Author Archives: manyheadedhailwood

About manyheadedhailwood

Mark Hailwood is a Senior Lecturer in Early Modern History at the University of Bristol

The People and the Law: an Online Symposium

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Mark Hailwood

England in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries was a remarkably – and increasingly – litigious society. Whether through a growing drive to prosecute crimes and enforce laws, or a greater willingness to take neighbours to court, early modern men and women across the social scale routinely found themselves in the legal arena as plaintiffs, defendants, and witnesses. This level of popular engagement with the law was arguably at a higher point in the years between 1560 and 1640 than at any other time in English history.  

This is great news for historians of this period, and especially for the practitioners of ‘history from below’; whilst the common people, who were likely to be illiterate, leave us few written sources penned by their own hands, their actions – and sometimes their attitudes – did leave an imprint in the legal sources recorded and retained by the many courts of early modern England. Since the 1970s, then – when social history began to take off in UK university History Departments – researchers have often turned to court records in their attempts to uncover the history of early modern non-elite actors.

William Cecil presides over the Court of Wards, c.1560-1590

The first wave of work on legal sources often focused, quite understandably, on what these records could tell us about patterns of crime and criminality, not infrequently using a quantitative approach to make sense of the changing nature of court business. From the 1990s, under the influence of the ‘cultural turn’, the emphasis shifted from counting crimes to offering close qualitative readings of legal sources, especially the detailed statements – or depositions – given by those called before the courts, for what they could reveal about the gender dynamics, or social conflicts, at the heart of certain types of case. More recent work has often adopted an ‘incidentalist’ approach, using these depositions to examine everyday activities that were mentioned in passing, rather than being the subject of a case, thereby reconstructing patterns of work and sociability, or the experiences of particular groups in this society, such as female servants.

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The Rabble that Can Write: Rethinking Literacy in Rural England, 1550-1700

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Mark Hailwood

I have often said that writing a blog post can be a good way to disseminate research findings or ideas that you don’t think would sustain a whole article. But sometimes a blog post can act as a seed that slowly germinates into something more substantial, and before you know it you realise that most of your articles started out as blog posts. At which point it feels like the right thing to do is to complete the cycle and blog about those articles, as some kind of superstitious homage – an offering of thanks – to the blog format, in the hope it will provide again.

So, this August saw the publication of my article on ‘Rethinking Literacy in Rural England, 1550-1700’ (open access!) which was the product of several years of musing on a post I wrote on this blog some nine years ago: ‘The Rabble that Cannot Read? Ordinary People’s Literacy in Seventeenth-Century England’. In that post, I wondered whether historians of the early modern period were missing a trick when using people’s signatures to ascertain their literacy skills, with a full signature taken as evidence of full literacy, and anything else – termed a ‘mark’ – as an indicator of illiteracy. It seemed to me that there was a lot of variety in the way people signed off on various legal documents – from full signatures to initials, images of tools, crosses, circles, and a whole host of other squiggles and shapes – that might in themselves reflect hierarchies of reading and writing skills.

Well, since then I have encountered a lot of signed documents as part of my research on the Women’s Work in Rural England project, so I duly collected as many examples of marks and signatures as I could, and in my recent article I subjected them to more sustained analysis. I don’t want to go into too much detail about the findings – I want you to read the article! – but the headline is that I think we can usefully sort sign offs into the following categories:

  • Signatures
  • Double Initials
  • Single Initials
  • Icons
  • Circles
  • Crosses
  • Multi-stroke marks
  • Single-stroke marks
  • Indistinct scrawls

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Hangovers, Marxists, and Plebs: Tales from the Blarchive

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Mark Hailwood

We typically think of digital media outputs as relatively impermanent and ephemeral: they enjoy a brief window of exposure before sinking to the bottom of timelines, coming to rest in obscure corners of the web or vanishing behind broken hyperlinks. They are timely, not timeless.

The blog post might fit this mould in some ways, and when we started the many-headed monster ten years ago we were very much writing posts for the present rather than posterity. But without particularly planning to (planning has never really been our MO) it turns out we’ve created quite the archive over the years. A blog archive. A blarchive, if you will.

Whilst some of our posts were rapid responses to specific current events – remember ‘plebgate’? – or conferences we had attended – History after Hobsbawm – a great many of them have aged fairly well. When we joined in debates about periodisation, or the importance of history from below, we were engaging with issues that continue to be relevant. Not least of all in the classroom: its clear that some of our posts and series have become widely used as teaching resources.

So we’ve come to think about the many-headed monster not just as a platform for posting new content, but as a repository of pieces that often come in useful years after they were first written. We’d like our readers to see it – and use it – that way too.

Our plan this this summer then, as we mark our tenniversary (I know, enough with the portmanteaus already…) is that each monster head will take a little trawl through our archives to highlight some of the older stuff that lurks there that might still have value for our readers. We hope it might even encourage you to seek out your own gems from our blarchive too!

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I started my own search by calling up my first ever post back in July of 2012. Unsurprisingly it was on a drink history topic – the 17th century hangover. I think it was mostly just an excuse to throw together some references to hangovers that I had come across in my research, but it did raise a bigger question that I came back to regularly in later posts: can historians recover the physical and sensory experiences of the past?

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The Virtual Parish: Scholarly Communities Online

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Laura Sangha & Mark Hailwood

In this post we reflect on eight years of running a ‘virtual’ scholarly community – this blog! – to consider questions that are currently pressing ones for all academics: what do we gain from taking our conversations online? What do we lose? What needs to be improved?   

In the spring of 2020, as much of the world was plunged into ‘lockdown’ by the advance of the coronavirus, regular forms of face-to-face interaction were swiftly replaced by online alternatives. For academics, the classroom morphed into the online seminar; the conference trip was replaced by a day tucked away in a corner of the bedroom staring at Zoom; the common-room catch-up was transferred to the Departmental WhatsApp group.

Innovative initiatives have abounded, including A Bit Lit, a series of fun and informal filmed conversations about history, literature and culture, designed to fill the gap left by the kind of over-a-coffee-conversations that might take place between scholars. We were delighted to receive an invite to take part, and you can see our ramblings here. In the opening film, Andy Kesson talked about A Bit Lit as part of a process of building new kinds of academic community—or to give it a more early modern twist, new kinds of ‘parish’—that would draw on digital forms of contact to overcome the obstacles of infection.

We liked this notion of new ‘virtual parishes’, especially since many of us have been involved in a variety of ad hoc ways in constructing such novel online communities in recent months. But this notion also struck a chord with us because we realised that we—along with Brodie Waddell and Jonathan Willis—had already created a ‘virtual parish’ long before the current crisis: this blog. The context of its creation was very different to the circumstances we face now, but the impulse to create a scholarly community that transcended physical obstacles was central. Indeed, the loss of physical proximity that we had enjoyed as a group of postgrads at Warwick was an important catalyst. Continue reading →

Alice Clark’s *Working Life of Women in the 17th Century* at 100: An Online Reading Group

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Mark Hailwood

The conditions under which the obscure mass of women live and fulfil their duties as human beings, have a vital influence upon the destinies of the human race…

Alice Clark, 1919

It was this conviction that drove Alice Clark to write her pioneering study of the working life of women in seventeenth-century England. One hundred years later, few historians would now contest such a statement, and as a consequence the obscurity of women’s lives in the early modern past is less acute than in Clark’s time. But how far have we come in our understanding of women’s work? How have historians added to, and revised, the picture mapped out by Alice Clark?

s-l1600The centenary of the publication of this seminal work presents a great opportunity to both celebrate the scholarship of Alice Clark, and to reflect on the current state of the history of early modern women’s work. And so, we would like to invite you, dear reader, to join an online reading group here on the many-headed monster that will do just that.

Between now and October of this year we will read one chapter a month of Working Life of Women in the Seventeenth Century (freely available on archive.org here). For each chapter a leading historian will offer their reflections on it in a blog post, which will serve as a starting point for discussion ‘below the line’ in the comments section (and/or on twitter, no doubt).

The blog posts will be published at the start of each month, on the following schedule, with a double-header in early April to kick us off: Continue reading →

Historical Fiction and the ‘Pastness’ of the Way People Think

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Mark Hailwood

Once upon a time, I wrote a blog post about the story telling techniques that historians use in their writing.

This was not a long time ago, and nor was it far away – you can read it here in fact. Inspired by the ‘Storying the Past’ reading group, and a series of ‘Creative Histories’ events, the post reflected on some of the ways academic historians draw on the writing methods associated with more creative genres, and considered how they might fruitfully do more of this.

One example of the latter that I discussed was Philip Ziegler’s attempt at an ‘imaginative reconstruction’ of the experience of the Black Death in a medieval English village. In essence it is a piece of creative writing, informed by historical evidence, intended to ‘evoke the atmosphere’ of that moment in time. As Ziegler himself put it, he was essentially borrowing the approach of the ‘historical novelist’ to try and recover an aspect of the past that his cold, hard analysis of the facts – the supposed purview of the historian – could not: how people at the time felt about their villages being ravaged by the plague.

But can the approach of the historical novelist really bridge this gap? Continue reading →

“As I Went Forth One Summer’s Day”: Putting the Story in Early Modern History

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Mark Hailwood

Twas the night before Christmas, in the year 1681, and one Soloman Reddatt was drinking in the Nag’s Head in Reading, with his sister, Elizabeth, and a friend, George Parfitt, when, at around 9pm, their sociability was disturbed by the shattering of glass. Moments earlier, Debora Allen had burst into the alehouse in search of her husband Edward. After locating him in the kitchen drinking with the alehousekeeper, William Newbury, she flew into a rage, picking up a quart pot and throwing it through a window. As a startled Reddatt and his companions looked up from their drinks, Debora Allen emerged from the kitchen into the room where they were drinking, where the angry wife ‘levelled her passion’ against Sara Newbury, the alehousekeeper’s wife, who was busy serving customers. Debora Allen called Sara Newbury a whore and a bawd, and accused her of running the alehouse as a bawdy house, before turning her fire onto the alehousekeeper William Newbury, labelling him a cuckold. The furious Debora Allen repeated the accusations several times, both within the alehouse and at the street door, ensuring that her opinion of this alehouse and its proprietors received a public airing.

A version of this vignette appears at the start of a chapter that I have written for a forthcoming Bloomsbury textbook on the cultural history of alcohol in the early modern world. The focus of the chapter is the relationship between gender, sexuality and alcohol in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and I use an analysis of this opening anecdote to highlight several of the themes that run through the essay: the gendered character of alcohol retailing; the extent and character of women’s public consumption of alcohol; the complex relationship between masculinity and drinking; and so on.

It is a classic technique of historians in my field – that is, the social history of early modern England – to start an article or a chapter with a story; a telling anecdote that draws the reader in and sets up the analysis that is to follow. Indeed, I have just used it here. More often than not, though, the storytelling ends there – the historian steps out of the role of fireside narrator, and proceeds to offer up their analysis in a cool, detached, ‘academic’ register, deemed more suitable for the pages of a peer-reviewed journal or academic monograph.

This is a writing convention that I myself have followed many times, and one that I relatively uncritically absorbed and mimicked from my own academic mentors and inspirations. But the endeavours of the ‘Storying the Past’ virtual reading group, and associated ‘Creative Histories’ events, have encouraged me to become more reflective about the storytelling techniques that I use in my writing as an academic historian, and those employed in my particular field of academic history.

What storytelling techniques, other than the trusty opening anecdote, do the historians that I spend most of my time reading deploy? Continue reading →

A ‘Creative Histories’ Mini-Series

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Mark Hailwood & Laura Sangha

Over the past couple of years the pair of us have had the pleasure of being involved in a series of events around the theme of ‘creative histories’, curated by the fertile brains behind the Storying the Past reading group.

Put simply, the aim of these conversations has been to encourage participants – which have included academic historians, authors, singer-songwriters, teachers, filmmakers and many others – to talk and think about the creative elements of historical research, writing, teaching, and consumption.

If this sounds like your kind of thing then you can read a whole host of blog posts that have emerged from these events, over at the Storying the Past blog. No need to do anything creative at this stage, simply click here.

But we thought it might be nice to collate the contributions that we have made to these conversations into a monster mini-series, to draw them to the attention of any of our readers who might have missed them, and hopefully to whet your appetite for reading more over at Storying the Past.

So, this week we will be re-blogging our posts here, as follows: Continue reading →

E.P. Thompson’s forgotten sci-fi novel: The Sykaos Papers

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Mark Hailwood

Back in October I was writing a lecture on E.P. Thompson when I learnt, to my surprise, that he had written a sci-fi novel towards the end of his career. Published in 1988, The Sykaos Papers seems to have made very little impact, despite being generally well reviewed at the time as far as I can tell. The New York Times said it possessed ‘undeniable power’; the Observer opined it ‘will surely become a classic’. Well, it didn’t. When I asked around on Twitter there were only a few responses from people who had heard of it, let alone read it. ‘Should I bother with it, dear twitter?’ ‘It depends how into Thompson deep-cuts you are’… enough, I decided, to order a copy.

9780747503279-us-300Now I’ve read it. I had low expectations – presumably it had fallen off the radar because it was junk, right? – but I must say I think it is a belter. It is a bit mad, I’ll grant you, but endlessly inventive and stimulating, and at times downright hilarious and at others deeply affecting – neither of which I was expecting. And, I’d say it is much more fluent than his academic writing, which I have heard described recently by a historian who shall remain anonymous as ‘wittering’. I’m not sure I’d go that far, but I take the point, and I was expecting a slog – it wasn’t one. Anyway, I’m no great book reviewer – of fiction at any rate – and you can make your own mind up on this stuff, but I would recommend it to readers of this blog. With Christmas coming up and all that…

Not sure? I’ll try to give you a bit more to go on. The book’s central character is Oi Paz. He has been sent to Earth (which his people call ‘Sykaos’), sometime in the 1990s, from the planet Oitar, which has endured ecological catastrophe, to assess whether this planet might make a suitable location for a new Oitarian colony. What ensues is an anthropological face-off between Oi Paz and the humans (and in particular Dr Helena Sage, an anthropologist, who is the other major character in the book) as each side tries to unpack and decipher the other’s society and culture, often with hilarious consequences (not that Oi Paz laughs: his culture has no laughter, so he calls it ‘the Incongruous Noise’).

In a sense, you could call it a work of anthropological fiction, as much as science fiction, and there are interesting attempts to construct the alien subjectivity of Oi Paz (it’s also interesting, given that gender is often seen as his blind-spot, to witness Thompson’s attempt to construct the subjectivity of a female academic, Dr Sage). But historians should not feel left out, for the book’s main nod to Thompson’s own craft is the fact that the novel is structured as though the story of Oi Paz’s expedition has been reconstructed later, by the Oitarians, from a series of surviving PRIMARY SOURCES! There are the notebooks and diaries of Oi Paz and Helena Sage, interspersed with news reports, official communications, memos, etc, which the account – partial and multi-vocal, of course, like all histories – has been pieced together from.

I did wonder if part of the reason for the book’s low impact is that many of its key themes seemed less urgent as the Cold War ended and the 1990s progressed, dating it quickly. But the threat of nuclear war, a reckless U.S. President, a dangerous Russia, a tension between nationalism and the need for humankind to unite to confront its most pressing threats, ecological catastrophe – sadly, none of these feel like outdated themes today.

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E.P. Thompson: an #AcademicWithCats?

But Thompson’s prescience doesn’t end there, for the book also prefigures the social media age’s valorisation of the cat as a vital antidote to doom and gloom. The Oitarians worship them: they have good vibes. I strongly suspect, in fact, that E.P. Thompson himself would have been an avid consumer of, and contributor to, #AcadecmicsWithCats. A sci-fi novel, by E.P. Thompson, with cats! Surely that’s mad enough to warrant a look…

And if you do read it, or have done, please come back and share your thoughts in the comments section below – I’d love to know what other people think of it, positive or negative.