The latest issue of the Institute for Historical Research points to a couple of rich online sources.
The History of Parliament online – pretty much what it says on the tin.
And the Connected Histories, covering 1500-1900. (Not all of the databases linked to are free, but all give at least a snippet, giving a sense of what’s there.)
Feeling very old when I think I can actually remember when the first CD journals arrived in the university library and I discovered the joys of full-text search!
A shorter version was published on Blogcritics
A foundation of the “academic method” in the Western world is contradiction, turning established knowledge and ways of things on its head, challenging established assumptions. It’s something that James C. Scott does in spades in The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia.
At its heart is one region of the world, one of the last areas of the world to be brought into the nation-state system. “Zomia is a new name for virtually all the lands at altitudes above roughly three hundred meters all the way from the Central Highlands of Vietnam to northeastern India and traversing five Southeast Asian nations (Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, Thailand, and Burma) and four provinces of China (Yunnan, Guizhou, Guangxi, and parts of Sichuan). It is an expanse of 2.5 million square kilometres containing about one hundred million minority peoples of truly bewildering ethnic and linguistic variety.” (p. ix)
And there’s huge amounts of fascinating detail there – from the role of the New World crops of maize and sweet potato in allowing what I was taught of at school as “traditional” slash and burn (what Scott calls swidden) agriculture, to the egalitarian politics of the Lisu, which on Scott’s account is strongly anti-authority and built around many stories of the felling of over-mighty, over-ambitious headmen.
But it’s the overarching frame of this book that really makes it a must-read for those who like finding new ways of looking at history and the shape of the modern world. Scott points out (unarguably) that the state is a very recent arrival on the human scene, and that most humans, through almost all of our history, have lived in far smaller, freer, often anarchic and flexible units.
We can’t now, however, know what they were like, for contrary to the view (established by people writing from within, and usually in support of the nation state) the usually independent, often anarchical groups in Zomia are not some historical hangover, “primitive” people who couldn’t manage for one reason or another to “modernise”, but groups who chose to avoid the restrictions of the state, the “discipline” of padi farming, and choose the freer (and almost invariably better nourished) life of the forest and hill. (Scott comprehensive rebuffs the traditional tale of Malaysia’s orang asli “original people” once thought to have been descendents of earlier waves of migration less technically developed than the Austronesian populations who followed. They are not genetically different, he says, but part of a “political series”. p. 183)
And they’re not tightknit “tribes”, but highly flexible groupings that can change identity for practical advantage almost at will, and absorb a huge range of disparate incomers, from runaway slaves, peasants and soldiers to adventurous traders and general malcontents.
It doesn’t quite deliver, but hints at an alternative world history in which the nation state, rather than its traditional portrayal as “civiliser”, “developer”, “stabiliser” is in fact a destroyer of rights, a deliverer of poor health and nutrition, a veritable Kali of woes. And one where the non-state societies are the defenders of functionality, freedom and hope.
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The following is drawn from London and the Kingdom: A History Derived Mainly From the Archives at Guildhall by Reginald R Sharpe, DCL, in Three Volumes, printed by order of the Corporation of Under the Direction of the Library Commmittee, London, Longmans, 1894.
The author explains in the preface that authors have rarely touched on the City’s politics, yet “its geographical position combined with the innate courage and enterprise of its citizens served to give it no small political power and no insignificant place in the history of the Kingdom” (p. iv). He explains tha impetus as the popular tradition making this the 700th anniversary of the Mayoralty. (I suspect the existence of the Royal Commission on the Amalgamation of the City and County of London, which also reported in 1894 had something to do with it.)
Going back, right back… “the City has never been subject to any over-lord except the king. It never formed a protion of the king’s demesne (dominium), but has ever been held by its burgesses as tenants in capite by burgage (free socage) tenure. Other towns…were subject to overlords, ecclesiastical or lay, in the person of archbishop, abbot, baron or peer of the realm, who kept in their own hands many of the privileges which in the more favoured City of London were enjoyed by the municipal authorities.” (p. 3)
Athelstan ( king 924 or 925 to 939) gave encouragement to commercial enterprise “by enacting that any merchant who undertook successfully three voyages across the seas at his own cost (if not in his own vessel) should rank as a thane”. (p. 16)
William the Conqueror granted London a charter “by which he clearly declared his purpose not to reduce the citizens to a state of dependant vassalage, but to establish them in all the rights and privileges they had hitherto enjoyed. … William, King, greets William, Bishop, and Gosfregdh, Portreeve, and all the burgesses within London, French and English, friendly. And I give you to know that I will that ye be all those laws worky they ye were in King Eadward’s day. And I will that every child be his father’s heir after his father’s day and I will not suffer any man offer you any wrong. God keep you.” (p. 34)
Henry I granted a further charter “the citizens were henceforth to be allowed to hold Middlesex to farm at a rent of £300 a year, and to appoint from among themselves whom they would to be sheriff over it; they were further to be allowed to appoint their own justiciar to hold pleases of the crown, and no other justiciar should exercise authority over them; they were not to be forced to please without the city’s walls; they were to be exempt from scot and low and of all payments with respect to Danegelt and murder; they were to be allowed to purge themselves after the English fashion of making oath and not after the Norman fasion by wager of battle; their goods were to be free of all manner of customs, toll, passage and lestage; their husting court might sit once a week; and lastly, they might resort to ‘withernam’ or reprisal in cases where their goods were unlawfully seized.” (p. 41)
A lot of this was lost for a time under Stephen and Matilda, Henry II and Richard, particularly the shrievalty “when it was restored to the citizens (AD1199) by John’s second charter, the office of sheriff of London had lost much of its importance owing to the introduction of the communal system of municipal government under a mayor.” (p. 58) The origins of this are unclear, but may go back to Stephen’s reign. Certainly John and the barons after deposing Longchamp “granted to the citizens ‘their commune’, swearing to preserve untouched the dignities of the city during the king’s pleasure. (p. 63-4)
The first mention of the mayor is in 1202, “when John attempted to suppress the guild of weavers ‘at the request of our mayor and citizens of London’. A few years later when John was ready to do anything and everything to avoid signing the Great Charter which the barons were forcing on him, he made a bid for the favour of the citizens by granting them the right to elect annually a mayor, and thus their autonomy was rendered complete.” (p. 68)
The city rising of 1196: “The pressure of taxation weighed heavily on the poor, and occasioned a rising in the city under the leadership of William Fitz-Osbert. They cry was that the rich were spared whilst the poor were called upone to pay everything. [Sound familiar??!] … it is certain he had a large following. When Hubert Walter, the justiciar, sent to arrest him… he took refuge in the church of St Mary-le-Bow. Thither he was followed by the king’s officers… who with the aid of fire and faggot soon compelled him to surrender. On his way to the Tower he was struck at and wounded by one whose father (it was said) he had formerly killed; but this may or may not be the whole truth. A few days later he and a number of his associates were hanged.” (p. 71)
In 1200 first mention of alernmen… “the establishment of a court of aldermen preceded that of the common council”. (p. 72)
Edward III’s charter to the city of March 6, 1327, “which has been held to be of the force of an Act of Parliament,… appointed the mayor one of the justices of the gaol delivery of Newgate as well as the king’s escheator of felon’s goods within the city; it gave the citizens the right of devising real estate within the city; it restored to them all the privileges they had enjoyed before the memorable Iter of the last reign; and granted to them a monopoly oof markets within a ciircuit of seven miles of the city.” (p. 161)
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“… in the 13th century there is evidence of growing tension between the governing class and the poorer citizens, whose only means of civic expression were the folkmoots – mass gatherings which took place in St Paul’s Churchyard. When the churchyard was enclosed in the early years of the 14th century the folkmoot ceased to meet” (The City of London, A Book Reprinted from the special number of The Times, 1928).
For enclosure read “‘elf ‘n’ safety’ or ‘tourist income’. Take your pick…
I confess I’m not really sure if they’re ravens, carrion crow or rooks — I haven’t got close enough to use my excellent RSPB bird books to distinguish them — but I do know that in a valley I regularly visit in the Morvan in Burgundy, there’s lots of one or more crow species, and they seem to interact in interesting ways, forming, particularly in winter, quite large groups that swoop around at dusk, raucously dominating the neighbourhood.
So when I saw Mark Cocker’s Crow Country, it was clearly a book that I’d not only read, but read in France. Which is what I’ve just done, and it’s left me with a strong desire to learn more about my local corvids, because I’m sure there’s a lot to be discovered.
The fact that Cocker describes himself as a “nature writer” did give me some pause — the more literary end of nature writing tends to leave me cold — but although some passages of Crow Country were a bit too far down the poetical side for my taste, overall I found it a fascinating account of the natural history of rooks and jackdaws in Britain, and gave me plenty of information about their French cousins.
The key line of the book is Cocker’s attempt to understand rook behaviour, and particularly their spending part of winter in large, sometimes enormous, mass roosts. He starts with their rookeries (breeding centres), the reasons for which are well established.
“In the nesting season, the abundant supply of worms is the key to the rook’s success. The onset of the breeding cycle in earliest spring is timed to coincide with the maximum availability of prey for the chicks. But the food items aren’t spread evenly, they’re clustered randomly…It’s thought that rooks have evolved to share resources and capitalise on the shifting and temporary abundances by pursuing a feeding strategy of follow-my-leader…. Each bird discovering a food hotspot faces the disadvantage of competition from neighbours, but it is more than compensated by the opportunity, on all occasions when it is less successful, to share the good fortune uncovered by others.” (p. 75)
That’s from late February to June, the nesting season, but the rest of the year, Cocker gradually concludes, they are roosting, often split between a late summer/early autumn roost and a later one – the latter reflecting a large concentration of birds. Roosts are usually in the middle of woods, even though these are birds that feed in grasslands (they’ve been recorded flying up to 32km to feeding grounds for the day – “as the crow flies”!), and he concludes that protection from weather, uninterrupted nights (they’re usually in very calm places) and perhaps to some degree predators (although there’s few of these now) , are an important part of the roosting behaviour.
But the biggest advantage for rooks in these huge gatherings is, he concludes, like in rookeries, the spread of information. It is, however, more complicated than that. In the Yare Valley roost he studied, numbers ranged from 10,000 to 40,000 at the year’s peak, numbers depending to a large degree on continental European visitors, who leave snow-covered territories for warmer western wintering grounds.
“For non-resident naive individuals the primary value might lie in following resident birds out to otherwise unknown feeding sites. The resident population may thus enjoy a dominant status in the roost and occupy more central locations in the trees. They can monopolise the best perches for thermal protection or defence against predators.” (p. 164.)
It’s well known that corvids are intelligent – the Caledonian crows having shocked researchers by inventing tools – but Cocker also finds real world examples. There’s the M4 rooks who’ve learnt to get to waste at the bottom of bin bags by gradually tugging them up the side of their frame, holding the bulked plastic under one foot, and those birds who’ll bury food for later consumption. (For jays this is standard, for rooks seemingly more learned behaviour.) So we learn in the Aberdeenshire vernacular a self-seeded tree is “craw(rook)-sown”. (p. 57)
Cocker’s also interested in history – both human, rook and how they intersect. He recounts tales of rooks acting as vulture-like scavengers, on sheep and dog carcasses, and infers an “ancient and resonant scene”.
“Our Mesolithic ancestors were accustomed to place deceased relatives on special excarnation platforms where natural predators would pick the bones clean, before the remains were taken to be buried in a barrow or cairn. I can just imagine the rook flock that chanced upon the same easy pickings, smothering the raised corpse in a blanket of dark wings and excited calls”. (p. 59)
But that’s not standard fare – Cocker explains it is mainly insects and arthropods in the upper topsoil, particularly worms, which explains their distribution as a bird of pastures and cropland. (Although they’ll also eat small mammals, eggs and grain.) They stab 5-6cm into the ground, then uses Zirkeln, open-billed probing, to find their prey. Forest is not for them.
“They occupy vast swathes of the Mongolian and Manchurian grasslands, right through to the outskirts of Beijing and the shores of the Yellow Sea. To the west they’ve conquered the immense oceanic expanses of Russia and Asian grassland from about 160E to a point half a world away on the Baltic coast. …Rooks were dependent on the westward spread of stock grazing and cereal agriculture … to make their own entry into Europe. So when you next pass a rookery remember to stop and listen. Amond the spring-summoning cacophony you’ll hear the faintest echo of a Neolitic axe.” (p61)
Reading The Women’s Victory – and After: Personal Reminiscences, 1911-1918 by Millicent Garrett Fawcett (1920), it’s hard not to think that little has changed in the campaigning world. Fawcett was president of the National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies, and this little memoir is a pretty well blow-by-blow account of the final push from the non-militant wing of the suffragist movement. (They were, you might say, today’s Friends of the Earth and the suffragettes, with their militant tactics, the Sea Shepherd of the time.)
The parliamentary tactics, the lobbying, the enlisting of parliamentary supporters to convert waverers, the plotting to find ways to disarm the enemies of your cause, and the betrayals coming from those who’d promised support but found excuses to back down might come straight from an account of any similar efforts today.
As today, that often involved meetings with people with whom you had little sympathy – and they the same for you. Fawcett is delightful on the subject of her first meeting with the Chancellor Asquith. “We had with us Miss Emily Davies, the founder of Girton college; Lady Strachey, wife of the well-known Indian administrator; Miss Frances Sterling; Miss I.O. Ford, and other well-known suffrage leaders from our various societies. While we were still in the waiting-room, I was sent for by myself for a preliminary interview with Mr Asquith’s private secretary. If found him a rather agitated-looking young man, who said: ‘I want you, Mrs Fawcett, to give me your personal word of honour that no member of your deputation will employ physical violence.’ ‘Indeed,’ I replied, ‘you astonish me. I had no idea you were so frightened.’ He instantly repudiated being frightened… As we entered the room, where Mr Asquith was sitting with his back to the light on our right, I observed in the opposite corner on our extreme left a lady I did not know. So I said to the secretary in a clear voice, ‘I give no guarantee for that lady’ I do now know her.’ ‘Oh that,’ he rejoined, and again showed some agitation – that lady is Miss Asquith.’” (p. 17)
There’s also some of the same dilemmas as for today about how far a “non-party” campaigning group should do in backing parties that support it and working against those with which it disagrees. There’s some clear defensiveness in Fawcett’s tone as she describes the decision from 1912, after the Liberals had gone back on plans to include women’s votes in the Government Reform Bill in 1911. “It is interesting now to look back at the NUWSS report in the year 1912, and see the care with which we defined our position. No Government candidate was to be supported, because the Government, under Mr Asquith, had shown the most determined opposition to our enfranchisement. When a Conservative candidate was supported, it was because we deemed this the best way of securing the defeat of a Government candidate; when the Labour candidate was supported, it was made clear that this was done because the Labour Party was the only party which had made women’s suffrage part of its programme, and had, moreover, rendered us the signal service of calling upon its parliamentary representatives to oppose any Franchise Bill which did not include women.” (p. 34)
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