800000 project investigates the human cost of war
The human cost of civil wars is to be investigated in a four-year project entitled 'Welfare, Conflict and Memory during and after the English Civil Wars,1642-1700’ funded by a major grant of over £800,000 from the Arts and Humanities Research Council.
The project’s principal investigator is Dr Andrew Hopper from our Centre for English Local History and involves the University of Nottingham, Cardiff University and the University of Southampton. It will analyse how ordinary men and women remembered the conflict, and how victims of the war negotiated with authorities for charitable relief.
The main output will be a freely available website containing photographs and transcriptions of every petition for relief from maimed soldiers and war widows in England and Wales relating to losses suffered in the Civil Wars. Genealogists and family historians will also benefit from the website’s searchable list of claimants to military welfare in these years, which will include details of the sums awarded to them. This website, together with a separate education website for schools entitled ‘Death and Survival in the Civil Wars’ will be developed and hosted by the University of Nottingham’s Multimedia Online Archive Service.
The project team will be collaborating with the recently established National Civil War Centre at Newark Museum, Nottinghamshire. Building on the Museum’s successful ‘Battle-Scarred’ exhibition about civil-war military welfare, the project and Museum will collaborate in organising special events, exhibitions and teachers’ workshops. The project will also support the production of a research monograph and articles by the project team as well as an international conference and two collections of scholarly essays.