• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 1027 0

joined ‘all sorts of Londoners’, marching to the works ‘with all alacrity’. One reason may have been that the very fact of fortification increased anxiety in the City, of course. If much of the work was voluntary, however, this was still a huge financial commitment, paid for by the City, some of it remitted from the tax bill, but some raised by special extra taxes. This was clearly a pay day, albeit one made much in arrears, for victuallers, bricklayers, masons and carpenters as well as for the soldiers and military suppliers.13

One of the twenty-eight ‘works’ around London’s civil war fortifications

Much smaller places had to find the resources for large-scale works too: particularly well-studied are those at Exeter, where £4,400 was spent between November 1642 and August 1643, and to good effect too. Oxford and Newark (and Colchester in 1648) were made defensible in the face of increasingly heavy artillery bombardment.14 Fortified country houses and castles became the focus for protracted sieges too: Basing House resisted parliamentary sieges repeatedly before its bloody fall in 1645. Lathom House was similarly celebrated for the heroism of its defenders, and tied up significant numbers of parliamentary troops in the north-west.15

Garrison towns were fortified and defended, or seized, at massive cost to the local population. Bombardment and the storming of defended towns could be extremely destructive. Estimating the extent of property destruction is no less fraught with difficulty than arriving at estimates of casualties, but it seems that at least 150 towns and fifty villages sustained some damage. Reliable sources for estimating the scale of this damage are available for a sample of these places – twenty-seven towns and seven villages. If the loss in these places is representative of the experience more generally, then across the whole country 10,000 town houses, 1,000 houses in villages and 200 mansions or country houses were lost. This suggests that the war might have made 55,000 people homeless – 2 per cent of the population; that is the equivalent of the entire population of Norwich, Bristol and York combined.16 Obviously such a figure is only indicative of a general order of destruction, but in market towns sieges and associated property destruction were common, and much of it seems to have been concentrated in 1643.

As with the battlefield deaths it is perhaps better to talk of specific experiences than aggregated statistics. The siege of Gloucester was said to have resulted in the loss of properties worth £22,400, of personal goods worth £4,500 and another £2,000 through the deliberate flooding of surrounding fields for defensive purposes. The city had been assessed at £500 for the much-reviled ship money levies, although in 1638 that had been reduced to £180.17 Exeter may have lost one fifth of its houses. Leicester, stormed by royalists on 31 May 1645 and retaken by Parliament only a few weeks later, was said to have lost 120 houses, besides other property damage and plunder.18 It was not just the cities, of course: smaller communities, with fewer resources, might suffer too. Holt and Farndon, small towns either side of the Dee a few miles south of Chester, also suffered substantial damage. The castle at Holt commanded an important bridge over the Dee but the town itself was indefensible. Much property was destroyed, particularly, it was said, by the garrison as a preventive measure. After the Restoration it was claimed that 103 houses had been lost. In Farndon, similarly, houses were destroyed when Brereton forced a crossing of the river in November 1643, and then again in February 1645, following a parliamentary withdrawal when the garrison at Holt carried out further preventive destruction.19 Repair of the damage in many places did not begin until the 1650s, and lasted in some places into the 1670s and beyond. The repair of communal resources – hospitals, schools and almshouses – could take much longer and the damage inflicted on churches and other monuments might be irreparable. The memory of sufferings