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, shows how the city was far from peaceful during these years. He traces how Norwich’s citizens were drawn into supporting the parliamentarian war effort. The religious and political divisions in the city, sharpened by the experience of civil war, persisted well beyond the conflict and into the following century.
Related programme
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.
