ABSTRACT
Civil War England, topographically and in many other senses too, was thoroughly different from the England of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It presented, in reality, a series of major obstacles to successful military campaigning, in the nature of its countryside, its road system and its means of communication. The England of 1642 was a rural country reliant upon agriculture for its wealth, with trade primarily involved in the distribution of agricultural produce both internally and overseas. It used to be maintained that the rough division of the country which prevailed after civil war began, the parliamentarian zone of the South and South-East and East against the royalist zone of the North, Wales and the West, corresponded to areas of allegiance. That is to say, that the backward, pastoral regions supported the King, and the more forward-looking eastern areas, Parliament. The creation of volunteer forces did not entirely break with the Trained Band concept.
