UoP Senior Lecturer in history Dr Fiona McCall had the following post published today on the website of the Ecclesiastical History Society, in which she discusses the extraordinary role of the military in Interregnum religious life.
Tag: interregnum
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Don’t lose your head – surviving a dissertation on King Charles I’s killers
Below, one of last year’s third-year students, Alex Symonds, gives some timely advice on how to survive writing your dissertation. Alex’s dissertation was entitled “‘Cruel Necessity’: Understanding the Influences on the Commissioners in the Trial of Charles I”. As Alex’s supervisor, I knew she had it in her to do very well, but my mouth dropped to floor once I began reading her work. The dissertation was very bold in its arguments with an original central focus on humanising the regicides, as well as those chosen commissioners who chose not to sign the death warrant, who have been far less studied. Alex developed some sophisticated arguments around the role of religion in motivating individuals, the fact that several potential signees in the military were otherwise engaged preserving the uneasy peace, the concern of lawyers over the legality of the trial, and the worry amongst aldermen about how signing would look to their constituents. Alex’s handling of the extensive historiography on the subject was particularly strong, as was her fluid writing style, and the way she structured, signposted and referenced. Part of the problem for Alex was that she had chosen such an enormous (and enormously important) topic. Luckily for us, Alex has decided to expand her research for an MRes with the UoP. – Fiona McCall
This is a longer blog post, but I think this subject deserves the time, both to tell you why I’m worth listening to and not just another patronising voice, and to give you some genuinely helpful candid advice that should make you feel less alone. I can’t give you subject specific advice, but I can tell you what I needed to hear when I found myself barely surviving my dissertation.
Firstly, much like yourself dear reader, my dissertation process couldn’t have been more different from what I’d spent three years imagining. After a nightmarish final year, I found myself two weeks away from the final deferral deadline with absolutely nothing written but a failed draft of my first chapter, which despite containing some useful feedback I could only view as a haunting failure, a reminder of everything I had done wrong.
I nearly gave up. The academic year had gone wrong at every turn, and by this stage I truly felt like all I was doing was prolonging my inevitable failure, and stopping now would give me that sweet relief of a break that I so desperately needed. I was so mentally low and burnt out that redoing an entire year felt like less of a mountain than carrying on for two weeks. And for one day I stopped, had a breakdown and gave up, before realising that I’d spend every day this way if I didn’t try, and my efforts would solidify my feelings of my failure being inevitable rather than potentially my fault. So I picked myself up and decided to try.
A broadside of 1829 commemorating the martyrdom of Charles I includes the scenes of the trial and execution, a reproduction of the death warrant, and portraits of the trial judge John Bradshaw, the regicides Oliver Cromwell and his son-in-law Henry Ireton, and parliamentary general Sir Thomas Fairfax, who famously chose not to attend the trial or sign the death warrant. And I got it done. Against the odds I finished proofreading about two hours before the deadline, realised I’d forgotten a glossary and panicked, frantically wrote said glossary and submitted with an hour left. Against even more odds I earned a first on that dissertation, and while I cannot promise you that you’ll achieve that same grade as you drag yourself across the finish line – I can promise you that you can reach that finish line, and it is so worth it. The delayed gratification of that break is bliss, and the release from the crippling self-doubt that I’m sure you’ve been battling is worth it.
My hope for this blog post is that it will motivate just one person that finds themselves in the shoes I found myself in: utterly hopeless, devoid of motivation, finding every piece of advice patronising because they weren’t the ones in this situation.
I have worn those shoes, and therefore here is my advice for surviving your dissertation, in no particular order:
- You are not a failure. This is less advice and more of a reminder, but I know you need to hear it. You have not let anyone down. Even if you don’t get it done and do need to redo, you are not a failure. You are human, things go wrong, and we learn; if worse comes to worst, you can use this experience to do better next time. You are not a failure.
- Break it down into as small chunks as possible. I knew I had fourteen days (thirteen minus my breakdown day), giving myself three days per chapter, one day for an introduction, one day for a conclusion, one day for referencing (more on this later), and 1 day for a buffer. This already made it feel significantly less scary, my 3000 word essays from the rest of the year typically took three days to write, and my chapters were shorter than that – and just like that the impossible task became possible. I broke the content of these chapters down further, 750 words a day discussing one of the main themes of that chapter; a significantly smaller mountain. Make that mountain as small as you can for yourself.
- Stick to your schedule. It’s hard to, but if you’re going to break it down into chunks you have to stick to them, unfortunately you don’t have time for endlessly editing. Finish the section and move on, the last thing you need is further panic because you’ve fallen off of your stable lifeline of a schedule. Working a buffer day into your schedule will make this easier; don’t plan to be flawless.
- Lower your standards and focus on getting it done. I know, it’s easy for me to say because I got a first, but believe me I was not aiming for one. Aim to submit something, anything, so you can say that you are done. Once you take the pressure off of yourself that high quality writing will come naturally to you. You will hit your daily word goal far quicker than you realise, giving you a feeling of success that I am sure you need, and you can focus on quality from there. Do not give yourself the self-doubt of aiming for perfection with every word.
- Re-read the criteria. I’m sure you think you know exactly what is expected of you. I did too, and then on my final re-read before submitting realised I forgot a glossary. That was extra stress that I didn’t need, and could have easily avoided by double checking the criteria.
- Do not underestimate referencing. Giving myself a day for my referencing was the best decision I made; I needed every minute of that day. If you’ve been able to submit more of the ‘optional’ draft deadlines you might need less time as your footnotes and bibliography might be more in order – but my bibliography was non-existent and my footnotes were scribbles. Do not leave it to the last minute, the last thing you want is to finish your dissertation but be capped at 50 because you didn’t reference. I strongly recommend doing your referencing on a day you’re feeling less up for writing content, it’s monotonous enough that it provides somewhat of a mental break while still making huge progress.
- Reach out for help. I’m sure you’ve been putting off admitting that you need help, but I strongly recommend finally swallowing your pride. I’m sure you’ve had the Student Welfare team recommended to you before and you’ve convinced yourself into not accepting their help; they are wonderful people who will help you think rationally in this panicked time. Additionally, ask someone to help you proof-read; having another set of eyes read your work before your supervisor will help you catch silly mistakes and validate that your work is good. Swallowing your pride is worth it.
- Get up and fight. You have worked too hard to give up now. It is never too late to try. Look at your previous grades: they are proof that you can do this and you are more capable than you realise. You might not feel like it right now, but your degree is worth fighting for. You are worth fighting for.
Good luck. You’ve got this. I promise it will be worth it in the end. You can survive your dissertation.
If you would like to contact me for advice, please feel free to do so: UP895045@myport.ac.uk.
If you are you are interested in reading about a dissertation which took a different perspective on King Charles I, read about Connor Scott-Butcher’s dissertation here.
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Church and People in Interregnum Britain
In this post, UoP senior lecturer in history Dr Fiona McCall talks about her new book Church and People in Interregnum Britain, bringing together new research from scholars across Britain and further afield on the profound religious changes which took place after the British Civil Wars and how people responded to them.
From 1642-5, England, Ireland, Wales and Scotland, endured the first in a series of devastating civil wars, which split communities ideologically, politically and religiously. These wars have been termed ‘the last of the wars of religion’ by leading Civil War historian John Morrill.[1] In 1645, as the first Civil War approached its end, and the religious reformists gained the upper hand, a second Reformation took place which profoundly changed British society. Before 1640, there had been only one religion allowed in England, and that was the Church of England. After 1645 the Church was effectively dis-established, and Godly puritan practices promoted in parish churches and everyday ordinary life. The aim was to make the Church in England more like other Calvinist ‘reformed’ churches in places like Scotland and Geneva. Some people welcomed these changes, like Lady Brilliana Harley, who wrote in a letter to her son in 1641, that she looked forward to those things being reformed which burdened the conscience of God’s children and had ‘longe trubeled the peace of the church.’ [2] Others sought even more radical religious change. New religious beliefs and practices emerged, horrifying traditionalists, who experienced these as times of madness and trouble. Historians continue to debate the extent of the social disruption that resulted, and the impact of Godly ideals.My first book, Baal’s Priests, the Loyalist Clergy and the English Revolution (2013) looked at the impact of the Civil Wars on the clergy who supported the losing side.[3] In 2015 I gained British Academy funding for a project looking at traditionalist resistance to religious change. Included in that funding were funds to run a conference, ‘The people all changed: religion and society in Britain during the 1650s’, held at the University of Portsmouth on 15-16 July 2016. Because of the significance of the political changes and military events of this period, the social and religious aspects of the period tend to be neglected by historians. Social historians often prefer to concentrate on what the Annales school of history termed the longue durée, centuries rather than decades, and there has become a tendency for research projects to either end in 1640 or start in 1660, or to treat the seventeenth century as if the disruptions of its middle years hardly mattered. The aim of the conference had been to help to change this, by drawing together researchers working on the records of this period. These tend to require specialist knowledge because political and religious administrative structures were not the same as before 1640, and kept altering still further, another reason why research into the interregnum has been more limited than it might be.
We were really lucky to attract the pre-eminent social historian of the period, Professor Bernard Capp from the University of Warwick, to give one of the keynote papers at the conference.[4] When thinking about publishing the papers presented at the conference, we also benefitted greatly from a suggestion made by Professor Dave Andress, to put forward a proposal to the Institute of Historical Research New Perspectives series. This is a book series commissioned and edited by the Royal Historical Society and published for the Institute of Historical Research by the University of London Press. It specialises in publishing the work of early career historians. Many of the contributors to our conference fell into that category. Happily, Bernard agreed to write an introduction for the volume, and took a very hands-on attitude throughout the process by commenting on and even editing the different contributions. I also had considerably assistance from Dr Andrew Foster, now at the University of Kent but formerly at the University of Chichester, who runs an early modern studies group based in Chichester in which I participate. Andrew and Helen Whittle, another member of the group, both contributed chapters for the book. I also found two additional contributors to the volume amongst fellow-attendees at two 2017 conferences I attended: the British Churches 1603-1707, at the University of Kent, and Religion and Conflict in the Medieval and Early Modern Periods, at Nottingham Trent University.
The final volume includes chapters from eleven contributors. Some relate to the administration of the interregnum church, the role of Oliver Cromwell in ecclesiastical affairs, efforts to survey parish churches with a view to reform, and on the problems of parish record keeping during this period. There were chapters on the clergy of Sussex, Dorset, Warwickshire and Wales, and on moral discipline in Scotland. Contributors came from the Victoria County History, and from the Universities of Warwick, Kent, Leicester, West of England and as far afield as Sydney, as well as my own. My own chapter looked at how the regime, having abolished the church courts, turned to the secular courts to police religious matters.[5]
Dutch engraving satirising Oliver Cromwell’s role in the church, 1651, British Museum, 1871,1209.975. What will the volume contribute to our understanding of the period? Firstly individual chapters show how committed the reformers were to bringing in their own particular brand of religion. In appointing clergy to parishes, Cromwell had a very active role, assuming the powers of the king, and taking them even further.[6] The regime had very high ideals, setting out to improve the way churches were run and to get rid of anything they considered ‘superstitious’, or similar to the Catholic church, like bishops, the book of common prayer, religious imagery, organs and choirs. They made changes in the way baptisms, funerals and particularly marriages were conducted, bringing in laws to say people could only be married by a justice of the peace, and not by the clergy. But many people opposed these changes. Keeping things under control politically via a large army made the regime hard-pressed for money; funding religious improvements often meant taking money from ex-royalists, who naturally were not too happy about this.[7] To make the changes work, the regime had to remove a significant proportion of the clergy who supported the King or traditional ways.[8] Parishioners did not necessarily like the changes either: those who supported reform were probably only a minority, if a significant and determined one. The reformers were particularly keen to enforce sabbatarianism, where everyone went to church twice on Sunday, with no working, dancing or playing sports. In Bristol they even turned off the water supply on Sundays to prevent people using it.[9] I found plenty of evidence of resistance to this policy, whether from groups of boys playing football or walking on Scarborough beaches, or weavers in Exeter working on Sunday behind locked doors.[10] Quite frequently physical violence was involved. Some groups, like the Quakers, who emerged in this period, were opposed to any form of religious organisation, to clergy and to churches, and caused problems by interrupting and disrupting church services. All this led to a lot of turbulence and instability: one of the most interesting findings for me was the high turnover of clergy, indicative of a somewhat troubled parish life.[11] Although the majority of clergy survived in post, many had to deal with attempts to displace them, or otherwise make their life difficult.
Southwick church, north of Portsmouth, 16th-18c interior. All this challenges the impression, which I still find repeated in history books, that religious life continued on pretty much the same as normal despite the reforms. Yes, some things didn’t change: parish churches were administered by churchwardens as they had been before, for example. Where parishes had previously been served by puritan clergy, services wouldn’t have looked so different to what people were used to. Other aspects were quite different. The Book of Common Prayer, previously required to be used in church services, was banned; a few churches may have tried to continue using it, but there’s little evidence it was used widely, at least in public. Private baptisms became more common in this period, probably because people wanted to have Common Prayer used for this important religious rite.[12] In places like Suffolk, where there had been an organised campaign to remove images and break stained glass windows, churches would have looked different.[13] Cathedrals and larger churches were often in a sorry state, as were those churches which had been involved in civil war fighting, including several in Hampshire. Portsmouth Cathedral had its tower destroyed by Parliamentarians firing from Gosport during the siege of Portsmouth at the start of the Civil War; at Alton the church was the centre of a civil war siege, ending with the royalist commander being killed in the pulpit.[14]
The only stained glass left after the visit of iconoclasts to the church of Clare in Suffolk were these images of the sun and moon, probably left because they were non-religious images. To quote Bernard Capp’s final conclusion, the interregnum church, fond of controversy, assailed by both traditionalists and radicals in religion, with its many vacant parishes and dilapidated churches, was ‘not one to inspire enthusiasm’.[15] Yet it did mark a watershed for the state of religion and morality in Britain. Attempts by the puritans to tighten moral order proved counter-productive, permanently damaging the system of moral control previously in place. There was a democratization of religious belief which made it very difficult for the state to continue to tell people what to believe. The return of the Church of England after the Restoration of 1660 restored traditionalist ways, but non-conformists, confirmed and solidified in their own groupings and religious beliefs which had flowered under the turbulence of the interregnum, were resolved to have little part in it.
[1] J. S. Morrill, The Nature of the English Revolution (London: Longman, 1993), 68.
[2] The Letters of the Lady Brilliana Harley (London: Camden Society, 1854), 110.
[3] F. McCall, Baal’s Priests: The Loyalist Clergy and the English Revolution (Farnham: Ashgate, 2013).
[4] B. Capp, England’s Culture Wars: Puritan Reformation and its Enemies in the Interregnum, 1649-1660 (Oxford, 2012).
[5] F. McCall, “Breaching the Laws of God and Man: Secular Prosecutions of Religious Offences in the Interregnum Parish, 1645-1660”, in F. McCall (ed.), Church and People in Interregnum Britain (London: University of London Press, 2021), 137-170.
[6] R. Warren, “The Ecclesiastical Patronage of Oliver Cromwell, c. 1654-60, in McCall, Church and People, 65-86.
[7] A. Craven, “Soe good and godly a worke’: the surveys of ecclesiastical livings and parochial reform during the English Revolution”, in McCall, Church and People, 41-64.
[8] McCall, Baal’s Priests, 130-31.
[9] Bristol Record Office, JQS/M/4 1653-71, Quarter Session Minute Book, Epiphany 1655.
[10] M.Y. Ashcroft (ed.), Scarborough Records 1640–1660 (Northallerton, 1991), 261; Devon Heritage Centre, ECA, quarter sessions order book, 1642-60, fo. 351v, 23 March 1656/7.
[11] See Helen Whittle’s chapter on the Sussex clergy, H. M. Whittle, “The clergy of Sussex: the impact of change, 1635– 65”, McCall (ed.), Church and People, 111-136.
[12] P.M. Kitson, ‘Religious change and the timing of baptism in England, 1538-1750’, Historical Journal, 52 (2009): 292.
[13] The Journal of William Dowsing, ed. T. Cooper, (Woodbridge: The Ecclesiological Society, 2001).
[14] G.N. Goodwin, The Civil War in Hampshire, 1642-45 and the story of Basing House (Alresford: Laurence Oxley, 1873).
[15] B. Capp, “Introduction: Stability and flux: the Church in the interregnum”, McCall (ed.), Church and People, 18.
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Have yourself a puritan Christmas
Dr Fiona McCall is a lecturer in early modern history, teaching units on the British Civil Wars, and Crime, Sin and Punishment in early modern Britain, amongst others. Her current research project investigates traditionalist resistance to puritan values in English parish churches during the 1640s and 1650s, and in this blog she discusses how Christmas was banned during this period.
Christmas was officially banned during the late 1640s and 1650s along with the rest of the church calendar. But the interdict was widely ignored. Trawling through various counties’ quarter sessions depositions for the period, I have found frequent references to Christmas, Easter, Whitsun, and various saints days, the witnesses (even those testifying against suspected royalists) usually oblivious to the fact that these festivals are no longer supposed to be celebrated. At Bristol the Mayoral court was even postponed from December to January ‘because the feast of Christmas comes betweene’.[1] Some were clearly mindful that Christmas was a sensitive issue: a 1651 Cheshire case refers to the ‘tyme Commonly called Christmas’, while a 1655 Northern Circuit assize deposition refers to the twelfth day after Christmas ‘so commonly Called’ [2] The term ‘Christide’ was frequently preferred instead, but not by everyone: one Devonshire witness timed the events he reported to ‘the Feast of the birth of our Lord god last past’. [3]
Josiah King, The Examination and Tryall of Old Father Christmas (1658) Churches were supposed to be closed on Christmas Day and shops open. That was the theory, anyway. At Norwich in 1647, the Mayor of Norwich apparently gave notice that Christmas Day was to be observed, the market kept the day before instead, and even invited the ejected Bishop of Norwich, Joseph Hall, to preach in the Cathedral. [4] The authorities in Canterbury attempted a harder line. On the 22 December 1647, the town crier there proclaimed that a market was to be kept on Christmas day. This ‘occasioned great discontent among the people’ causing them to ‘rise in a rebellious way’, throwing shopkeepers’ ware ‘up and down’ until they shut up shop, and knocking down the mayor when he attempted to quell the ‘tumult’ with a cudgel. [5] ‘That which we so much desired that day was but a Sermon’, protested Canterbury Prebendary Edward Aldey, ‘which any other day of the weeke was tollerable by the orders and practise of the two Houses and all their adherents, but that day (because it was Christ’s birth day). [6] Elsewhere in Kent, parishioners crowded round the puritan minister Richard Culmer’s reading desk in protest at the lack of a Christmas day service, and assaulted him in the churchyard. [7] Gloucestershire minister Mr Tray, unpopular on account of his opposition to the festival, became the target of malicious rumours. Stories were spread that he had sabotaged the Christmas pies of his parishioners, baking in the communal oven, by sending his own unconventional confection to be baked alongside them. Lines of verse were placed under Tray’s cushion in the pulpit:
Parson tray, on Christmas Day
To help on reformation
Instead of the word did bake a t[urd]
And poyson’d his congregation [8]
