As a schoolboy I was told that on the eve of the battle of Marston Moor in 1644, as the rival armies drew up, a sturdy yokel was found ploughing his fields. When brought up to speed about the war between King and parliament he asked, “What has they two fallen out again?”.

Like most of the best stories, this one is apocryphal, but unlike some it is also completely incredible. Marston Moor was the largest battle of the Civil War, probably the largest battle ever fought on English soil, and it is not possible that around 45,000 men could have congregated, and fed themselves, without the local farmers knowing about it. Indeed, a good number of the soldiers had been holed up for several months in York, seven miles to the east, with a very large besieging army outside the walls. York’s pre-war population was probably around 12,000—no-one has ever claimed that it was invisible to the local bumpkins.

By the end of 1644 perhaps 46,000 had died in the fighting in England, and masses of property had been destroyed, not least by forces besieging or defending strongholds like York. It is probable that in the end the death toll was higher, as a proportion of the population, than during the First World War.

Since the 1970s these horrors of war have figured prominently in academic histories—the slaughter, atrocities, the ethnic and religious hatreds, the futility of it all. After all, what did this suffering achieve? During 1643, as the combatants settled in for a long campaign, the parliamentarians beefed up their war effort. Legislating without royal assent (for obvious reasons), Parliament assumed powers to raise taxes and seize property which in some eyes created a roundhead tyranny far worse than anything done by Charles I before the war. Charles II was restored in 1660 on, essentially, the terms that had been reached in negotiation in 1641, prior to the war.

For a generation of historians, many of them students during the anti-Vietnam War protests of the 1960s, it was perhaps easy to believe that war was fought for ideological purposes remote from any real sense of the public good; that alongside the war between the partisans, there was a war between the partisans and the rest of the people, the silent majority whose labour, money, and lives they needed in order to pursue their argument.

This emphasis on the horrors of war shared prominence with scepticism about the importance of progressive thought, either as a cause of the war, or as the natural winner in the ensuing revolution. Conrad Russell’s alternative to Laurence Stone’s Causes of the English Revolution (1972) was the Origins of the English Civil War (1990). It was an analytic point—that explaining the outbreak of civil war in 1642 was a separate question from an explanation for the execution of the King six years later—but it was also explicitly aimed against heroic Whig and Marxist accounts which saw the Regicide as a necessary step on the road towards political modernity, driven by the rise of classes previously excluded from power.

Instead, quite different causes of the war were identified: The ‘functional breakdown’ of a government unable to deal with the practical challenges it faced, a not necessarily very forward-looking provincial resistance to central government, religious disagreements, or the unmanageable interactions of the Stuart Crown’s Three Kingdoms (Ireland, Scotland and England).

The conflation of radical with popular politics was also questioned. The importance of the Levellers, for example, was downplayed while that of the clubmen was emphasised—men like the apocryphal bumpkin at Marston Moor, but who were all too aware of the horrors of the war, and armed themselves in order to keep it out of their local communities. This view of the place of national politics in the lives of ordinary people made a fairly comfortable bedfellow with the new social history, interested in altogether different forms of politics at the heart of the lives of the average man or woman in the field—the politics of class, gender and age were sought in the politics of the parish, not the Revolution.

In a sense, then, the costs of war and the benefits of Revolution have been at poles of interpretation in this debate, as one text book had it, ‘was the revolution worth it?’. More recent work, however, has tended to reintegrate the two, and also to re-connect social and political history—not to explain how social change caused the crisis, but to give political life its full social depth.

A new picture is emerging in which the massive demands of the war enabled or forced ordinary people to engage with national politics. War-time government generated new institutions which survived the peace, and the interlocking politics of the Three Kingdoms solidified patterns in their relations that persisted long after. New patterns of political engagement and new solidarities based on religious and political affinity emerged in all Three Kingdoms. In England in particular they were forged in the world of illegal print, street petitioning, and demonstrations, military campaigns and the courtroom. They continued to evolve and to shape English political culture long after 1660.

Above all, there was startling intellectual creativity. Not just progressive ideas such as popular sovereignty, religious toleration, and equality before the law, but a rich, even chaotic, world of public debate. Prophets set up camp on Blackheath to await Armageddon, ploughed the common lands, or sought to push forward understanding of the natural world in order to usher in the millennium. This was the context for the writing of John Milton and of Thomas Hobbes’s greatest works, as well as others only slightly less renowned, such as James Harrington and Andrew Marvell.

On this view the Revolution kicked off a process of much broader significance than the constitutional measures following the Regicide, and one that affected many ordinary lives. For men such as our bumpkin at Marston Moor, war and revolution, trauma and creativity, were interlocking elements of the same inescapable and consuming experience.

Headline image: ‘And when did you last see your father?’ painting by William Frederick Yeames, 1878, public domain via Wikimedia Commons.