Last night’s Zoom talk was by Dr Jonathan Fitzgibbons and was entitled The Civil War in Lincolnshire.
Jonathan is a Senior Lecturer in Early Modern History in the School of Humanities and Heritage at Lincoln University. His area of research and teaching expertise is the political, constitutional and intellectual history of seventeenth-century Britain. Besides writing a biography of Oliver Cromwell (Cromwell’s Head, 2008), he has also published widely on visual culture, public ceremony, law and political theory during the period of the British Civil Wars and their aftermath.
Jonathan has talked to us several times now on Cromwell and the Civil War in Lincolnshire; this time, he filled in some of the gaps of our knowledge about how they started and the effect they had on the ordinary folk in Lincolnshire. Most people did not want to take sides or fight, it was often thrust upon them in the form of taxes or housing and feeding the various armies and their horses who took over their land, be it only for a short time. The death rate of each side was high, and that had an effect as it was the workforce of the land. Disease was also a factor as the armies moved from place to place, carrying typhus and plague from some of the sieged towns and cities, also there was lots of wounded to be cared for. Many things that never get a mention in the history books.
As usual, Jonathan’s talk was excellent and gave us lots of thing to ponder on. Many thanks Jonathan, and we look forward to the next installment.
