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Justices had rivals, however, in the military administrations and, particularly in parliamentary areas, the proliferating committees. Many places saw the routine of local administration – quarter sessions and assizes – disrupted, and in Somerset, in fact, the county committee was the only effective authority.65 Junior military commands, committee positions or commissions such as that to William Dowsing to purify churches in East Anglia undoubtedly delivered considerable power to relatively obscure men. There was widespread friction between excise officers – salaried functionaries – and the established local officeholding population, a tension frequently expressed in accusations of corruption.66

Many wartime frictions arose from the new-found power of otherwise marginal or dependent men. Among those who left Myddle to fight was Thomas Formaston, ‘A very hopeful young man’, but there were also a number of men whose prospects in the village did not appear so rosy: Nathaniel Owen, whose ‘father was hanged before the wars and the son deserved it in the wars’; Richard Chaloner, bastard son of the blacksmith who had been partly maintained by the parish; William Preece ‘of the cave’, also known as Scoggan of Goblin Hole; and ‘an idle fellow’ whose name escaped Richard Gough when he came to write his history of the parish. Preece had served in the Low Countries and as a sergeant in the Trained Bands, but was lame as a result of falling out of a pear tree while trying to commit a robbery.67 Terrible as it was, military service may have been empowering for men such as these, as well as a way of making a living.

The existence of large armies may have been a help to apprentices, too. A Lambeth apprentice who ran away in June 1645 turned out to have gone via Kingston and Guildford to the army, returning in August with ‘our regiment of dragoons’. His master had gone to William Lilly to try to find him, and there was, perhaps, some relief behind the laconic note that he had returned ‘of his own accord’.68 There is certainly evidence that other apprentices had an advantage on their masters, for once. Matthew Inglesbye, apprenticed as a weaver for two years then ‘went forth a soldier for the parliament’, serving five and a half years. On his return he served his master for another ten months but, he complained, ‘the full term of his apprenticeship being now expired, and more’ he was denied his freedom. Thomas Sheppard left the service of William King, a baker in Northamptonshire, ‘taking notice of several ordinances and Acts of parliament to encourage masters to permit their apprentices to serve the parliament in arms’. In this case, having signed up, he was sued as a runaway, and he may not have been alone in seeing the armies as a way out. William Jennifer, in a similar dispute having left for service in Ireland in the later 1640s, was able to employ the language of national politics to his own advantage: he had served because of ‘his good affection to the parliament’ and also because he was aware of ‘a want of supplies for Ireland against those bloody, barbarous and cruel enemies’.69

Apprentices, it seems, could take the chance to escape their masters and even, having served in the wars, to claim their military service against their apprenticeship term. This was not the only means by which they were empowered, of course. There can be little doubt that the surging crowds of 1642, and those to come in 1647, gave power and licence to young men formally subject to strict patriarchal discipline. The term ‘roundhead’ referred to the enforced hairstyle of the dependent young man; there must have been an appeal in the opportunities offered by war: as in the ‘London Prentices’ who had humiliated the minister of Marsworth in the summer of 1640, ‘triumphing in contempt and derision’. These were perhaps moments when differences were submerged in a shared adolescent identity and licence.70

But this was not a faceless war. Soldiers were not simply