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Freedom seekers review

Posted on by Nathanael Bendix

Book Review: Freedom Seekers: Escaping From Slavery In Restoration London by Simon P. Newman.

This week’s reading for our Early Modern England history class was Simon P. Newman’s Freedom Seekers: Escaping From Slavery In Restoration London, published in 2022. The book covers the history of enslaved people during Restoration London. When you think of slavery, you normally think of it as happening across the Atlantic, but Simon Newman provides evidence that it happened in London as well. If you think about Great Britain in the seventeenth and eighteenth century, do you picture people of color on the streets as well? Simon Newman uses the intimate stories of enslaved people to inform the reader of racial slavery in Restoration England, a time and setting in which slavery is not commonly associated with. The main idea that Newman is presenting in Freedom Seekers is that the people who owned slaves in Restoration London were contributed to the construction of racial slavery. The sources that he uses are newspapers, slave advertisements, church records,etc. Despite the limited historical research upon this topic, Newman uses reasoned interpretation to draw historically sound conclusions to determine that.

Simon P. Newman structures his book into three parts. The first part, Restoration London and the enslaved, is Newman plunging the reader into the world in which the book takes places. The reader is introduced to the workings of Restoration London and how slavery fit into this world. The second part is called The freedom Seekers, this part is 12 shorter chapters that all are about a different enslaved person/person. The third and final part is Freedom seekers in the colonies. This final part touches upon the laws passed in the colonies that effected enslaved people. These chapters are meant to explore what life was like in Restoration London for the enslaved person and it proves that main idea that the enslavers contributed to the construction of racial slavery.

What is Freedom Seekers trying to say? In his introduction, Simon P. Newman writes “Given that surviving records tell us rather more about enslavers and the community than about the enslaved, this book also seeks to illuminate how those who owned bound people of colour in Restoration London were constructing and defending racial slavery in the metropole.” (xxviii). Despite records to the contrary, one of Newman’s arguments is that the owners of enslaved people of color in London were connected to the creation of racial slavery. How does Newman illustrate this point? Newman writes” Londoners who claimed ownership of these people were themselves part of the vast imperial project and their dedication to the expansion and preservation of the slave trade and slavery included the development of a system for the recapture of any enslaved or bound person of colour who dared to reject their subordination by attempting to escape”(37). This quote proves Newman’s main point that the enslavers contributed to the construction of the racial slavery system.

One of the things I liked about this book was how immersive it was. That first chapter about London really submerges you into Restoration London. This is important because in order to understand what life as a slave in Restoration London, firstly you must understand what London was like in this period.  Newman really paints a picture complete with sailors, coffee houses. The topic is also quite niche but interesting. Slaves in Restoration London is not exactly something many people know about or think about. This shows the quality of Newman’s research because he makes such a detailed book from a topic that has received few, if any attention.

The sources used by Newman are both similar and different to sources used in previous works we have read before. For example. Newman discusses a historian who used church court depositions (p.9) This kind of source is similar to the sources used in books such as A People’s Reformation, or The Dissolution of the Monasteries. But Newman also goes into his usage of wanted posters for runaway slaves. While these posters contain valuable insight on the period, Newman also points out that “.‘Runaway slave’ advertisements rendered the very people they described as property and as criminally fugitive: by their very nature, these advertisements became part of the process of the commodification and depersonalization of enslaved people. Historians today who collate and analyze these advertisements engage in an act of remediation that risks continuing the datafication of enslaved people.” The use of these sources helps prove Newman’s main idea of enslavers in Restoration London contributing to the construction of the racial slave system.

The runaway slave poster, which many of us see as just a piece of paper, Newman describes as “This mechanism for the recovery of enslaved people who had escaped would eventually create and largest and richest resource for the study of resistance of escape in England’s colonies and then in the United States”(218).Newman also writes “During the seventeenth century Londoners made use of newspaper advertisements in constructing the idea of the runaway slave and the practice of broadcasting information designed to secure freedom seekers, while English colonists responded to runaway in a more forceful and comprehensive manner by creating new laws and practices that were unprecedented in English law.”(196). Newman uses these sources and analyzes in a way that doesn’t devalue the enslaved person that is portrayed. But Newman sees them as a human rather than property.

“Can a historian imagine London’s enslaved in a manner that transcends an archival record constructed by their enslavers? Perhaps the best we can do, treading carefully as we go, is to build from archival research to hint at possibilities, encouraging readers to imagine real people who remembered, who suffered, who are, who slept, who laughed, who sang and who danced.” (xxv). This is what Newman does for Part 2 of his book, The freedom seekers. This is 12 chapters, each revolving around one or more enslaved persons. As the quote above mentioned, because there is not as much primary sources or scholarly evidence alone, Newman must use archival research to build what could have happened in a historically plausible way. I believe this is called reasoned interpretation which Newman uses. Each chapter uses one enslaved person to explore a specific particle of life in Restoration London for an enslaved person. For example, the Pompey chapter goes into the kind of shackles that was put upon a enslaved person. The Jack chapter goes into what young, enslaved boys experienced. These chapters all contribute to Newman’s main idea which is that the enslavers of Restoration London helped build the racial slavery system. We see this in the chapters and through Newman’s detailed research.

What I liked About Simon P. Newman’s Freedom Hunters is that for a book about a topic that does not cross most people’s mind, it is well-researched, and provides a perspective rarely seen in historical works today. I was particularly interested in the mention of South-Asian enslaved people which you rarely hear about, or at least I rarely heard about it. Freedom Seekers is a well-researched book that touches upon how the slavery system was constructed In Restoration England. He uses reasoned interpretation to infer conclusions to story that we simply don’t have all the details to. This was a good book on a topic I admittedly knew nothing about. It was very informative.

Freedom Seekers by Simon Newman – CHall Review

Posted on by Chappy Hall

When faced with the silences of the archives and their reification of the hierarchical power dynamics of slavery, how does one recover the voices and lived experiences of the oppressed? In his 2022 monograph Freedom Seekers: Escaping from Slavery in Restoration London, Simon P. Newman provides an answer. Emeritus Professor of History at the University of Glasgow, Honorary Fellow at the Institute for Research in the Humanities at the University of Wisconsin, and a Brown 2026 Visiting Fellow Newman is a renowned historian of colonial America and the early modern British Atlantic. In addition to his expertise in the Americas, he leverages over a decade of research into the history of slavery and the Transatlantic Slave Trade in the British world to deliver a sagacious and methodologically striking monograph in Freedom Seekers.

At the heart of Newman’s work is the aim of bringing to light the agency, humanity, and lived experience of enslaved Africans seeking freedom in late seventeenth century London. While this is an approach fraught with challenges, Newman strives to encourage “readers to imagine real people who remembered, who suffered, who ate, who slept, who laughed, who sang and who danced” (Newman, xxv). In addition to recovering the voices of the enslaved, Newman also articulates a central polemic. He challenges existing historiography of the development of institutionalized racial slavery which is primarily occupied with Britain’s American colonies. These scholars “have assumed that White colonists enslaved West Africans and indigenous Americans beyond the oversight of an English government that was preoccupied with religious conflict, civil war and the Cromwellian Protectorate” (Newman, xxvi). Instead, Newman argues that English efforts on English soil were directly involved in forming this system of racialized oppression. In fact, he states that “Racial slavery was being created simultaneously in London and in the colonies, and the development of runaway slave advertisements as a response to this form of slave resistance [escape] was actually a London creation” (Newman, xxvii). Newman places print media and London at a critical juncture in the construction of the racial slavery so often attributed to the colonies.

Freedom Seekers is organized in three parts, each with a distinct purpose. Newman uses the first of these to provide a broader historical context of Restoration London. It is comprised of three chapters: one detailing the exponentially growing metropolis of London during the period, another exploring the Black community of London at the time, and the last an overview of freedom seekers in London as a group. These chapters not only provide the setting for the more personal and focused analysis Newman brings later, but also platform two of his sub-arguments. One of these is the rising influence of print and news media with newspapers, primarily the London Gazette, combining with the growing commercial communities of the Royal Exchange and coffee houses to create a ‘new public sphere’ (Newman, 22). This environment was a rich network for the dissemination of information. It was therefore ripe for the runaway advertisements which were a critical tool for the enforcement of racialized slavery and which serve as the core of Newman’s primary source base.

These chapters also illuminate the growing urban and commercial community in the metropole which put out these runaway ads. As Newman argues, “An interconnected web of aristocrats, gentry, merchants, bankers, coffee shop owners, craftsmen, shipwrights, ship captains and their families in the capital emerge from these newspaper notices, revealing the connections between those who owned or directly benefitted from the traffic in and exploitation of enslaved people both in the colonies and in London (Newman, 67). It is this assemblage of Londoners who were engaged “in their own domestic process of defining slavery as they understood and practiced it” based on the concept of theft (in this case the enslaved person stealing their own body by escaping) that Newman attributes the development of racial slavery in London to. In addition, he begins here to articulate an argument which also features prominently is his third major section that the runaway slave advertisement, which “would become the most ubiquitous evidence of resistance by the enslaved” in the English-speaking Atlantic, originated in London and then matriculated to the colonies (Newman, 67).

The second part of the monograph is a collection of twelve chapters which each outline a category or characteristic of the freedom seekers. As the main body of the book, these chapters focus on the freedom seekers as a whole, using specific individuals as representative windows into larger groupings. For example, Newman examines particular demographic divisions such as boys or South Asians as well as common experiences such as escaping from a maritime context or branding. It is here where he especially focuses on giving voice to these people often overlooked in the historical narrative.

Following this, Newman concludes the book with a third part which extends his analysis and its ramifications to the colonies in three chapters. Of particular note here is his bolstering of the argument that the runaway advertisement system developed in London spread to the colonies. Rather than examine London in isolation, he connects it to the broader British Empire. The epilogue focused on the escape of John King, a person enslaved by Benjamin Franklin (whose printing business often published runaway advertisements), serves to thematically bring this argument full circle (Newman, 217-218).

The most impressive facet of Freedom Seekers is Newman’s methodology. He employs a large collection of runaway slave advertisements as his main body of primary sources. These advertisements published in London newspapers present both opportunities and challenges which Newman navigates with aplomb. They offer an important, if limited window, into the lives and humanity of enslaved persons as “by definition these advertisements reveal resistance to bondage and assertions of individuality and agency” (Newman, xxvii). These individuals rarely appear in the historical record outside of these advertisements and occasional parish records, another source used by Newman, but what can be understood about them is drawn out by the author.

While doing so, he also struggles against the danger of reifying the hierarchical power of the enslaver. Newman clearly explains that “the few dozen words of each advertisement were those of an enslaver… asserting legal control of the freedom seeker, defying his or her agency” (Newman, xxvii). These advertisements are a historical artifact of oppression, and he is clear eyed about the violence of the archive that must be combatted in their use. Like other social historians trying to extract the humanity and lived experience of common or oppressed people Newman reads against the grain of his sources. Lucy Kaufman’s A People’s Reformation: Building the English Church in the Elizabethan Parish is another example of this methodology where the author plies out of church records the common people’s religious experience. It can also be seen in Mark Stoyle’s A Murderous Midsummer: The Western Rising of 1549 where, due to the destruction of documents, the author purposefully questions of the bias and power dynamic of sources to bring to light the rebel perspective of the Prayer Book Rebellion. Newman aptly describes the need for this approach as “the words, the experiences, the motivations, the hopes and dreams of the freedom seekers themselves are largely absent from the archival record, and it requires contextual research and more than a little imagination to see the freedom seekers as individuals rather than as objects” (Newman, xxvii).

He pursues this humanizing goal through other methodological approaches as well. One of these is a very intentional use of language. Newman avoids using terms, even appropriate period words, which reinforce the dehumanizing, racist power dynamic of slavery (Newman, xi). For example, rather than ‘slave’ he uses ‘enslaved,’ but also chooses to still use the term ‘master’ as during the Restoration period it lacked later racial connotations. Focused, but impactful choices like this play an important part in bolstering Newman’s efforts to recover the oppressed subjects of Freedom Seekers.

Another methodological technique which Newman employs for this effect is his use of anecdotes and creative narrative. Where the archival sources fail to provide rich stories of the freedom seekers’ experiences Newman looks to fill that gap. He begins the monograph’s prologue with a vivid, imagined narrative of the enslaved person Ben’s attempt to escape from the merchant Theodore Johnson (Newman, xxi n1). This use of fiction to impress upon the reader a historical subject’s experience is unusual but striking in its success at humanizing Ben. Although uncommon, another example of it can be found in Jim Downs’ Maladies of Empire: How Colonialism, Slavery, and War Transformed Medicine which employs this imaginative approach from the methodological lens of Black Feminist Critique. Similarly, each of the twelve chapters in part two begins with a particular runaway advertisement and Newman’s attempt to give life and detail to the freedom seeker in question as much as possible. Criticism could be leveled at Newman for potentially reaching beyond what can be concretely gleamed from his sources about these individuals. However, such a critique would undermine the robust research and scholarly imaginativeness used by Newman to lift these forgotten people out of obscurity. Freedom Seekers is a brilliant piece of modern scholarship on slavery in the early British Empire and the humanity of its victims.

Ian Gentles’ The New Model Army: Agent of Revolution book review by Max Smith

Posted on by Max Smith

Ian Gentles’ The New Model Army: Agent of Revolution book review by Max Smith

In the mid-17th century, England was engulfed in a series of civil wars, mutinies, and revolutions that would eventually result in the deaths of as many as half a million English, Irish, and Scottish citizens, as well as that of King Charles I himself. Although this period is perhaps one of the most researched areas of English history, the historiography has not taken any dramatic new turns among recent historians, appearing to be one of those events of which “all there is to say about it has been said.”

In 2022, professor of History at Tyndale University Ian Gentles published his work entitled The New Model Army: Agent of Revolution, a comprehensive reexamination of this period which seeks to uncover the true accounts of this newly formed military force and their subsequent actions following the falling out between Parliament and King Charles I in 1642. Gentles states that in the second publication of this work he ultimately  produced “a very different book from the one I first published,” due to his condensing of original material in order to add various new chapters.

Gentles’ writing style is reminiscent of older and more traditional histories of the period which precede him, given its top down framing, as well as its extensive use of charts and illustrations concerning budgets and battlefield movements. However, in many other ways he distinguishes himself from those traditional narratives by lending a greater deal of attention to the social, interpersonal, and religious dynamics which molded the actions of the army and its leaders. Given the extensive scope of this work It is also quite difficult to place The New Model Army squarely into one single category of historical literature. It is of course a military and political history, but he does not confine himself to these definitions by any means. 

This book follows a chronological timeline of events which begins with the establishment of a new professional fighting force overseen by leaders such as Cromwell and Fairfax in the 1640’s and the initial successes they enjoyed over royalists. The author meticulously follows the political and military changes throughout England and its surrounding empires through the Second Civil war, execution of Charles, and death of Cromwell which ends with the eventual rejection of sole parliamentary rule and the reestablishment of the monarchy 20 years later. Each section of Gentel’s work is dedicated to a particular aspect of the army’s most active years ranging from highly statistical information regarding conscription, pay, and battlefield achievements, all the way to more elusive characteristics such as the effects of religion and disbelief among the ranks. 

One thing I appreciated was his attention to the class differences which marked the roles of soldiers, for instance he states that “…it was clear that the poor were the ones being targeted. In principle all men between the ages of eighteen and sixty-five were liable to impressment, but any man, or the son of any man The new model army, rated at £5 in goods or £3 in land, was exempt.”p20 Unlike the sons of Yeoman and craftsmen which mainly composed the calvary, the infantry was made up of “scum” from the lowest classes of society. This inevitably had the effect that “Few foot soldiers understood or cared about the reasons for fighting against the king.”p21

As Tony mentioned in his review, the role of soldier’s religious beliefs (or lack thereof) is a major part of Gentles’ research. While he acknowledges that high morale was partially a result of a collective religious consciousness among soldiers, and that they eventually became nicknamed the “Praying Army,” he also poses the question of whether or not these religious services, both official and unofficial, were actually “meaningful to those who took part in them? Did they make a difference to the soldiers’ conduct?”p46 He demonstrates that during the early years of victories when soldiers were generally preoccupied on the battlefield, religious dissent was at its lowest. However after the fighting died down, more and more instances of heresy, quakerism, and debates on topics such as infant baptism grew steadily causing conflicts between soldiers and civilians. 

By 1646 the new model army was facing increased threats of extinction by parliamentarians who wanted to curb their numbers in order to decrease the debt they owed soldiers, among other reasons. As a dramatic last ditch effort, Cromwell approved a plan to seize Charles I who had continued to plot against them along with the help of presbyterians. Gentles demonstrates that what followed was a series of political wars and conspiracies that ultimately resulted in the outbreak of the second civil war, setting in motion a chain reaction of disastrous events for England’s stability. 

His examination of the personal aspects of Cromwell’s life adds to his arguments by calling to attention the deaths of his children and Cromwell’s wavering religious bravado which eventually collapsed with the defeat at the island of Hispaniola, an event that Gentles claims he never really recovered from. 

Ian Gentles’ The New Model Army: Agent of Revolution is an extremely comprehensive review of the timeline between the First English Civil War and the Restoration of the Monarchy, a period of only 20 years in which the country’s history would be forever reshaped. I was immediately struck by the statistical nature of this work and the quantity of examples that Gentles provides his readers in order to paint a clear picture free of bias and without reliance on previous works on the subject. That being said, this is not a work which seems to make any one grand rejection of previous accounts, but rather one that seeks to be much more all encompassing in its use of evidence. For me that is the strongest aspect of Gentles’ methodology, but it is occasionally hampered by the feeling many of the examples he provides do not necessarily add to an overall argument.

It is thus useful to note that the author concludes this work by restating the dual natured legacy of the new model army by subsequent historians; having defeated absolute monarchy, and raising suspicion of standing armies simultaneously. Here we can see the clearest that what Gentles has actually done is to complicate these legacies by approaching his research without first having taken either side, but letting the evidence speak for him.

Review of The New Model Army: Agent of Revolution by Ian Gentles, by Tony Rossell

Posted on by Tony Rossell

Dr. Ian Gentle’s The New Model Army: Agent of Revolution is a political and military history of the turbulent years of the English Civil War and Revolution.

Gentles sets the goal for this narrative history as “to listen to the voices of those who lived through the Revolution, to attend to what they said and wrote, and to refrain from subjecting them to ‘the enormous condescension of posterity.’” In doing so, he provides a balanced view of The New Model Army, highlighting its role in ending absolute monarchy, advocating for democracy, and supporting unbiased legal reform, while also acknowledging the challenges presented by a standing army, the Protectorate, and ultimately a “naked military dictatorship.” (297) When using the term, “the enormous condescension of posterity,” he adopts it from historian E.P. Thompson, who warns against judging previous generations by modern standards. Gentles succeeds in offering an unprejudiced view of the New Model Army.

Perhaps an alternative title for the book could be The Rise and Fall of the New Model Army. Gentles traces the army’s beginnings with an ordinance by the Commons on January 28, 1645, through the early victories in 1645 and 1646, the second Civil War, the Regicide of Charles I, the Levellers’ mutinies, the conquests of Ireland and Scotland, the Protectorate, the return of the monarchy under Charles II, and The New Model Army’s laying down its arms under the Act of Indemnity in 1660.

Dr. Ian Gentles is a Professor of History at Tyndale University College in Toronto, Ontario. He earned his Ph.D. from the University of London, England. His specialization is in British history from 1500 to 1800. His other books include Oliver Cromwell: God’s Warrior and the English Revolution (2011), The English Revolution and the Wars in the Three Kingdoms, 1638-1652 (2007), and Soldiers, Writers, and Statesmen of the English Revolution (1998). For the book, Gentles relies on primary sources from the Oxford archives and the British Library. The critical printed sources are thousands of pamphlets and newspaper articles, also housed in the British Library. However, for this narrative history, Gentles relies heavily on secondary sources.

Unlike the social history readings in our course by Dyer, Kaufman, and Mansell, Gentles presents his top-down history, focusing on the major political and military figures, starting with Charles I, where he states, “It was the king who fired the opening shot in England when he declared war on Parliament.” (2) He recognizes the pressure from citizens and lower-ranking soldiers who, at different times, initiated and demanded change throughout the period. However, these actors remain unnamed. Instead of using names, Gentles refers to them as numbers. For example, reporting the initial size of the army at 20,000 and those killed in the New Model Army’s battles. Even in reviewing the mutinies at Ware, Whalley’s Regiment, and Burford, some higher-ranking leaders were named, but the lower-level soldiers were simply referred to as “agitators,” “ringleaders,” “rank and file,” or “mutineers.”  After suppressing these mutinies, “the army’s rank and file never found their political voice again.” (237) The officer corps would drive the political changes.

Perhaps the most consistent theme throughout his history is religion. Gentles avoids theological debates and instead explores the motivating power of the New Model Army’s religious beliefs. “The religious energy that imbued the army affected both its fortunes on the battlefield and its relations with civilians.” (59) However, beyond unifying the army, faith became the army’s goal to enforce on society. Gentles notes that with the expulsion of the Rump Parliament in 1648, Cromwell’s defense was “I have sought the Lord” as his justification for his military takeover. And the army’s support followed, with Gentles stating their motivation was that “if the Revolution was to be safe, the godly would have to govern for the foreseeable future.” (250)

For the most part, Gentles avoids engaging in the historiographical debates about this period. One exception is when he discusses the regicide of Charles I. He notes that “A younger group of historians has recently argued that neither the purged Parliament, nor the army, nor the High Court of Justice wanted the king’s death.” (148) Michael Bradick presented this case of an unintended regicide in God’s Fury: A New History of the English Civil War. To counter this, Gentles states that “a number of scholars have rejected this revisionist interpretation” (149), citing in his footnotes that the idea was challenged by Mark Kishlansky in his article “Mission Impossible: Charles I, Oliver Cromwell and the regicide.” Gentles concludes this discussion by saying that Cromwell, starting in 1648, was determined to see the king killed because he was “a man whose heart God has hardended.” (149) Certainly, if he were to dive into historiographical controversies, it could take over the book.

Looking at the broader picture, Gentles’ book emphasizes the chain reaction that can occur once a conflict starts. What began as a Civil War, he argues, evolves into a revolution. Therefore, the subtitle of his book describes the New Model Army as the “Agent of Revolution.” However, at some point, the revolution must come to an end. The army that was “Fired by revolutionary zeal” eventually became “tamely submitted to the return of the son of the tyrant they had vanquished only eleven years before.” (319)

In conclusion, Gentles’ The New Model Army offers a comprehensive, balanced, and accessible account of the Civil War and Revolutionary era in English history. He does not judge the major figures of this time nor excuse their actions, but allows their behavior to speak for itself without modern bias. It is notable that some people today cannot avoid this reinterpretation. For example, Buchholz in Early Modern England recounts how Margaret Thatcher spoke at the Bicentenary of the French Revolution, saying that “Britain was great precisely because it had never had a revolution.” Buchholz adds that “British attitudes to the events of the 1640s and 1650s are conflicted and ambiguous . . . there was no clear ‘right’ side for politically correct moderns to embrace.” (250) Gentles avoids these traps.

 

Review by Edward Kirsch of Eleanore Hubbard. Englishmen at Sea: Labor and the Nation at the Dawn of Empire, 1570-1630. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2021.

Posted on by Ed K

Eleanor Hubbard’s Englishmen at Sea: Labor and the Nation at the Dawn of Empire, 1570-1630 is a social history, maritime history, and a history of empire, focused on the agency and experiences of English seafarers as “practitioners of a skilled craft” and in-demand “global labor [force], connecting the Mediterranean, the Atlantic, and the Indian Ocean, the Old World and the New, the East and the West.” (4) She argues English seafarers possessed bargaining power in the aggregate due to their reputation for violence, valor in battle, accurate gunnery, and extensive maritime skills that was often sufficient to protect and even expand their unwritten customary rights such as the right to private trading, shares of prize money, and wages in the face of disaster against merchants, including even the powerful state-like East India Company. (4, 190, 197)

Eleanor Hubbard obtained her PhD in history from Havard in 2009 while working with David Armitage. She was an Assistant Professor at Princeton University from 2009 to at least 2017 focused on early modern England and maritime studies.  She is fluent in French and reads Dutch, German and Italian which is reflected in her use of Dutch East India Company and Venetian state records.

Eleanor Hubbard’s research effort for this work is impressive. In particular, she painstakingly mined the archives of the High Court of Admiralty, and used often neglected sources such as libels (i.e., complaints), written examinations from witnesses and movants in prize cases, wage disputes, spoilage cases and other matters; as well as the archives of the English East India Company, Trinity House, Venetian and English State Papers; and travel writings, including ships logs, diaries, and other sources to skillfully reconstruct from this fragmentary evidence the biographies and collective experiences of about 10,000 individual seafarers – not all of whom of course make appearances in her book. (17-21)

Her lively narrative adeptly tells the story of these forgotten seafarers while supporting larger themes regarding the development of the English Empire and role of seafarers during a predatory period under Elizabeth I to a more commercial orientation that she argues emerged after James I concluded the long running war with Spain in 1604, and onward to the 1630s. (29) She concludes that although, “they had no guild to protect them, sailors regarded themselves as practitioners of a skilled craft, a collective body in their own right, with customary rights that they were eager to protect and, if possible extend” with the result that they had more bargaining power than most land laborers. (11)  Hubbard argues convincingly, “the common rights the seamen most valued were the rights to plunder and trade” for their own account to supplement wages, thereby ignoring the monopoly rights of the East India, Moscow, and Levant Companies, and opportunistically engaging in privateering and piracy. (11, 203)

Hubbard makes substantial contributions to the history of the English Empire by tracing the transition from an Elizabethan policy of predation to the end of the Anglo-Spanish War (1585-1604) under James I and the more corporate approach of the English East India Company. She argues convincingly that the “corporate vision of empire” of the East India Company and others “clashed with the freewheeling traditions of English seafarers” who were in high demand as a resource and “essential to English enterprise” which gave them considerable agency collectively. (2) The East India Company, captains and owners had to make concessions to the customary rights of sailors because “their skills and mobility, the dangers and endemic violence of the seas, the weakness of the state, and the decentralization of the English empire all combined to give seafaring laborers more bargaining power than their fellows on land.” (10) Despite the Company’s efforts to preclude private trading, she argues “Sailors were not blank slates; they came to the Company with expectations developed on English privateers, merchantmen, and pirates’ ships as well as in foreign service.” (166) Moreover, she observes that in contrast to the Spanish and Portuguese “seaborne empires, in which the state played a more central role, English Maritime expansion remained largely a matter of private enterprise, more the uncoordinated product of a multitude of actors and their short-term interests than any coherent imperial plan.” (4-5)

Although she begins with the shipwreck in 1609 on Bermuda of the “Sea Venture” which was bound for the nascent Jamestown English colony; Hubbard’s seafarers most often roam the Mediterranean and Asian waters. Nonetheless, the geographic breadth of her work and her vivid depictions of English seafarers fluidly offering their services to Ottoman pashas, the Grand Duke of Tuscany, and even the Dutch, and opportunistically roaming in and out of piracy in Ireland, Mamora, Algiers, Livorno and elsewhere, all the while anticipating pardons, and trading commodities on their own behalf, is reminiscent of themes identified in Atlantic History and the turn to global history. (73, 78-79, 136-138) Atlantic historians have long focused on the circulation by sea of goods, people, revolutionary ideas, pathogens, plants, consumer tastes, slaves and commodities.[1]  Hubbard argues similarly that “like the elite travelers who roam through Game’s Web of Empire,[2] seafarers were men with global horizons, cosmopolitans, who moved fluidly across institutional, legal and even national boundaries” with agendas that often clashed with that of the English Government, East India Company, Levant Company, and other patrons and players. (3)

Consistent with trends in Atlantic history, she observes that seafarers shaped the emerging British empire such that control and policy did not always originate in the metropole; rather, “it was also constructed within the corporations themselves and in the territorial colonies,” and by the piracy and obstinate pursuit by seafarers of their customary rights. (5) Although speaking to an earlier period, Hubbard’s work is consistent with that of Atlantic historian Tyson Reeder.  Reeder focuses on the Atlantic and persuasively argues that smugglers, privateers, and rogue officials engaged in illicit trade flows in the wild, messy periphery or “borderwaters” of the Atlantic shaped metropolitan policies in Britian, Portugal, Brazil, and the United States in the eighteenth century. Reeder further argues that “if state policies [at the core] shaped Atlantic trade networks, those networks developed just as much from contravention of state policies” in the periphery by smugglers and conniving local officials.[3]

Hubbard’s concept of nascent English nationhood or “Englishness” among seafarers is a distinctive and innovative historical intervention. Hubbard boldly argues that “persistent and lethal maritime violence and the difficulties of managing cross-cultural trade despite intense European rivalries made [English] nationhood the glue that bound global English maritime enterprise together.” (15) She argues English nationhood was important to seafarers “because foreign interlocutors found it useful to treat them as a national collective in which individuals could be held responsible for one another’s actions.” (16) Moreover, English seafarers sought each other’s assistance when under duress in foreign ports. Hubbard argues that in Asia, English merchants attempted to distinguish themselves from other traders by emphasizing the power of their sovereign and “presenting themselves as courteous and friendly people.” (222) However, Hubbard’s argument is undermined somewhat by her own evidence that English seafarers often failed to perform “manly courtesy” and foreign hosts were most often more impressed with their level of military power and trading goods to the extent they considered them relevant at all. (236) As she notes, Jahangir, and Japanese Lords perceived the English as marginal players and the Dutch VOC seized opportunities to humiliate and demonstrate their regional superiority in Southeast Asia which undermined English performances of manly courtesy. (236-240)

In contrast to the overriding importance of religion in other works in this course, Hubbard is largely dismissive of the role of religion as a motive in seafarer behavior. Hubbard situates herself in opposition to C. M. Senior’s emphasis on the “rough patriotism and anti-Spanish fervor” of English pirates. (39, 153) She argues instead that Protestant identity was not the focus of their Englishness as they “often nurtured commercial bonds with Muslims and ‘pagans,’ while the Dutch, their [erstwhile] religious allies, became dangerous and hostile rivals.” (14-15) Further, she provides numerous examples of seafarers cynically converting to Islam or Catholicism when it suited their interests and observes that “evidence of visceral hatred for Catholics is sparse . . . in the records of everyday privateering.” (44) In sum, Hubbard is a good storyteller and weaves a compelling narrative that recovers the lives of the common seafarers that formed the backbone of English maritime power in this period and makes substantial contributions to the social history of seafarers, and the early history of the nascent English empire.

[1] In her Atlantic history, for example, Ashlii White uses the metaphor of “an intricate web of connections” to describe her Atlantic framework. Ashli White, Encountering Revolution: Haiti and the Making of the Early Republic (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010), 6. See, e.g., David Armitage, “Three Concepts of Atlantic History,” in The British and Atlantic World 1500-1800, eds. David Armitage and Michael J. Braddick (New York: Palgrave-Macmillan, 2002), 11; John R. McNeill, Mosquito Empires: Ecology and War in the Greater Caribbean, 1620-1914 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010) (impact of spread of pathogens in the Atlantic).

[2] Alison, Games, The Web of Empire: English Cosmopolitans in the Age of Expansion, 1560-1660 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008).

[3] Tyson Reeder, Smugglers, Pirates, and Patriots: Free Trade in the Age of Revolution (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019), 35. Coincidentally, Tyson Reeder will make a presentation at GMU on April 6, 2026.

Englishmen at Sea: Labor and the Nation at the Dawn of Empire, 1570-1630 by Eleanor Hubbard

Posted on by Carol Schremp

Eleanor Hubbard was formerly an Assistant Professor of History at Princton University specializing in early modern British history. She received the David L. Rike University Preceptor in History award for 2014-2017. At the time of publication of Englishmen at Sea (2021) she was the Elizabeth and J. Richardson Dilworth Fellow in Historical Studies at the Institute for Advanced Study. In addition to Englishmen at Sea, Hubbard is the author of City Women: Money, Sex, and the Social Order in Early Modern London (2012).

Hubbard’s detailed and engrossing account of Englishmen at Sea is a history of maritime activity when England was not the powerful actor it would be in the eighteenth century and beyond. During the reigns of Elizabeth and James, England was focused on European politics. Under both monarchs England did not have the financial resources to establish new colonies, or to maintain the ships needed to project imperial power. First efforts at colonial activity were financed by private investors. Habsburg Spain was a major power with vast wealth coming from mines in the New World. From 1585 to 1604 England was at war with Spain. Private English ships with seamen became privateers with a letter of marque issued by the crown. Investors who owned the ships would profit from captured Spanish ships with valuable cargo, and all the participants would gain from this activity. The crown benefitted from the success of each voyage through the collection of tariffs on confiscated goods. Queen Elizabeth was an investor in privateers. English sailors skilled in sailing these ships and willing to fight were essential to this activity.

Hubbard’s book “makes extensive use of sailors’ and merchants’ examinations for the Court of High Admiralty.“(18) Civil disputes and criminal cases involving piracy provided depositions from various participants. Hubbard states, “more than 10,000 sailors appear in legal records, travel writing, and state papers that form the archival basis of this book, and in a number of cases they can be traced across different archives.”(8) It is her goal to highlight the various activities of this period from the point of view of common English sailors. She acknowledges contributions to the subject of her book provided by other historians: Kenneth Andrews “revealed the chasm between Elizabethan imperial rhetoric and reality.”(9) N. A. M. Rodger explained that “heavily armed and handy English ships were not suitable for founding or sustaining a colonial empire overseas.”(9) John Appleby states that despite English maritime strength by 1625, England “had yet to establish an overseas colony able to reproduce itself.”(9)

Common seamen were laborers, men who had to be compensated and managed to achieve specific goals. Labor is a major focus of Hubbard’s study. She states that in colonial and imperial activity private individuals endeavored to get labor at the lowest cost possible. Indentured workers and transported people in the colonies served the purpose of providing cheap labor, and eventually so did slave labor. “Medieval maritime custom endowed English sailors with the belief that their interests ought to be central to maritime enterprise.”(10) This attitude led them to assert their right to a share in the profit of privateer activity. In addition to windfalls from captured ships, common sailors on English ships were able to get higher wages than people working on land because of their skills and their willingness to fight. Over the period Hubbard covers, sailors will be authorized English privateers, seamen working for foreign privateers, employees of English merchant capitalists, and pirates acting independently and in defiance of English laws.

A second major focus of Hubbard’s book is nation. The English seamen in this history, and the English people who employed them identified as Englishmen. They were seen as Englishmen by the many people they encountered from other countries. “The nation was a key organizing principal for the sailors and merchants who participated in overseas enterprise.”(14) “The idea that English merchants and seamen were part of the English nation suggested they were members of a single coherent national community bound together in a web of mutual obligation.”(15) This sense of mutual obligation conflicts with the exclusive definition of membership in the national community held by elite society who controlled economic activity. The English nation was defined as a commonwealth, and Hubbard claims a commonwealth “rests upon the assumption that there was such a thing as the public good. In practice, the public good was…the claim that only the interests of certain people mattered, the people who belonged.”(6) Indentured servants did not belong until they had paid their debts. Transported people did not belong because they violated English laws and were thought to be a drain on society. “Private rulers and colonial elites fashioned societies that were advantageous to themselves, expecting much of their laboring subjects and granting little.” (6) Common sailors assumed participation in the English nation, and they insisted they should participate in the benefits of maritime activity.

“Violent plunder was central” to what sailors engaged in English privateering had in common.(22) These men “were largely attracted by the prospect of material gain and martial masculinity.”(22) “Common seamen were shareholders in voyages: like other participants, they had interests to protect and expected to take part in important decisions.”(22) The life of a privateer was dangerous and violent, but it had the potential to make money unavailable to most people who worked on land. When the war with Spain ended under James I, English privateering was forbidden. Some former English privateers went to “the Mediterranean, where they entered the service of both Muslim and Catholic patrons of the religious privateering war known as the corso.”(22) Here they were engaged as foreigners to religious groups to which they did not belong. The nature of the work was familiar to them, and potentially the rewards were similar.

Merchant-capitalists, when they were urging sailors to do something dangerous and to face more risk, asked them to do so for their country or their king. In some situations, but not all, sailors died to protect the people and goods on the ship where they were employed. This was true particularly on English ships with English crews. Merchants from the East India Company or the Levant Company encouraged seamen to behave in respectful and courteous ways to foreign people to demonstrate the honesty and trustworthiness of English traders and English people. This was self-serving behavior on the part of English merchant-capitalists, and not necessarily true. These merchant-capitalists were promoting an alternative form of economic activity to that of the plunder economy. It would be the model that prevailed in the eighteenth century as England developed its vast colonial empire.

For a dramatic but brief period, English seamen engaged in outright piracy in the Atlantic. They made their home ports in Mamora in Morocco or sometimes on the western coast of Ireland. This was opportunistic plunder with no legal backing. Some of the English pirates who had participated in privateering during Elizabeth’s reign or working for corsairs moved into piracy. Despite their illegal activity, some of them maintained the sense that they still belonged to the English nation, and they hoped to return to England to live. They continued to have connections with seamen living in London. Hubbard suggests that “Jacobean Atlantic piracy may be considered and alternative, illegal form of private imperial expansion, one that retained a strongly national quality exemplified by the lethal rivalry between English and Dutch pirates but that was more lucrative and less dangerous for seamen than legal commercial and colonial projects.”(23)

“The basic elements of English maritime power: thriving fishing and coal-shipping industries, a large merchant fleet, global trade routes, and a standing navy” were in place by the 1630s.(276) Despite ongoing problems with piracy, the transition from predatory economic activity to “a more disciplined commercial and colonial orientation was complete.”(276) The English Navy assumed responsibility for securing commercial shipping, eliminating the economic leverage English seamen had prior to the early 1630s. In 1680 the population of English sailors was “around fifty thousand, about 1 percent of the total population.”(276-7) Wages increased into the 1670s; after that they were stagnant for 150 years. These many changes in the future do not diminish the impact of English sailors between 1570 and 1630. Hubbard declares these sailors “had set England’s course for empire.”(279)

 

Anatomy of a Duel by Lloyd Bowen

Posted on by Hyrum Higgins

Anatomy of a Duel in Jacobean England: Gentry Honour, Violence and the Law was written in 2021 by Lloyd Bowen, a professor of early modern history at Cardiff University. His research has focused on political and religious history centered on early modern Wales. Anatomy of a Duel is his third book.

The book is a microhistory that focuses on the events and context leading up to a duel between John Egerton and Edward Morgan in 1610 in the north Welsh marches. Bowen argues that the historiography around dueling is that the practice of dueling in England represented an early-modern shift away from medieval forms of personal violence such as feuds and trials of combat. Historians such as Mervyn James have argued that as English nobles became “demilitarized,” the state grew to have a monopoly on violence, and noble disputes were increasingly resolved with lawsuits rather than violence. Within this model, dueling was an exceptional response to the process of modernization that otherwise reduced elite violence. (2)

Bowen argues that this characterization is incorrect for two reasons. First, he challenges the idea that violence actually decreased within the English gentry during the early modern period. (8) Second, he argues that the barrier placed by historians between medieval feuds and early modern duels is artificial; elite feuds continued after the Middle Ages, and duels could result from them. (9) Bowen presents the Egerton/Morgan duel as a culminating example of a feud between gentry families as well as an example of how lawsuits did not always replace elite violence; not only could legal and physical battles coexist together, they could also feed and intensify each other.

To make this argument, Bowen makes heavy use of legal sources. He uses the court records of the various complaints and suits the two families brought against each other, but also uses reports from the coronial investigation into the central duel. Bowen notes that coronial investigations are less commonly used by historians because details from them were generally discarded after cases were tried. However, in the case of the Egerton/Morgan duel, records of the investigation survived, and Bowen argues that they offer both a more personal record of the duel, but also an insight into how coronial investigations functioned generally. (10) This fits into Bowen’s additional goal with his book. He wants to investigate the details of what happened between the Egertons and Morgans, but as records are fickle, the book is also focused on the legal processes themselves that both families used in their struggle. Nevertheless, despite the ambiguities inherent in legal records, his creative analysis of the records yields a plausible and rich picture of the events that culminated in a fight to the death.

One of the strengths of Bowen’s investigation is that he starts his story generations before the duel begins. He examines the genealogies of the families involved. The feud is really as much between the Egertons and the Mostyns as it is with the Morgans, but he shows how all three families were connected by blood. When combined with legal records showcasing the expanding lands and fortunes of the families as well as their perceived relationships.  Bowen creates a rich chronology of the three families. While it is impossible to know for sure the motives behind the feud, Bowen uses this chronology to suggest the possible goals, connections, and frustrations of the three families. For example, Bowen sketches out the relationship between Sir John Egerton and Piers Mostyn through records showing that Piers was guardian over Sir John as a youth (34), descriptions that Piers had “‘inward especiall love and affection’” towards his nephew (35), critiques by Sir John’s enemies that Sir John had been using his residence in a different county to skirt the law in Piers’s favor (37), and Piers’s statement that “‘the devell should have his lands before William Moston his brother.’” (37) Taken together, Bowen tells a story of a nephew who had close personal and business ties with his uncle. Bowen uses these details to argue to show why Piers might have given his inheritance to Sir John, his sister’s son instead of following more regular inheritance patterns and willing it to his brother’s son (this is relevant as this disputed inheritance is the core of the feud between the three families). This level of detail and creative analysis is typical throughout the book.

Through showcasing the history of the feud between the Egertons, Morgans, and Mostyns, Bowens succeeds at supporting his thesis that duels could be deeply intertwined with feuds rather than replacing them. He also succeeds at showing his similar argument that litigation could go hand in hand with violence in such feuds. Outside the duel itself, Bowen highlights the violence, destruction, and intimidation wrought by the family’s armed men. The story of a group of armed Mostyn men waiting inside a church during a service to ambush Sir John doesn’t fit with a world that had abandoned private violence in favor of litigation. (41) While Bowen convincingly supports his thesis, he is careful to not exaggerate his claims. He argues that the story of the Morgan/Egerton duel did not necessarily represent a norm in England but rather a specific lived experience in a specific region. (16) Nevertheless every story is part of a greater whole, and Bowen’s book adds context and color to the history of violence and honor in early modern England and Wales.

Anatomy of a Duel by Lloyd Bowen – CHall Review

Posted on by Chappy Hall

            Anatomy of a Duel in Jacobean England: Gentry Honour, Violence and the Law by Lloyd Bowen is a microhistory which tells the story of an early seventeenth century duel between the English gentlemen John Egerton and Edward Morgan. It then expands the insights gained by studying this unique case to explore the world of gentry honor and the place of dueling within it during the Jacobethan era. Bowen is a Professor of History at Cardiff University and a prolific historian who specializes in early modern English and Welsh history. Bowen has published works on a wide variety of subjects, but has experience working on gentry, legal records, and the Welsh Marches region which all play an important role in Anatomy of a Duel. As a subject expert, Bowen deeply engages with relevant historiography to further refine understandings of dueling and honor culture.

In Anatomy of a Duel, Bowen argues that early modern English gentry honor was mutable in nature and that dueling was an important, if controversial, part of this complex social construct. Bowen makes a large number of claims or sub-arguments which fit within or adjoin this position, although how clearly Bowen articulates them and their hierarchy of importance leaves something to be desired. Of these, one which is central to his thesis is the formation of gentry honor. He takes a position which supports and expands on the arguments of Richard Cust and Courtney Thomas in which gentry honor is viewed “as a multi-faceted and flexible social construct which was both an interior and exterior quality through which individuals constructed their own public personalities and were, in turn, judged by their peers” (Bowen, 4-5). Throughout Anatomy of a Duel Bowen returns to this, examining how individuals’ sense of honor, slights against honor, and attempts to present oneself as an honorable gentleman drove decision making and action. For example, he points out that in the immediate exchanges the day before Egerton and Morgan’s duel, “Morgan was highly sensitive to any suggestion that he was anything less than a perfectly honourable gentleman” which likely influenced his decision to accept the proffered challenge (Bowen, 89). At times it was restraint which marked gentlemanly conduct, and in cases like this Bowen argues that for Morgan to stand his ground was critical to preserving his claim to honorable behavior. This articulation of honor as circumstantially malleable and, critically, as an outward presentation is central to Bowen’s monograph.

The other key aspect of Bowen’s thesis is a three-pronged historiographical intervention. The first of these is that his work “challenges and problematises the historiographical tendency to render the provincial gentry of this period as ‘tamed’” (Bowen, 9). Bowen situates himself in opposition to historians like Mervyn James and their ‘pacification of the elite’ narrative of gentry honor and violence. As part of this refutation of that concept’s lack of nuance, he also challenges the propensity of that argument “to analyse the feud and the duel as wholly separate categories of elite violence” (Bowen, 9). Bowen, using the Morgan-Egerton feud as a case study, demonstrates how the allegedly discarded and purely Medieval practice of familial feuds and extended conflict not only persisted and, in some circumstances, motivated duels of honor. Both of these prongs contest the whiggish pacification argument which portrays a less violent elite falling under the control of a centralized government.

Bowen’s third intervention does so as well. Anatomy of a Duel “also serves to question our tendency to distinguish law and violence by their relationship to a supposedly unbelligerent ‘modernity’” (Bowen, 9). Historians who align their arguments or even take unconscious inspiration from James often present violent resolutions like the duel as an alternative solution to the law. However, Bowen argues that they in fact coexisted and were often engaged in simultaneously in the search for a satisfactory resolution to feuds and similar conflicts. This further undercuts the pacification argument which traditionally presents the increasing use of law courts, especially centralized state or royal courts, as a replacement for violent recourse and a method for the crown to assert its central authority.

In addition to these interventions, Anatomy of a Duel also sits in concert with certain other corners of the historiography. One contemporary trend in particular is to draw extended links between the late Medieval world and early modern England, or within the latter period as well, rather than creating stark divisions between eras. For example, in A Murderous Midsummer: The Western Rising of 1549 Mark Stoyle reframes the Prayer Book Rebellion as an uprising rooted in an extended history of discontent rather than a spontaneous blip. Susan Doran’s From Tudor to Stuart: The Regime Change from Elizabeth I to James I breaks down the sharp divide historians create in 1603 between the two monarchs’ reigns to point out the extended continuity of the Jacobethan era. This trend is evident in Bowen’s push back against the idea that dueling was a purely spontaneous and Italian Renaissance import, instead connecting it to the tradition of dynastic feuds.

Bowen also aligns in certain respects with Markku Peltonen and his influential scholarship on early modern dueling. However, where they critically differ is that unlike Peltonen’s overview scale intellectual history, Bowen’s work is built on the zoomed in methodology of microhistory. This naturally provides a different perspective, and Bowen uses it to draw some of his larger conclusions about the period, both through what ways the duel between Morgan and Egerton is typical and in what ways it is exceptional. This approach is possible due to the significant number of primary sources which were created and survived on the specific duel and its surrounding legal case. They are legal records which concern the inheritance struggle preceding the incident and those which surround the later prosecutions against Morgan on charges of murder. These sources are a great boon for Bowen, but also offer a significant challenge as they “are slippery, ambiguous and often difficult to work with” and many were collected for the purposes of a private prosecution of Morgan by the Egerton family, which further complicates their reliability (Bowen, 13). As a result, Bowen is very measured in his arguments and narrative, always careful to outline what simply is unknown or uncertain in the record.

Structured as a narrative, Anatomy of a Duel begins by outlining the history of the families involved in the feud and the Talacre inheritance dispute which was at the root of their conflict. The core of the book then outlines the lead-up to the duel with challenges evaded and the eventual London encounter where Egerton and Morgan agreed to their deadly contest. In these early chapters in particular Bowen emphasizes the coexistence of attempts at legal and violent recourse. He then proceeds to the duel itself, being careful to articulate what little is certain about the event from the many contradictory accounts, and the contentious legal case which followed. It is here that many of Bowen’s sub-arguments and themes take shape including the complex public opinion on dueling on display in the debate between murder and manslaughter, the rarely visible but essential legal impact of coroner’s depositions, and the makeup of gentry honor. He then concludes the book by briefly outlining how the involved parties’ lives proceeded following Edward Morgan’s pardon.

The shining success of Bowen’s work is this microhistory, narrative format which delves deeply into a dramatic and gripping tale of feud and violence. Even despite his refusal to, and inability due to sources, provide a final, incontrovertible account of the duel, he succeeds in weaving a compelling narrative across this complexity and simultaneously draws many exciting historical conclusions. Where Bowen’s writing is at times lacking is, as previously alluded to, in cogently articulating these many claims. It is not always clear which arguments he situates as the most important or sound, nor are all immediately apparent. There are times where the reader is told that the source material allows unusual insight into a topic, but what that insight is must be carefully teased out of the center of the text rather than clearly stated by Bowen. This shortcoming may make the text less approachable, especially for those foreign to the subject material, but it does not detract from the quality of the author’s research. Anatomy of a Duel is still a robust and engaging microhistory of gentry honor and dueling in the early Jacobean period.

“Anatomy of a Duel in Jacobean England” Review — Matthew Zilic

Posted on by Matt Zilic

Just north of London on April 21, 1610, two men of the English-Welsh gentry, John Egerton and Edward Morgan, fought a duel that lead to the death of Egerton and a protracted legal battle which ultimately saw Morgan receiving clemency by James I. In what serves as an impressively written microhistory and case study of this single duel, Lloyd Bowen’s 2021 Anatomy of a Duel in Jacobean England analyzes what he calls “the most fully documented duel in early modern England,” (1). Despite the wealth of primary sources that center around the duel and its aftermath, he also writes that it is largely ignored by historians (195), which can perhaps be indicative of how understudied the field of duelling in early modern England has been. 

Through the use of primarily court documents, Bowen is able to argue that the duel was almost certainly not a spontaneous event, but instead the result of a feud that stretched back years, beginning in 1606 during an inheritance dispute over the estate of Talacre. In a carefully written narrative fashion, Bowen interweaves the duel itself with the messy legal aftermath; the coroner’s inquest and the King’s Bench and Star Chamber hearings. He also ties the context of the families’ dispute to the duel in 1610. Bowen’s main aim is to challenge and dismiss the notion that violence had disappeared among the social elite by the seventeenth century. The book is part of a broader historiographic trend that eschews the Whiggish notions of violence declining in the early modern period due to an increase in civility and government control. Bowen additionally argues to a lesser degree that the culture of the northern Marches of Wales were more accepting of duels to a martial culture. As he states: “Indeed, an argument can be made that there was something of a provincial culture of duelling to be found here [in northern Wales] in this period,” (73). Widening the scope as well, Anatomy places the Highgate Duel in a European context that saw a general rise in elite violence influenced by French and Italian models. 

Anatomy is constructed both thematically and chronologically. Bowen first introduces the two kin-groups: the Egertons of Cheshire and the Morgans of Flintshire, with their shared Mostyn family connections. He then reconstructs the Talacre inheritance quarral of 1606–08 (chapters 2–3), showing how each side raised legal actions and exchanged challenge letters. This section is full of colorful depictions of legal back-and-forths and highlight the legal scope of the book. An example can be found in Bowen’s description of a common strategy to flood the courts with litigations in order to “exhaust the money, patience, and resources of one’s opponent by delay, manipulation and a multiplicity of suits,” (42). Chapter 4 surveys duelling in Elizabethan and Jacobean Britain to provide context (noting, for example, that duels occurred throughout society). Chapters 5–7 zoom in on the Highgate encounter and its immediate aftermath. Finally, chapters 8–9 cover the King’s Bench trial and political intrigue, including the Morgans’ alliances at court. Chapter 8 sees Edward receive his conviction for murder and also his pardon from the king. The text is supplemented by very helpful appendices (a timeline of the conflict, jury lists).

The social class that these families belong to is something that Bowen thinks is worth examination. One might think that as members of the landed gentry, they would have an ample amount of secondary material written on them, which is not the case. In his introduction, Bowen identifies a gap in the historiography, in which both the older and newer trends in history have forgotten the “lesser gentry,” particularly those who lived further from London. As residents of Cheshire and Flintshire, the Egertons and Morgans have fallen into that gap forgotten by historians. Religion additionally plays a role, albeit not one as large as one may think. During the Talacre trial and in previous trials, the Protestant Egertons lobbied that the Catholic Morgans had failed to maintain peace in the region, despite the family patriarch Edward Morgan I being a JP. However, Bowen interestingly points out that religion had little to do with the duel itself, if anything. The Catholic Morgan family were able to ally themselves with a Protestant family at court in the Howards, meanwhile the Protestant Egertons “gained little traction with the reform-minded Lord Chancellor Ellesmere,” (196).

The critiques for the book are few and hard to find due to the limited scope and overall fluid structure. Starting small, a personal nitpick I had with the book was Bowen’s apparent refusal to use Oxford commas. Delving to a deeper level, however, there are some assumptions about the character of these men that are made which are perhaps too grandiose or general. This is true particularly when it concerns the victor of the duel, Edward Morgan. By all accounts he appears to be a violent and insecure individual. One only needs to read the challenge letter that he sent to John Egerton in 1608 (54). However, Bowen does seem quick to dismiss him as a one-sided villain, when he was likely a complex individual who we will never know the full character of. Bowen himself admits that one of the unfortunate downsides of chasing these sources is the inability to know all. He states that “On the other hand, these legal sources are slippery, ambiguous and often difficult to work with. In dealing with the civil courts, for example, the record is inherently adversarial and partisan and was, in some senses, designed to produce contradictory narratives,” (13).  In the end, Edward Morgan removed himself from his inheritance as eldest son and instead became a coal entrepreneur, a sign that the duel and the trial had likely greatly changed him one way or the other. 

Anatomy is a highly intelligent work that I would recommend to anyone interested in early modern English social history. Bowen’s meticullous use of court records and its vivid reconstruction of a single duel combine to illuminate larger themes of gentry honor, violence, and a broader European movement.

Free Review: Elizabeth’s French Wars by William Heap

Posted on by Chappy Hall

Elizabeth’s French Wars, 1562-1598: English Intervention in the French Wars of Religion by William Heap is an extensive, albeit meandering, exploration of Elizabethan England’s military and diplomatic engagements in France. Heap, who earned his Bachelor of Arts in History at the University College of North Wales and his Maîtrise and Diplôme d’études approfondies at the Sorbonne in Paris, is a military historian experienced with research in both English and French archives. This background is critical to Elizabeth’s French Wars which dives deeply into the intersection of Anglo-French military and diplomatic relations. Inspired originally by finding diagrams of French fortifications in English archives, Heap’s monograph adds a great deal to an often-overlooked subject.

In Elizabeth’s French Wars, Heap’s primary argument is that while English involvement in the French Wars of Religion is both understudied by historians and often dismissed as insignificant, it was in fact highly impactful over the course of the conflict and a successful policy for Elizabeth I’s government. He defines this success in the context of the Queen’s principle foreign policy concern: preventing major foreign invasion. Heap argues that thanks to the wars “France was effectively neutralised” (Heap, 255). Furthermore, he claims that “Intervention prevented the unification of France and Spain in an [Catholic] alliance against England” and that it “ended French designs both in Scotland the Low Countries” (Heap, 255). Through military, financial, and diplomatic intervention, France, rather than England, was maintained as a central battlefield of European religious conflict and consequently this foreign policy “helped to preserve Elizabeth” despite her powerful enemies (Heap, 255). Heap connects this success to the influence of English investment, which was not insignificant. Rather, he argues that without said aid “the Huguenot resistance would soon have collapsed under Royalist pressure” and therefore the effect of English aid, and its success in keeping England’s enemies fighting elsewhere, is evident in the protracted nature of the conflict (Heap, 252). In his own words, he makes the bold claim that “England effectively kick-started and perpetuated the wars” (Heap, 14).

Heap spends a significant portion of his introduction addressing the historiographical angle of his thesis. He explains that the lack of attention this topic has received from other scholars is in part due to English military history in this time period being overshadowed by an interest in maritime history and Elizabeth as an individual character (Heap, 16). He also argues that within the military histories written on this period, English intervention is often sidelined because it manifested in skirmishes and sieges, not the pitched battles and decisive campaigns which grab attention. He points to historian John Hale as one example of this who claimed that it was not worth investigating “in depth” due to its lack of large scale engagements (Heap, 16). In addition, Heap notes that English military ventures in the Netherlands against Spain have also diverted attention away from the French conflicts, a trend he dates back to late nineteenth century historians such as John Motley and Clements Markham. He then situates his study and its subject in the long history and study of Anglo-French relations, noting that the peculiarity of the alliance between Elizabeth I and Henri IV also contributes to the topic’s estrangement.

While they are not numerous, Heap does also address the other historiographies which engage with English intervention in the French Wars of Religion. He groups both stalwarts of the field of English military history and more recent contributors; including John Fortescue, Alfred Rowse, Albert Pollard, and Henri Zuber; together into a single camp of critics who all label these Elizabethan campaigns in France as futile, insignificant, or even disastrous. This is a sentiment which Heap strongly opposes and throughout the monograph he demonstrates time and again that it is at best a simplistic mischaracterization. Heap shows both the depth of worthwhile material hitherto under explored and that those who have approached the subject before failed to appreciate the significance of English involvement.

Following his extensive historiographical overview, Heap spends Chapter One outlining Elizabeth’s motivations for intervention and how the English became and stayed involved through each part of the conflict up to the Treaty of Vervins in 1598. Although there are further entanglements in the seventeenth century, they are beyond the reign of Elizabeth and therefore only briefly alluded to by Heap. He dedicates his second chapter to explaining the many ways in which the English intervened and the nature of the deployed forces, with a particular emphasis on material and logistics. This is followed by a traditional, blow by blow narrative of the various campaigns and operations English forces were involved in in Chapter Three. Heap then turns to the lived experience of English soldiers, politicians, and diplomats engaged in France during the period in Chapter Four and Elizabeth’s hostile reaction to the Treaty of Vervins which led to the cessation of fighting in France in Chapter Five. Finally, he turns to exploring English reactions to the conflict in Chapter Six.

While Heap frames his work as one of military history, and it indeed is, his methodology is diverse and he incorporates a great deal of diplomatic history as well. His source base is mainly documents and records found in state archives in both France and England. He takes full advantage of his proficiency in multiple languages. Chapter Six is dominated by literary and cultural analysis of various publications, political pamphlets, and other media created at the time which reflect the English reaction to the conflict. In constructing this picture, Heap compares various period translations of French publications to show that the titles were often altered in English translations to convey a shock and animosity towards England’s Catholic French enemies (Heap, 233).

In addition to qualitative analysis to reconstruct the course of events, Heap specifically employs quantitative analysis focusing on the logistical and financial records of intervention. This is especially prevalent in his second chapter where he provides a detailed account of the foreign subsidies paid to French allies and German Princes. He also puts forward extensive data collected on English weapons, armor, and ammunition exports sent to France (Heap, 84). Other examples of Heap’s extensive quantitative work can be found in his discussions and provided tables on manpower (110-111) and the cost of clothing soldiers (122). This quantitative analysis is critical in supporting his argument that English intervention was substantial as he demonstrates that while the number of soldiers provided was not always massive in scale, the overall investment was.

Finally, Heap also uses visual sources to great effect throughout his book. For example, he examines illustrations of various engagements and sieges like that at Gournay-en Bray to show the shift in equipment and approach of English soldiers towards pike and shot. He emphasizes the rising prominence of English Pikemen, and harquebusiers, over halberdiers and longbowmen (Heap, 116-117). He even draws upon modern images in Roger Agache’s aerial photography to corroborate the scale of the earthworks and fortifications depicted in period military plans (Heap, 186). Heap’s use of visual sources adds a welcome diversity and robustness to his arguments, and many are reproduced in color for the reader which further elevates the work.

While Elizabeth’s French Wars is impressive in its breadth and depth, it also suffers from a lack of focus at times. Heap often detours from his main argument into adjacent topics or various minutia. The previously mentioned discussion of English pikemen and the shift from longbow to arquebus is one example. While interesting and well thought out, Heap does not adequately make its relevance to his key arguments clear. This critique can also be leveraged at his sixth chapter. While interesting, how his analysis of public reactions to the conflicts demonstrates the impact of English involvement is unclear. Another facet of this diffuse quality is an additional argument, not yet touched on, which Heap makes. He provides a “re-evaluation” of Henri IV as a military leader, qualifying others’ critiques with the inhibiting circumstances he faced (Heap, 16). English troops were often used by Henri, and a variety of his operations are covered in the book, but this argument is out of place and disconnected from Heap’s others and would perhaps be better suited to a separate piece where it can stand on its own.

At the heart of this meandering quality is Heap’s organization. The monograph is structured thematically, with sections often moving internally in chronological order with a narrow focus. This organizational structure can be very effective but requires writing which clearly unites different themes back to one another and the main argument which is where Heap falls short. A chronological approach which weaves various themes and arguments together when relevant perhaps would have suited his style and topic better. Mark Stoyle’s A Murderous Midsummer: The Western Rising of 1549, another monograph which examines Tudor military operations (albeit internal), is an excellent example of chronological organization which addresses sub arguments and themes as they arise and as a result remains focused and cohesive.

In spite of these critiques, the quality of Heap’s extensive research shines through. If meandering, Heap’s exploration of a variety of minutia is interesting and brings the period to life. Elizabeth’s French Wars is an excellent demonstration of broad and deep research within Tudor military history. It is a much-needed addition to an underdeveloped historiography.