ABSTRACT
Though sporadic violence had occurred since late spring of 1642, the raising of the royal standard at Nottingham officially opened the Civil Wars. Although the king marched south with his newly embodied army, the parliamentary effort in the north stood in grave danger in the autumn of 1642. Heavily outnumbered, Lord Fairfax, the parliamentary commander, devised a strategy that aimed at preventing total royalist domination of the north. For the earl of Newcastle, soon to supersede the ineffectual earl of Cumberland as royalist commander at York, the physical destruction of the numerically inferior parliamentary forces and eventual conjunction with the larger main army in the south for operations against Essex stood as the essential strategic imperative.
