[posted by Gavin Robinson, 9:10 am, 27 October 2010]
Nehemiah Wharton was a servant from London who joined the Earl of Essex’s army at the start of the English Civil War. From August to October 1642 he sent a series of letters addressed to his master, George Willingham, a merchant at the Golden Anchor in St Swithin’s Lane. These letters have survived (although how they ended up in the State Papers is anyone’s guess) and were published in the 19th century (no free online version available, but the British Library has published a reprint as part of their digitization project). I’ve been looking at them for evidence of horses and social status. Wharton mentions another of Willingham’s servants, usually referred to as Davy (or Barry in one place, but I’ve assumed it’s the same man), who was serving in the army with a horse. The letters don’t give any further details of the man and horse, but it seems likely that Willingham had voluntarily contributed a cavalry horse under the scheme known as the Propositions and sent his servant to ride it. The UK National Archives have an account book of cavalry horses listed on the Propositions (SP 28/131 part 3), and as it’s a very important source for my work on horses, I’ve made a transcript of it. There is an entry for George Willingham, on 15 July 1642 (folio 19):
George Willingham of Londonstone painter stainer entred one gray horse, his rider David Avys armed wth a Carbine, a case of pistolls a buffe coate and a sword all valued by the Commissaryes at 27 – 00 – 00
This is close but there are a couple of potential problems because the address and occupation don’t quite match. This doesn’t rule him out completely. London stone was just around the corner from St Swithin’s Lane in Cannon Street, so they could be referring to the same place (see the Agas map). Although London citizens tended to be identified by occupations, their trades could change, and the company through which they were admitted to the freedom of the city didn’t necessarily have anything to do with the trade they were pursuing. George Willingham could be a freeman of the Painter Stainers Company and trading as a merchant. What we need is another source to confirm or deny the link between Wharton’s letters and the Propositions list.
British History Online has a published list of London citizens from 1638, but it doesn’t cover St Swithin’s parish, which is where St Swithin’s Lane and London stone were. But the National Archives do have a will for a George Willingham, Painter Stainer of Saint Swithin, City of London, proved in 1651. That looked very promising, so I downloaded it (if I’d known I was going to need this last time I was at Kew I could’ve printed out there and saved £3.10). I’ve put a transcript of the whole thing on the Your Archives wiki. In the will, Willingham describes himself as “Cittizen and Paynter stayner of London”, so he was free of the Painter Stainers Company, but not necessarily following that trade. He mentions having children called John, Samuel, Ebenezer, Hannah and an unnamed daughter married to John Colyer. Wharton mentions Elizabeth, Anne, John, and Samuel in his letters, which roughly coincides with the children in the will. According to IGI, George Willingham married Anne Eaton at St Dunstan, Stepney, on 21 September 1624. They had these children baptised at St Swithin’s London Stone:
John Willingham, 28 February 1629
Ana Willingham, 24 June 1627
Ebenezer Willingham,11 October 1642
Therefore Ebenezer wasn’t mentioned in Wharton’s letters because he hadn’t been born yet (the last letter is dated 7 October 1642). I can’t find a baptism for Samuel, but IGI isn’t complete. Given the wild variations in 17th century spelling, Ana and Hannah are probably the same person. The will also includes a bequest to “Mr Abraham Moline my deere and approved freind”, who could be the Mr Molloyne mentioned in Wharton’s letters.
The details in the will are enough to link the letters to the Propositions list and resolve the ambiguities. On the balance of probabilities, all three documents relate to the same person. Without the will it would be hard to link the other two documents together and reconcile the differences between them. This all adds up to proof that David Avyes was a servant and that his horse and arms were supplied by his master. (It doesn’t prove that he was decayed, or that royalist cavalry were any different. See my post about Cromwell and Balfour for some problems with the “decayed serving men and tapsters” myth.) Willingham must have been very rich. He bequeathed £700 to each of his three sons and left the residue of his estate to his daughter Hannah, explicitly stating that he intended her to have at least as much as the boys. That kind of wealth is consistent with trading as a merchant. He could easily afford to give away a horse and arms worth £27. The value of his contribution and the early date (July was a long time before contributions became compulsory) suggests that he was quite enthusiastic about the parliamentary cause. His will has some strong hints of puritanism. He asked for his body to be “decently buried without pompe and ringeing”, and bequeathed a book of sermons and a confession of his faith to his daughter. There’s no mention of any servants in the will, so it doesn’t help to solve the mystery of what happened to Nehemiah Wharton. Since his letters stopped in October 1642 he could have been killed at the battle of Edgehill, but as far as I know there isn’t any definite proof.
[posted by Gavin Robinson, 3:48 pm, 22 September 2008]
CALL FOR PAPERS
Nottingham Trent University FORWARD Early Modern Social History Symposium
This symposium will take place at Nottingham Trent University on Wednesday 12th November 2008 from 1:00pm – 5:00pm
Proposals are invited for 20 minute papers, which explore the latest unique approaches to research in any aspect of Early Modern British and Irish Social History, including but not limited to topics of Family, Order, Reform, Women, Anarchy, Rebellion & Dissent
Abstract proposals should be no longer than 300 words and submitted to RitaWierzbicki_FORWARD@hotmail.com by Wednesday 22nd October 2008
For more information or to book your place for attendance, please direct your inquiries to the above e-mail address
[posted by Gavin Robinson, 2:30 pm, 10 August 2008]
Way back in October 2006 (when this blog was all shiny and new) I wrote about female saddlers in London during the English Civil War. My work on saddlers and harness makers (male as well as female) is quite open-ended. I don’t know exactly where I’m going with it, so I’m just tying to find out as much as I can about these individuals and their families when I get the chance. A while ago I searched the records of the Prerogative Court of Canterbury for wills of people I was interested in. These are available through DocumentsOnline, but I found it cheaper to print out copies while I was at the PRO (20p per sheet as opposed to £3.50 per will). I didn’t find a will for everyone (some might have had their wills proved in other courts) but I came up with a lot of hits. Recently I finally got round to transcribing them (which was good palaeography practice) and publishing the transcripts on Your Archives.
Although wills tend to come in a standard form, that structure can contain a lot of variety. They can tell us about people’s wealth, business activities, and families, and contain all kinds of incidental details which shed some light on their lives. Below is a selection of some of the more interesting things I found, with links to the full transcripts.
Last week I finally got round to reading Joshua Goldstein’s War and Gender. Goldstein argues that gender shapes war, and that war shapes gender. The evidence for the first is very strong. War would be different if its conduct wasn’t dominated by gender ideology. War has occurred in nearly all cultures, but nearly all cultures in nearly all periods have excluded women from active combat roles. The argument that this is because women are biologically unsuited to combat does not stand up. Goldstein shows that although women are smaller and weaker than men on average individuals are distributed along bell curves which overlap. The top 10 to 15% of women are bigger and stronger than then bottom 10 to 15% of men. Therefore under some historical circumstances armies could have had more and better soldiers if they recruited women as well as men.
The second argument, that war shapes gender, isn’t so strong. It’s true that gender is at least as universal as war, but Goldstein acknowledges that gender roles vary widely across cultures in almost every respect other than combat roles and hunting. It seems hard to explain how all of this diversity could be directed towards the same purpose: to produce warriors or potential warriors. Goldstein is very much the voice of rational liberal 20th century America. Although he makes good use of anthropology and recognises the huge diversity of gathering-hunting cultures I think he underestimates the strangeness of medieval and early-modern European cultures.
As an alternative to the warrior, Goldstein suggests the provider as a new ideal of masculinity which American men might aspire to in future. The big problem here is that this model is suspiciously similar to the ideals of early-modern English patriarchy studied by Anthony Fletcher and Alexandra Shepard. There was more to the early-modern patriarch than just providing, but he was certainly more of a provider than a warrior. To be a man was to be the head of a household. Boys were toughened up, but this was mainly so that they could control their own bodies, their wives, their children, and their servants. The ordered household was seen as the basis of an ordered society. In contrast, the warrior was not much of a normative ideal. Grievances over billeting suggest that even before the civil wars English civilians saw English soldiers as dangerous outsiders. Stereotypes of professional soldiers had more in common with the disobedient anti-patriarchal forms of masculinity which Shepard identified among students and apprentices. War was disorder: the very thing that early-modern patriarchy most feared.
I’m still in awe of Goldstein’s ambitious scholarship, and I think we need more historians (particularly military historians) to show this kind of imagination. But I also think his work shows some of the weaknesses of broad comparative studies: they risk abstracting and generalising to such an extent that a lot of important differences can be lost.
Anthony J Fletcher, Gender, Sex and Subordination in England 1500-1800 (Yale University Press: New Haven, 1995).
Joshua S. Goldstein, War and Gender (CUP: Cambridge, 2003).
Alexandra Shepard, Meanings of Manhood in Early Modern England (Clarendon Press: Oxford, 2006).
