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…)

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

This evening event in London on 27 June may be of interest to some readers: Who’s Creating Knowledge? The challenge of non-university researchers

Is the university the primary site for the creation and authorising of knowledge? That is commonly the conventional view. But in practice large numbers of independent and non-academic researchers are enthusiastically engaged in the production and establishment of knowledge outside university walls. The panel will discuss the issues raised by the work of these often ‘invisible’ creators of knowledge, operating as they do across a wide diversity of fields of research, from family history to ornithology, astronomy to biography, philosophy to archaeology – and much else. Do such researchers present a challenge to the still often-assumed monopoly of the university over the production and validation of knowledge? Despite the obstacles they face are they perhaps following a more open route to knowledge production than in the increasingly constrained setting of university research today? Do we need to rethink the central role of the university in the establishment of knowledge? And may important new processes of knowledge-creation be emerging through the interactive potential of the internet for bypassing established university controls and evading the traditional gatekeepers to the publication and dissemination of knowledge?

Attendance is free but space is limited and you need to book a place. (And apparently there are free drinks afterwards…)

I don’t think I’ll be able to travel down and attend, but it’d be great if it could be blogged, so if anyone who doesn’t have a blog would like to go along and report on it, I’d be willing to post their reports and/or provide an open comment thread for people’s thoughts (and for links to any discussions on other blogs).

Early Modern E-prints is now up and running. At the moment it’s very small, but I have plenty more entries to add over the coming months.

You can help out if you know of examples of the following, on any early modern (ie, c.1500-1800) topic:

1. Research papers and publications archived at academics’ personal webpages, which can be particularly hard to track down.

2. Articles, chapters, papers and so on from sources (journals, books, e-seminars, etc) that aren’t specifically devoted to early modern history (this may include graduate student journals, as long as they’re peer-reviewed).

3. Free samples (eg, book chapters) from publishers’ websites.

4. Postgraduate theses and dissertations.

Just leave a comment, or send an email, with the links (or at least enough information that I could find them through Google).

Apart from the basic requirement of being free to access, they must be ‘proper’ academic research publications or papers (peer-reviewed, heavy on text and argument and referencing, etc – the kind of thing you’d tend to print out to read rather than browse on a screen). This can include historiographical discussions, but I’m not looking for book reviews unless they’re substantial review essays (I already have a book reviews resource page, and there are millions of the things out there). Also, I’m not going to include anything from Google Book Search or Amazon’s text search facility.

I hope that eventually there will be full-scale open access repositories for history and this resource will no longer be needed. But in the meantime it should help to facilitate access to good quality academic research for people who are studying early modern history but don’t have access to well-stocked university libraries, and it may also encourage the development of open access publishing/archiving by historians.

RAE axed in Brown’s budget.

Mind you, I expect the bastards will replace it with something equally hateful one way or another.

As some of you know, I’m participating in some obscure local historians’ get-together at the weekend… oh, and doing this. This post is really just a handy place to put a bunch of links that I might find useful. (And I’m just copying the smart example set by scribblingwoman.)

I plan to focus on a theme of conversations and collaborations: so if you have any interesting thoughts to offer, you’re welcome to leave a comment. (If you’re really smart, you might get a mention on Saturday. If that’s any kind of incentive.) And if you’re at the session and have anything you want to add afterwards, you can use the comments for that too. I may not have time to post about the experience for a while.

http://earlymodernweb.blogspot.com
http://www.earlymodernweb.org.uk/emn
http://www.earlymodernweb.org.uk/emr

http://www.oldbaileyonline.org
http://etext.virginia.edu/salem/witchcraft
http://www.outlawsandhighwaymen.com/index.htm
http://www.staff.ncl.ac.uk/j.p.boulton/his104home.htm

http://philobiblion.blogspot.com/2004/10/victorian-almost-feminist-and-stuart.html
http://www.earlymodernweb.org.uk/emn/index.php/archives/2004/10/blogging-serendipity
http://philobiblion.blogspot.com/2004/10/blog-ography.html

http://www.earlymodernweb.org.uk/emn/index.php/archives/2005/12/history-carnival-22
http://www.earlymodernweb.org.uk/emn/index.php/archives/2005/10/material-evidence-in-early-modern-courts/#comment-3992

http://www.earlymodernweb.org.uk/emn/index.php/archives/2005/08/thinking-about-duels-and-violent-gentlemen

http://www.earlymodernweb.org.uk/emn/index.php/archives/2005/10/a-seventeenth-century-detective
http://www.earlymodernweb.org.uk/emn/index.php/archives/2005/10/material-evidence-in-early-modern-courts
http://earmarks.org/archives/2005/10/14/14
http://earmarks.org/?p=18
http://headheeb.blogmosis.com/archives/029895.html
http://headheeb.blogmosis.com/archives/030380.html
http://headheeb.blogmosis.com/archives/030526.html

http://headheeb.blogmosis.com/archives/030802.html

http://crookedtimber.org/2005/10/02/contwow-fweak-games
http://sciencepolitics.blogspot.com/2005/11/moron.html
http://www.eff.org/bloggers/lg

http://chronicle.com/free/v52/i07/07b01401.htm
http://www.unbsj.ca/arts/english/jones/mt/archives/2005/10/the_18thc_online_commonplace_b.html
http://www.earlymodernweb.org.uk/emn/index.php/archives/2005/09/so-why-would-i-champion-academic-blogging

I’m still always amused* at this sort of entry in an archival catalogue:

No. 59
1673-1689
REGISTER of the names of those who personally appeared, as required under the Test Act, at the Quarter Sessions for co. Denbigh from 15 July 1673 to 15 Jan. 1688/9, to deliver certificates of receiving the Sacrament according to the usage of the Church of England, to take the Oaths of Allegiance and Supremacy, and to make a declaration against Transubstantiation.
(Roll; parts destroyed by vermin) [my emphasis]

And the next one “helps to fill up gaps nibbled out of No. 59″. Lovely.

*Well, amused as long as it’s not a document I need to call up.

I swear, my next research project will be based on printed sources.

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…)

Andrew Groome was a swineherd from “Hills Coppy”, Shropshire,* who went off on business into Flintshire in May 1687, with his servant Richard Finney, expecting to be away for about 3 weeks. But he didn’t come home. At first his wife Sarah thought he had just extended his trip. But then she got word from a neighbour that a man had been killed near Bronington (Flintshire), and “by his cloathes shee feared it was her husband”. Sarah sent her brother to Flintshire to investigate.

They learned that Andrew’s body had been found in a cornfield by workers on 13 June, with the back of his head smashed in. The people in Bronington had not known his identity, except that he had told an alehousekeeper that he was a “dealer in swine” and lived near Nantwich (Cheshire). A coroner’s inquest brought in a verdict of murder (by person or persons equally unknown). He had already been buried by the time Sarah’s brother arrived: he was identified by his clothes and by a knife found in his pocket. What was not present, however, was any of the substantial sum of money that Andrew had taken with him when he went away.

So where was Richard Finney? (more…)

The discussion of forensics in early modern courts continues over at Head Heeb, with a great post on prosecutions for counterfeiting coin.

From Natalie of Philobiblon, the news that upstairs in the English department there’s a new colleague who is working on the biographies of Renaissance ‘nobodies’. (Yes, I am mildly entertained to get Aber news first from a blogger in London, but no doubt I’d have bumped into her sooner or later…)

Sometimes amongst early modern court records, you find autobiographical material. This is most common in what are known as ‘settlement examinations’ or in the petitions of paupers for poor relief: in both cases the life of the petitioner or examinant is being set out to establish the case (or lack of it) for eligibility for parish-based support. But there are a few others, confessions to crimes that (for less immediately obvious reasons) reach back into the personal history of the offender.
(more…)

Following on from our discussion at this earlier post… well, I remembered an article from one of the Welsh local history journals, Montgomeryshire Collections, which as far as I know is not available online anywhere. (Not sure it has any kind of web presence at all.)

The article is by Murray Llewelyn Chapman, and describes the proceedings in a 16th-century felony trial. This was recorded, most unusually, because of a subsequent prosecution (of the jury) for perjury. The story: Two brothers, Robert and Thomas ap Morris ap David, of Llanfihangel-yng-Ngwynfa in Montgomeryshire, were tried for stealing sheep belonging to Morris ap John in 1571 (and acquitted).

Morris ap John gave evidence (in Welsh, translated for the English-speaking judge):

that the sheep in question had his mark but “he wold not take it upon his oth and concience that the same were his proper goods”…

The question of the ownership of the sheep was to be decided by the jury “upon viewe of the said iiie [three] sheep togeather with iiiior [four] other sheep of the said Morris ap John which were broughte to the same Sessions”. One of the prosecution witnesses, the wife of one Savage, viewed the sheep which were brought into the court and declared that the ewe was one of the lambs that her husband had sold to David, the brother of the two suspects…

Chapman adds in a footnote that

The bringing of livestock to be viewed by a trial jury was apparently a common feature of trials in the Courts of Great Sessions. In a letter from the Council in the Marches in Wales, dated 24 August 1575, to Thomas Revell JP of co. Pembroke he was ordered to bind Ieuan Ygo and Thomas Peter of co. Pembroke to appear at the next great sessions of co. Montgomery to answer for stealing a mare and to bring the mare in question to that session.

Murray Ll. Chapman, ‘A sixteenth-century trial for felony in the court of Great Sessions for Montgomeryshire’, Montgomeryshire Collections, 78 (1990), pp.167-70. (From NLW Wales 4/127/3)

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.

Early modern social history in the news: theguardian has a short piece on the forthcoming book by Catherine Richardson, Domestic life and domestic tragedy in early modern England, which is largely based on church court records (on which, see this old post). She’s also one of the co-ordinators of the Clothing, culture and identity in early modern England project.

I was doing some reading around on the modern law of homicide in England and Wales, for comparisons with the early modern situation, which led me to some rather interesting places. One was the Law Commission’s 2004 report on partial defences to murder, which came with a set of appendices. One (appendix C) is a really interesting survey of attitudes to mitigating circumstances in homicides. Another (appendix G, from p.288 in the text/179 of 204 in the file) is described as ‘a sociological history of provocation and diminished responsibility’. I read on with some curiosity; and I have to say, it looks a lot more like a fairly standard legal history than ‘sociological’ history to me.

For example, it spends a fair amount of space discussing ‘chance medley manslaughter’. The odd thing about this particular (and particularly early modern) category of homicide is that although it often comes up in the contemporary law texts, and legal historians do write about it quite a lot, you won’t find much about it in work by social historians based on court records.

To be sure, if you rely on late 16th- to early 18th-century law texts as your sources, this emphasis on chance medley is quite reasonable. Nearly all the ones I’ve read so far define chance-medley as ‘killing in a sudden quarrel’ and equate it with manslaughter, and discuss it at some length (e.g., Lambarde’s Eirenarcha, late 16th century; Coke’s Institutes, early 17th century; Hawkins, Treatise of the pleas of the crown, early 18th century; later in the 18th century, Blackstone seems to confuse it with self-defence, which was something else again). And it’s quite true that in the courts those circumstances – killing in ‘hot blood’ in the course of a spontaneous brawl – would indeed tend to result in a manslaughter verdict (eligible for benefit of clergy, so the convict was rarely executed).

The only clear exception I’ve found so far – but it’s quite an important one! – is Matthew Hale (in both his History of the pleas of the crown (written before 1676 but not published until 1736) and Methodical summary (1678)). He equates chance medley with homicide per infortunium (by ‘misfortune’ or accident) and, moreover, explicitly distinguishes it from manslaughter.

Curiously, the legal historians discussing chance medley never seem to refer to Hale, but his view looks to me like a more accurate representation of courtroom practice, probably well before the 1670s and certainly after that: i.e, ‘chance medley’ and ‘manslaughter’ were two separate things. Homicide per infortunium was a pretty rare verdict by the 17th century – it had been much more significant in medieval courts, under very different laws on homicide – and had a quite different legal status from manslaughter (it resulted in an automatic pardon).

I have very occasionally come across ‘homicide per infortunium’ verdicts in the 17th-century Welsh and Cheshire records. I can’t, however, recall or find in my databases any mention of the term ‘chance medley’. Meanwhile a keyword search turned up just 8 instances in the much larger Old Bailey Proceedings Online, dating from 1676 to 1742. And here it’s Hale’s definition that seems to be in use (particularly clearly so in the judge’s summing up in the 1742 case, I think).

I may want to follow this up and see if other court archives do in fact support this argument (I could look at the published calendars of the Home Circuit assize records, for example, which would also take me back to the mid-16th century so I could look for any shifts in practice). If I have time. But assuming that they do, I’ve got to wonder why there should be this divergence between legal doctrine (in most texts) and what was happening in courts. It’s an interesting little puzzle thrown up by differences between sources that tend to be used by different sorts of historians.

Like Hale, many of the writers were judges or (I think) lawyers reporting judicial decisions. (I don’t really know enough about how and by whom these texts were produced, though.) But were they simply tending to repeat and reify a definition – itself a 16th-century innovation – that had in reality already fallen out of use? Could this turn on some sort of conflation (which crops up in a number of sources) of ‘chance medley’ with the French term ‘chaud melee’? Any ideas, anybody?

I was curious to know if readers would consider this case to be a duel. The answers I got were: no and maybe, which is pretty much my feeling about it.

OK, duels in reality (especially in the 16th and 17th centuries) often did not live up to the idealised rules of the code duello. (I am wondering if there are any such codes from before the 18th century, actually?) Contemporaries recognised the idea (and practice) of the ‘spontaneous’ duel, in which a verbal challenge and fight followed immediately after the initial affront, rather than awaiting a written challenge. But in this case there isn’t even a verbal challenge. (Or at least, there isn’t one recorded. Let’s come back to that in a moment.)

As a bit of an update, this is what an early-eighteenth-century writer has to say about challenges:

Sometimes persons quarrel accidentally and abruptly, and draw and fight without any deliberation: But commonly duels are by previous challenges, which are given divers ways… At present challenges are either verbal or written; verbal challenges are either given by the person himself, who apprehends himself affronted or injured as soon as the actions or words which gave the offence pass…

On top of that, as one of the commenters said, Grosvenor didn’t give his opponent time to dismount and draw his sword to defend himself. That was an important issue if a fight could be properly considered a duel of honour.

There is a possible interpretive problem here: are the witnesses telling us everything? As I mentioned, both of the two witnesses seem to have been under some kind of suspicion (and they were bound over to appear at the next Great Sessions). It’s possible, then, that they might have been selective in what they said to the examining magistrates; if this were to go to court it would be in their interests to avoid any mention of anything that might make the clash seem premeditated or organised, to make it look as much like a typical manslaughter scenario as possible. (If it were manslaughter, as opposed to murder, they could not be charged as accessories before the fact; and in murder cases, accessories received the same punishment as principals: death. So, potentially a big difference for them.)

And yet in scenarios like this a murder verdict was highly unlikely anyway; the ‘reality’ of what happened would have to be radically different – not just a matter of details – from what was described here before a jury would be likely to find murder (and even if it did, a judicial recommendation for pardon would have almost certainly followed).* It wouldn’t have made much difference if there had been an explicit challenge or a moment’s pause for Roberts to draw his sword, as far as the law was concerned. The real fight may have been a slightly less confused scuffle than it appears, but I don’t think there could have been much in it.

As I’ve already said, duels need to be seen in their larger context to be properly understood. Maybe that also means that a social historian needs to think rather carefully about just what is and isn’t defined as a duel. This one looks pretty much like a host of other fatal confrontations between early modern men at the time: it can be said to be about personal honour and ‘affront’, provocation and anger, but calling it a ‘duel’ seems to be according it dignities that it doesn’t really deserve. It was a case I transcribed quite a long time ago and didn’t at the time pay that much attention to it, to be honest. (Though I was intrigued by the foot race.)

So why did I bother to ask at all?

Well, here’s the interesting thing: I was subsequently reading various secondary sources in local history relating to the Myddleton family of Chirk Castle (Roger Grosvenor’s widow was a Myddleton), and they all asserted – though usually very briefly – that he had been killed in a duel. Online, you’ll find it mentioned at the Eaton Hall website, in the ODNB biography of Roger’s son (if you have a subscription) and passing references at genealogy sites. It’s referred to in the Calendar of the Wynn of Gwydir Papers and (I think) in one or two similar publications. And this is how it was (mis-)remembered locally at the end of the 18th century, in a letter in the Chirk Castle archives:

.. I have left Mr Lloyd’s memoir of the Chirk castle family at Dyffryn, and can therefore only tell you from memory, that one of old Sir Thomas Myddelton the Cavalier’s daughters, married Roger Grosvenor of Eton, son and heir of Sir Richard Grosvenor: this Roger was killed… in a duel on horseback with pistols on Belgrave heath [in Cheshire], by the grandfather of Major Roberts of Hafodybwch…

Now, the Grosvenor and Myddleton families were quite a respectable, solid set of landowners – not your average tumultuous country squires (or hellfire aristocrats). Roger’s grandfather, Sir Richard Grosvenor (ODNB biog, sub. required again), had been a ‘godly’ magistrate (he’s well known to early modern English historians) earlier in the 17th century, while Roger’s father-in-law Sir Thomas Myddleton (who was still alive) had been a key moderate parliamentarian in north Wales. Perhaps neither family was entirely happy at the idea of the Grosvenors’ eldest son and heir getting himself killed in a duel, but how unthinkable – and dishonourable – might it have been to admit to themselves or others that he had got himself killed in an ugly fight that was little better than a common pub brawl?

But then you might start to wonder how many other so-called ‘duels’ that were reported in letters (and, later on, newspapers) were equally un-duellish in their origins, and were called that retrospectively to make them look better in the eyes of the world…

……

*You’ll have to take my word for this, or slog through chapter 3 of my thesis.

From a letter to Sir Thomas Myddleton at Chirk Castle in Denbighshire, from John Wynne, dated 25 Sept 1681:

…I shall give you a true & faithfull account of the message I carryed from you to Sir John Trevor… After that I desired to have private discourse with him he went wth me to a private roome, where I imparted your buisness to him in these very words (i.e.) Sir I am come to you upon a message from Sir Thomas Middleton he is informed by a gentleman that you called his father the sonn of a traytor, he therefore desires you just now to walke out with your sword in your hand to give him satisfaction, to which Sr John Trevor replyed truely Sir I never sayd that his father was the sonn of a traytor, but that he was a person that he much honoured & respected, & more to that purpose… [I] made reply to Sir J.T. in these words, Sir since you disowne ye speaking of ye words for which I am com to question you, I will rather endeavour to make a right understanding between you then promote a quarell…

(A little background: Myddleton and Trevor were not on good terms around this time. At the beginning of 1681, they had fought it out for the county seat in parliamentary elections; there were some serious disturbances (enough to alarm the government in London) and at the end a spot of sharp practice on Trevor’s part to take the seat. At almost the same time (no coincidence, I reckon…) Trevor had involved himself in a long-running dispute about enclosures between Myddleton and his tenants near Chirk, with both direct action in throwing down Myddleton’s fences and a number of subsequent lawsuits and prosecutions. There’s much more about all that in chapter 6 of my thesis, though somehow I missed this particular letter when I was doing my PhD research.)

Another thing in the literature on duels which causes me some doubt is the tendency to assume that once a challenge had been issued, a duel was inevitable, related to a broader assumption that duelling was virtually compulsory amongst upper-class men whenever an insult was given or perceived. (One of the things I like about Peltonen’s work is that it’s showing that the situation was much more contested than that.) Here, despite the intensity of political rivalry and legal disputes between Myddleton and Trevor at the time that this challenge was issued, and whether Trevor had said the words in question or not, he was ready to back down and deflect the challenge. (And I have noted down at least one more example in the NLW archives of a challenge refused, which I’ll be taking a look at soon.)

…..

Earlier posts:

A duel?
Thinking about duels
Duelling and honour

I happened to be going through some files recently that I’d looked at before very early on in my PhD research. Little new student me had left quite a few blanks and question marks in my original transcriptions, and now they nearly all just seem sooo obvious.

It’s not just because of more experience in transcribing the handwriting. It’s often about greater familiarity with context. Some of the gaps were place names; now I can not only recognize quite a lot of the places straight off, I also understand much better how Welsh place names are constructed, what’s possible and what isn’t. (Even with the irregular and inconsistent spellings that you get in these documents.) The same thing goes for the legal terms, abbreviations and contractions, bastardised Latin and archaic vocabulary.

(There were, more worryingly, also a) a few words I’d got hopelessly wrong but didn’t question mark at all and b) occasional unnerving gaps. I’d missed out a whole paragraph in one document. Which is the sort of thing that has me worrying about everything I’ve transcribed or recorded, ever. Ah, well.)

So if you are an early modernist (or medievalist) grad student who has just started archival research for the first time and you’re having real trouble deciphering the handwriting, I promise it will get easier as you go on. Just keep at it, leave the gaps first time around and come back to them.

But that leads to one other piece of advice, for students planning your first big and expensive research trip somewhere: you don’t want to be using up precious time there working out how to decipher the documents. (I was lucky: I lived a 10-minute walk away from my main archives.)

Especially if you will need to read handwriting in a foreign language: one of my biggest early stumbling blocks was that I’d learnt Latin (and Welsh too) from modern printed texts whilst my palaeography training had been done quite separately, and exclusively in English-language examples. Some of my biggest early difficulties came from trying to integrate the palaeography skills (at which I was pretty good) with the language skills (at which I was pretty useless… well, I still am). Especially as in court records, quite a bit of the Latin was often written in a rather archaic and formal hand at which I’d had less practice. (Not to mention all the horrible abbreviations and contractions.)

So, before you go away on that first all-important trip, try to get beyond the usual palaeography tutorials and manuals. The best thing is to get some real practice with a range of documents similar (in form, content, language etc) to the ones you’ll encounter on the research trip, either in a local archive or on microfilm (or online at archives’ websites, like 17th-century witchcraft case documents or parish lists or medieval charters). There’s nothing quite like the real thing…

But you can also start by getting a clearer sense of the documents you’re likely to encounter – just what sorts of physical objects do those neat lists under the ‘Archival sources’ heading in bibliographies really represent? Where you can get it, read information about the records that has been prepared by the archivists (such as the excellent TNA guides; TNA’s online catalogue also contains a lot of useful information about record classes, like this), and ask people who have some experience with researching those types of records what they’re like. Once you’ve done that, too, you can talk to your palaeography teachers about your specific needs; they might be able to provide you with extra practice material. It will be worth the effort.

(By the way, if you’re going to work with 17th-century English (or Welsh) court records and you want practice examples, I have plenty of jpeg images of documents…)

(Following on from my earlier thoughts about duels, I have taken a quite long and detailed deposition from the files and rather than just pasting it in, I’ve turned it into a first-person narrative in modern English so you can read the story more easily.)

On 26 August 1661, Kenrick Edisbury of Sonlli (Denbighshire), gentleman, was examined by two JPs in relation to the death of Roger Grosvenor, esquire:

On 21 August I was at Chester for a foot race to be run to Wrexham, between a footman of Mr Roger Grosvenor [of Eaton Hall, Cheshire], and a footman called Astyn, formerly my servant, now ‘maintained’ by Mr John Pulford of Wrexham. [NB: The title 'Mr' in this period always denotes a man of gentry status.] Shortly before the start of the race, Pulford asked me to ride along with Astyn, and I went to Grosvenor and asked him if I could do so, if Astyn went into the lead, in order to encourage him. Grosvenor answered, ‘Yes, yes, I care not if two or three do ride with him but I will not have a crowd to come between them’.

After the race began, the two runners were together for about half a mile and then Astyn drew ahead by about ‘a stone’s cast’, at which point I asked Grosvenor, ‘Now that the fellow is far enough ahead, may I ride up to him, without prejudice to your footman?’, to which Grosvenor did not object. I rode up to the front, along with Mr Hugh Roberts and Mr Francis Edisbury, my brother. Although we avoided the beaten way to avoid raising dust, about half a mile on Grosvenor sent someone to call back Roberts, saying ‘it was uncivil, unhandsome and not like a gentleman’ to ride in front of Grosvenor’s man and raise the dust. Roberts responded that he was doing no harm and he would not go back.

On being told this, Grosvenor rode up to us and demanded ‘with passionate language’ that Roberts turn back. Roberts refused, and Grosvenor swore he would stop the race, to which Kenrick answered that he could stop his own man if he liked, but Astyn should continue.

Grosvenor went to strike Astyn, who ‘forsook his way’, and Roberts rode between Grosvenor and the footman. Grosvenor struck Roberts with a stick, and then suddenly leapt off his horse and drew his sword. He went up close to Roberts as he sat on his horse, forcing Roberts to dismount from the other side, and go backwards 3 or 4 steps, when he drew his own sword. Grosvenor ‘made a pass upon him’ which Roberts ‘put by’ and they ‘closed’ together.

When I saw the swords drawn, I also dismounted in order to separate them, and came up to them with only my whip in my hand, and thrust my hands between them, saying ‘Enough gentlemen I hope there is no hurt done to you’, to which Grosvenor replyed, ‘Yes, he has wounded me in the belly’. I said, ‘I hope not’. Grosvenor got down on hands and knees, I asked to see his wound, he got up and let down his breeches to show the wound in his belly. Meanwhile another man named Mr Jockut[?] and the footman came up to us, each with a drawn sword. I drew my own sword and stood upon my guard and said, ‘Put up your swords, I fear there is too much hurt done already’, at which they put up their swords and then I left and rode towards Wrexham.

(Francis Edisbury also gave a shorter deposition to the same effect which adds the detail that after Grosvenor and Roberts had been separated, Grosvenor said to Roberts, ‘I wonder you would do so by me’, to which Roberts replied that ‘he was never so much obliged to any as to let him kill him in a humour’. I should probably add the slightly technical detail that in both examinations the words ‘sayeth and confesseth’ were used at the beginning, which usually means that the examinant is under suspicion for something.)

……..

So, was that a ‘duel’? (To be continued…)

My archival research this summer has (at last) begun to develop some sense of direction, and one of the themes is masquerading under the working title of ‘Gentlemen Behaving Badly’. And I may well be writing a lot more about this, because it encompasses a lot of tasty topics: masculinity, ‘class’ or social rank, politics, litigation, violence, rioting, drinking… [Indeed, it looks like this is going to turn into a proper little series of posts: see here and here, and this earlier post as well. Not to mention this, too. Exciting eh?]

(I suspect that I shall not, however, be taking my cue from this book.)

And right now it has me thinking about the subject of the duel, on which there’s been a good deal of research since the late 1980s (perhaps especially in the mid-90s). I realised that I have quite a bit of catching up to do, in fact. So what follows here is very provisional. I’m just thinking my way around it, but I have some issues about the ways in which ‘the duel’ seems to be discussed in the work that I’ve read so far. Key problems: the research seems to me to tend to decontextualise the practice and not really think much about the relationship between theory and practice.

(more…)