The World Turned Upside Down - The British Civil Wars 1638-1651

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

Strategically located at the lowest bridging point of the River Trent, the market town of Newark in Nottinghamshire became the focus of one of the most sustained conflicts of the British Civil Wars. Staunchly Royalist, the town’s inhabitants were besieged by Parliamentary forces three times – in February 1643; again in February and March 1644; ... Read more

William Cavendish, Earl and later Duke of Newcastle, was the foremost of the King’s aristocratic Generals. By 1643 he’d raised the largest Royalist army of the First Civil War. He was granted greater powers than any other regional royalist commander, and was able to raise his own taxes and coin money. He also dubbed 12 ... Read more

Pantomime villains, box office gold and famous (or infamous) shadowy figures of fiction and non-fiction, pirates are familiar stereotypes in popular media. But these common images hide a critically important group of men (and occasionally women) who were socially, economically and politically significant in shaping the European maritime empires of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. ... Read more

The inseparable intimate relationship between politics, production and trade in the years preceding the Civil Wars has often been underplayed or even ignored. However, historians now increasingly recognise that the links between occupation and religious beliefs were fundamentally important in nurturing opposition to the King and his government in the years prior to the Civil ... Read more