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By Root 1359 0

others might well have drawn a different conclusion from the same observation.1 About the temper of the times, however, he seems to have been absolutely right. Nine days later, at Wem, in Shropshire, 1,200 clubmen gathered to defend their communities from the consequences of the war.2 In fact, at a number of points during 1645 the garrisons and field armies of both sides encountered local forces of this kind. Hereford had been besieged by 5,000 clubmen in March, while another group had effectively assisted the parliamentary army following Langport: capturing royalist horses, arms and fleeing soldiers, blocking the roads to Bristol and joining in the siege of Bridgewater. On other occasions in the western campaigns, however, Fairfax and Cromwell had met less friendly clubmen, particularly in Dorset, where the claimed neutrality of some clubmen was rightly suspected to be a cover for royalism.3

Although they differed from locality to locality and over time (after September 1645 it was clear that Parliament was going to win, and so a neutralist stance had a different meaning), this was recognizably a general phenomenon. Such mobilizations have been identified in four broad groups: in Shropshire, Worcestershire and Herefordshire, between January and March; in Wiltshire, Dorset and Somerset between May and September; in Berkshire, Hampshire and Sussex in September and October; and in south Wales and the border between August and November.4 In the end they posed little threat to the garrisons and field armies, and both royalists and parliamentarians asserted military control over them at different points, but fighting a war with such movements in train would clearly become complicated.

Comparatively little is known about the clubmen. In Shropshire the movement seems to have been prompted by the ill-discipline and depredations of royalist troops under Vangerris. Elsewhere there was a similar relationship between the activities of a particular commander and the organization of resistance – in Herefordshire it was Barnabas Scudamore’s troops and in Somerset it was Goring’s.5 More generally, of course, it was in counties which saw the most active campaigning by field armies that the clubmen were located: the counties enumerated above were all prominent in the campaigns of the previous two and a half years. But there are some puzzles. There were no clubmen in the counties of the east Midlands, Cheshire or Lancashire, where there was a lot of military activity, and in Worcestershire the clubmen originated from the area of the county least affected by the fighting.6

The initiative in Shropshire found echoes in meetings in Worcestershire in March 1645 at Woodbury Hill and Malvern, the same month that clubmen had laid siege to Hereford.7 By that time men were also being mobilized in Dorset and in May large numbers of men from Dorset and Wiltshire assembled at Gussage Corner, near Wimborne St Giles (Dorset). On 2 June there was another large meeting, at Castle Cary, Somerset.8 The Sussex movement arose from a meeting in September, but was over as an effective protest four days later.9 The numbers involved were impressive. In Berkshire it was claimed that 16,000 people had joined and in Wiltshire and Dorset it was claimed (and not denied) that 20,000 men could be raised within forty-eight hours.10 If remotely true, this compares favourably with the military mobilizations of the two field armies, which took much longer and did not reach numbers significantly beyond this.

Some of the movements seem to have had identifiable preferences between the two sides – those in mid-Somerset were probably pro-parliamentarian, as were those in the cheese-producing country of Wiltshire, while those on the Dorset downlands and in Worcestershire were fairly clearly royalist.11 Information about how the movements were mobilized is patchy, and there were undoubtedly differences among them. But, despite these differences, there were some underlying similarities in the ways that these movements harnessed traditions of communal self-government and applied