Gender, Class, and Labour in the Popular Construction of the Martial Self

When it comes to the interactions between labour and social identities in early modern England, the military profession might be one of the most complex objects of study. For much of English history, soldiery was not considered a profession at all: armies were only raised as and when needed and filled with men of all ages and occupational backgrounds, who would return to their regular lives and labour as soon as the job was done. As such, popular imaginings of military identities were shaped not around notions of occupation, but gender and class. Martialness was an inherent virtue of the highborn men who filled the upper ranks, a part of the wider ideal of a masculine and noble self, rather than an acquired quality around which to construct a labour-based identity.

However, the shifting nature of the English military scene during the seventeenth century paints a more complex picture. The gradual centralisation of military violence on the state, particularly surrounding the establishment of the first standing armies in 1645, slowly gave rise to a more clearly defined sense of professional martialness as an identity linked to occupation, not class. Drawing on contemporary military texts, pamphlets and ballads, this paper explores the significance of class and gender in constructing popular ideals of martialness as an occupational identity in seventeenth-century England. It shows how the rise of professionalism, in particular during the English Civil War, increasingly transcended class boundaries by braiding military identity with occupational identity.