People, events and ideas of the British Civil Wars explored and explained by leading historians

The last major battle of the British Civil Wars was fought in and around the city of Worcester on 3 September 1651. With the 375th anniversary of this momentous event now upon us, we thought that the time is right for a reappraisal of the campaign and battle. In this, the second of two episodes, ... Read more

The last major battle of the British Civil Wars was fought out in and around the city of Worcester on 3rd September 1651. With the 375th anniversary of this momentous event now upon us, we felt that the time was right to ask for a succinct reappraisal of the campaign and battle. To do this, ... Read more

On 24 April 1648 a rioting crowd in the centre of the city of Norwich accidentally unleashed the largest explosion recorded in seventeenth-century England. Ninety-eight barrels of gunpowder were detonated; about three times as much as was hidden in cellars under Parliament by the notorious Gunpowder Plotters of 1605. Norwich magistrates’ subsequent investigation made the ... Read more

The city of Norwich, England’s largest provincial city during the 1640s, sat deep within the parliamentarian-controlled territory of the Eastern Association. It is sometimes wrongly dismissed as isolated from the fighting, and only marginally affected by the civil wars. Yet in this podcast, Andrew Hopper, Professor of Local and Social History at Oxford Lifelong Learning, ... Read more

Colchester in Essex was a hotbed of Puritanism in the seventeenth century. Unsurprisingly, the Essex town came out strongly for Parliament when civil war broke out in 1642. However, just six years later, the townsfolk would find themselves besieged – and systematically starved – by parliamentarian forces commanded by Thomas, Lord Fairfax. The siege, which ... Read more

Informing and informers were pervasive in successive governments’ attempts to maintain the security and stability of the English Republic between 1649 and 1660. Some members of the public felt that by informing on others they significantly and positively contributed to the security of the Interregnum Regimes. Indeed, many members of the public considered that informing ... Read more

In 1660, the Restoration of the Monarchy made the question of remembering and memorialising the English Revolution not only controversial, but also dangerous. In that year, the Act of Oblivion and Indemnity pardoned those other than the regicides who had rebelled against the crown during the Civil Wars and the Interregnum. The Act commanded the ... Read more

What was the landscape of rural England like, over which many of the battles of the Civil Wars were fought? How did these fields and woods shape the armies’ tactics and influence the outcomes of battles such as Naseby which would alter British, and even World, history? And how different is the remaining rural landscape ... Read more