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The Civil War In Lichfield

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The book I read to research this post was Loyal and Ancient City: The Civil War In Lichfield by Howard Clayton which is an excellent book which I bought from a car boot sale. I live in Birmingham so Lichfield in Staffordshire is quite near to me. It’s famous for having the smallest cathedral in Britain and also unusually it’s made of sandstone. During the Civil War, Lichfield was very loyal to the Royalists & it was a relatively large city by their standards with a population of around 3,000. It was also a key outpost close to the frontier between Royalist & Parliamentarian forces. The eastern and western parts of the country including Wales & London were Parliamentarian with a great big band cutting the middle of the country of Royalist areas. Lichfield changed hands several times as it was attacked by Parliamentarian forces & then Royalists would try to save them. Quite a few of the famous battles of the war were near to Lichfield underlying its importance. Lichfield also supplied a huge contingent of the Royalist forces but they were generally outnumbered by the Parliamentarians in the battles. Charles the 1st made Oxford a temporary capital city during the war. The war famously started when Charles went to parliament to arrest 5 members of the house who had already fled and were recruiting an army for war. Towards the end of the Civil War the Parliamentarians beseiged Lichfield and although in the meantime many other Royalist settlements like Ludlow & Dudley did surrender after relatively brief sieges the city of Lichfield stuck it out for quite a long time. Interestingly the first bishop of Lichfield was Saint Chad and the cathedral is named after him. The cathedral was badly damaged during the Civil War but they had a really good bishop who greatly built on the congregation and was good at organising the tidying up work. Of course Cromwell turned out to be a dictator and when he died and his son took over the nation as a whole soon got fed up and they brought back parliament and the monarchy. This book is really interesting and appears well researched.



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