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Lincolnshire in the English Civil War Period

Civil War story is shaped by grain, rivers, and fortified towns, with the county’s main fighting concentrated in the first war and later phases felt mostly through occupation and taxation.

Overview: Lincolnshire in the English Civil War Period

This article examines how Lincolnshire was drawn into the fighting years of England’s mid-17th century upheavals, focusing on the storming of Lincoln and the battle of Winceby as the county’s two defining military episodes.

Throughout LRH, the term English Civil War Period (1642 - 1651) is used to describe the three connected wars fought within the wider English Revolution (1640 - 1660). While those later phases reshaped national politics, Lincolnshire’s direct military experience belongs overwhelmingly to the first war. It was in 1643 and 1644 that armies crossed its fields, towns changed hands, cavalry rode out from neighbouring strongholds, and siege warfare scarred its most prominent urban centre.

After that point, Lincolnshire ceased to be a front-line battleground. When the second war erupted in 1648, and when the third followed in 1650 - 1651, the county was already firmly under Parliamentarian control. Its role shifted from contested territory to a secured hinterland - supplying food, taxation, and manpower while decisive fighting unfolded elsewhere.

For that reason, this article concentrates on Lincolnshire during the first war before turning, in later sections, to examine how the county experienced the remainder of the English Civil War Period through continued garrisons, fiscal pressure, and political administration rather than renewed invasion.

Timeline: Lincolnshire in the first English Civil War

1642. Local militias mobilise across Lincolnshire. Parliament secures much of the county, but its western edge remains exposed to raids from Royalist-held Newark-on-Trent.

Early - mid 1643. Royalist forces push into the county, taking several towns and threatening Parliament’s eastern supply corridor. Strongpoints in the Wolds, including Bolingbroke Castle, become flashpoints.

11 October 1643. Parliamentarian cavalry defeat a Royalist relief force at the Battle of Winceby, swinging momentum back toward Parliament in the county.

Late 1643 - early 1644. Parliamentarian armies consolidate positions, squeeze remaining Royalist garrisons, and prepare to retake Lincoln itself.

3 - 6 May 1644. Lincoln Castle is besieged and stormed, returning the city to Parliamentarian control and removing the last major Royalist foothold inside central Lincolnshire.

1645 - 1646. Military focus shifts west toward Newark and the Trent corridor. Lincolnshire becomes increasingly secure under Parliamentarian administration.

1648 - 1651. During the second and third wars, Lincolnshire plays no major battlefield role, functioning instead as a supply base and administrated hinterland.

The build-up: roads, rivers, grain, and Newark’s shadow

Lincolnshire’s importance in the 1640s grew from geography rather than ideology. Its open arable fields produced grain in abundance, while grazing marshes sustained livestock. Navigable rivers - the Trent along the west and the Witham cutting eastward - linked inland communities to ports and London markets. Roads threading fen-edge villages and Wolds ridges carried carts and droves that would soon be repurposed for war.

This landscape was unusually exposed. Lincolnshire lay close to the Midlands frontier zone where Royalist and Parliamentarian territories pressed against one another. Nowhere embodied that tension more sharply than the fortified town of Newark-on-Trent, perched astride a key Trent crossing and the Great North Road.

From there, mounted forces could surge eastward into Lincolnshire’s farming districts, disrupting river traffic, seizing grain, and testing Parliamentarian control of market towns deeper in the county. By early 1643 this proximity had turned Lincolnshire into a pressure zone - its villages and wharves caught between rival supply systems, its roads repeatedly scouted or ridden by armed columns.

1643: the road to Winceby

The campaigning season of 1643 marked Lincolnshire’s most volatile year. Pressure radiating out from Newark combined with Royalist garrisons inside the county to fracture Parliament’s hold on the region. Several towns changed hands, and the eastern supply routes that fed Parliament’s armies came under sustained threat.

In response, Parliamentarian forces advanced from East Anglia and the Wash, moving deliberately to isolate Royalist positions scattered across the Wolds and fen-edge settlements. Castles and fortified houses - among them Bolingbroke - became focal points in a widening contest over roads, ridges, and river approaches.

Royalist commanders attempted to counter these advances with fast-moving mounted columns drawn from the Newark system and northern garrisons. Relief expeditions threaded through narrow lanes near Horncastle, skirting chalk hills and shallow valleys that funnelled troops into predictable corridors.

These manoeuvres culminated in October when opposing cavalry forces collided on farmland near Winceby - an encounter that would decisively reorder the county’s war.

11 October 1643: the battle of Winceby

The battle of Winceby was short, violent, and dominated by cavalry. Parliamentarian horse met a Royalist relief force attempting to reach threatened garrisons, and fighting surged across gently rolling ground cut by hedges and trackways.

Set against the timeline’s broader arc, Winceby represents the moment when the balance inside Lincolnshire tipped. Royalist momentum faltered, eastern supply routes reopened to Parliament, and commanders were forced back toward Newark and the Trent corridor.

For LRH, Winceby matters less for the names of officers than for its setting. This was agricultural countryside - fields, slopes, and farm lanes - suddenly turned into tactical assets. Lincolnshire’s working landscape became a battlefield, and its inhabitants were left to negotiate the aftermath of mounted charges and abandoned equipment across land only days earlier used for grazing.

Winceby did not end fighting in Lincolnshire, but it changed its direction. Over the winter of 1643 - 1644, Parliamentarian pressure began to isolate the remaining Royalist garrisons scattered across the county. Above them all loomed one final obstacle: the Royalist hold on Lincoln Castle, still commanding the steep high ground at the county’s administrative heart.

1644: the storming of Lincoln

With the balance of power altered after Winceby, Parliamentarian commanders turned from chasing relief columns to dismantling the last major Royalist footholds inside the county itself. The most formidable of these lay at Lincoln, where the castle’s guns overlooked river approaches, roads, and the tightly packed streets of the upper town.

In early May 1644, siege guns were hauled into position and bombardment began. Over several days attackers tested defences and cut off supply lines. On 6 May, the final assault went in uphill under fire, ladders were raised against walls, and close-quarter fighting raged along the castle approaches.

Placed in the timeline, the storming of Lincoln stands as the county’s decisive urban episode. Once the castle fell, Parliament secured the administrative and symbolic heart of Lincolnshire. No other Royalist stronghold inside the county would match its importance.

From this point onward, Lincolnshire’s Civil War story shifts away from invasion inside the county and toward unfinished business on its western edge. With Lincoln secured, Parliament redirected men and artillery toward the great Royalist fortress beyond the county boundary that had haunted Lincolnshire since the war’s opening years. Control of the Trent corridor - and the fate of Newark - now became the decisive question.

Newark and the Trent corridor: closing the western frontier, 1644 - 1646

After the fall of Lincoln Castle, Parliamentarian strategy in the region narrowed sharply. The chief remaining Royalist obstacle was Newark-on-Trent, whose fortifications still dominated the River Trent crossing and the Great North Road.

From this fortified bridgehead, Royalist patrols had long disrupted Lincolnshire’s western parishes, intercepting river traffic and drawing cavalry columns eastward into farming districts. Even after Lincoln was retaken, Newark continued to threaten supply routes and to anchor Royalist resistance in the Midlands.

Between 1644 and 1646, pressure steadily increased along the Trent corridor. Parliamentarian forces tightened their grip on roads and wharves feeding the town, while surrounding countryside was drawn into siege logistics - supplying artillery trains, carts, timber, and provisions.

The repeated sieges of Newark turned riverbanks, fields, and causeways into instruments of blockade. For nearby Lincolnshire communities this meant renewed requisitioning and prolonged military traffic even after their own towns were no longer under immediate threat.

When Newark finally surrendered in 1646 - on the personal order of the king - the strategic equation in the region changed decisively. The Trent corridor was secured, Parliament’s eastern counties were no longer exposed to raids from the west, and Lincolnshire’s role as an active battlefield effectively came to an end.

With the western frontier closed, the county slipped into a different phase of wartime experience - no longer contested ground, but territory governed, taxed, and organised to support campaigns elsewhere.

Aftermath: Lincolnshire after the first war, 1646 - 1651

By the summer of 1646, the decisive military phase of Lincolnshire’s war was over. The storming of Lincoln and the final surrender of Newark had removed the county from the front line, and Parliamentarian committees now governed most towns and hundreds largely unchallenged.

Yet peace was slow to arrive. Garrisons remained. Taxes continued. Royalist estates were sequestered or redistributed. Parish officials managed billeting, requisitioning, and political surveillance as routine business.

When the second war erupted in 1648, Lincolnshire did not again become a battlefield. No major uprisings broke out and no pitched battles were fought on its soil. Instead, the county functioned as a secured hinterland - feeding Parliament’s forces while campaigns unfolded in Wales, the north, and the south-east.

The third war of 1650 - 1651 followed the same pattern. With fighting centred in Scotland and the north-west, Lincolnshire experienced those years through fiscal strain and continuing military administration rather than fresh invasions.

For LRH, this quieter phase is crucial. Lincolnshire’s central role lay in the first war; its lasting political imprint was forged afterward, when conflict faded from view but its institutions of control remained embedded in everyday life.

Legacy: how the war reshaped Lincolnshire

By the time armies finally moved elsewhere, Lincolnshire had been permanently altered. Parishes had learned to petition authorities. Borough officers had become managers of supply chains and soldiers. Rural households had endured repeated waves of taxation.

The English Civil War Period left more than scars on castle walls. It reshaped how people understood power - how quickly it could arrive, how deeply it could intrude, and how dependent it was on geography.

Fields that once fed markets had fed armies. Roads that carried livestock had borne artillery. Market squares that hosted fairs had quartered troops. Lincolnshire’s landscape had become political terrain.

In that sense, the county’s experience during the first war did not vanish once armies moved on. It entered local memory and resurfaced in later centuries whenever communities faced new pressures from distant authority - different causes, different banners, but recognisably the same geography of dissent.

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