ABSTRACT
This chapter deploys a selection of the mundane yet novel archives generated by the increasingly powerful parliamentarian war effort to explore ways in which English people's spatial experiences were disrupted and transformed by war and how understandings of place prompted memories of Civil War. The parliamentarian wartime state was coercive and extractive to an unprecedented degree, but it also provided novel opportunities for participation, and Wildbore was participating on his own terms. Joshua Sprigg’s volume suggests how Civil War transformed the practice, experience and understanding of place and movement in England as villages and towns were affected and connected by the soldiers who had marched. Before the Civil War, subordinate groups were neither powerless, nor lacking in political awareness, and the ‘social depth’ of the English state facilitated popular mobilisation in the 1640s. In recounting the burdens of Civil War, the consciousness of familiar places disrupted was a frequent stimulus to remembering and recording.
