Project overview
This major collaborative research project, funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council, sets out to locate, to transcribe and to publish all of the surviving petitions for financial relief which were submitted to county quarter sessions courts and to other administrative bodies by men who were wounded during the English Civil Wars of the mid-seventeenth century, and by the widows of soldiers who were killed while fighting in that same conflict. The project team is made up of five academic historians who are experts in the history of the English Civil War and of its long and troubled afterlife. They are: Professor Andy Hopper (University of Oxford), PI; Dr David Appleby (University of Nottingham) Co-I; Dr Lloyd Bowen (University of Cardiff) Co-I; Professor Mark Stoyle (University of Southampton) Co-I; and Dr Ismini Pells (University of Oxford), Project Manager. Photographs and transcriptions of all of the extant petitions are currently being made freely accessible to all via the project website. In due course, the project team will also be publishing a series of five hard copy volumes which will include transcriptions of all of the surviving petitions from: 1) the North of England; 2) the Midlands; 3) Wales and the Marches; 4) South West England and 5) London and South East England. The documents which the project team have amassed provide a treasure trove of information about the ways in which ordinary men and women both experienced and looked back upon the English Civil Wars: the most devastating conflict in this country's entire history. Those same documents also allow us to gain a better picture than ever before of the way that local administrators right across the kingdom struggled to find resources to assist those who had been wounded or had lost family members in 'England's wars' during the the half century of internal peace which followed.
