Welfare, Conflict and Memory during and after the English Civil Wars, 1642-1700

Recent estimates suggest that over 3% of the population of England and Wales died as a direct result of the Civil Wars of 1642-51: a greater proportional loss of population than Britain suffered during World War One. This project will illustrate the social, economic and cultural consequences of England's mid seventeenth-century catastrophe in greater depth than ever before by publishing the original petitions which thousands of wounded ex-soldiers and war widows submitted in order to gain financial aid - on a free-access, fully searchable website. These petitions, drawn-up between 1642 and 1700, provide graphic testimonies of what it felt like for ordinary people to live with horrific wounds, trauma, suffering and loss. By making them freely available, this project brings to life the appalling personal consequences of these wars. It will expose a wide public audience to the significant advances in surgery, hospitals and pensions made during this conflict, while at the same time underscoring how the war's consequences persisted for generations after armed hostilities had come to an end.

The project is particularly timely with the opening of the National Civil War Centre at Newark Museum in May 2015, an organisation with which the PI has collaborated since 2011. It builds upon the award of four AHRC PhD studentships on this topic since 2013, and a successful application to the Wolfson Foundation to fund a research centre at Newark. It is also the first time that a team of experts on civil war petitions has been assembled, drawn from every level of the academic ladder. The PI and Co-Is will each be responsible for co-ordinating agreed regions (Hopper - north, Stoyle - south, Appleby - east, and Bowen - Wales and the Marches). This will involve identifying the archival documents, limited transcription work, metadata capture, inputting data from the quarter sessions' order books, arranging photos and feeding content through to the IT team to assemble onto the website.

The project will analyse the strategies which were used by and on behalf of maimed soldiers and war widows to obtain charitable relief. It will examine the language used in the petitions to appeal for aid and the different ways in which widows pleaded with local justices and central government to secure their deceased husbands' arrears of pay. It will also examine how petitioners represented military service, how they fashioned themselves as 'deserving cases', how they played upon magisterial expectations, and in what ways petitions reflected feelings of entitlement. The information in the petitions will develop our understanding of how the early modern poor endeavoured to sustain themselves through what has been well-termed the 'economy of makeshifts'. The geographical spread of the petitions will also be considered, as will the aims of the various regimes in granting relief.

County archivists will provide digital images of the petitions and supporting medical certificates which survive in collections scattered across the country. Our Postdoctoral Researcher will then transcribe those documents, which will be made available for searching on a website, together with contextual commentaries to guide users. Archival repositories will retain copies of both the digital images and transcriptions to enrich and enhance access to their own holdings. The website will be searchable across fields such as name, gender, parish, county, details of service, military unit, nature of wounds sustained, occupation of petitioner, outcome of petition, and size of gratuity or pension awarded. This will allow data to be mapped and compared. A faceted search will also be available. This website will provide a national resource for Civil War history in England and Wales on a scale to parallel that of the flagship European digitisation project, the 1641 Depositions in Ireland: http://www.1641.tcd.ie/

The National Civil War Centre (NCWC) at Newark Museum will provide an access point for impact for this project. Made possible by a Heritage Lottery Fund grant of £3.5 million in 2012, it opened on 3 May 2015. It will enable this project's research to reach an international public and schools audience through an onsite Wolfson Research Centre, a temporary exhibition leading to a permanent gallery, student internships, educational website and teachers' workshops programme. The NCWC has developed a Learning and Participation programme that is projected to reach 17,000 people per year. The Centre is keen to emphasise its national status and to cover themes that transcend Newark's civil war experience. Its management have recognised that a focus on care, welfare and medicine provides the ideal means to achieve these aims. As a result, the project's research will form an integral part of this exciting new Centre's academic resources, enriching its galleries, interpretation, digital resources and schools' programme. http://www.nationalcivilwarcentre.com

The project website aims to be highly accessible and user friendly. Its intended audience embraces groups beyond academia, such as history enthusiasts, family historians, professional genealogists, local history societies, heritage professionals and re-enactors. These groups will benefit because the free-access website will be rich in details of personal names and place names as well as a wealth of biographical detail. The project website will contain perhaps the largest single corpus contribution to plebeian surname and place name data since the collective amalgamation of parish register materials on websites like Ancestry.com. The website will be widely advertised through county record offices, local history societies, social media and family history networks.

County record offices nationwide will benefit by having the relevant material in their quarter sessions collections better catalogued and more accessible than ever before. Each entry in the website will feature hyperlinks to the relevant county archive's online catalogue, in order to encourage increased public use of their facilities. The project will also benefit the National Archives, who have identified early modern women as one of their research priorities. The project's focus on war widows neatly fits with their wider aims of improving access and developing new ways of interpreting early modern material. Their Engagement Officer has stated that this project would be an excellent vehicle to encourage county archive services to work more closely together, and thus to foster a more cohesive national archive service. A comparative dimension might also benefit the US National Archives in Washington DC, who have their own project researching widows' pensions from the American Civil War. This includes four million digital images from approximately 125,000 American Civil War widows' pension files, see: http://www.fold3.com/title_24/civil_war_widows_pensions/. Military welfare is of special, and current, interest in countries such as the UK and USA, not least because issues such as the Military Covenant and the care of service personnel injured in Iraq and Afghanistan are highly topical questions for political debate.