ABSTRACT
Most of the partisan tracts listed above are exceptionally dangerous sources to employ. Each generation of historians discovers more information within them to be misreported, deliberately distorted or completely fallacious. This book contributes its own quota to these categories. Hence I have observed the following general rule when admitting information from them: to accept only those assertions which are corroborated by a hostile or neutral source or which can contribute no benefit to the teller. I relax this rule in the case of official despatches which are printed in full giving the name of the author, the date and the location, and for Parliamentarian news-papers after December 1645, when the obvious defeat of the Royalists made misrepresentation unnecessary and I can detect no cases of it.
