English Civil War: Myth, Legend and Popular Memory

Cavaliers and Roundheads are figures who appear in hundreds of English ghost stories. In this innovative account, Charles Esdaile argues that such tales are in reality folk memories of an episode of English history that was second only to the Black Death in terms of individual and collective suffering alike, and, further, that they reveal important truths about the way in which the conflict was represented: it is no surprise, then, to find that spectral Cavaliers are often romantic figures and revenant Roundheads grim ones full of menace. Yet, the book is no mere catalogue. On the contrary, rather than being discussed in a vacuum, the tales of haunting are rather set within a detailed regional history of the conflicts of 1642-1651 of a sort that has never yet been attempted, but is, for all that, badly needed. AUTHOR: Professor Charles J. Esdaile is one of the leading historians of the Spanish Civil War, the Napoloenic Wars and the Peninsular War, and he holds an Honorary Senior Research Fellowship in the Department of History of the University of Liverpool. His books The Spanish Civil War: A Military History and The Peninsular War: A New History are classic works on their subjects. Among his many other publications are Napoleon's Wars: An International History, 1803-1815, Napoleon, France and Waterloo: The Eagle Rejected and Walking Waterloo: A Guide. Stuart England may therefore seem to fall a long way outside his usual interests, but more than forty years' service in the ranks of the Sealed Knot have testify to a fascination with the Wars of the Three Kingdoms that is second to none. 10 b/w illustrations