English Warfare 1511-1642 chronicles and analyses military operations from the reign of Henry VIII to the outbreak of the Civil War. The Tudor and Stuart periods laid the foundations of modern English military power. Henry VIII's expeditions, the Elizabethan contest with Catholic Europe, and the subsequent commitment of English troops to the Protestant cause by James I and Charles I, constituted a sustained military experience that shaped English armies for subsequent generations. Drawing largely from manuscript sources, English Warfare 1511-1642 includes coverage of: *the military adventures of Henry VIII in France, Scotland and Ireland *Elizabeth I's interventions on the continent after 1572, and how arms were perfected *conflict in Ireland *the production and use of artillery *the development of logistics *early Stuart military actions and the descent into civil war. English Warfare 1511-1642 demolishes the myth of an inexpert English military prior to the upheavals of the 1640s.

Philip Skippon was the third-most senior general in parliament’s New Model Army during the British Civil Wars. A veteran of European Protestant armies during the period of the Thirty Years’ War and long-serving commander of the London Trained Bands, no other high-ranking parliamentarian enjoyed such a long military career as Skippon. He was an author of religious books, an MP and a senior political figure in the republican and Cromwellian regimes. This is the first book to examine Skippon’s career, which is used to shed new light on historical debates surrounding the Civil Wars and understand how military events of this period impacted upon broader political, social and cultural themes.

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With chronologies, biographies, key documents, maps, genealogies, an extensive bibliography and packed with facts and figures, this is an invaluable, user-friendly and compact compendium examining all aspects of the period from James I to Queen Anne.

Horses played a major role in the military, economic, social and cultural history of early-modern England. This book uses the supply of horses to parliamentary armies during the English Civil War to make two related points. Firstly it shows how control of resources - although vital to success - is contingent upon a variety of logistical and political considerations. It then demonstrates how competition for resources and construction of individuals’ identities and allegiances fed into each other. Resources, such as horses, did not automatically flow out of areas which were nominally under Parliament’s control. Parliament had to construct administrative systems and make them work. This was not easy when only a minority of the population actively supported either side and property rights had to be negotiated, so the success of these negotiations was never a foregone conclusion. The study also demonstrates how competition for resources and construction of identities fed into each other. It argues that allegiance was not a fixed underlying condition, but was something external and changeable. Actions were more important than thoughts and to secure victory, both sides needed people to do things rather than feel vaguely sympathetic. Furthermore, identities were not always self-fashioned but could be imposed on people against their will, making them liable to disarmament, sequestration, fines or imprisonment. More than simply a book about resources and logistics, this study poses fundamental questions of identity construction, showing how culture and reality influence each other. Through an exploration of Parliament’s interaction with local communities and individuals, it reveals fascinating intersections between military necessity and issues of gender, patriarchy, religion, bureaucracy, nationalism and allegiance.

The causes of the three English Civil Wars (1642 to 1645, 1648, and 1651) are complex and controversial clashes of conviction, belief, and personality, and a struggle between opposing social groups and economic interests. But, whatever the focus of scholarship, many answers can be sought at the local level, among county communities that were far more outward-looking than once suggested. That is why Ian Becketts in-depth study of Buckinghamshire, one of the pivotal counties during this turbulent period in British history, is of such value. None of the best-known battles or sieges took place in Buckinghamshire, but there was destructive combat in the county on a smaller scale because its location placed it on the front line between the opposing forces between the royalist headquarters at Oxford and the parliamentarian stronghold of London. As Ian Beckett shows, the impact of war on Bucks was considerable. His analysis gives us an insight into the experience of local communities and the county as a whole and it reveals much about the experience of the conflict across the country.

This book examines literary depictions of the construction and destruction of the armored male body in combat in relation to early modern English understandings of the past. Bringing together the fields of material culture and militarism, Susan Harlan argues that the notion of “spoiling” – or the sanctioned theft of the arms and armor of the vanquished in battle – provides a way of thinking about England’s relationship to its violent cultural inheritance. She demonstrates how writers reconstituted the spoils of antiquity and the Middle Ages in an imagined military struggle between male bodies. An analysis of scenes of arming and disarming across texts by Christopher Marlowe and William Shakespeare and tributes to Sir Philip Sidney reveals a pervasive militant nostalgia: a cultural fascination with moribund models and technologies of war. Readers will not only gain a better understanding of humanism but also a new way of thinking about violence and cultural production in Renaissance England.