‘The Accounts of the Kingdom’: Memory, Community and the English Civil War

Sometime in 1647 a Cheshire innkeeper recounted his troubles during the English civil war. William Summer of Over township had been forced to provide free-quarter to ‘Yorkshire souldiers under the Comand of Major George being 72 men and soe many horses one night when the seige was drawne off, by reason of prince Ruperts cominge to Beeston Castle anno domini 1645’. The horses had ‘eaten and destroyed’ four loads of hay worth ‘as I conceave’ £2, while their riders had cost him £2 in ‘meate, strong drinke, white bread, and cheese’; in all Summer estimated this involuntary hospitality at £5. On another occasion two soldiers with their horses had cost Summer 4s., besides 5s. ‘in strong drink for themselves and others which would have payd but he would not suffer them’. The social conventions of drink during a civil war were ambiguous: quartering two Cheshire men had cost Summer another 5s. for ‘strong drinke in an extraordinary way by the said souldiers which would neither pay not suffer others to pay’.¹ Being a constable in a parish subject to exactions from both sides was probably worse than being an innkeeper with ample space for quartering. Lott Keyte of Great Wolford, Warwickshire, described his personal losses at length in a statement that began by using ‘he saith’, as in a legal deposition, but evolved into a straightforward first person narrative: ‘he saith that upon the Lord Brooke his request a horse and furniture … did in the whole amount to’ £6. 5s. But

about August 1643 one Hastings Ingram then taking up arms for the parliament I did furnish him with four souldiers whereof one was my eldest sonne which soldiers did stand out in his house with him in their defence against part of the kings army till he was forced to yeald and they to fly the house being fired over their heads I did relieve them … to the value of £1.

These payments did not spare Keyte from forcible distraint when he failed to contribute to Warwickshire’s parliamentary forces:

In July 1645 by reason of my inabilitie and oft plunder by the king’s side, then having but three milch cowes for the maintenance of me and my family, and being not able to pay Contribution, John Ward, a corporal to Captain Wells tooke from me two milch cowes out of three worth £5 although I did give him a particular of my losses and the necessities I and my family was in.

Keyte’s personal losses were combined with his sufferings as constable responsible for organizing and collecting the general levies on the community. In June 1644, a ‘great part of Sir William Wallers army marching through or towne’, Keyte lost £2. 10s in ‘provision and things taken out of my house by them’, and spent £2 quartering ‘the rere of the army that night about 40’. He ‘kept two of Sir William Wallers sicke souldiers 13 days of which two one died at my house the charge, £1. 5s’. These were his personal charges, but in addition,

about the 26 of the said month I being then a constable a warrant came to me to presse two carts for Sir William Waller and by reason that a little before I was wounded in two severall places of my body {by the kings souldiers [inserted]} I was not then able to execute the said warrant but did send it to the tithingman to execute but being not executed one England a commissary came with other soldiers and tooke from me for the said service three horses and three paire of geeres worth at the least £9.

In 1643 and 1644 he explained ‘I did expend in the office of constable £4. 12s. more than I can receive of some of my neighbours which are unable and others which are not willing to pay me’.²

These pedantic but deeply felt personal experiences are amongst many thousands of narratives, some vivid, others more laconic, through which men and women recorded, and tried to make sense of, their experiences of a bewildering and burdensome civil war. Perhaps surprisingly, they are taken from financial accounts of payments and losses to the parliament’s armed forces and civilian administrators drawn up by local communities from the mid 1640s and preserved, in the main, in England’s National Archives.³ Parliamentarian legislation prompted the drawing up of parish accounts. A central accounts committee was established in February 1644, with powers to establish local sub-committees, while subsequent measures, in particular an ordinance of 27 June 1645, ‘For the better taking and expediting the Accompts of the whole Kingdome’, empowered the committees to issue warrants to local officials to ‘make strict and diligent inquiry in every parish of this Kingdome’ into what

money, Plate, Horse, Arms, Ammunition, Houshold-stuff, Goods of all sorts, Rents and Profits of Lands, Wood, Provisions of all kinde, and free-quarter have been received, taken, collected, raised, seized, or sequestred.

The accounts were to cover formal taxation, voluntary contributions, and enforced losses, notably through free-quarter and plunder, but not losses to the king’s forces; on the other hand, all parliament’s receivers were to be identified. Local officials were to enquire at every house in their jurisdiction, and anyone failing to present accounts was to be denied any benefit of the ‘Publick Faith’ for their contributions, so that there would be no prospect of compensation from the state.⁴

The immediate generation of these archives looks then like a classic example of record accumulation through state formation, encouraged by central authority, under the intensified military-fiscal pressures of an extensive civil war. The accounts are powerful evidence for the importance of the mid seventeenth century wars to the development of the English state.⁵ More precisely, however, in the sustained interactions between a central committee and local officials based on processes long established by the 1640s, the taking of accounts better exemplifies the complex, negotiated or integrated nature of English state formation as discussed by Michael Braddick and Steve Hindle. Within this framework local initiative is as important as central direction. As Paul Slack has emphasized, it was often through local and unofficial lobbying that information was collected while central government struggled to make effective use of the results.⁶ In any case, the compilation of local accounts and their survival in their hundreds in a central archive were not the outcome of a straightforward policy by a united central authority, but of partisan and ideological fragmentation within English political and bureaucratic structures. Royalist exactions were outside the remit of the accounts committees because the taking of accounts was not a product of the overarching division between royalists and parliamentarians but rather of bitter intra-parliamentarian divisions. The drive for full details of the costs of civil war was associated essentially with those moderate parliamentarians, increasingly summed up as ‘Presbyterians’, who were hostile to military domination and autocratic committees, and anxious to achieve a peace with the king that would restore more familiar forms of government.⁷ The chairman of the main, London-based accounts committee was the notorious critic of parliamentarian authoritarianism, the ‘Presbyterian’ William Prynne. The most energetic local sub-committees were usually found in counties, such as Warwickshire, where there was deep resentment of ruthless administration of the war. Sub-committeemen based in Coventry and Warwick worked tirelessly to encourage parishes to give in accounts; they were working documents, obsessively annotated and cross-referenced against the claims of soldiers and committee officials to challenge receivers’ accounts. Notes on Leek Wootton’s book record that it had been ‘examined concerning [the Warwickshire commanders] Colonell Purefoy, Colonel Barker, Collonell Boswell [Bosevile], Captaine Flower and Captaine Attoway’. The most energetic Coventry committeeman Robert Wilcox compiled a book of 134 pages listing in alphabetical order all the forces and commanders who were mentioned in accounts for parishes in two Warwickshire hundreds, with all the taxation, plunder, and free-quarter they had taken.⁸ These archives were thus generated through partisan and propagandist motives; they were a product of intra-parliamentary attempts to hold the wartime regime to account in moral and political, as well as financial terms.⁹

Most of the surviving parish accounts are now in the misleadingly named ‘Commonwealth Exchequer Papers’, SP28, in the National Archives, more properly the records of the Accounts Committee itself, along with Parliament’s Army Committee. Many more accounts must have been compiled than now survive, and while many random processes must have affected survival, the presence of a conscientious sub-committee was an important factor. For counties such as Warwickshire, Northamptonshire and Surrey, with surviving order books or other records of sub-committees, there are also numerous parish accounts, with some survivals for most parts of England. The discussions here are based on thorough analysis of Warwickshire accounts with more impressionistic research on other counties.¹⁰ Some 150 accounts survive for both Northamptonshire and Warwickshire where there were enthusiastic sub-committees, amounting in both cases to some three-quarters of the county’s parishes. In Northamptonshire printed ‘directions’ were sent to local officials while in Warwickshire warrants were issued from local sub-committees to high- and petty-constables who, quoting the ordinance, were charged with ensuring the communities in their jurisdiction brought in presentments or ‘bookes of accompts’ within twenty days, along with the names of any people who have not given in ‘theire bills’.¹¹

This vast body of financial material in the National Archives has been deployed, to great effect, by historians for some fifty years. Historians have used these archives to discuss the sometimes ramshackle, but ultimately effective parliamentarian war effort, to suggest something of the impact on the population, and to highlight the profound divisions within the parliamentary cause over the legitimacy of the measures taken to win the war.¹² But most previous work on these archives has been haunted by unease at their lack of precision or accuracy, by their being an imperfect ‘source of historical fact’ in Adam Smyth’s phrase. The partisan origins of the enterprise and the suspiciously broad numbers deployed by informants, with much recourse to such qualifiers as ‘about’ ‘at least’ or ‘as I conceive’ (as in my initial examples) limited their value as evidence for the political, economic or administrative impact of the civil war.¹³ There is more to these accounts, however, than factual information about the burdens of war or evidence deployed in factional disputes. Parish accounts were the product of complex political and social processes, and the meanings these archives had for their immediate creators transcended the motives of those prominent officials who solicited them. Furthermore, much recent scholarship has broadened our understanding of the social and cultural significance of accounting as much more than a discourse of ‘fact’. Taking ‘the accounts of the kingdom’ may have begun as a ‘top-down’ exercise, albeit a complex one, but the specific character of the archives owes more to the minor officials and often very humble informants who constructed them from ‘below’, fashioning the accounts as a means of recording and making sense of troubling experience; a way of remembering and marking loss and intrusion. Parish accounts, novel archives generated and preserved in intimidating abundance by parliament’s intrusive wartime administration, offer rewarding insights into the cultural, social and political history of the civil war.

The creation of these archives from above and below was only possible because of the vital importance of accounting for communities and individuals within early modern English culture, politics and society. Jacob Soll’s recent survey has established the significance of a culture of accounting and accountability, normative for individuals, communities and states.¹⁴ Considering the initiative from above, and despite the partisan origins of the call for accounting, it is a remarkable insight into the self-image of Parliamentarianism as honest public service that parliament legislated to hold its own officials and soldiers to account, facing openly the danger of private corruption. Key to the remarkable local response is the fact that by the 1640s, all men who had served as churchwardens, overseers of the poor, or constables had perforce to compile and deliver up accounts in crucial moments of interaction and accountability between the different levels of the increasingly active English state. Constables’ accounts were delivered ‘upwards’ to Justices of the Peace, but churchwardens’ accounts were audited by the inhabitants of the parish, no doubt usually the more substantial inhabitants, but in theory at least by all who chose to attend an annual meeting. A popular guide explained that churchwardens should give account ‘before the Minister and the parishioners’ and in Warrington, Cheshire, accounts were audited in the parish church ‘upon publike warning’ given by the Rector, and before the Rector himself and ‘divers others of the parish then assembled’. Auditing perhaps remained a literal as well as a symbolic description of the event, with churchwardens’ accounts read aloud.¹⁵ Local communities, then, were habituated to drawing up and assessing collective or general accounts, while for individuals, keeping good accounts was a moral and prudential duty as much as a practical necessity. Although precise manipulation of numbers was rare, sophisticated forms of numeracy were found across a broad social spectrum. Women as well as men were trained to keep accounts, and although most uneducated people used round numbers, sums with ‘cultural resonances’ that were markers of quality as much as quantity, these were effective in most contexts. Craig Muldrew’s discussion of inter-personal credit relations and Alexandra Shepard’s account of how witnesses in court estimated their own and others’ worth reveal a ‘pervasive culture of appraisal’ within English communities, where people were ‘adept’ at assessing the value of moveable goods.¹⁶ Valuations were offered for marriage negotiations and probate inventories, while the bills and receipts from tenants, traders, servants and craftspeople found in the archives of elite families, provide ample evidence of accounting processes in the everyday affairs of women and men.¹⁷ Beyond its practical functions, drawing up accounts had affinities with storytelling and could easily become a form of life-writing, where financial transactions offered a way to record and reflect on personal experience. As the literary scholar Adam Smyth has demonstrated, accounts are rarely bare lists, but rather ‘rhetorical, artful, partial’ narratives.¹⁸

The profound metaphorical and normative resonance of accounting, evoking concepts of justice and fairness, and perhaps offering the prospect of recompense, is amply demonstrated by the civil war parish accounts. Most obvious is the insistence of local people on the difficulty, significance and importance of the enterprise. The declaration of the four men charged with drawing up the accounts of Kings Cliff in Northamptonshire is typical: ‘Wee whose names are underwritten have endeavoured with much care & paines to make parfect our booke of Accompts soe neere as wee can, by giveing notice to all the parishe according to the warrant’, while in the same county, inhabitants of Wood Newton stressed their ‘diligent inquiry’ and the accountants from Ravensthorpe and Teeton had ‘faithfully collected’ as much information as possible although they acknowledged ‘in many places they be defective yet have we done our utmost indeavour and cannot possibly supply the defects thereof by reason that many of the accounts of the townes are lost and many men have forgotten upon some occasions what sumes they payd and to whom’. The minister and constable of West Mousley in Surrey were very specific: ‘we have done or best endeavour to enforme ourselves of the trueth of every particular but are not satisfyed of the trueth of the losses of John Osbourne, but in all the rest give in this our account’.¹⁹

Deeply felt motives and specific meanings given to their accounts by local people are revealed in a wide variety of scribal strategy and material form. In some counties, sub-committees sought to encourage systematic accounting through imposing a common framework, but even in these cases idiosyncratic elements intruded and in general the accounts reveal the particular and local purposes they were meant to serve, further testimony to the importance of the ‘local’ in English culture.²⁰ In the counties of the Eastern Association, villagers were asked to respond to forty-seven printed questions, but nonetheless the accounts include superfluous detail and a tendency to express indignation through personalized narrative. To an admittedly broad question covering miscellaneous losses, one inhabitant of St Giles Tidd in the Isle of Ely responded

that by the command of Collonell Palsgrave goeing to Dunnington fight one of his souldiers had a horse, bridle and saddle from Richard Browne of this towne, worth £3. or thereabout, the which horse the Colonell promised the owner should have him againe, or be paid for him but he never had either.²¹

In Warwickshire no common form was attempted, with the Warwick sub-committee simply asking that accounts were ‘fayrely wrytten in large sheetes of paper’.²² Consequently the material form of accounts from the county varies, as do the methods used to acquire the information and to present the accounts. The balance between collective summaries of total burdens, and detailed accounts of individual losses varied significantly, although listing formal taxation through collective totals with informal plunder and free-quarter itemized by individuals was a relatively common system. Some communities pondered the best approach: Packwood, Warwickshire, delivered a detailed account of individual losses to the sub-committee while the local gentleman who led the process kept an abstract — ‘a brief collection of the substance of the Accounts delivered to the Comittee’ — amongst his own papers.²³ This version was organized through categories of levy. Most accounts were presented in specially prepared books, fairly written by one or more scribes, but in a variety of shapes and sizes. Coventry’s wards delivered bound volumes in elaborate script while smaller, poorer communities offered flimsier folded paper books. Other relatively prosperous towns such as Rugby and Warwick, however, simply bound together individual original bills.²⁴ The township of Butlers Marston combined two different attempts at accounting, with distinct material forms and descriptions of their accounts. A small book with the title ‘A Just Note’ is now bound together with a folio book headed as a ‘presentment’, while Bubnell called their single book their ‘information, answer and account’, covering all the bases.²⁵

The various headings (‘bills’, ‘presentments’) offer hints as to how the accounts were collected from each household. In all communities a small group of men including recent constables were entrusted with their compilation, and some may have been written up from individual bills. Many exhibit clear signs that oral testimony was taken down by a scribe, sometimes attested to by signatures or marks. As in many other archives, there are traces of orality within the written record, testimony of the overlap and interaction between oral and written forms of communication.²⁶ The example of Lot Keyte’s first person testimony has already been given, and in many villages, as in Church Lawton, Cheshire, the inhabitants were sworn as if providing a deposition in court, attesting to their accounts with a signature or a mark. In this community, scribal formulations varied with individual circumstances and first person forms disrupted the use of the third person or the passive voice. While the gentleman John Lawton had spent more than £60 on ‘mayntayninge men upon servis for the publike’, his poorer neighbours, including John Poole and Hugh Hall, noted their own expenses ‘for going upon servis for the publick’, while Hall also insisted on his costs ‘for shewing [shoeing] their horses and other worke I did for them, And was not payd in all 3s’.²⁷ At Over in Cheshire one or two of the accounts were corrected on the page, suggesting the immediate transcription of oral testimony.²⁸

Illiteracy was no barrier to giving in an account and, of course, during the civil war the social reach of formal taxation was significantly extended, while in contested regions all villagers with any space at all in their homes would find themselves giving bed and board to men and horses, and anyone who had goods might suffer plunder. A small minority of parish accounts cover only subsidy men and traditional taxpayers, but most include the accounts of a relatively broad range of men and women, beyond the substantial ‘middling men’ who were the usual driving force behind the collection of information.²⁹ In Church Lawton, Cheshire, the losses of 42 individuals (presumably householders, although there were only two women) were listed, compared to 58 households in the 1660 poll tax.³⁰ Farnborough in Warwickshire claimed their accounts included the ‘charges and losses of every particular Parishioner’, while in Long Lawford and Abbots Salford in the same county, the accounts of ‘cottars and labouring men’ were overtly included, and Long Lawford’s account included almost all households.³¹ Accounts might place a mistress and servant side by side on the page as in Rowington where the prosperous Catholic widow Ursula Betham claimed total losses of over £650, while her servant Henry Greswold put his mark against a total of under £9.³² These archives are amongst the most socially inclusive we have for early modern England, with humble people present as narrators of significant experiences alongside their neighbours.

Moving from the general character of these archives to an exploration of how accountants recollected and defined their experiences during a painful conflict, we can draw on what Andy Wood has described as the productive, eclectic ‘mess’ that is memory studies, as well as connecting the evidence of parish accounts with the more specific, emerging scholarship on memory and the civil war.³³ There are some difficulties here. All disciplines concur on the ‘social nature of individual remembering and forgetting’ but this is not the same as collapsing individual or autobiographical memory into collective or social memory.³⁴ Early modern work on memory tends to privilege the long-term and the communal, whereas memories of the civil war in particular were both individual and collective, fleeting and more enduring, expressed in literary works of history and biography and through partisan commemorations, or experienced in specific places and on individual bodies.³⁵ Memorialization through loss and contribution was both communal and individual. In considering and contesting overall liability for taxation, for example, all inhabitants had shared interests in lowering burdens, and in rating disputes they often collectively appealed to custom and precedent, although when it came to individual payments, precedents could become fragmented and divisive.³⁶ Within these civil war accounts, then, we find echoes of memorial practices found in other contexts, as well as more particular, ambiguous attempts at normative comment.

It was not easy to remember and record the unsettling experiences of civil war. This might have been (as contemporaries claimed) for practical reasons, but it may also reveal, as suggested for other early modern conflicts, a profounder reluctance or struggle in the face of dislocation and loss. Memorialization (‘memory-work’) took effort, and perhaps accounting as a form of remembering was especially prone to risk ‘the ever-present possibility of forgetting’.³⁷ Examples of hesitation and excuse abound. The accounts of Barnwell (Northamptonshire) were headed: ‘what can be found out and remembered in answer to the Acts Ordinances and Orders of this present Parliament’, while in Long Lawford the accounts began with items ‘in general which could not be remembered in particular’. In Temple Grafton (Warwickshire) the current constables had ‘diligently enquired through all the parish concerning the premises given us in charge, and so far as we can learn or be informed of the same by the inhabitants of the same’ they concluded that all sums levied by the parliament had been duly paid to the appropriate receivers. But many former constables were absent or dead so their successors were unable to give ‘an exact account’.³⁸ Individuals were similarly uncertain: in Southam, Warwickshire, the royalist cleric Francis Holyoake itemized costs of £47. 4s. 6d. for free-quarter, but insisted on ‘at least £40 which I cannot now remember being soe long since and noe notice taken of the number of souldiers and their horses which have bin quartered with me at severall tymes and I never received penny for any quarter’.³⁹ Testimony, as we have seen already, was hedged with qualification: ‘soe farr as I can give in to my knowledge’; ‘according to my beste remembrance’; ‘as neare as I can’. Neighbours came to each other’s aid: Robert Clerke of Willoughby ‘could give noe Account neither for Tax nor any thing else’, but ‘wee whose names are subscribed doe testifie that he hath paid all Taxes according to the proporcon of his Lands which doth amount by others Accounts for their yeard Lands & pole mony to £15. 2s. 6d’.⁴⁰ Wealthier or well-organized people might have kept warrants or made a note of dates, particularly for formal taxation; where tenants on ‘rack’ or economic rents paid tax landlords were obliged to deduct the sums from rents due, and these transactions could leave archival traces. In some well-administered or relatively peaceful regions soldiers might leave receipts for the quarter received.⁴¹ But useful paperwork might easily be lost. In Wibtoft (Warwickshire) the constables could not be sure the 1640s subsidies had been paid ‘by reason of the death of our then constable and the losse of many of our noates and papers by occasion of theis calamitous distractions’, and this response (like that of Ravensthorpe and Teeton quoted earlier) suggests that beyond the practical difficulties of remembering details of losses lay a more profound connection between the calamity of civil war and the fracturing of the archival record.⁴² The creation of the most complete and authoritative paper record was, in turn, a way of coping with or domesticating this calamity.

Other aspects of the accounts suggest attempts to normalize disruptive and alien experiences. When listing the costs of free-quarter it was necessary, where possible, to identify the troops who took it, for the sake of verisimilitude, and perhaps in the hope of recompense, but these troubling intrusions of strangers into people’s homes were often ‘remembered as communicative acts made within certain social situations’, much as Muldrew has described more routine peacetime credit transactions.⁴³ Some accountants discriminated between quarter given freely and that for which recompense was expected, perhaps because troops behaved well or made some payments. John Wildbore of Kings Cliff in Northamptonshire listed ‘his Contributions, loanes, taxes and freequarter for the use and service of the Kings Majestie and Parliament … out of his small estate of about a yard and a halfe of Copyhold land’, formulations to which we shall return. He had quartered many Eastern Association soldiers, including the Quarter Master of the Earl of Manchester’s army, when those forces were ‘passing to & from Yorke’, ‘which he freely gave besides provisions sent to others in the feilde’; and for other men from nearby garrisons including Crowland, Huntington and Leicester ‘he chargeth not’. Northampton and Rockingham men were another matter. Wildbore emphasized costs of 20s. for which he was ‘paid nothing’; and he mentioned in particular ‘Captaine Harpers souldiers in Anno 1643 1644 came twice in the night with five horses and five men and put me in feare. And divers other times in the daie time and never paid any thinge to the damage of xxs’.⁴⁴

Many accounts of free-quarter offered details that were superfluous or irrelevant in strict accounting terms, but these additions personalized the encounters, suggesting again a real social encounter and ‘a sense of significance or value beyond the financial’.⁴⁵ Margery Holland, a widow of Over and her son George had quartered: ‘1 foot man a drumer under Captain Booth 1 night: 6d’., while John Bagshaw of Long Lawford had quartered six footmen for one night ‘was going they said the went to meete the Queenes armey of Blackamoores’, 4s.⁴⁶ Soldiers as well as their commanders were often named. In Wisbech, Cambridgeshire, Widow Taylor remembered sheltering ‘Thomas Freeman, a sick soldier hurt against Croyland’, and Symon Gumbye had quartered two soldiers under Major Hambleton, ‘vizt. John Heires and Richard Earne which lay sick of the small poxe in his house from the 15 of Aprill to the 29 of May following’.⁴⁷

Memorialization of civil war experience was often connected to specific places and particular things, as we should expect from general studies of memory. In discussing the Clubmen’s resistance to military exactions, Michael Braddick has written of ‘a sense that the war was something external to local life’,⁴⁸ and these accounts suggest something similar but perhaps more complex. Accounts of free-quarter and plunder become narratives of soldiers on the move, to and through the place of account, of Waller coming to Warwickshire, or Manchester ‘passing to and from York’ through Northamptonshire. Villages are no longer bounded, secure places, but vulnerable thoroughfares connected against their will to a threatening wider context.⁴⁹ Robert Manyer, a cottager of Abbots Salford explained that ‘when William Waller went by us it cost me in free quarter and grass’, 10s. Cheshire villagers noted the losses to Scots soldiers heading north ‘Linnens taken by the Scots at the marchinge of ye Army throwge our County’, coming from Hereford towards Yorkshire. Warwickshire and Worcestershire people noted the earlier depredations of the Scots on their way south towards Hereford.⁵⁰ Nearby and familiar places were newly identified as militarized, politicized and dangerous sites, of battles, garrisons or committee headquarters. Widow Crafts of Long Lawford, had sent provision worth 3s. ‘to the heath to the yearle of Essex when he cam downe first from London 8 gallons of drinke one lofe of Bread and 2 cheeses’. For William Summer, my first example, and many of his neighbours in Over, events at the contested garrison, Beeston castle, some ten miles away, fixed losses in time. Ralph Bostocke of Over described how ‘Captain Buckley at the retreat from Beeston Castle kept a horse gard over against the house of the said Raffe Bostockee and did eate and distroy with their horses in Corne and hay and burned my fyre wood, when Prince Rupert relieved Beeston Castle value £1’.⁵¹ Jeremy Brownesall of Church Lawton described a range of places in Cheshire, centring his experience around the headquarters of the county’s wartime administration at Nantwich. His service for ‘the public’ involved ‘First, to Namptwitch the day that Whitchurch was taken, one daye’, 8d.; ‘another time to Namptwiche when seige was first layd to Chester two dayes’, 1s. 4d.; and ‘to Sandbach Heath two days at the Randezvous 1s. 4d’.⁵² Battles were an obvious point of reference. Randle Mariot of Hill Morton, Warwickshire, remembered he had been ‘plundered … the same weeke that Naseby fight was’ while ‘Rowton battle’ on the outskirts of Chester, was a useful aid to memory in Over. Another Over man had forgotten the names of many commanders but he did recall the quarter of four men and five horse ‘when they came from Mungomery Battell’.⁵³

If place was one reference point for recollecting the experience of war, personal possessions were another crucial source of meaning. Widow Crafts’ insistence on her ‘one lofe of Bread and two cheeses’ sent to Essex, Summer’s white bread and cheese, and Bostock’s fire wood are examples of the widespread compulsion to provide detailed, personal descriptions of precious lost possessions, linens, plate, cattle, clothes, dishes, food, hay and grass. Muldrew and Shepard have demonstrated how ‘social identity in early modern England was rooted in the possession of moveable estate’, essential to creditworthiness and credibility in court alike.⁵⁴ The specific goods themselves mattered as much as their estimated cash value. They mattered emotionally, as in other conflicts, as crucial markers of loss. In the depositions collected from Protestant settlers in Ireland after 1641, many informants listed their lost possessions in copious detail whereas officials considering circulation of the material crossed out these lists, leaving only the bare cash total. More recently, French Jews returning from deportation in 1945 mourned their ‘lost lives through petitioning … for restitution of the contents of their homes’ — as in England this process began as a response to a bureaucratic demand, but ‘rarely in fact complied with it’; as in England the petitions included irrelevant or superfluous detail and lapsed into narrative.⁵⁵ A few civil war examples must suffice. Thomas Webb of Long Lawford listed ‘a boke the practis of pietie and a pare of spures and a table napkin a pare of gloves and a band and a handcarcheve’. A neighbour had lost a copy of the same book to Waller’s soldiers, along with ‘a hat and a jackit Coat and a new pare of stocings for a man’. In a society where many goods were second hand it was important to many poorer people to stress the loss of brand new possessions. A Coventry labourer, Richard Lakins insisted that the goods ‘plundered by the Scots’ were all new, a new belt, a new pair of shoes and a new comb, as well as a knife.⁵⁶ Robert Whittington of Over had been plundered by local forces of twelve cows, three heifers and one calf. This was a very substantial loss, but the emotional edge is seen in Whittington’s memory that they had also taken ‘a cheane which the Calfe was tyed with’. Henry Greswold of Rowington, the servant to Ursula Betham, noted the loss of money in his purse, his clothes, and his bed linen but he also mentioned the plunder of a bottle, and that his hat, worth an improbable 6s 8d, had been taken off his head.⁵⁷

Humphrey Greswold was describing an assault. Like John Wildbore’s aside that he had been ‘put … in feare’, or the comment by John Burton, a Coventry tiler, that the Scots ‘violently took from him’, clothes, a kettle and strong beer valued at £8. 4s., the accounts provide some oblique evidence of the violence that sometimes marked encounters between troops and civilians. Given the scholarly consensus on the significant loss of life in the English civil war, the relative absence of descriptions of violence might be thought strange. The deaths reported are those of sick quartered soldiers.⁵⁸ The accounting genre did not lend itself to complaints about physical assault, but evasion may reflect a deeper reluctance to confront horrors directly. In recollections of suffering in contemporary German conflicts, brutality was often presented as something that happened elsewhere, perpetrated by foreigners.⁵⁹ Neither was there room for overt political commentary, and it is important to remember that these accounts were delivered to parliamentarian authorities. Nonetheless there is much normative and emotional language amongst the bare listings of taxes, quarter, and plunder, and subtle variations in language reveal contrasting evaluations of wartime experience. Atherstone, a small town in east Warwickshire, offered a self-serving, overstated contrast between the king’s party and the parliament from 1643, claiming that Henry Hastings, the royalist commander at nearby Ashby, had demanded the payment to his forces of £120 assessed on the town by the parliament, ‘threatening if they should refuse to pay the money to plunder the towne’. He collected only £60, while ‘not long after in the same yeare 1643 Collonell Purefoy [the local parliamentarian leader, and their near neighbour] knowing the poverty of the Towne and how willing they have bin to serve the state with men and horses was happie to accept of a tax of sixtie pounds’. The same charge could thus be presented very differently.⁶⁰ However, extraneous detail might express indignation rather than ingratiation. Wildbore’s mention of his small estate is one example, while the same Northamptonshire account suggested resentment of the excise in the descriptions of some of its ‘victims’: ‘Katherine Clare, widdow, a poor victualer’ had paid 12s. 4d.; John Kytt, another victualler ‘a poore man with a great charge of children’, 13s.⁶¹

The accounts reveal that the words plunder and plundered, relatively recent coinages in England, had become deeply embedded in the language of local people. Likewise, there was frequent, if carefully calibrated, recourse to the language of the state and the public service, so that particular individual and local experiences were framed by more general, national constructions. Northamptonshire accounts compiled in 1647 have distinctively moderate formulations. Kelmarsh described their losses as ‘for the use of the King, Parliament and State’, while Wildbore in Kings Cliff, perhaps more pointedly listed his losses ‘for the use and service of the Kings Majestie and Parliament’.⁶² Gosford Street in Coventry, in contrast, gave in ‘The informacion of divers inhabitants … consarning such payments as have bin paid for the publick use of the states servis’. Birmingham accountants emphasized that they had given freely for the service of the state, a sign perhaps of widespread parliamentarian commitment. In Over, the concept of the state’s service seems to have been more narrowly focused. There individuals described their losses as for the parliament’s soldiers or the parliament’s party, hinting perhaps at their partial or factional nature, whereas sequestered rents were listed generally by collectors as ‘for the use of the state’.⁶³ Most strikingly, despite frequent reference to sides and parties, there is never a mention of civil war. These were rather ‘calamitous distractions’ or, more commonly, ‘troublesome times’.⁶⁴

Recording and remembering civil war was difficult and painful; indeed the desire to forget, later encouraged by the Restoration Act of Oblivion, can already be seen by the mid 1640s. Nonetheless, invited by the ‘state’ to enumerate their losses to the parliament, English local communities responded with enthusiasm, offering individuals the opportunity to recount the personal impact of the war alongside overall calculations of community burdens. These financial archives show the complex impact of war on individuals and communities and the fragmentation of memory. The war might be understood collectively as an intrusion into ‘our’ county, our town, or as a transformation of nearby heaths and towns, but it was also experienced very differently by individual households in terms of tax paid, soldiers quartered in the their houses, and goods lost. And individual experiences struggled for meaning against and within more obviously political frameworks of the king’s or the parliament’s party, and complex understandings of the state’s or the public service.

There are some obvious similarities between the parish accounts and the depositions collected by the English authorities following the Irish rising of 1641, although here the investigators were concerned with military activity and violence against civilians as well as material losses.⁶⁵ Soldiers in the English civil war were encouraged to remember and recount their service and its impact on their bodies through financial claims for arrears or pensions, while Dutch communities and French convents sometimes memorialized their experiences of conflict through detailed accounts of material loss within petitions for recompense.⁶⁶ All this suggests the rich potential offered for narration and memorialization by ‘accounting’, in a broad sense. The English parish accounts have some distinctive features, however. They integrated individual and communal experience, and were extremely unusual in their focus on the burdens of the authority soliciting the accounts rather than on losses to the enemy. This may have had the unintended consequences of fixing parliamentarian exactions and military burdens more firmly in popular memory. What remains most striking, however, is the way in which a partisan, bureaucratic order ‘from above’ attracted such an enthusiastic response ‘from below’, where a demand for factual information was answered through detailed, emotionally charged narratives of personal experience. This is evidence for the distinctive character of English (parliamentarian) state building, founded on the integration of the local and the central established over the previous century; but above all it reflects the determined agency of thousands of people whose lives had been disrupted by civil war.

¹ British Library, London (hereafter BL), Harley MS 2126, fo. 12^r. In quotations I have silently extended abbreviations.

² The National Archives, London (hereafter TNA,) SP/28/182, pt 3, ‘Woolverd’, 3–4.

³ Few of the Cheshire accounts seem to have been delivered to the central committee of accounts, and some found their way into local antiquarian collections.

⁴Acts and Ordinances of the Interregnum, 1642–1660, ed. C. H. Firth and R. S. Rait (London, 1911), 387–91, 717–22, <http://www.british-history.ac.uk/no-series/acts-ordinances-interregnum/pp717-22 > (accessed 4 June 2015). The term ‘parish’ accounts has been used for convenience, although in practice they were drawn up according to constabulary divisions of parishes and townships.

⁵ The comparatively brief treatment of England in the mid seventeenth century in Richard Bonney (ed.), The Rise of the Fiscal State in Europe c.1200–1815 (Oxford, 1999) can be contrasted with M. J. Braddick, The Nerves of State: Taxation and the Financing of the English State 1558–1700 (Manchester, 1996); and M. J. Braddick, State Formation in Early Modern England c.1550–1700 (Cambridge, 2000). See also James Scott Wheeler, The Making of a World Power: War and the Military Revolution in Seventeenth-Century England (Stroud, 1999).

⁶ Braddick, State Formation in Early Modern England; Steve Hindle, The State and Social Change in Early Modern England, 1550–1640 (Basingstoke, 2000); Paul Slack, ‘Government and Information in Seventeenth-Century England’, Past and Present, no. 184 (Aug. 2004), especially 57–9; Paul Griffiths, ‘Local Arithmetic: Information Cultures in Early Modern England’, in Steve Hindle, Alexandra Shepard and John Walter (eds.), Remaking English Society: Social Relations and Social Change in Early Modern England (Woodbridge, 2013).

⁷ Donald Pennington, ‘The Accounts of the Kingdom, 1642–1649’, in F. J. Fisher (ed.), Essays in the Economic and Social History of Tudor and Stuart England (Cambridge, 1961); Jason Peacey, ‘Politics, Accounts and Propaganda in the Long Parliament’, in C. R. Kyle and Jason Peacey (eds.) Parliamentary Committees: Political Power and Public Access in Early Modern England (Woodbridge, 2002), where the sub-committees are seen as ‘weapons in the counter-revolution’ (p. 68); Ann Hughes, Politics, Society and Civil War in Warwickshire, 1620–1660 (Cambridge, 1987), ch. 6; Ann Hughes, ‘Parliamentary Tyranny? Indemnity Proceedings and the Impact of the Civil War’, Midland History, xi (1986).

⁸ TNA, SP28/183/33; SP28/186, pt 3; Hughes, Politics, Society and Civil War in Warwickshire, 243–6.

⁹ Cf. Slack, ‘Government and Information’ for the partisan motives for record-keeping.

¹⁰ Order or letter books survive for Northamptonshire, Hertfordshire, Surrey and Warwickshire: TNA, SP28/254. For lost accounts see a pamphlet based on 160 Herefordshire returns: Miles Hill, A True and Impartiall Account of the Plunderings, Losses and Sufferings of the County of Hereford by the Scottish Army (London, 1650); few originals for this county remain in TNA.

¹¹ Northamptonshire accounts are mostly in TNA, SP28/171–174; Warwickshire, SP28/182–186. I first examined the Warwickshire accounts forty years ago: Hughes, Politics, Society and Civil War in Warwickshire, 258. See, for example, TNA, SP28/ 172, pt 4 (Barnwell, Northamptonshire); Shakespeare Birthplace Trust, Stratford upon Avon (hereafter SBT), DR3/712, warrant to Rowington, 16 January 1647, and TNA, SP28/185, fo. 181^r.

¹² See, for example, The Committee at Stafford 1643–1645, ed. D. H. Pennington and I. A. Roots (eds.) (Staffordshire Record Society, 4th series, i, 1957); Clive Holmes, The Eastern Association in the English Civil War (Cambridge, 1974); John Morrill, Cheshire 1630–1660. County Government and Society during the English Revolution (Oxford,1974); Philip Tennant Edgehill and Beyond: The People’s War in the South Midlands (Stroud, 1992); Philip Tennant, The Civil War in Stratford-upon-Avon (Stroud, 1996); Peter Edwards, Dealing in Death: The Arms Trade and the British Civil Wars (Stroud, 2000); Ben Coates, The Impact of the Civil War on the Economy of London 1642–1650 (Aldershot, 2004).

¹³ See, for example, Hughes, Politics, Society and Civil War in Warwickshire, 245, 255; Pennington, ‘The Accounts of the Kingdom’; Adam Smyth, Autobiography in Early Modern England (Cambridge, 2011), 96.

¹⁴ Jacob Soll, The Reckoning: Financial Accountability and the Making and Breaking of Nations (London, 2014).

¹⁵ William Sheppard, The Offices and Duties of Constables (London, 1641), 110–11, 226, 328–32 for the accounting duties of local officials; 332, for churchwardens’ accounting (I owe this reference to Alexandra Shepard, Accounting for Oneself: Worth, Status and the Social Order in Early Modern England (Oxford, 2015)); Cheshire County Record Office, P316/5448/204 (Warrington, 1632); Eamon Duffy, The Voices of Morebath: Reformation and Rebellion in an English Village (New Haven, Connecticut, 2001), 22–4, for reading churchwardens’ accounts aloud.

¹⁶The Business and Household Accounts of Joyce Jeffreys, Spinster of Hereford, 1638–1648, ed. Judith Spicksley (British Academy Records of Social and Economic History, New Series, xli, Oxford, 2012); Jane Whittle and Elizabeth Griffiths, Consumption and Gender in the Early Seventeenth Century: The World of Alice le Strange (Oxford, 2012); Keith Thomas, ‘Numeracy in Early Modern England’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 5th series, xxxvii (1987); Craig Muldrew, The Economy of Obligation: The Culture of Credit and Social Relations in Early Modern England (Basingstoke, 1998), 62–7; Shepard, Accounting for Oneself, 2–11, 27–8, 35–8, 45–6, 82–5, 98–9 (pp. 35, 303 are quoted).

¹⁷ In the Le Strange family, Alice kept her own detailed accounts, but her husband relied on the bills submitted by tradesmen and servants (Whittle and Griffiths, Consumption and Gender, 28–30); the financial papers kept by the Temples of Stow include numerous bills and receipts from tenants, craftspeople and tradespeople: Henry E. Huntington Library, San Marino (hereafter HEL), STT Accounts, Boxes 22–24.

¹⁸ Muldrew, Economy of Obligation, 64; Smyth, Autobiography in Early Modern England, ch. 2, p. 61 quoted.

¹⁹ TNA, SP28/171, fos. 649, 600; SP28/172, pt 4; SP28/179.

²⁰ Andy Wood, The Memory of the People: Custom and Popular Senses of the Past in Early Modern England (Cambridge, 2013), 10.

²¹ TNA, SP28/152, fo. 28^r.

²² SBT, DR3/712.

²³ TNA, SP28/184, pt 4; Warwick County Record Office (hereafter WCRO), CR2981/6/4/1.

²⁴ Coventry: TNA, Bishop Street Ward, SP28/182, with a parchment cover;Gosford Street Ward, SP28/174, pt 1, has a cardboard cover. High Pavement Ward, Warwick: SP28/184, pt 1; Rugby: SP28/186, pt 3. The Northamptonshire town of Maxey included decorative patterns in its beautifully written account: TNA, SP28/172, pt 1.

²⁵ Both in TNA, SP28/183.

²⁶ Wood, Memory of the People, 249–56; Adam Fox, ‘Remembering the Past in Early Modern England: Oral and Written Traditions’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 6th series, xxiv (1999).

²⁷ BL, Harley MS 1943, fos. 34, 28–9, 36.

²⁸ BL, Harley MS 2126, fo. 5^v: ‘Memorandum that the two lynes above written weare mistaken for proposicon money concerning the above named John Marsh’.

²⁹ Griffiths, ‘Local Arithmetic’, 115.

³⁰Church Lawton Manor Court Rolls, 1631–1860, ed. Guy Lawton (Record Society of Lancashire and Cheshire, cxlvii, 2013), 264–7.

³¹ TNA, SP28/182 (Farnborough); 183/33 (Long Lawford); 185, fo. 293 (Abbots Salford); Hughes, Politics, Society and Civil War in Warwickshire, 260–2.

³² TNA, SP28/185, fo. 49^r.

³³ Wood, Memory of the People, 23.

³⁴ Wulf Kansteiner, ‘Finding Meaning in Memory: A Methodological Critique of Collective Memory Studies’, History and Theory, xli (2002) 185–6; amongst a vast literature see also Peter Fritzsche, ‘The Case of Modern Memory’, Journal of Modern History, lxxiii (2000); Geoff Cubitt, History and Memory (Manchester, 2007), 68, 199–200; and Susannah Radstone and Bill Schwarz (eds.), Memory: Histories, Theories, Debates (New York, 2010).

³⁵ Wood, Memory of the People; Fox, ‘Remembering the Past in Early Modern England’; Erika Kuijpers et al., Memory before Modernity: Practices of Memory in Early Modern Europe (Leiden, 2013); Matthew Neufeld, The Civil Wars after 1660: Public Remembering in Late Stuart England (Woodbridge, 2013); Blair Worden, The English Civil Wars and the Passions of Posterity (London, 2001); Kate Chedgzoy, Women’s Writing in the British Atlantic World: Memory, Place and History (Oxford, 2007); Mark Stoyle, ‘Memories of the Maimed: The Testimony of Charles I’s Former Soldiers, 1660–1730’, History, lxxxviii (2003); Mark Stoyle, ‘Remembering the English Civil Wars’, in Peter Gray and Oliver Kendrick (eds.), The Meaning of Catastrophe (Manchester, 2004); Ian Atherton, ‘Remembering (and Forgetting) Fairfax’s Battlefields’, in Andrew Hopper and Philip Major (eds.) England’s Fortress: New Perspectives on Thomas, 3rd Lord Fairfax (Aldershot, 2014).

³⁶ Shepard, Accounting for Oneself, 301.

³⁷ Smyth, Autobiography in Early Modern England, 120. For examples of other conflicts: Erika Kuijpers and Judith Pollmann, ‘Why Remember Terror? Memories of Violence in the Dutch Revolt’, and Peter Wilson, ‘Atrocities in the Thirty Years War’, both in Micheal O’Siochru and Jane Ohlmeyer (eds.), Ireland, 1641: Contexts and Reactions (Manchester, 2013); Susan Broomhall, ‘Disturbing Memories: Narrating Experiences and Emotions of Distressing Events in the French Wars of Religion’ in Kuijpers et. al. (eds.), Memory Before Modernity.

³⁸ TNA SP28/172, pt 4; SP28/183/33; SP16/513/15.

³⁹ TNA SP28/183/33.

⁴⁰ All quoted from the accounts of Willoughby, Warwickshire, TNA, SP28/ 184, pt 5. Cf. Summer and Keyte quoted above.

⁴¹ HEL, STT Accounts, Box 22, folders 3 and 4 include accounts of rents with details of taxes paid and deducted. Folder 10 includes a receipt for free-quarter, attested with the mark of Lieutenant Richard Leathorne.

⁴² SP28/182, pt three.

⁴³ Muldrew, Economy of Obligation, 65.

⁴⁴ SP28/171, pt 4.

⁴⁵ Smyth, Autobiography in Early Modern England, 101.

⁴⁶ BL Harley 2126, fo. 10^r; TNA SP28/183/33.

⁴⁷ TNA SP28/152, pt 6.

⁴⁸ Michael Braddick, God’s Fury, England’s Fire: A New History of the English Civil Wars (London, 2008), 417.

⁴⁹ For the importance of place to memory, see Nicola Whyte, ‘Landscape, Memory and Custom: Parish Identities c.1550–1700’, Social History, xxxii (2007); Steve Hindle, ‘A Sense of Place? Becoming and Belonging in the Rural Parish’, in Phil Withington and Alexandra Shepard (eds.), Communities in Early Modern England (Manchester, 2000); Alexandra Walsham, ‘History, Memory and the English Reformation’, Historical Journal, lv (2012).

⁵⁰ BL Harley MS 2126, fo. 24; For a Worcestershire example of losses to the Scots, see the accounts of Hartlebury: TNA SP28/187, pt 1.

⁵¹ TNA SP28/183/33; BL Harley MS 2126, fo. 16.

⁵² BL Harley MS 1943, fos. 24–5.

⁵³ TNA SP28/185, fo. 360; BL Harley MS 2126, fos. 9–11.

⁵⁴ Shepard, Accounting for Oneself, 35; Muldrew, Economy of Obligation.

⁵⁵ For examples from Ireland see the depositions of Joane Crews of Cork, and Anthony Farmer of Tipperary, <http://1641.tcd.ie/> (accessed 10 June 2016); Leora Auslander, ‘Beyond Words’ American Historical Review, cx (2005), 1036, 1043. I am grateful to Margot Finn for alerting me to this work. See also ‘Historians and the Study of Material Culture’, American Historical Review, cxiv (2009). For the bodies of knowledge and ‘surplus of meanings’ attached to things see Daniel Roche, A History of Everyday Things (Cambridge, 2000), 7.

⁵⁶ TNA SP28/183/33; SP28/174, pt 1.

⁵⁷ BL Harley MS 2126, fo. 19; TNA SP28/185, fo. 49^r.

⁵⁸ Barbara Donagan, War in England 1642–1649 (Oxford, 2008); Braddick, God’s Fury, England’s Fire, 389–95.

⁵⁹ Wilson, ‘Atrocities in the Thirty Years War’, 163. See also Kuijpers and Pollmann, ‘Why Remember Terror?’, 183 for the reluctance to recollect violence in the Dutch Revolt.

⁶⁰ TNA SP28/183/25.

⁶¹ TNA SP28/171.

⁶² TNA SP28/171, pt 4.

⁶³ TNA SP28/174, pt 1; SP28/186, pt 4; BL Harley 2126.

⁶⁴ As seen, for example, in Wibtoft and Barnwell; cf. Joyce Jeffreys who noted her payments ‘during the tyme of troubles abroade in the cuntry’ Business and Household Accounts, 265.

⁶⁵ Micheal O’Siochru and Jane Ohlmeyer (eds.), Ireland, 1641: Contexts and Reactions (Manchester, 2013).

⁶⁶ Stoyle, ‘Memories of the Maimed’; Broomhall, ‘Disturbing Memories’, 261–2 (where detailed lists and precise values were offered); Kuijpers and Pollmann, ‘Why Remember Terror?’, 186–8.

Author notes

* I am grateful to the organizers of the British Academy Conference, ‘Transforming Information’ for the opportunity to present an early version of this chapter, and to fellow participants for their comments. I have also benefited greatly from suggestions made by Ian Atherton, Richard Cust, Peter Lake, Naomi Tadmor and John Walter at seminars at Keele and Vanderbilt Universities.