Civilian Memories of the British Civil Wars, 1642-1660

This chapter discusses the imbalance, offering the first detailed account of civilian petitions to various local authorities in the period between the outbreak of the war and the Restoration. In 1646, Thomas Puller, from Christleton in Cheshire, lamented that he had 'lost all hee had at the burneinge and plunderinge of' the village, while Charles Gun, an eighty-year-old malt brewer from Warminster, noted that he had been 'robbed' by one Dunbarre and his associates. Neither quartering nor property loss, of whatever variety, was interpreted as acts of God. Such ambivalence is captured in the petition of the Wiltshire man Charles Gun, whose evocation of the loss of his goods 'robbed' was poised between an act of theft and an act of war. One difficulty that confronts historians of civilian experience is that the very notion of a ‘civilian’ is historically contingent. As Mark Grimsley and Clifford Rogers have noted, the term ‘civilian’ is anachronistic when applied the Middle Ages.