History@Portsmouth

University of Portsmouth's History Blog

Tag Archives | British Civil Wars

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Getting creative with early modern history

In a previous post, Dr Katy Gibbons looked at how second-year students studying the Debating the Past module, translated Natalie Davis’s book The Return of Martin Guerre into other media: emojis, memes and poetry.  Our first-year students in the Beliefs, Communities and Conflicts: Europe 1400-1750 module are also set an assessment asking them to employ the imaginative use of media to explore a theme relating to their studies on the module.  Below we look at two great responses to this. Having initially thought about crocheting an item or artwork from the early modern period (!), Megan Conway decided to produce a comic. Visual formats often make it easier to take in […]

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Christmas under the puritans

Dr Fiona McCall is a Senior Lecturer in early modern history, teaching a third-year module on the British Civil Wars, the first-year Beliefs, Communities and Conflicts module and a second year option, Underworlds. Her research investigates traditionalist resistance to puritan values in English parish churches during the 1640s and 1650s, and in this post, updated with further research from an earlier one, she discusses how Christmas was banned during this period. Christmas was officially banned during the late 1640s and 1650s along with the rest of the church calendar.  But the interdict was widely ignored.  Trawling through various counties’ quarter sessions depositions for the period, I have found frequent references […]

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Don’t lose your head – surviving a dissertation on King Charles I’s killers

Below, one of last year’s third-year students, Alex Symonds, gives some timely advice on how to survive writing your dissertation.  Alex’s dissertation was entitled “‘Cruel Necessity’: Understanding the Influences on the Commissioners in the Trial of Charles I”.  As Alex’s supervisor, I knew she had it in her to do very well, but my mouth dropped to floor once I began reading her work.  The dissertation was very bold in its arguments with an original central focus on humanising the regicides, as well as those chosen commissioners who chose not to sign the death warrant, who have been far less studied. Alex developed some sophisticated arguments around the role of […]

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Church and People in Interregnum Britain

In this post, UoP senior lecturer in history Dr Fiona McCall talks about her new book Church and People in Interregnum Britain, bringing together new research from scholars across Britain and further afield on the profound religious changes which took place after the British Civil Wars and how people responded to  them. From 1642-5, England, Ireland, Wales and Scotland, endured the first in a series of devastating civil wars, which split communities ideologically, politically and religiously.  These wars have been termed ‘the last of the wars of religion’ by leading Civil War historian John Morrill.[1]  In 1645, as the first Civil War approached its end, and the religious reformists gained […]

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King Charles I – a man of principle, not a “man of blood”?

Many people instinctively blame King Charles I for the British Civil Wars. So recent UoP history graduate Connor Scott-Butcher’s decision to use his dissertation to challenge the idea, perpetuated by the regicides, that Charles was a “man of blood”, and the weight of historical argument ranged against him, always seemed to me a risky and provocative proposition.  Below, Connor writes about how he went about his research.  He gave a few sleepless nights to his supervisor, as well as himself, but the result was a balanced and well-structured argument, based around extensive use of contemporary primary sources. – Dr Fiona McCall. My topic for my dissertation was a thorough examination […]

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