ABSTRACT
Recent attention turned to the construction of memories of the English Revolution of the 1640s and 1650s has focused on two levels: a national memory mediated through the printed word and individual memories of veterans or those standing against a dominant Restoration condemnation of the wars and revolution as rebellion. Such approaches have considered only a narrow time frame, rarely going beyond 1689. By contrast, this chapter considers the ways in which the English Revolution was commemorated not just in print but also performatively and at the level of local communities rather than of individuals or the nation. It examines a series of annual commemorations of deliverance celebrated in at least eleven English communities from the 1640s well into the eighteenth-century and beyond; both former Parliamentarian and former Royalist communities commemorated their Providential deliverance from defeat or preservation from their enemies in local, annual rites. The chapter seeks to demonstrate the shifts of memory revealed by a longer time frame than that usually employed, as well as the complexities of those memories, showing that deliverance was a more fruitful lens for memories in a revolution that had no victors and in which all groups could nurse a defeat they could not forget.
