1I shall not waste the time of this conference by offering yet another definition of our subject. It is, however, desirable to remind ourselves that the compilation of short ’lives’, or indeed collective biographies, which can be traced back in western literary culture at least to Plutarch, is not the same thing as prosopography. Thus, for example, the Dictionary of National Bioqraphy and the Complete Peerage, although invaluable works of reference for all periods of British history, provide the raw materials for prosopographers rather than themselves forming contributions to this branch of historical writing.

2Historians of 17th century England can claim no priority in the development of our subject. In the context of the English-speaking world, Charles A. Beard’s work on the Founding Fathers of the American constitution (1913), Lewis Namier’s on the Parliaments of 1760 and 1761 (1928, 1929, 1930), and Ronald Syme’s (exploiting the researches of earlier German scholars) on the supporters of the early Principate in Augustan Rome (1939) all have priority. Perhaps one should also mention T. F. Tout’s work on medieval administration and its personnel (1920-33, 1932-4). Among the earliest applications of any significance to the study of the Tudor and Stuart periods was that of J. E. Neale (1949, 1951), himself partially under the influence of the French historian Lucien Romier (1922). This was followed by two books published on the same subject: MF. Keeler (1954) and D Brunton and D. H. Pennington (1954), both on the M P s of the Long Parliament, the former being a biographical dictionary but restricted to the original members (those elected in 1640-41), the latter covering the whole span of the Parliament’s existence and constructed along more analytical lines My own initial work on the institutions and personnel of English central government (1955) was that of a student much influenced by some of those mentioned above, as by the work being done by G. R. Elton (1953) and W. C Richardson (1952) on central government under the early and mid Tudors, and to whom it seemed perfectly natural to compile notes on a partly biographical basis, although I was (and remained for some time) quite ignorant of the term prosopography. Nor would I claim any particular precedence for my first book (1961), which was in part based on the use of collective biography.

3The applications of the prosopographical, as of any other historical method, will vary in every specific context. This will normally depend on two distinct but inter-related factors:

4(I) the availability of different types of source matenals;

5(II) the kind of questions which historians consider the most significant, and the most worth trying resolve, in that particular context.

6It is necessary to say a little about each of these in relation to the scope of this paper, namely England in the 17th century.

7The sources from which collective biographies can be reconstructed are, as is well known, plentiful, indeed copious, but extremely uneven. There are few, if any notarial and no police records; against this, the main state papers senes and those of the central law and revenue courts are unrivalled. But there are no Quarter Sessions (J. P.s) records for many of the counties before the Restoration, and likewise no Assize records (of the common-law judges on their half-yearly circuits) for large regions of the country until the later 17th century, or even after that. The best of the church court records are very full, but again survival has been uneven. This is even more the case with manorial records. Even parish registers and other parochial records (e.g. of church-wardens’ activities) have survived only patchily, and are often uninformative (the registers should have been kept continuously from the time of Thomas Cromwell). Two further facts compound our difficulties at the most humble, local level, although I realise that the same may be true also in other parts of pre-industrial Europe:

8(I) the distribution of surnames is geographically biassed; indeed they tend to run in districts;

9(II) given, or Christian names tend to run in families. This is true of the less as of the more usual names, of Gerald Aylmer as much as of John Smith

10Add to these unavoidable difficulties, the pre-occupations -one is tempted to say sometimes the obsessions- of family historians and genealogists, students of lineage, heraldry and title, together with the uneven survival of the sources, which of course extends to estate records and correspondance, and we have to reckon with a marked social bias. As a general rule, indeed in the vast majority of instances, the higher that people stood in the social hierarchy of early modem England, the easier it is to find out about them. As recently as 20 years ago this would have seemed axiomatic. It is a little less obviously the case today because of the great advances which have been made by some social historians, through the minute, immensely painstaking exploitation of parochial, manorial and other types of local records I do not know whether such pioneering innovators as Alan Macfarlane (1977) and Margaret Spufford (1975) would wish to be called prosopographers, but their work and that of others has certainly weakened the assumption that our methodology is inevitably distorted in favour of those with high status and inherited rank or title. At its worst, the charge is one of social snobbism and political reaction: the middle-class 20th century historian enjoys consorting with his social superiors in the past, as a substitute for doing so in the present. How much truth there is in this, I must leave to others to judge: a little with some historians, none with many others, is my personal reaction.

11This relates to the other charge brought more specifically against Namier, and others who applied his methods in the study of 18th century political history, by Herbert Butterfield and others, that they "took the mind out of history". Certainly Namier did not seem to allow much room for political and other motives of principle in his microscopic examination of the political system around 1760, although he did refer to the subsequent ’rise of party’, with which he promised to deal in a later volume, but never succeeded in doing so. And setting aside other historians of the 18th century who were more or less under his influence, but who are not out our concern here, it is true that Brunton and Pennington were junior staff in his department at Manchester in the later 1940s-early 1950s. But I would not wish to pursue such personal lines of inquiry any further. The issue really divides into two: do prosopographers wilfully neglect the role of ideas by excessive concentration on financial and other economic interests, family connections, patronage and clientage, perhaps even unconscious atavistic instincts and prejudices (that is to say, shades of Freud as well as of Marx)? But maybe issues of principle are more to the fore in some historical situations than in other. More interesting in my view is the other question arising from this accusation: how far does the method of collective biography actually disable us, whether we want or not, from trying to discover many of the most worthwhile and important things about people -their attitudes, values and beliefs? Again, this is relatively easy in the case of a small minority; but in this respect ease of research through the availability of sources is biassed towards the articulate rather than the socially distinguished: authors, diarists, letter-writers and so on. Yet even here it is possible to come upon surprising lacunae, to reach unexpected to the evidence. Our ignorance about the greatest of all English creative writers has led to a multitude of theories about him, some only a little less bogus or half-witted than the rest. Apart from Shakespeare’s plays and poems, the authentic records of his life consist almost exclusively of legal documents, either containing his name or with his signature appended (see Schoenbaum, 1970). By contrast, most of the career of John Donne (Carey, 1981) is reasonably well documented, and that of John Milton (Parker, 1968) even more so. On the other hand there is continuing controversy, as to whether the John Dryden, alias Driden, who walked with the other secretaries and men of letters in Oliver Cromwell’s funeral procession was or was not the future cavalier poet laureate

12For the great majority, who did not leave writings of their own, either in print or in manuscript, we have to fall back on other sources. The mention of men and women in public and other institutional records, and in the writings of others is a fruitful source but one to be used with caution. Enrolment at a particular school, college, university or legal Inn, does indeed tell us something; but one must of course beware of supposing that everyone who was a student when even the most brilliant and charismatic of tutors was at the same college, was influenced at all by this tutor, let alone having become his disciple. At or towards the end of people’s lives we have the evidence of their wills, and immediately after death of the inventories of their possessions. We do not have wills even for all those who must have had property and goods of which to dispose: some because death took them suddenly and unexpectedly, others perhaps because there was some particular reason (ideological or personal) for not making a will (disposal of possessions to trustees in anticipation of death, or refusal to acknowledge the authority of the established Church, which had charge of testamentary matters except from 1652 to 60). This does not exhaust our difficulties. A generation or so ago some historians, including the present author, used the theological prologues to wills as evidence of religious sympathies and convictions; now we are told that these reflect only the formulae of particular scribes, who usually decided for testators what sentiments these prologues should express. In the case of the educated and articulate, I am not wholly persuaded of this, but it seems plausible for the majority, especially the illiterate and semi-literate. Where books are bequeathed by individual title or are listed in inventories (surprisingly rare) this must surely tell us something. However, the survival of inventories before the Restoration is much thinner, more ragged than that of wills. The evidence of contemporary and near contemporary collective biographers (e.g. Fuller, Aubrey, Wood) is equally tantalising in a different way. These writers did not, we may think, normally ut deliberately to deceive posterity, but often they could not resist embroidering or repeating a good story about some famous or notorious person, regardless of its inherent probability.

13How near can we hope to approach to a group portrait which takes account of its members’ outlook, their view of God, the world, humanity, the problems of their country in their own time? Besides M. P.s, royal officials, army officers, etc., we may perhaps take particular note of some other groups recently studied in this way where ideas would appear almost by definition more interesting and important than material wealth or family connection: in chronological sequence, I refer to Jacobean bishops (Fincham, 1990), parliamentary army chaplains (Laurence, 1990) and early Fellows of the Royal Society (Hunter, 1982, 1985). I do no know that any of these authors would wish to be descnbed as a prosopographer, but in all three cases their work seems to owe something to this method. Attempts have even been made to apply such techniques of group biography to Levellers (Aylmer, 1970, solider studies by others are under way), Diggers (Thomas, 1969), early Quakers (Vann, 1969) and Fifth Monarchymen (Capp, 1972). With all such groups, whether of radical or conservative persuasion, whether authoritarian or libertarian in tendency, we have to guard against the danger of vulgar ’reductionism’. Whether this temptation afflicts the prosopographer more than other historians, I am not altogether sure; but we should be aware of it in ourselves. Because there is a statistically valid correlation between two (or more) sets of characteristics among some group which is being studied, or a sufficiently large random sample within that group, we must not assume that one set of characteristics is ’cause’ and the other ’effect’, or vice versa. They may both be related to some other kind of variable, which we may not yet even have identified; or they may be unrelated. In principle, this is as true of peers or bishops as of villagers or vagrants, as true of Cavaliers, High Tories or Jacobites as of republicans or antinomians. Of course with the humbler and poorer members of society we run up against our other mam limiting factor: paucity of evidence. Alan Macfarlane (1977) has argued that it is only worth trying to pursue his method of ’reconstruction’ with a village that is exceptionally well-documented with a whole range of records: parochial, manorial, ecclesiastical, quarter sessional, probate, etc., preferably with some personal source (letters, diary or memoir), as is true for Earls Colne in Essex and Myddle in Shropshire (Hey, 1974), and moreover with a population of at least 800 (with, I suppose, an upper limit of about 2.000). Interpreted strictly, this would mean discarding the possibility of a prosopographical approach for the great majority of the population. Only where ordinary people belonged to some organisation or movement, through which they can be identified, will they prove exceptions to this, and then we are at once into the further logical deadlock, as to whether such membership in itself makes them untypical, unrepresentative of the social groups or classes to which they belonged. Unlike a modem field sociologist, you cannot gather up a random ’control group’ against whom to measure Quakers, Diggers or whoever it may be.

14On the matter of explaining differences brought to light by the method of collective biography, let us return to M. P.s. In their study of the Long Parliament Brunton and Pennington (1954) were at pains to emphasise that they had found no discernible social or economic differences between the future Royalists and Parliamentarians among the 538 members whom they were able to classify under one of these two headings. They did, however, find a very striking age difference between the parties: the median age of the Royalists having been 36 and that of the Parliamentarians 47 at the beginning of the Parliament, the difference in the arithmetical average of the two sides was over 10 years in age. Unfortunately, whether because ofdisagreements between them, excessive intellectual modesty, or the fact that Brunton died in an accident before the book was completely finished, they offered no explanation at all for this dramatic finding. Reviewers were not slow to rush in where the authors feared to tread. Namier himself suggested an anti-Puritan reaction among the younger generation, anticipating the frivolity and licentiousness of the court of Charles II. Trevor-Roper put the emphasis the other way round, insisting that it was the older men who had lived through the experience of the Elizabethan sea war with Spain, and then later in their lives through the traumatic defeats suffered by the Protestant cause in Europe during the first ten or eleven years of the so-called Thirty Years War. If those marked in early manhood by the latter of these two experiences included Oliver Cromwell (born 1599), they also included (though he was king not M. P.) Charles I (bom 1600). Clearly we know from the experience of our own time that there are, or at least can be, significant generational differences; the trouble is that generations overlap and all boundaries between them are arbitrary. Maybe for quite a lot of people in Britain, perhaps also in France, the United States and elsewhere the years 1946-7 marked such a watershed. Those of us who were adult, even if we were very young, before that date, had our world views in varying degrees formed before the onset of the Cold War. I do not of course mean that everyone who grew up before that time was a supporter of some kind of Popular Front, nor that everyone growing up after was some or other species of neo-Conservative; obviously one is talking about general trends to which numerous individual exceptions can always be found But it would not be inherently implausible to suggest that there might have been similar differences, e.g. between those whose world view was substantially formed before 1628 and those for whom this was not true until after 1629. On this view Charles I and Archbishop Laud were winning the war of education and ideas. Time was literally against John Pym and John Hampden, Lord Saye and the other parliamentarian leaders. This may help to explain their readiness to form a secret alliance with the leaders of England’s hereditary enemy, the Scots, who were the first to defy Charles I with armed forces (in 1639-40) and then to exploit the propaganda advantages of the Irish Rebellion (in 1641-2), which their own policies and prejudices had done a good deal to precipitate. I have to say that I am a little sceptical of this argument; since, although I found among the central royal office-holders of 1642 that there was indeed an age difference between the adherents of the two sides, though not as large as with the M. P.s (Aylmer, 1961), I subsequently discovered that many of the leading servants of the republic during the years 1649-60 were also younger by a fair measure on average than those whom they replaced or helped to overthrow during the intervening decade, 1642-48 (Aylmer, 1973).

15Another explanation, to help account for the Brunton-Pennington finding may be tentatively ventured. Although these historians found no difference in terms of social or economic class between the two sides, it is possible that they gave insufficient consideration to differences of standing and connection within the same social class. Were proportionately more future Royalists among those elected in 1640-1 drawn from families more nearly connected to the nobility, more embedded in the pre-1640s, even pre- 1630s, elites of their respective counties, and thus the kind of men -given the electoral system of the time- who would be likely to get elected relatively young in life? Conversely, might more of the parliamentarians have come from the less well-established, less aristocratically connected families within the gentry class? More of them may have had to make their mark, as lawyers or men of business in the service of great nobles, or even in the King’s service, before they were as likely to enter the Commons. This is not to deny that generational differences can have an ideological dimension, as Trevor-Roper and Namier were suggesting in their repective ways, it is only to offer the additional hypothesis that there can be social differences which do not correspond to class divisions and yet which are politically significant. For what it is worth, there was an age difference of about ten years between Labour and Conservative M. P.s in the very evenly divided House of Commons after the election of 1964; probably this would be less so today, the inter-generational pendulum having swung back a bit the other way (?)

16Where does this leave us with regard to prosopography in the study of seventeenth-century England? Whether or not it is known by this name, the method of collective biography seems unlikely to be wholly discarded. But almost all historians see it as a, not as the method. Computerisation, the use of more advanced quantitative techniques, offers attractive improvements over the pencil and paper counting calculation of forty years ago. On the other hand, while computers can marvellously and almost instantaneously re-order the material which they have been given, they cannot qualitatively improve or increase such data. They are a way of making better use of research, not of substituting for it; moreover much prosopographical work of the kind which I have been discussing requires only quite simple statistical techniques, well within the reach of a personal computer, if not of a good calculating machine.

POSTSCRIPT

17In the light of the other papers presented to this Colloquium, more might have been said here about the links between the use of prosopography in the study of the Ancient World (of classical Greece and Rome) and of the early ’Dark Ages’ in Christian Europe. An eminent ancient historian once told me that the technique of epigraphy (the study of inscriptions) had been far and away the greatest advance in knowledge and understanding. For many individuals in the Roman Empire, this is the only evidence available. Early-modern historians too have inscriptions, normally those on funeral monuments. But even what is carved on stone or marble can lie, or at least suppress the truth. In the city of York alone I can think of three cases: the date of birth of Charles Howard, the first Earl of Carlisle, is given wrongly and the Cromwellian part of his career passed over in silence; the attainder of the Jacobite conspirator, Sir John Fenwick goes unnoted; and (in a parish church, as opposed to the minster) Sir Thomas Herbert’s service under the English Republic (1649-60) is likewise ’edited out’. Only two or more independent sources, confirming each other, can be accepted as reliable beyond reasonable doubt; unless such sources are independent of each other, everything may turn out to rest on a single error, or even deliberate deception

18Finally, we might clarify the prosopographical method as embracing two extreme types:

1. the collection of relatively small quantities of material about large numbers of people;

2. the collection of large amounts of material about small numbers of individuals. But clearly, as the papers presented to this Colloquium demonstrate, there is in reality a continuum rather than a simple dichotomy. And this only serves to underline my basic conclusion: prosopography is a technique, or range of techniques, not in itself a separate kind of history. It is not comparable to constitutional, political, ecclesiastical, social, cultural, economic, or demographic history, although it can be used in relation to all of these, with patience and accuracy, also with caution and restraint.

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