The Wounded, the Orphaned and the Widowed of the English Civil War

Dr Ismini Pells gives talk for the Ealing Branch of the Historical Association

The Battle of Marston Moor, John Barker

May 28, 2025

The next meeting of the Ealing Branch of the Historical Association will feature a talk by Ismini Pells.

Her subject will be ‘Maimed Soldiers, War Widows and the Human Cost of the English Civil Wars’ and she will explain some of the many stories that have come out of the Civil War Petitions Project.

The lecture is taking place on Tuesday 10 June from 7:30pm-9pm, at Ealing Green Church, (W5 5QT).

The seventeenth-century Civil Wars left a deep impression on the national population. As many as one in four adult males in England alone were mobilised for the various armies and recent estimates suggest that across the British Isles, a greater percentage of the population died as a result of the Civil Wars than during the First World War. The Civil War Petitions project is unearthing thousands of documents detailing the impact of the Civil Wars on the lives of these ‘ordinary’ people. During the conflict, parliament, and later the restored monarchy, offered war pensions and other financial gratuities to wounded soldiers, and the widows and orphans of those who had died in their service.

This talk will reveal how these people looked back on their experiences during the Civil Wars and how they coped with its aftermath. It will examine what induced men to enlist in an army and what we might learn from their accounts of the military engagements they fought in. It will also highlight the medical care made available to injured soldiers and the ingenious ways that the wounded and bereaved negotiated with the authorities for financial relief. Finally, it will consider how those who managed welfare systems responded to the enormous strains of supporting thousands of soldiers and civilians, as well as the relationship between the provision of relief, political considerations and the contested memories of conflict.

Dr Ismini Pells is an historian of early modern military and medical history. Her research particularly focuses on the British Civil Wars of 1639-51. She is the project manager of Civil War Petitions, a project based at the University of Oxford. She obtained her PhD from University of Cambridge, where her thesis explored the career of Philip Skippon, commander of the infantry in the New Model Army. This was subsequently published as a monograph with Routledge under the title of Philip Skippon and the British Civil Wars: the ‘Christian Centurion’.

All are welcome to attend . Members pay £15 per annum and for visitors a donation of £5 per talk is suggested with no payment expected from students.

Meetings are usually held on the second Tuesday of each month at Ealing Green Church at 7.30pm, with the exception of the November meeting which takes place at Twyford School at 6.30pm. Talks are live events but with the speaker’s permission the association aims to make a recording available afterwards to those registering on Eventbrite (the booking link will be available on the society's website one month in advance of each talk).

For more details of the association’s programme of talks for the coming season visit its web site.