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Remembering the English Civil Wars is the first collection of essays to explore how the bloody struggle which took place between the supporters of king and parliament during the 1640s was viewed in retrospect.
The English Civil Wars were perhaps the most calamitous series of conflicts in the country's recorded history. Over the past twenty years there has been a surge of interest in the way that the Civil Wars were remembered by the men, women and children who were unfortunate enough to live through them. The essays brought together in this book not only provide a clear and accessible introduction to this fast-developing field of study but also bring together the voices of a diverse group of scholars who are working at its cutting edge. Through the investigation of a broad, but closely interrelated, range of topics - including elite, popular, urban and local memories of the wars, as well as the relationships between civil war memory and ceremony, material culture and concepts of space and place - the essays contained in this volume demonstrate, with exceptional vividness and clarity, how the people of England and Wales continued to be haunted by the ghosts of the mid-century conflict throughout the decades which followed.
The book will be essential reading for all students of the English Civil Wars, Stuart Britain and the history of memory.
List of contents
Introduction: Remembering the English Civil Wars 1 Civilian Memories of the British Civil Wars, 1642-1660 2 'When the Scotts Army did March Thorow our County': Space, Place and Remembering in the English Civil War 3 History, Politics and Power: Shaping the Recent Past in Civil War Pembrokeshire 4 'Extreme Trials of Fidelity'?: Captain Bartholomew Gidley and Royalist Memories of the English Civil War 5 'All Forms Accustomed': Ritual, Precedent and the Past at the Coronation of Charles II 6 The Farnley Wood Plot and the Memory of the Civil Wars in Yorkshire 7 From Revolutionary Bulwark to Loyalist Bastion: The Restoration Refashioning of the London Artillery Company, 1660-85 8 'Memories of the Maimed': The Testimony of Charles I's Former Soldiers, 1660-1730
About the author
Lloyd Bowen is Senior Lecturer in Early Modern and Welsh History at Cardiff University, UK. His previous publications include The politics of the principality: Wales, c.1603-1642 (2007) and Family and society in early Stuart Glamorgan: the household accounts of Sir Thomas Aubrey of Llantrithyd, c.1565-1641 (2006).
Mark Stoyle is Professor of Early Modern History at the University of Southampton, UK. His previous publications include The black legend of Prince Rupert's dog: witchcraft and propaganda during the English civil war (2011) and Soldiers and strangers: an ethnic history of the English Civil War (2005).
Summary
The essays brought together in this first, edited collection to be devoted specifically to the memory of the Civil Wars, provides a clear and accessible introduction to this fast-developing field of study, bringing together a diverse group of scholars who are working at its cutting edge.
Additional text
"This wide-ranging, rich and innovative collection throws new light on how memories of the civil war were fashioned and refashioned by former participants and by their families, friends, allies and adversaries. The essays explore parliamentarians and royalists, individuals and institutions, and memories of place as well as people."
Bernard Capp, University of Warwick and FBA, UK
Report
"This wide-ranging, rich and innovative collection throws new light on how memories of the civil war were fashioned and refashioned by former participants and by their families, friends, allies and adversaries. The essays explore parliamentarians and royalists, individuals and institutions, and memories of place as well as people."
Bernard Capp, University of Warwick and FBA, UK
