This is the second in a series of three posts about the Historical Association Conference, held in Birmingham on 10 and 11 May 2024.

After lunch on day 1, I went to hear Ann Hughes talk about the role and reputation of Birmingham during the civil wars. She acknowledged that this stage Birmingham was less important than Warwick or Coventry but it had plenty of craftsmen and industry and it was lightly governed. Charles was repulsed at the walled city of Coventry in 1642 when he was refused entry. During the summer it was secured for parliament and at this point “schismatics” flocked to the city. Coventry, therefore, has a reputation for being the town that shored up opposition to the king. Many of the crafts and industry in Birmingham were weapons based – guns and swords – and they refused to supply the royalists.

Birmingham also had a reputation as a ‘godly’ or Puritan town. In April 1643 Prince Rupert came with his troops to Birmingham and was accused of firing the town. The event was publicised throughout the country- in fact the civil war is the first major conflict to be covered in print. Both Birmingham and Rupert became really will known through print. Local people produced their own pamphlets. Ann suggested that the state initially became more powerful as a result of the civil war. Echoing the themes of Alexandra Walsham’s keynote, Ann commented that memories of what happened in Birmingham were contested and debated for many years, and the language of civil war politics was then used in the context of other quarrels.

Parliament asked for statements of what had been given in recompense to householders and what had been paid to parliament over the course of the war. People presented themselves as loyal supporters of parliament – they stress they give freely and early to Parliament. These gifts were described as loans but really it was taxation, but in the records they cross out “loaned” and suggest it was a free gift. But these records aer particularly revealing because people also make comments about other things, including accounts of costs created by other things such as quartering the Scots, or goods that were plundered by other forces. They are loss accounts and record people’s experiences of the war.

By the end of the seventeenth century Coventry is in decline while Birmingham flourishes and is growing. Ann noted that it is probably difficult to base this on their reputations from the civil war but of course Birmingham benefitted from the profits of arms manufacture.

Next up was a joint lecture on Women in the Crusades by Natasha Hodgson and Jonathan Phillips, who described crusading as a family commitment. Women had to give husbands permission to go and noble wives might go on crusade with their husbands, but lower status women were also there: they generally performed auxiliary roles running camps, lice picking and digging ditches. They argued, though, that in order to find out about women in the crusades, we need to expand our view. They suggested that we should think about the women impacted by the campaigns including separation of familles, violence against women, the financial burden borne by women and the women who ran estates (regencies) in their husbands’ absences. They pointed out, for example, that queens had a diplomatic role. They compared two women who had very different experiences but whose lives were thrown together during the 7th crusade. They suggested that we need to look at royal couples working together in what they term ‘corporate monarchies’ rather than as individuals.

For my last session of the day, I chose to go back to the Secondary Strand to hear Sarah Jackson-Buckley and Jessica Phillips talk on ‘From past to history: what does it mean to get better at interpretations? They asked why teaching interpretation is so challenging, suggesting that there isn’t enough context and we don’t teach enough about how history works. At the root of this is the difference between the past and history? The past is anything that has happened: it is not fact. History is created by someone – it is the aspects of the past that have been remembered and represented.

An ‘interpretation’ is something that has been thought about afterwards. For the purposes of the curriculum, it also has to be part of a full argument not just freestanding thought. Students writing the most basic answers to interpretations questions will suggest that there is a simple correct answer and it can be found. Their process as teachers is then to look at the role of the historian in creating the account and this often leads to students thinking that historians have a particularly biased views (there’s that word again) that they want to push so no-one is reliable. This, of course, is no more helpful than the starting position of everyone being right. Instead students need to evaluate historians’ positions. Influence is unavoidable but some interpretations are better than others and students need to be able to discern quality. What, then, makes a good quality claim? They argued that the best interpretations are open and honest about what they are trying to achieve. The historian is the active agent in the claims making process.

After this session, it was time for the Roundtable – more on that in my next post.