Abstract
Social Network Analysis (SNA) has transformed the study of many fields of history over the last decade, with historians of the early modern and modern periods using computer-assisted modelling and visualisations to identify configurations of social relationships in the past and how they changed over time. For the most part, historians of late medieval England have not embraced these methodologies. Since the pioneering work of K.B. McFarlane 75 years ago, however, late medievalists have developed their own concept of networks rooted in 1960s observation-based social anthropology rather than twenty-first-century ‘big data’ sociology. It is a concept operating in opposition to ‘community’ and based on the assumption that informal social ties tend to concentrate power in the hands of the few. These connotations contrast with the concept of ‘networks’ as used in early modern and modern history, where it is often associated with decentralised, non-hierarchical, and long-distance relationships. Instead of thinking of SNA as a neutral statistical tool, we should perhaps consider ‘networks’ as a keyword whose meaning varies according to the academic context and is laden with the intellectual baggage peculiar to specific sub-disciplines.
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Notes
- 1.
For details of this dispute, see Muriel E. Curtis, Some Disputes between the City and the Cathedral Authorities of Exeter (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1932), and Lorraine Attreed, ‘Arbitration and the Growth of Urban Liberties in Late Medieval England’, Journal of British Studies, 31 (1992), 205–35.
- 2.
S.A. Moore (ed.), Letters and Papers of John Shillingford, Mayor of Exeter 1447–50 (Camden Soc., New Ser., 2, 1871), 4–12.
- 3.
For a combination of central-place theory and networks in a historical context, see Paul M. Hohenberg and Lynn Hollen Lees, The Making of Urban Europe, 1000–1994 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995), 4–5.
- 4.
See Christina Prell, Social Network Analysis: History, Theory & Methodology (London: Sage, 2012), ch. 5.
- 5.
See Bruno Latour, Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 70–86.
- 6.
E.g.‚ Letters and Papers of John Shillingford, 5–6, 11, 14, 20, 32, 48.
- 7.
E.g.‚ ibid., 12–13, 18, 21.
- 8.
E.g.‚ ibid., 5, 9, 18, 22.
- 9.
Ibid., xiii.
- 10.
Material pertaining to the period around October 1447 is contained in Devon Record Office, Exeter City Archives, Receiver’s Accounts, 25–26 and 26–27 H VI. Extracts are printed in Letters and Papers of John Shillingford, 146–52.
- 11.
Devon Record Office, Exeter City Archives, Receiver’s Accounts, 26–27 H VI; Letters and Papers of John Shillingford, 149–50.
- 12.
On ‘identity’, see Andrea Ruddick’s chapter, above. For further discussion of the concepts of ‘state’ and ‘feudalism’, see Introduction, above.
- 13.
Ruth Ahnert, Sebastian E. Ahnert, Catherine Nicole Coleman, and Scott B. Weingart, The Network Turn: Changing Perspectives in the Humanities (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020), 43.
- 14.
For ‘network’ as a concept and its changing meaning over time, see ibid., ch. 1.
- 15.
Kate Davison, ‘Early Modern Social Networks: Antecedents, Opportunities, and Challenges’, American Historical Review, 124 (2019), 456–82; Joanna Innes, ‘“Networks” in British History’, The East Asian Journal of British History, 5 (2016), 51–72. Nevertheless, the reader should note my debt to these two articles. I have cited their work in this chapter when I make direct reference to it in the text, but to avoid excessive footnoting I have not indicated all the occasions on which Davison and Innes’s pieces have proved helpful.
- 16.
Linton C. Freeman, ‘The Development of Social Network Analysis—With an Emphasis on Recent Events’, in John Scott and Peter J. Carrington (eds), The SAGE Handbook of Social Network Analysis (London: Sage, 2011), 26.
- 17.
Davison, ‘Early Modern Social Networks’; Innes, ‘“Networks” in British History’.
- 18.
K.B. McFarlane, ‘Parliament and “Bastard Feudalism”’, in England in the Fifteenth Century: Collected Essays (London: Hambledon Press, 1981), 1–21.
- 19.
Ibid., 20–21. The italics are my own.
- 20.
For the ‘retinue’ approach, see e.g., Carole Rawcliffe, The Staffords: Earls of Stafford and Dukes of Buckingham, 1394–1521 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978), ch. 4. For the ‘county’ approach, see e.g., A.J. Pollard, ‘The Richmondshire Community of Gentry during the Wars of the Roses’, in Charles Ross (ed.), Patronage, Pedigree, and Power in Later Medieval England (Gloucester: Sutton, 1979), 37–59.
- 21.
Susan M. Wright, The Derbyshire Gentry in the Fifteenth Century (Chesterfield: Derbyshire Record Soc., viii, 1983), 144.
- 22.
Michael J. Bennett, Community, Class and Careerism: Cheshire and Lancashire Society in the Age of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), e.g., 52.
- 23.
Christine Carpenter, Locality and Polity: A Study of Warwickshire Landed Society, 1401–1499 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), esp. ch. 9.
- 24.
J.K. Campbell, Honour, Family and Patronage: A Study of Institutions and Moral Values in a Greek Mountain Community (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1964); Carpenter, Locality and Polity, 287 n. 21.
- 25.
Christine Carpenter, ‘Gentry and Community in Medieval England’, Journal of British Studies, 33 (1994), 340–80.
- 26.
Ibid., 365. Italics my own.
- 27.
Jeremy Boissevain, Friends of Friends: Networks, Manipulators and Coalitions (Oxford: Blackwell, 1974).
- 28.
Carpenter, ‘Gentry and Community’, 366.
- 29.
E.g.‚ J.A. Raftis, Warboys: Two Hundred Years in the Life of an English Medieval Village (Toronto: Pontifical Institute, 1974).
- 30.
Judith M. Bennett, Women in the Medieval English Countryside: Gender and Household in Brigstock before the Plague (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), esp. ‘Appendix: A Note on Method’.
- 31.
Prell, Social Network Analysis, 35.
- 32.
E.g.‚ Harrison C. White, Scott A. Boorman, and Ronald L. Breiger, ‘Social Structures from Multiple Networks. I. Block Models of Roles and Positions’, American Journal of Sociology, 81 (1976), 730–80.
- 33.
J. Clyde Mitchell, ‘Social Networks’, Annual Review of Anthropology, 3 (1974), 295–96.
- 34.
Ibid., 292.
- 35.
Freeman, ‘Development of Social Network Analysis’, 26–39.
- 36.
See brief summaries in ibid., 28–30, and Prell, Social Network Analysis, 46–47, 173.
- 37.
Davison, ‘Early Modern Social Networks’, and Innes, ‘“Networks” in British History’.
- 38.
Emily Buchnea, ‘Transatlantic Transformations: Visualizing Change over Time in the Liverpool-New York Trade Network, 1763–1833’, Enterprise & Society, 15 (2014), 687–721.
- 39.
Ahnert et al., Network Turn, ch. 3.
- 40.
Dan Edelstein, Paula Findlen, Giovanna Ceserani, Caroline Winterer, and Nicole Coleman, ‘Historical Research in a Digital Age: Reflections from the Mapping the Republic of Letters Project’, American Historical Review, 122 (2017), 400–24.
- 41.
E.g.‚ Natasha Glaisyer, ‘Networking: Trade and Exchange in the Eighteenth-Century British Empire’, Historical Journal, 47 (2004), 451–76.
- 42.
E.g.‚ Alan Lester, Imperial Networks: Creating Identities in Nineteenth-Century South Africa and Britain (London: Routledge, 2001); Zoë Laidlaw, Colonial Connections 1815–45: Patronage, the Information Revolution and Colonial Government (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2005).
- 43.
Esp. Simon J. Potter, ‘Webs, Networks, and Systems: Globalization and the Mass Media in the Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century British Empire’, Journal of British Studies, 46 (2007), 621–46.
- 44.
Stephen Howe, ‘British Worlds, Settler Worlds, World Systems, and Killing Fields’, Journal of Imperial & Commonwealth History, 40 (2012), 699–701.
- 45.
Davison, ‘Early Modern Social Networks’, 477.
- 46.
See, e.g., Rees Davies, ‘The Medieval State: The Tyranny of a Concept?’, Journal of Historical Sociology, 16 (2003), 280–300; Peter Crooks, ‘State of the Union: Perspectives on English Imperialism in the Late Middle Ages’, Past & Present, 212 (2011), 3–42; Peter Crooks, David Green, and W. Mark Ormrod, ‘The Plantagenets and Empire in the Later Middle Ages’, in iidem (eds), The Plantagenet Empire, 1259–1453: Proceedings of the 2014 Harlaxton Symposium (Donington: Shaun Tyas, 2016), 1–34.
- 47.
Michael Bennett, ‘The Plantagenet Empire as “Enterprise Zone”: War and Business Networks, c. 1400–50’, in Crooks et al. (eds), Plantagenet Empire, 335–58.
- 48.
Jackson W. Armstrong, ‘Centre, Periphery, Locality, Province: England and its Far North in the Fifteenth Century’, in Crooks et al. (eds), Plantagenet Empire, 248–72.
- 49.
David Postles, ‘Personal Pledging: Medieval “Reciprocity” or “Symbolic Capital”?’, Journal of Interdisciplinary History, 26 (1996), 419–35.
- 50.
David Gary Shaw, ‘Social Networks and the Foundations of Oligarchy in Medieval Towns’, Urban History, 32 (2005), 200–22.
- 51.
Ian Forrest, Trustworthy Men: How Inequality and Faith Made the Medieval Church (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2018), esp. 225–26.
- 52.
Eliza Hartrich, ‘Charters and Inter-Urban Networks: England, 1439–1449’, English Historical Review, 132 (2017), 219–49; Eliza Hartrich, Politics and the Urban Sector in Fifteenth-Century England, 1413–1471 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019), ch. 3.
- 53.
Armstrong, ‘Centre, Periphery, Locality, Province’, 251.
- 54.
The quotation comes from Ahnert et al., Network Turn, 39.
- 55.
Ibid., ch. 2.
Acknowledgements
I am grateful to my colleagues Jayne Gifford, Joel Halcomb, and Samantha Knapton for their helpful comments on the text and their suggestions for improving its intelligibility to non-medievalists.
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Hartrich, E. (2022). Networks. In: Armstrong, J.W., Crooks, P., Ruddick, A. (eds) Using Concepts in Medieval History. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-77280-2_8
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