bailey Online 1674-1834 is now the Proceedings of the Old Bailey and Central Criminal Court 1674-1913.

This doesn’t only mean that you can now search for 200,000 trials held at the Old Bailey over a period of 2 and a half centuries. The other new set of goodies is the full text of (almost) every Ordinary of Newgate’s Account between 1690 and 1772 (in the next few months this should expand to a full archive of every known surviving Account from c.1674 onwards).

I’ve written here before about these grimly fascinating pamphlets. They’ve been used by a number of historians, including Andrea Mackenzie and Peter Linebaugh, but the surviving pamphlets have been scattered across a number of different libraries and archives. From now on they’ll be together in one fully searchable digital archive. Plus, I’m in the process of completing a database that links every convict mentioned in the Accounts to their trial, providing it has a surviving report (perhaps 3/4 of the links have already been made).

This should make for some interesting research possibilities. For example, historians often argue that women who successfully ‘pleaded their bellies’, ie had their death sentence postponed on grounds of being pregnant, usually escaped hanging. In fact, we say that in our own background section. But I’m not so sure. Through the process of cross-referencing trials and Ordinary’s Accounts, I’ve already discovered several women whose sentences were respited for pregnancy but subsequently carried out (eg in September 1695. So what I’ll be asking (once I’ve finished making the damned links) is: how many were executed and how many were permanently reprieved? Have we historians been getting it wrong? Answering those questions wasn’t impossible before now, but it would have been extremely difficult. And there will, no doubt, be many more possibilities like this.

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The other news, because I haven’t been plugging it enough and you’ve probably all forgotten, is that we’re holding a conference in July to celebrate the relaunch: The Metropolis on Trial, in the throbbing metropolis of… Milton Keynes. If you’d like to attend, registration is open and you can download a booking form at the website. If you want to book the accommodation we’ve arranged at discount rates, you need to send the form in by the end of May at the latest and preferably as soon as possible. There is a 2 person room sharing option which is really good value (if you’re skint and looking for someone to share with maybe we can put people in touch here - leave a note in comments).

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Linkage…

(Note that old links will continue to work for a few months, and we may well set up proper redirection at some point.)

Old stuff on OBP at this blog: Old Bailey category and the Old Bailey Symposium.

Old Bailey Files at The Head Heeb.

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*Already this morning some searches have been very slow, which is not a good sign.

Last November, I dashed off a quick post about someone I’d encountered in an Ordinary’s Account: It’s Your Neck or Your Arm

On the evening before execution, a respite of 14 days was brought for George Chippendale, and to be continued, if within that time he shall submit to suffer the amputation of a limb, in order to try the efficacy of a new-invented styptic for stopping the blood-vessels, instead of the present more painful practice in such cases. For this indulgence, he, together with his brother and his uncle, had joined in a petition to his Majesty, and thankfully accepted it, appearing in good health and spirits, ready and chearful to undergo the experiment. (Ordinary’s Account, May 1763.)

Well, I got at least one important thing wrong, anyway. It wasn’t George’s arm that was, er, on the block. It was his leg.

How do I know this? Well, by sheer chance, a few weeks after I posted that, I got an email query at work, from a family historian who was searching for a George Clippingdale in the Old Bailey Proceedings. The problem was that the OBP reporters (unlike most other sources the researcher had consulted) spelt his surname Chippendale. (Spelling variations are not an uncommon problem in 18th-century sources, as I’ve mentioned here before.)

So, we got that sorted out, and that would normally have been the end of it. But then the researcher happened to mention that his George was reprieved from a death sentence because a surgeon wanted to use him in an experiment.

At which point, I thought ‘Hang on a minute… that sounds familiar’, and came over here and checked my earlier post. And it’s the same man!

Naturally, of course, I had to write back with a barrage of questions. And the researcher was kind and generous enough to send me his write-up of everything he’d found out about George - and to agree to let me tell you lot about it.

(But I warn you, there’s a sad ending.)

(more…)

Ari asks: who’s the most important historical figure about whom most people know nothing? (Hat-tip: popping up all over the place, but as teofilo notes below, there’s a good discussion going on at Unfogged. Unless they’ve moved onto the cock jokes by now.)

The emphasis in blogs I’ve seen so far tends to be American and modern - what do the medievalists and early modernists think?

I think I’m going to be bloody-minded and nominate Edward Bushel.

The criminals went to the place of execution in the following order, Morgan, Webb, and Wolf, in the first cart; Moore in a mourning coach; Wareham and Burk in the second cart; Tilley, Green, and Howell in the third; Lloyd on a sledge; on their arrival at Tyburn they were all put into one cart. They all behaved with seriousness and decency. Mary Green professed her innocence to the last moment of the fact for which she died, cleared Ann Basket, and accused the woman who lodged in the room where the fact was committed. As Judith Tilley appeared under terrible agonies, Mary Green applied herself to her, and said, do not be concerned at this death because it is shameful, for I hope God will have mercy upon our souls; Catharine Howell likewise appeared much dejected, trembled and was under very fearful apprehensions; all the rest seemed to observe an equal conduct, except Moore, who, when near dying, shed a flood of tears. In this manner they took their leave of this transitory life, and are gone to be disposed of as shall seem best pleasing to that all-wise Being who first gave them existence.*

In my research sources before I came to Sheffield, capital punishment appeared fairly infrequently, briefly and usually in the future tense: typically, the marginal note ’suspendatur’ (abbreviated to sur’ or sr’), ‘to be hanged’. Even those terse notes of an event 300 years old, which quite possibly didn’t happen anyway (as many of those sentenced were reprieved), always disturbed me slightly.

I read the records of homicides and coroners’ inquests - murders, gruesome accidents, negligence and cruelty - and they are distressing and disturbing, yet they don’t evoke quite the same sense of culture shock as do the accounts of executions and ‘Last Dying Speeches’. We aren’t simply talking about the execution of murderers here: in the 18th century burglars, robbers, pickpockets, horse thieves, sheep- and cattle-rustlers, forgers and counterfeiters could all face slow, horrible deaths, in most cases public strangulation, and this was regarded by most people as perfectly normal and civilised. (Indeed, there were those who thought that hanging was not punishment enough.)

In my new job, I’ve spent some time reading Ordinary’s Accounts, which are one of the many sources we’re digitising. These are rich and fascinating sources, full of stories of the lives of common people. But they are also stories of death, and they give me the willies - not least because ordinary, decent, intelligent people in the 18th century had no problem with the idea of pickpockets, shoplifters, burglars, sheep rustlers, forgers and counterfeiters, receiving exactly the same punishment as murderers.

So, I wasn’t quite sure what to make of Andrea McKenzie, since she has written an entire, densely detailed book about the subject and the source: Tyburn’s Martyrs: Execution in England 1675-1775. She must be a tougher soul than me.

In fact, at the very beginning of the book she mentions some of the bemused reactions she received from people learning what her research topic was, including the gentleman who suggested that she should study “something pleasant, like great battles”. (more…)

The latest Carnivalesque is up at Serendipities, great work by Kristine. I haven’t had much time to peruse the carnival yet, but this list of 250+ killer digital libraries and archives looks like a stunning resource.

It’s the 300th [or 360th, or something] anniversary of a neglected landmark in British democratic history, the Putney Debates of 1647. Yes, it’s all very Grauniad, and Tristram Hunt gets awfully excited about it, but don’t let that put you off.

Alternatively, you could try the official fan website of Charles II…

It’s just a surprise it’s taken this long.

BBC4 is screening a new version of Fanny Hill; adaptation by - well, who else could it be? - Andrew Davies.

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…)

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)

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Originally posted June 2005

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.

Henrik has posted the latest edition of Carnivalesque at Recent Finds, and for reasons outwith his control, he was unable to include some of the most recent nominations made via the Blog Carnival submissions form. So I’m posting them here as a supplement (with a couple of links I hadn’t got round to sending Henrik).

Van de Venne’s Album posted at Giornale Nuovo

Parish registers: the new novel? posted at Renaissance Lit

The Lost Power Point Slides (Armada Edition) posted at the skwib

August 15: John Metcalf, aka “Blind Jack” (1717-1810) posted at Disability Studies, Temple U.

Martin wants to excavate the Harbour of the Sheaf Kings

From Cardinal Wolsey, some notes on the origins of the Ordnance Survey

In my working capacity as the Oracle of the OBP Online, I was recently asked a question that went something like this (details changed):

I’m confused by all these results. If Robert Scott was hanged in 1765, who are all these other Robert Scotts? And some of them are after 1765?!

This is at first glance a slightly daft question - well, obviously, they’re all different people but with the same name, aren’t they? (The question also contains a common misconception about the source, which I’ll come back to in a moment.) And yet, at the same time, it’s not really silly at all.

They might not all be different people. In our database of the names in the OBP there are 142 instances of the name ‘Robert Scott’ (including slight spelling variations). (Mind you, this is nothing compared to a name like John Smith, which occurs more than 4000 times.) How do you decide whether one Robert Scott is the same person as another Robert Scott, or someone else altogether?

And this is without even starting on the problem that a significant proportion of those appearing at the Old Bailey were known by more than one name, and some had a string of aliases and nicknames. Oh, and the reporters (or printers…) sometimes got people’s names - even those of defendants - just plain wrong.

In other words, identifying the relationship between names and people in early modern sources is often extremely tricky, and the question ‘who the hell are all these Robert Scotts?’ isn’t so daft. Which is just as well, really, because this is precisely the kind of problem that’ll be keeping me in work for the next couple of years.

This isn’t just of concern to family historians trying to work out whether someone is really their ancestor or not. Most historians have to make these linkages, ask these questions, at some time or another in the course of their research. Most of us do it on a small scale by hand; a more select group do it on the large scale with computers and algorithms. I’ll hopefully post about both of these later. But in both cases, the process relies on weighing up and ranking probabilities.

Sometimes the answer, either way, is so obvious that the question doesn’t even need to be consciously formed. But at the other end of the scale, there are times when it’s impossible ever to know because you simply don’t have enough information, especially if a name is very common and you have very little contextual information besides the name itself. And I’m sure other historians will have encountered those frustrating borderline cases: if those documents are all referring to the same person, you have a great story. But are you certain enough to rest a serious argument on that identification?

It’s true, for example, that death is a clincher: if you know this Robert Scott died in 1765, then he can’t be the same person as that Robert Scott mentioned in records as alive and well in 1775. (At the other end of the life-cycle, birth is equally conclusive, of course.)

But are you sure he died?

The OBP doesn’t in fact tell you that Robert was hanged (this is the misconception I mentioned above); like archival records from early modern criminal courts, it normally records only the sentence that was passed. But many people sentenced to death in the 18th century were reprieved or pardoned. Unless you have corroborating evidence that the execution was carried out (this does occasionally appear in OBP), you need to be cautious.

So a Robert Scott in the database after 1765 could be the same guy after all. Told you it was tricky.

(To be continued…)

A few links (because the place just isn’t the same without them):

The linkage of historical records by man and computer (JSTOR subscription required)
A discourse on method, historical knowledge and information technology
Reconstructing historical communities
AHDS guide

(X-posted at The Long Eighteenth.)

This message from Adam Smyth of Renaissance Lit should be of interest to early modernists in and around London:

I’m getting together an Early Modern English Literature reading group: we’ll meet once a month, mid-week, 6:30-8pm, in a pub near the British Library. We’ll alternate between reading literary texts and criticism. All are welcome. If you’d like to take part, please email me (a.smyth@rdg.ac.uk).

I’ve just found Exploring our archives. This is an interesting way to use blogging, a kind of public outreach initiative by the Royal Society: regular posts by two students about their work transcribing and editing the Robert Hooke Folio, a recently re-discovered manuscript owned by the Royal Society.

Yes, I know my British readers will be thinking, ‘Hang on, wasn’t that in March?’, but this one’s in America, which is a foreign country and they do things differently there. (Hopefully the sellers of nausea-inducing tacky cards and cheap chocolates won’t cotton on; two of them in a year would be serious overload.) Anyway, their Mothers’ Day has generated some good early modern-related blog posts. David Mazella on mothers in Jane Austen’s novels, while Hieronimo at Blogging the Renaissance plays with EEBO and finds… Mother Cunny.

… Oh, and Brandon has posted the Mother’s Day Proclamation, containing the hilarious line “Arise, all women who have breasts”.

It’s a bumper edition of early modern Carnivalesque!

There will be an early modern edition of Carnivalesque this coming weekend (24/25 February) at The Long Eighteenth, hosted by Carrie Shanafelt.

Send nominations of posts about all things (historical, literary, philosophical, artistic, etc) to do with the early modern period (c.1500-1800CE) to carrieshanafelt[at]gmail[dot]com or via the usual convenient submission form.

1607: Founding of Jamestown, Virginia

1707: Acts of Union between Scotland and England (who’d take any bets on reaching the quatercentenary…?)

1807: Abolition of the Slave Trade

Got any more?

I’ve just added to EMR (amongst lots of other great stuff) an 18th-century joke book (put online by Kevin Shay, a writer).

Seems to be a lot of black humour about death:

When Rablais the greatest Drole in France, lay on his Death-Bed, he could not help jesting at the very last Moment, for having received the extreme Unction, a Friend coming to see him, said, he hoped he was prepared for the next World; Yes, yes, reply’d Rablais, I am ready for my Journey now, they have just greased my Boots.

No shortage of bad puns:

It being proved in a Trial at Guildhall, that a Man’s Name was really Inch, who pretended that it was Linch, I see, said the Judge, the old Proverb is verified in this Man, who being allowed an Inch took an L.

And one for all the writers:

One saying that Mr. Dennis was an excellent Critick, was answered, that indeed his Writings were much to be valued; for that by his Criticism he taught Men how to write well, and by his Poetry, shew’d ’em what it was to write ill; so that the World was sure to edify by him.

There’s nothing like some bad (or not so bad) jokes to cheer up a dreary Sunday afternoon, now is there?

(If you modernists and youngsters didn’t get the second one, read this.)

I have a lot of great resources sitting in the EMR drafts folder, which I hope to catch up on in the next few weeks. You can easily keep up with new additions by checking out the News page here, or by subscribing to EMR’s RSS feed. I might even get round to checking for dead links…

For those of you interested in the Old Bailey Proceedings, eighteenth-century crime and all that jazz, this should be entertaining: Tales from the Hanging Court.

Buy it and make my bosses happy guys.

Is it just me or are there way more fireworks than when I was a kid? We went to the Abbey Gardens display every year, and apart from that, you got the occasional sparkler and liked it or lumped it. Besides, it was for kids, so it was mostly over by about 8 o’clock. Now, it’s every night for days beforehand and as for last night - well, at nearly midnight they were still going off. I mean, I like firework displays especially when I didn’t have to pay for them, but doesn’t it seem a teensy weensy bit excessive?

Anyway, since it’s that time of the year when we all remember crazy religious fanatics trying to destroy our treasured political and social traditions, here’s the latest Gunpowder Plot website, from our very own treasured Parliament.