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Revolution and civil war in Lincolnshire

How rivers, farmland, and fortified towns pulled Lincolnshire into England’s revolutionary decades and left behind a county practised in resistance, survival, and political mobilisation.

Introduction: Lincolnshire and the English Revolution (1640 - 1660)

When England slid into constitutional crisis in the early 1640s, Lincolnshire was not a distant agricultural backwater watching events unfold elsewhere. It was a county of grain stores and river crossings, of fenland causeways and market squares, of cathedral precincts and coastal trade - precisely the kinds of landscapes that determined whether armies could move, feed themselves, and hold territory.

Throughout this article, two closely related terms are used with care. The English Revolution (1640 - 1660) describes the full period of political, religious, and constitutional upheaval that reshaped the country. Nested within it is the English Civil War Period (1642 - 1651) - the three connected wars that brought sustained fighting, sieges, and military occupation to counties such as Lincolnshire.

Seen from parish boundaries rather than parliamentary chambers, the revolution arrived suddenly and physically. It came as troops billeted in inns, artillery hauled along fen-edge roads, grain seized from barns, churches converted into magazines, and new earthworks thrown up beside rivers. It was felt in the shadow cast by the nearby Royalist stronghold at Newark-on-Trent, and in the rapid militarisation of Lincoln, Grantham, and Gainsborough.

This cornerstone article tells that story through place. It traces how earlier traditions of resisting royal interference shaped political loyalties, how the English Civil War Period transformed everyday life across the county, and how the wider English Revolution left a durable imprint on Lincolnshire’s political culture long after the fighting stopped.

The land before upheaval: rivers, grain, and market towns

Before 1640, Lincolnshire was already strategically significant. Its open arable fields produced grain for distant markets, while grazing marshes and fen-edge communities sustained cattle and sheep. The county’s great river systems shaped its economy: the Trent running along its western edge and the Witham carrying produce eastward toward coastal ports.

Market towns anchored this world. Lincoln remained an administrative and ecclesiastical centre; Boston funnelled exports overseas; Grantham and Gainsborough structured inland trade. Roads, bridges, and raised causeways across wetland margins mattered enormously, because they governed how goods - and later armies - could move.

This geography supported strong local institutions. Parishes managed poor relief and worship. Borough corporations regulated markets. County magistrates oversaw taxation and justice. Such arrangements fostered habits of local autonomy, and sharpened resentment whenever royal government appeared to intrude too forcefully into county affairs.

By the later 1630s, when national politics darkened through unpopular fiscal demands and disputes over church governance, Lincolnshire’s prosperous farming communities and trading towns were already accustomed to guarding their own interests. Once mobilisation began, the county’s fields and waterways would become prizes worth fighting for.

A county with a memory of defiance before 1640

Lincolnshire’s Parliamentarian leanings in the 1640s did not emerge from nowhere. The county carried a longer political memory - of mobilisation, grievance, and confrontation with royal authority - that stretched back into the Tudor period.

In 1536, Lincolnshire became the epicentre of mass protest against religious change and taxation. Thousands assembled across the shire, royal officials were driven out of towns, and for a brief moment crown authority collapsed over large areas. Although the rising was suppressed, its scale left a residue in local consciousness: that county-wide resistance to royal policy was possible.

In the decades that followed, Lincolnshire’s parishes and boroughs remained shaped by strong local governance and reform-minded Protestant culture. Trading links tied its towns into eastern England’s commercial and religious networks, while county elites became accustomed to negotiating with - rather than simply obeying - central authority.

By the early 17th century, resentment over royal taxation, enclosure disputes, and church policy was already embedded in parish life. When crisis erupted nationally in 1640, Lincolnshire possessed not only strategic farmland and river corridors, but a political culture practised in defending local prerogatives.

Short chronology: from Tudor rebellion to Civil War loyalties

1536 - Tudor authority challenged. Large-scale rebellion erupts across Lincolnshire against royal religious reforms and taxation, demonstrating the county’s capacity for rapid collective mobilisation.

Late 16th century - Parish autonomy and reform. Market towns expand, Protestant preaching strengthens, and local governance traditions deepen suspicion of distant royal control.

1630s - Fiscal pressure and religious tension. Ship Money and church reforms sharpen resentment toward the monarchy in farming and trading communities.

1640 - 1642 - Crisis of monarchy. Parliament challenges royal authority, militias mobilise, and political loyalties harden across Lincolnshire.

1642 - 1651 - English Civil War Period. Most of the county sides with Parliament, while nearby Newark becomes a Royalist fortress and towns endure garrisons, requisitioning, and raids.

1646 - 1660 - Aftermath within the English Revolution. Military administration, confiscations, and political surveillance continue.

After 1660 - Restoration and long shadows. The monarchy returns, but memories of occupation and resistance endure.

Why Lincolnshire backed Parliament during the English Civil War Period (1642 - 1651)

When open warfare broke out, Lincolnshire’s political geography crystallised quickly. Commercial ties ran eastward toward Parliamentarian regions. Religious culture leaned toward reformist preaching hostile to episcopal authority. Farmers and merchants remained deeply wary of royal levies imposed from the centre.

Above all, the county’s position on the edge of Royalist-held Newark forced choices to be made locally. Raids, supply seizures, and the looming presence of a fortified neighbour pushed many communities toward Parliament not as an ideological abstraction, but as a practical means of defence.

Support for Parliament thus combined long-standing habits of local independence with immediate wartime necessity. Garrisons at Lincoln and Grantham were framed as shields against intrusion rather than symbols of distant political theory.

Newark: Royalist fortress on the county line

Newark commanded the River Trent and the Great North Road, projecting Royalist power into surrounding counties. Engineers encircled the town with earthworks, artillery platforms, and defensive ditches, adapting medieval structures to gunpowder warfare.

From this base, cavalry raided into Lincolnshire to seize grain and disrupt trade. The town endured three major sieges before surrendering in 1646 on royal orders, compressing the whole English Civil War Period into a single, battered place.

War in daily life across Lincolnshire

For most communities the war meant occupation rather than pitched battle. Garrisons settled into market towns, soldiers were billeted in homes and barns, and churches doubled as armouries.

Horses were seized, carts impressed, and grain removed before reaching market. River traffic faltered. Petitions, parish accounts, and emergency levies reveal a countryside negotiating constantly with armed power.

After the fighting: military rule and rebuilding, 1646 - 1660

Even when major campaigning ceased, Lincolnshire remained under military oversight. Estates were sequestered, taxes continued, and surveillance lingered.

Trade and drainage projects slowly resumed. Repairs to bridges, mills, and waterways marked a quieter second phase of the English Revolution - less dramatic than sieges, but equally transformative.

Restoration and long memory

The return of monarchy in 1660 reshaped authority again, but did not erase experience. Parish elites adapted, religious policy tightened, and wartime memories persisted.

Two decades of upheaval had altered expectations. Communities had learned how swiftly government could fracture and how much depended on local organisation.

Lincolnshire’s radical afterlife

Later centuries saw agricultural protest, dissenting religion, labour organisation, and democratic campaigning draw on traditions sharpened during the 17th century.

LRH traces that long arc: landscapes once dominated by garrisons became landscapes practised in petitioning, mobilisation, and resistance.

Conclusion: a county shaped by resistance

The English Revolution did not simply pass over Lincolnshire; it embedded itself in the county’s geography and political habits. Rivers that once carried grain carried soldiers. Market squares that hosted fairs hosted garrisons. Parish systems accustomed to managing harvests learned to manage occupation.

During the English Civil War Period, Lincolnshire aligned with Parliament partly through conviction and partly through necessity, shaped by proximity to Newark and by a long tradition of guarding local autonomy. After the fighting ended, years of military rule and shifting authority trained communities to negotiate power rather than assume its permanence.

That legacy outlasted the 17th century. When later generations challenged enclosure, taxation, industrial change, or political exclusion, they did so in a county already practised in collective action and wary of distant control.

Lincolnshire’s experience of revolution, war, and restoration therefore forms more than a chapter in national history. It is a local story of fields and rivers turned political, of towns drawn into continental-scale upheaval, and of a rural county whose repeated encounters with power left it unusually alert to the possibilities - and the limits - of resistance.

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