War and the Past

There is an apocryphal story of a ploughman stumbling across the Royalist and Parliamentarian armies as they deployed on Martson Moor and enquiring what was happening. When told, he allegedly replied, ‘Are them two fallen out then?’ In fact, it is highly unlikely that any Englishman in 1644 could afford the luxury of such ignorance of a war that had ravaged the country for almost 3 years. In a county like Buckinghamshire caught between the permanent outposts of the 2 armies at London and Oxford, for example, plundering by both sides had reached such an extent that it was claimed ‘that now a man may travel into those parts and see a thousand acres of land and never a heard of cattle on it’. By 1644 free quarter without subsequent repayment was the norm among troops of the Eastern Association and popular hostility to both sides had manifested itself in the phenomenon of the Clubmen in many southern counties.