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Fear of division was probably more significant than the reality for, despite the purges and the increasingly partisan role of quarter sessions and assizes in the conflict, the general impression seems to be that county government continued to operate reasonably normally into the autumn.26 But there were reports of enclosure and other disturbances in which social insubordination seemed to be a clear threat. The rival mobilizations clearly affected village relations, and were often interpreted in the light of a popular anti-Puritanism or anti-Catholicism.27 Gentry figures remarked on the strain placed on the normal courtesies of county society by political differences. Fear of disorder and division, and of military conflict, was potent and drove some gentry to try to demilitarize their counties. In Derbyshire neither the Militia Ordinance nor the Commission of Array was implemented, as the gentry united in order to keep war out, and a similar process led to a long delay in implementing the Militia Ordinance in Suffolk and Norfolk. In Staffordshire the sheriff, Justices and Grand Jury agreed a declaration at the Sessions of the Peace on 15 November – three weeks after the first battle of the war. They made arrangements for a force ‘for the defence of the county’ motivated by ‘the many outrages, riots, routs, and unlawful assemblies that have been made and committed in divers parts of this county by certain persons in arrays and warlike manner’ to ‘the great fear of all the inhabitants in general’.28

This is usually referred to as neutralism but ‘neutralization’ is often a better term – it did not necessarily reflect the absence of local ideological conflict or dispute, but an attempt to contain its consequences. In Staffordshire, for example, Henry Bagot and Philip Jackson, both signatories of the pact in November 1642, were in arms against each other a year later.29 Neither was this ‘localism’ necessarily a reflection of a parochial view of the issues – there might be deep ideological divisions among men with well-informed views of national politics, but war might still seem worse than peace. Contrarily, allowing one set of partisans uncontested control of the county might also be better than fighting, even if there was a strong current of opinion against them. In Buckinghamshire, Essex, Herefordshire, Lancashire, Shropshire and Worcestershire the unchallenged triumph of either the Militia Ordinance or the Commission of Array seems to have been a means of preserving unity.30 Local ‘neutralism’ of these various kinds was not evidence of disengagement from the issues, or of the irrelevance of these questions to local life, but of the difficulty of reducing these questions to a choice between two sides, or fear of the consequences of settling them by force of arms.31

In Norfolk and Lincolnshire, as in Staffordshire, there were attempts to raise a third force, something that looks more like an authentic neutralism or local-mindedness, albeit in reaction to the activities of local partisans.32 In Lincolnshire, for example, there had been considerable unity of purpose behind the implementation of the Militia Ordinance in June and in July the influence of Lord Willoughby of Parham was reflected in a powerful declaration of the parliamentary position. But when the King appeared in person in the county there was also a powerful display of loyalty to him: there seems to have been a genuinely divided response in the county. It was this partisanship, and the threat of radicalizing resistance to fen drainage, which seems to have informed the development of armed neutralism:

The rein of government has been so slackened as now is cut in pieces amongst us, many men of desperate fortunes… live together without the acknowledgement of any law… They resist it in a warlike manner, accumulating all manner of insolencies, by adding to their rebellion violences upon men’s houses, goods and lands, burning, stealing and devastating of them, so as men of fortune had need to serve them against such spirits.33

Much of this is county-minded,