The Northumberland Quarter Sessions files contain four surviving petitions to Justices of the Peace from old royalist soldiers of the British Civil Wars. These provide valuable evidence of how people looked back on this terrible conflict. The latest one is from Henry Norton of ‘Turfe House’ in Hexham, aged ‘near upon 90 years’, which was presented to the Midsummer Sessions at Hexham in July 1710. This made Henry among the very last soldiers from this conflict who was still alive. He may have been living in a house with a turf roof, or a hamlet in Hexham parish named after such a structure.
In his petition, Henry claimed to have borne arms for King Charles I ‘of blessed memory’. Henry’s three sons had left to join ‘the Queen’s service’, and were probably fighting in Europe under the command of the Duke of Marlborough. This, he claimed, had left him in ‘miserable and deplorable circumstances’, wanting friends, and utterly dependent upon ‘the charitable help of well-disposed persons’. For good measure, he added that he had always ‘been of a good life & Conversation & a True Member of ye high Church of England’. This was likely a calculated appeal to the Tory Justices on the County Bench. Henry did not sign his petition himself, and it is likely that it was prepared for him by a literate acquaintance in the parish, possibly the minister or churchwarden. The narratives in petitions like Henry Norton’s demonstrate the strategies and language used by claimants and their sponsors in order to appear as deserving cases to Justices and other authorities.
Petition of Henry Norton of Turfe House, Hexham, July 1710
Henry’s petition was successful. On 12 July 1710, Northumberland’s Justices at the Hexham Sessions ordered the churchwardens and overseers of Hexham to provide Henry with eight pence per week towards his maintenance. This was a pitiful sum, but still very much worth the effort to obtain to help him get by in his last years. The stories of old soldiers like Henry Norton, and those of the Civil War’s widows and orphans too, are being uncovered by a new Arts and Humanities Research Council-funded project, entitled ‘Conflict, Welfare and Memory during and after the English Civil Wars 1642-1710’.
The project team is drawn from the Universities of Leicester, Nottingham, Cardiff and Southampton. Its free-access project website will be launched on 26 July 2018 at the National Civil War Centre, Newark Museum in Nottinghamshire. It will contain images and transcriptions of the petitions and certificates submitted by maimed soldiers and war widows in order to claim military pensions. These stretch from the 1640s to as late as 1710 (Henry Norton’s is the latest one so far discovered), and will include examples from Northumberland. We are very grateful for the co-operation of The National Archives and the county record offices of England and Wales, without which this project would not be possible.
The project’s research builds on the inaugural conference at the National Civil War Centre that produced a temporary exhibition there entitled ‘Battle-Scarred’ which examined medical care and military welfare during and after the Civil Wars. The exhibition remains in situ until the autumn and free exhibition brochures are available there to visitors. A collected volume of essays, entitled Battle-Scarred and based on the proceedings of the conference is available with Manchester University Press from July 2018: http://www.manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk/9781526124807/
Maybe there are things we might still learn today about care and welfare for those wounded, maimed and worn out by war from this landmark moment in our Civil-War past?
http://www.civilwarpetitions.ac.uk
Brilliant project!