Final Reflection: Changing History

This will be my last post for this blog, and I just wanted to close out this record of my semester's research for Dr. Bucholz with a brief reflection on the work I've done.
I'll start, unsurprisingly, with history. History, as I have come to learn over my four years at Loyola, is a bit of a tricky word. It's tricky because it is one word that represents two very different concepts: history can mean the events of the past themselves (what happened, when it happened, who did it, etc.); and history as our record, story, and interpretation of those events. The work that I've been doing for Dr. Bucholz deals, I think, with both types, but particularly with the second notion of history, our records and presentation of the past. Generally, in the past, history was only concerned with the doings of the great or notable people: kings, generals, statesmen, religious leaders, great minds, genius artists, etc. Accordingly, past lists of officials of the English courts tended to focus mainly on the great people at court: the King, the Queen, various Princes and Princesses, as well as the various Earls, Duchesses, Knights, and Esquires who formed the social heart of the court. However, the goal of Professor Bucholz's project (and thus the focus of much of my grunt work) is to create a list of court officials that looks beyond just all these beautiful and noble people flitting around Westminster, Hampton Court, and St. James' and to uncover the hundreds of common working people who did much of the work that allowed the courts to function. This is in keeping with the fairly recent trends of social and popular history that have worked to shift the focus of history and historical study away from exclusive focus on the "great", and into a broader view of society as a whole, with a particular emphasis on those who have so often been left out of the historical picture: the workers, the servants, and the great common mass of humanity.
Thus, by charting the names and careers of all of the various working people who made up the courts (the laundresses, the grooms, the watermen, the footmen, and even our friends the turnbrooches) and ensuring their names are recorded for posterity along with the Earls and Princes and Dukes, I have helped create a new and different record of the past, have worked to bring a broader focus to the study of the court, and have, in my own small way, changed history.
I'd like to thank Dr. Bucholz for allowing me this excellent opportunity to help him in his research and to gain some actual experience in the field, and Dr. Roberts for his excellent work in coordinating and advising me and my fellow students throughout the course of this year's History 398 class.

Final Update (Reflection Forthcoming!)

I'm up a bit early on this, my last day of undergraduate classes, to provide one last update on my progress before closing this blog with a reflection piece on what I've done so far, which will be out a bit later this weekend. To my annoyance and disappointment, I discovered some serious formatting problems with my lists that I've had to spend rather a lot of time going back to fix. The lists still are not in the complete and final form in which they would be published/released, but after dealing with some of the format problems (involving a bunch of wrongly entered numbers of Establishment Books and some confusion on proper abbreviations) I think they're at least in a format that will be more useful to Professor Bucholz (or even me) in the future in constructing the more polished versions of the lists.  I've unfortunately not been left with enough time to get into the Notitiae that I've been hoping to get into for weeks now. I'm particularly frustrated with myself since I feel like if I'd not made the mistakes with the layout of the lists in the first place, I likely could have finished all of the raw info gathering and begun to get down to reorganizing the lists for presentation. Still, the raw data gathering was a substantial task that took me the better part of the time I've devoted to this project, and seeing the pages upon pages of names, dates, and positions is some satisfaction, at least. At this point, since I don't like leaving a job like this undone, I may ask Professor Bucholz for the Notitiae so I can put together the final (or at least a more final) version of the lists over the summer, but for now I'm just putting the last few touches on the lists for Caroline and George before sending them in for his evaluation. On that note, I've got to get back to work polishing up what I've got, so I'll close with this Interesting Historical Tidbit(!!!!!!!!) I came across several weeks ago while going through the lists of Prince George's Household, but was reminded of yesterday going over a section of the list:
The Turnbrooch
I came across this position in Prince George's kitchen staff, along with cool sounding positions like Yeoman Cook and Soyl-Carrier for the Kitchen. The Establishment Book listed two Turnbrooches, Thomas Carpenter and Timothy Poole. Their job, possibly the least interesting in the kitchen, was to sit around and turn the meat that was roasting on a spit, which took a while. Fortunately for Thomas and Timothy, they were compensated for their spit-spinning efforts with an annual salary of 30 pounds, which wasn't a bad salary at all for a working person in the 1710s.

A merry young Turnbrooch happily plying his craft.

Source for Turnbrooch Info
Image Source
Interesting Wage Comparison Source

April 14th Update

Due to some business in other classes and some travel, I haven't got as much done in the past two weeks as I might like, but I'm planning on putting the finishing touches on George's list so I can get around to getting the Chamberlayne lists from the Magna Britanniae Notitiae this week so I can complete the set of lists for Caroline and Fredrick soon! I'll try to get a post up this week before Easter break if I can get my hands on the Notitiae giving a bit more background on the source and how I'm going to use them in the lists!