Siege mentality
Civil wars shaped England’s governance, military and health services
“I’ve got 99 problems but a witch ain’t one,” proclaims a T-shirt hanging in the gift shop at the new National Civil War Centre in Newark, Nottinghamshire, a novel attempt to link rapper Jay Z’s exploration of social problems in modern-day America to one of the more bloody periods in British history.
It’s a sentiment that would have chimed with Charles I and Oliver Cromwell in the 17th century, as sorcery was probably a side issue when there was a throne to defend or the Parliamentarian army to muster. Mix in a starving populace, uprisings in Scotland and war crimes on an epic scale, and there’s a set of snags to keep anyone awake at night.
The English civil war – or wars, as there were three of them between 1638 and 1653 – changed the course of history, shaping our governance, our military and even our health service. But its causes and consequences have never become embedded in our general knowledge.
The gap is something the £5.4m museum in Newark – an important civil war town – aims to address with displays of around 70,000 objects of local, national and international significance relating to the conflict. The venue, funded by Newark and Sherwood District Council and a £3.5m Heritage Lottery Fund (HLF) grant, opened in May.
“It is amazing to think that until now there has been nowhere in the UK dedicated to telling the story of such crucial and dramatic events in our national history,” historian Michael Wood said when the centre opened.
“And nowhere could be more fitting than Newark to do that. It is the first such exhibition to tell the story of the civil war from start to finish. And it’s a tale we all should know, drawing in the people of the British Isles, from Elgin to Cornwall and from Newark to Haverfordwest and indeed over the sea from Dublin and Drogheda.”
The approach is part social history, showing how people lived, dressed, ate and worked at the time, and part military and political history. Around a third of the objects, including siege coins and the 1646 Newark Civil War Siege Plan, are from Newark collections, while loans from nationals, such as arms and armour from the Royal Armouries and a hand brand used on deserters from the Wellcome Collection, make up the rest.
But there’s also an attempt to draw parallels with contemporary warfare through a display of images from Magnum photography agency. This strives to draw links between the inevitable bias of accounts given by each side in the civil war and the images captured by contemporary war photographers in places such as Vietnam and Iraq.
Newark itself features heavily and the centre’s cinema shows a series of short films recreating 17th-century life. They were shot around the town, which retains many of its half-timbered buildings as well as its magnificent church, the towering spire of which bears a perfectly circular hole made by a Parliamentarian cannonball.
Another section is dedicated to local history, with objects including the Newark Torc, an iron age necklace found nearby in 2005 and until recently housed in London’s British Museum. Twenty-first-century technophiles, meanwhile, can download the National Civil War Centre app, which takes them on a virtual trail around Newark.
Centre manager Michael Constantine says that the venue could have been sited anywhere in the country because the conflicts affected the majority of Britain, but it was Newark that seized the opportunity. It had long been an aspiration in the town to tell the story of its pivotal role in the civil war.
As a Royalist stronghold, the town was be- sieged three times – siege coins are still occasionally dug up there. And despite attempts by Cromwell’s men to starve his Royalist enemies out, the townsfolk, who were fighting off disease, only grudgingly surrendered to the Parliamentarian forces when ordered to by the king.
Newark also has the best surviving sconces – small fortifications – in the country, thanks to a lack of postwar development on its outskirts. In the early 2000s, the council decided to close its underused town museum housed in the 16th-century Magnus grammar school buildings.
Needing to find a new use for the premises, the local authority thought it would kill two birds with the same stone – it acquired buildings either side of them and upped its ambitions to tell an important national story, rather than a parochial one.
Its first application for an HLF grant was rejected but a reworked bid with a beefed-up education plan was approved in 2012 and work began to convert five buildings – the original Tudor school and headmaster’s house, both Grade II listed, a schoolroom and Victorian outbuildings.
Converting the buildings soon revealed some surprises, not least in terms of construction – the Tudors were around 600 years ahead of their time when it came to sustainability, while the Georgians were more au fait with the bish-bash-bosh school of plastering.
“Most of the buildings weren’t well founded so we had structural issues across the site,” says Jane Roylance, an associate at Purcell architects, the firm that worked on the project.
“The Tudor building was sound, apart from its roof structure, but the Georgian headmaster’s house was built out of salvaged materials so there was an element of recycling on the site.”
Meanwhile, a Georgian lime-ash floor turned out to have been rather ham-fistedly repaired at some point, with reeds over the original oak boards that had rotted. And while records were kept of repairs through the centuries, they tended to be more of the back-of-an-envelope type rather than the detailed accounts favoured by historians and heritage bodies.
Roylance says this made the task of reconfiguring the buildings “interesting and, at times, taxing. We have had to fine-tune our conservation repairs to match each building type because of the difference in their ages.”
For Constantine, there have been other hitches, including clashes with the centre’s academic advisory panel over branding, reworking the layout of the main gallery to make it easier for visitors to understand the chronology of the conflict, and teething troubles with lifts. But the bigger challenge is going to be sustaining the venue.
The first year’s target for visitor numbers was 50,000. Between the opening in May and late June, around 7,500 people had been through the doors, paying £7 for a ticket (£12 for an annual pass), so the museum is on course to cover its first-year running costs of £272,000.
Constantine is adamant that it is a high-end place with a national focus and entrance fee to match rather than just another town museum. “I call it a visitor attraction and I appreciate that’s a challenge to a lot of museum professionals, but it isn’t to me,” he says. “If it’s worth coming to, it’s worth spending on.”
Worcester, armed with a consultancy report that confirms its own civil war heritage is distinctly underpowered and underplayed, is mounting a rebranding campaign with the events of the 17th century at the heart of a plan to attract tourists.
Iain Rutherford, the general manager of Museums Worcestershire, is overseeing the operation from the Commandery, the museum housed in the former headquarters of the Royalist forces that were defeated by Oliver Cromwell’s New Model Army during the era’s final skirmish in September 1651.
“The report says, for example, that we could provide better access to the battlefield which, in its later stages, stretched into the heart of the city,” Rutherford says. “Combined with the other attractions of a heritage city – the cathedral, the river, shopping – there’s a lot of scope to make Worcester a valuable proposition with civil war history in its DNA.”
Rutherford is energised by a memorable quote from Hugh Peters, Cromwell’s military chaplain, who urged Parliamentary soldiers to tell people they had been “at Worcester, where England’s sorrows began and ended”.
“As well as that fateful last battle, the first fighting took place years earlier on a small medieval bridge on the outskirts of the city,” Rutherford says. “There’s history all around us.” After the battle, many of the soldiers fighting for the king were transported to American states, and Rutherford is keen on attracting US visitors.
“In addition, presidents Thomas Jefferson and John Adams came on a tour of English gardens in 1786 but chose to see Worcester because, having sorted out their own Declaration of Independence, they believed the civil war had a special place in the story of how England developed its constitution,” Rutherford says. “Adams noted in his diary that ‘Englishmen so soon forget the ground where liberty was fought for’.”
Rutherford is mystified by the absence of the civil war in our collective memory and popular culture despite its unquestioned influence on political principles and religious freedoms. “Maybe it has deliberately been overlooked,” he says.
“Certainly after the Restoration, there was a concerted effort to forget about the whole thing and Worcester reshaped itself and declared for the king immediately. Its rebadging as a ‘faithful city’ is still a motto in use today.”
So is the reluctance to reminisce about the 17th century still prevalent in the city? “Only to the extent that the county has an embarrassment of riches when it comes to choosing historical periods or great figures to front promotional campaigns,” Rutherford says.
“Perhaps all the sites with civil war stories to tell should work together to ensure the period has a greater national profile. Naseby and other battlefields don’t get the attention they deserve and, working together, we could probably fix that.”
Rutherford does not feel that the new museum in Newark has stolen a civil war march on Worcester, however. “There’s much to bind us together. As we celebrate Magna Carta this year, let’s not overlook the curious coincidence that King John died in Newark Castle and was buried in the cathedral here.”
It’s a sentiment that would have chimed with Charles I and Oliver Cromwell in the 17th century, as sorcery was probably a side issue when there was a throne to defend or the Parliamentarian army to muster. Mix in a starving populace, uprisings in Scotland and war crimes on an epic scale, and there’s a set of snags to keep anyone awake at night.
The English civil war – or wars, as there were three of them between 1638 and 1653 – changed the course of history, shaping our governance, our military and even our health service. But its causes and consequences have never become embedded in our general knowledge.
The gap is something the £5.4m museum in Newark – an important civil war town – aims to address with displays of around 70,000 objects of local, national and international significance relating to the conflict. The venue, funded by Newark and Sherwood District Council and a £3.5m Heritage Lottery Fund (HLF) grant, opened in May.
“It is amazing to think that until now there has been nowhere in the UK dedicated to telling the story of such crucial and dramatic events in our national history,” historian Michael Wood said when the centre opened.
“And nowhere could be more fitting than Newark to do that. It is the first such exhibition to tell the story of the civil war from start to finish. And it’s a tale we all should know, drawing in the people of the British Isles, from Elgin to Cornwall and from Newark to Haverfordwest and indeed over the sea from Dublin and Drogheda.”
The approach is part social history, showing how people lived, dressed, ate and worked at the time, and part military and political history. Around a third of the objects, including siege coins and the 1646 Newark Civil War Siege Plan, are from Newark collections, while loans from nationals, such as arms and armour from the Royal Armouries and a hand brand used on deserters from the Wellcome Collection, make up the rest.
But there’s also an attempt to draw parallels with contemporary warfare through a display of images from Magnum photography agency. This strives to draw links between the inevitable bias of accounts given by each side in the civil war and the images captured by contemporary war photographers in places such as Vietnam and Iraq.
Newark itself features heavily and the centre’s cinema shows a series of short films recreating 17th-century life. They were shot around the town, which retains many of its half-timbered buildings as well as its magnificent church, the towering spire of which bears a perfectly circular hole made by a Parliamentarian cannonball.
Another section is dedicated to local history, with objects including the Newark Torc, an iron age necklace found nearby in 2005 and until recently housed in London’s British Museum. Twenty-first-century technophiles, meanwhile, can download the National Civil War Centre app, which takes them on a virtual trail around Newark.
Centre manager Michael Constantine says that the venue could have been sited anywhere in the country because the conflicts affected the majority of Britain, but it was Newark that seized the opportunity. It had long been an aspiration in the town to tell the story of its pivotal role in the civil war.
As a Royalist stronghold, the town was be- sieged three times – siege coins are still occasionally dug up there. And despite attempts by Cromwell’s men to starve his Royalist enemies out, the townsfolk, who were fighting off disease, only grudgingly surrendered to the Parliamentarian forces when ordered to by the king.
Newark also has the best surviving sconces – small fortifications – in the country, thanks to a lack of postwar development on its outskirts. In the early 2000s, the council decided to close its underused town museum housed in the 16th-century Magnus grammar school buildings.
Needing to find a new use for the premises, the local authority thought it would kill two birds with the same stone – it acquired buildings either side of them and upped its ambitions to tell an important national story, rather than a parochial one.
Its first application for an HLF grant was rejected but a reworked bid with a beefed-up education plan was approved in 2012 and work began to convert five buildings – the original Tudor school and headmaster’s house, both Grade II listed, a schoolroom and Victorian outbuildings.
Converting the buildings soon revealed some surprises, not least in terms of construction – the Tudors were around 600 years ahead of their time when it came to sustainability, while the Georgians were more au fait with the bish-bash-bosh school of plastering.
“Most of the buildings weren’t well founded so we had structural issues across the site,” says Jane Roylance, an associate at Purcell architects, the firm that worked on the project.
“The Tudor building was sound, apart from its roof structure, but the Georgian headmaster’s house was built out of salvaged materials so there was an element of recycling on the site.”
Meanwhile, a Georgian lime-ash floor turned out to have been rather ham-fistedly repaired at some point, with reeds over the original oak boards that had rotted. And while records were kept of repairs through the centuries, they tended to be more of the back-of-an-envelope type rather than the detailed accounts favoured by historians and heritage bodies.
Roylance says this made the task of reconfiguring the buildings “interesting and, at times, taxing. We have had to fine-tune our conservation repairs to match each building type because of the difference in their ages.”
For Constantine, there have been other hitches, including clashes with the centre’s academic advisory panel over branding, reworking the layout of the main gallery to make it easier for visitors to understand the chronology of the conflict, and teething troubles with lifts. But the bigger challenge is going to be sustaining the venue.
The first year’s target for visitor numbers was 50,000. Between the opening in May and late June, around 7,500 people had been through the doors, paying £7 for a ticket (£12 for an annual pass), so the museum is on course to cover its first-year running costs of £272,000.
Constantine is adamant that it is a high-end place with a national focus and entrance fee to match rather than just another town museum. “I call it a visitor attraction and I appreciate that’s a challenge to a lot of museum professionals, but it isn’t to me,” he says. “If it’s worth coming to, it’s worth spending on.”
Worcester and the war
Worcester, armed with a consultancy report that confirms its own civil war heritage is distinctly underpowered and underplayed, is mounting a rebranding campaign with the events of the 17th century at the heart of a plan to attract tourists.
Iain Rutherford, the general manager of Museums Worcestershire, is overseeing the operation from the Commandery, the museum housed in the former headquarters of the Royalist forces that were defeated by Oliver Cromwell’s New Model Army during the era’s final skirmish in September 1651.
“The report says, for example, that we could provide better access to the battlefield which, in its later stages, stretched into the heart of the city,” Rutherford says. “Combined with the other attractions of a heritage city – the cathedral, the river, shopping – there’s a lot of scope to make Worcester a valuable proposition with civil war history in its DNA.”
Rutherford is energised by a memorable quote from Hugh Peters, Cromwell’s military chaplain, who urged Parliamentary soldiers to tell people they had been “at Worcester, where England’s sorrows began and ended”.
“As well as that fateful last battle, the first fighting took place years earlier on a small medieval bridge on the outskirts of the city,” Rutherford says. “There’s history all around us.” After the battle, many of the soldiers fighting for the king were transported to American states, and Rutherford is keen on attracting US visitors.
“In addition, presidents Thomas Jefferson and John Adams came on a tour of English gardens in 1786 but chose to see Worcester because, having sorted out their own Declaration of Independence, they believed the civil war had a special place in the story of how England developed its constitution,” Rutherford says. “Adams noted in his diary that ‘Englishmen so soon forget the ground where liberty was fought for’.”
Rutherford is mystified by the absence of the civil war in our collective memory and popular culture despite its unquestioned influence on political principles and religious freedoms. “Maybe it has deliberately been overlooked,” he says.
“Certainly after the Restoration, there was a concerted effort to forget about the whole thing and Worcester reshaped itself and declared for the king immediately. Its rebadging as a ‘faithful city’ is still a motto in use today.”
So is the reluctance to reminisce about the 17th century still prevalent in the city? “Only to the extent that the county has an embarrassment of riches when it comes to choosing historical periods or great figures to front promotional campaigns,” Rutherford says.
“Perhaps all the sites with civil war stories to tell should work together to ensure the period has a greater national profile. Naseby and other battlefields don’t get the attention they deserve and, working together, we could probably fix that.”
Rutherford does not feel that the new museum in Newark has stolen a civil war march on Worcester, however. “There’s much to bind us together. As we celebrate Magna Carta this year, let’s not overlook the curious coincidence that King John died in Newark Castle and was buried in the cathedral here.”