One of the bloodiest moments in England’s history will be investigated in a new online project examining the human cost of the country’s Civil Wars.
Historians at the universities of Southampton, Nottingham and Cardiff, led by the University of Leicester, will examine how ordinary men and women remembered the seventeenth-century conflict and how victims of the war negotiated with authorities for charitable relief.
‘Welfare, Conflict and Memory during and after the English Civil Wars, 1642-1700’ is a four-year project funded by a major grant of over £800,000 from the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC).
The project’s main output will be a freely accessible website containing photographs and transcriptions of every petition for financial relief made by maimed soldiers and war widows in England and Wales, relating to losses suffered in the civil wars. It will be complemented with a separate educational site for schools, entitled: ‘Death and Survival in the Civil Wars’.
Professor of Early Modern History at the University, Mark Stoyle, commented:
The petitions submitted by wounded veterans and soldiers’ widows permit us to glimpse the human impact of the mid-seventeenth-century conflict in the most vivid and intimate detail.
The thousands of documents housed in individual record repositories across the country represent a dispersed national archive and by bringing them together and making them freely available online, the project will enable us to hear the voices of ordinary soldiers and widows en masse, for the first time.
Genealogists and family historians will also benefit from the website’s searchable list of claimants to military welfare, detailing sums awarded to them.
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