ABSTRACT

By definition all civil wars involve compatriots fighting each other. During the 1640s Englishmen, Scotsmen, Welshmen and Irishmen (and women), killed each other in battles, sieges, skirmishes and ambushes. Yet for most of them death in combat was a remote and random possibility. Their surviving letters, diaries and memoirs show that they were just as-if not moreconcerned about losing their property in some almost accidental episode of violence. Most common was the attitude of Sir William Brereton. After reviewing the problems facing Cheshire after a year of civil war he concluded that ‘Our greatest care being to preserve the county from plundering.’1 Parliament justified an assessment to Norfolk, Suffolk and Cambridgeshire to raise soldiers by explaining that it was ‘the better to prevent the spoiling of the said counties’.2 The English language reflected this important change. Although the word plunder was first used in a fairly rare Swedish newsletter of 1632, far more people became aware of it ten years later when A Relation of the King’s Army described how after capturing Brentford ‘they plundered it without any respect of persons’. By the following year the word plunder, brought over from the Thirty Years’ Wars by Prince Rupert and his henchmen, had become so familiar that William Prynne used it thrice in a single sentence.3