Will, Kate, and Cannadine.

In the epilogue to his 2001 work Ornamentalism David Cannadine notes that the 'hierarchical-cum-imperial world' characterised by mid-Victorian empire and monarchy had come, in his own lifetime, to an end. Few would disagree with these sentiments. Yet few I suspect would entirely comfortable with the slight caveat Cannadine adds to these thoughts – that though the 'entire interactive system' of empire had ended, some vestiges of her imperial legacy still lingered in Britain at the turn of the third millennium. Cannadine writes: 'The British Empire may have vanished from the map, but it has not entirely vanished from the mind: in Buckingham Palace, and elsewhere too, its hierarchical sentiments, and some of its structures, still endure'.

 

On April 29^th William and Kate became the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge. In the United Kingdom millions watched. A million lined the streets of London. Many communities held street parties. Some tried to ignore the whole pantomime altogether. The Australian reaction seems particularly pertinent to Cannadine's thesis. There recent referendums have only narrowly decided in favour of keeping the Queen as head of state, yet , Cannadine writes, 'while the traditionalists may have triumphed in the short run, the general feeling seemed to be a recognition that the monarchy would eventually go'. Without wishing to categorise (to caricature) the whole Australian nation, there seemed little sign of this in the concerns of their press. Monarchy (or at least the Will-Kate-Queen axis) is, it appears, enjoying a resurgence.

This of course does not render Cannadine's thesis incorrect. Although his predictions of monarchical decline may seem on 30^th April 2011 a little premature, #RW2011 is surely little more than a sticking plaster. Of greater importance perhaps, 'the wedding' alerts us to the trouble historians can run into (though Cannadine carefully litters his thesis with caveats) when predicting the future. Moreover it reminds us of the intoxicating power such public displays of 'ornamentalism' can still have on the 'public imagination'. For as an expression of everything 'ornamentlism' is, the wedding was also everything the Queen cherishes - as Cannadine writes 'medals, uniforms, decorations, investitures and ceremonial'. Combine that with a Clarence House administration more technologically savvy than most commentators give them credit for (see The Royal Channel), and suddenly we have a powerful 'ornamentalism' operating with an unprecedented communicative pervasiveness.

Land and Gender

Delving into a historical field or period outside of your specialist area of study can, it is always said, only make one a better historian.

Working with the tenancy records of the Rochester Bridge Trust since September 2010 for the ‘City and Region’ project at University of Kent has therefore been an enlightening experience. Indeed new experiences have been plenty in my interactions with the project at large (getting a grounding in economic history; working with, and digitising, historic maps; planning the delivery of a bespoke website to carry our dataset), but the records themselves have thrown up some truly surprising moments.

Today, whilst massaging the RBT dataset, I discorvered how economic approaches can be used to tell us something about gender in British history (and not merely, as is often the case, with respect to patterns of consumption).

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The small town of High Halstow near Rochester in Kent is not somewhere with which I have an acquaintance. However property records for the land there owned by the Rochester Bridge Trust between 1581 and 1914 reveal a remarkable fact: for 117 of the 333 years the main tenant of High Halstow was female.

Katerine Kelsham held the rural estate for 29 years from 1581 after the death of her husband Edward. Between 1643 and 1644 one Marye White paid £2 2s. rent per year on the property. She was awarded the property by the Bridge Wardens for, quote: "the great expense charges and troble the said Marye and her lately deceased sonne Alexander Witherley were enforced vnto in the defence of the right of the said Bridge vnto the said marsh land against the suite brought by one Sir George Theobald in his Majesties Court of Exchequer whoe thereby vaynly hoped to possess himselfe of the same". In 1659 the lease was taken by Margaret Lake who in 1674 passed it to her son, Hugh Lake. Similarly Ann Sanders (reverting back to her maiden name from Lake) took ownership in 1688 from Hugh (her late husband), and passed it to their son Nicholas in 1703. And finally one Laetitia Akers held the lease for a remarkable 41 years from 1775, during which time she saw her annual rent increase from £8 to £33 in 1795.

Hereafter the lease is held solely by men, all of which allows us to make some provisional conclusions.

These records tell us that the role of women was crucial in the early modern period to the way property was managed, inherited, maintained, and protected, only to decline (or mutate) sometime around the middle of the nineteenth century. One might speculate then that the idea of property (as land) was being renegotiated and gendered male in mid-nineteenth century Kent. This data may only provide a snapshot, but as something I’ve run across a few times since starting work on the dataset, it has forced me to ponder how even disciplines as traditionally separate as economic and gender history can, in fact, be fruitfully intertwined.

Tradition

Though decided on the AV debate - #Yes2AV - following the political mudslinging over the recent weeks has proven curiously captivating.

This morning I stumbled across this interview of Baroness Warsi conducted by the ever pugnacious Adam Boulton. Surprisingly, and not merely because he was on 'my side', Boulton came across rather well, particularly during his dissection of what Warsi classified as 'tradition' (She did not actually use the word, but statements such as 'fundamental principles' and 'generations have fought for' suggest what she is getting at. Well at least it did for me).

Two semantic problems arise from this which probably should trouble us more than they do.

First, how old is 'tradition'? Warsi was appealing (erroneously of course) to a tradition beginning around 1945, thus disregarding from tradition a long history of parliamentary adaptation. In a similar vein the Old Price rioters at Covent Garden theatre during the Autumn of 1809 classified the rights of Englishmen to public entertainments as existing since 'time immemorial'. In the same way that Milton's Areopagitica claimed press freedoms to be inalienable, the OP rioters had a dislocated and distorted sense of what terms such as 'tradition' and 'ancient' meant. Equally during a period of acute food shortages in the early-nineteenth century, Justice Kenyon prosecuted against forestallers and regrators. These practices, which inflated food prices artificially, were perfectly legal. However common law and custom stated that they were not, and thus many ignored the 1771 legislation repealing prohibitions on these practices. Kenyon, under the Cruikshankian gaze, became a popular hero, a defender of natural rights. Yet, there is more, the legislation making forestalling and regrating illegal was neither ancient nor natural but had clear sixteenth century legislative origins.

Tradition then is a complex beast. And depends on the perspective of those who claim something or other to be traditional. Indeed as environmental historians are keen to tell us, there is nothing ancient or traditional about any of this. Human existence, Bill McKibben notes, is to the lifespan of the Earth but a blink of the eye.

Second, whose tradition is tradition? This may seem a very obvious point, but if 'tradition' has chronological problems it is also impacted upon by gender, class, nationality, faith et al. This is exemplified by returning to our forestallers and regrators - for 'the people' (I use that word begrudgingly, with an awareness of the huge problems it entails...) treating food as a special case, as outside of market forces, was customary; for the acolytes of Adam Smith on the other hand food was just another product, another unit to be monetised (and so followed land, labour and, in the present day, carbon - see Doreen Massey's beautiful essay on such matters here).

For Warsi and many in the #No2AV camp, 'tradition' is associated with post-war frugality (both intellectually and financially), settling and stoicism. For many in the #Yes2AV camp, like myself, 'tradition' is something more theoretical, something more timeless (at least in theory, it can, I guess, never be so in reality) - that being a simple belief in individual agency and in a rejection of clannish traditions based upon words enshrined upon paper which one may not question.

Tradition then is the very rejection of tradition. And I suspect this definition (if we swap over the two traditions) nicely encapsulates where Warsi stands on the issue too.

Cruikshank in public

Two weeks ago I had the pleasure of speaking at The Cartoon Museum on the topics explored during my doctoral research. Reflecting on the experience, it strikes me how enchanted members of the public are towards the satirical prints produced in the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries; the supposed 'Golden Age'. Even when I had to explain the joke - which as Gombrich regularly reaffirmed only serves to kill it - chortles and chuckles filled the room. More importantly however, it intrigues me how willing the public are to accept ideas scholars might be more skeptical of.

The work of Isaac Cruikshank has formed the crux of my intellectual life for nearly four years (one of his most lively and detailed prints adorns the background of this very blog - see the record at the British Museum collections). As a result my talk focused on why I see Isaac as an important figure in the history of satirical printing - namely because, unlike James Gillray (whose work tends to be held up as representative of the trade at the time), Isaac rushed his etchings, made mistakes, lacked consistency in style, couldn't draw likenesses, and was generally a bit (to use my favoured antipodean term of slander) 'average'. Perhaps I'm being a little harsh on Isaac. He did after all teach a young George Cruikshank all he knew (well, maybe I'm exaggerating now...). But my point nonetheless is and was that artists such as Isaac Cruikshank are representative of the trade, not supreme masters such as Gillray.

Perhaps I underestimated my audience. But to be frank I expected a backlash. I expected the idea that artistic quality would not 'win out' to be dismissed, decried, and pooh-poohed. Instead the audience were very accepting of my remarks, and saw it as perfectly logical that we have to (to paraphrase the work of Adrian Johns on books) forget what we know about cartoons in the present when studying the same medium in the past, because, in sum, the two are actually not the same medium at all.

It has troubled me for a number of years that historians seem unable to make this leap of faith. And it surprised and delighted me in equal measure to find that those members of the public who made their way to The Cartoon Museum that night had indeed, it seems, made that leap. Or had they? Are we as historians taught to tie our sources together too neatly? Are we, despite Butterfield's warnings of eight decades ago, inclined towards Whiggish narratives of the past? Or, more controversially perhaps, has the influence of art-historians on the field of Golden Age satirical printing inculcated this Whiggishness?

My attempts to explore these problems, and much more, will be explored here.