Norwich’s ‘Great Blow’ of 1648

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 ‘mutiny’, ‘blow’ or ‘crack’, as contemporaries variously called it, the best documented riot of the century through the survival of 281 remarkable witness depositions.

In this podcast, Professor Andrew Hopper of Oxford Lifelong Learning, investigates how these legal records can advance our understanding of popular politics, royalism and urban culture in a (civil war) city on the threshold of the Second Civil War.

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War comes to England’s largest provincial city – Norwich

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.

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