Ghosts, Revenants and Historic Memory: The English Civil War and the Supernatural

If by no means as terrible as their contemporary, the Thirty Years’ War, the fighting that tore England apart between 1642 and 1651, has left an indelible imprint on her history. This has chiefly been remembered in terms of part of the long march to democracy and social and religious freedom, but for the bulk of the population at the time the reality was one that was very different, namely long periods of disease, privation and want interspersed with more-or-less brief episodes of terror and, indeed, horror. Not surprisingly, then, what stuck in the popular mind was not, say, the ideas of the Levellers, but, rather mutilated bodies, burning buildings and the bullying behaviour of much of the soldiery, not to mention a sense that society was falling apart around their very ears. So traumatic was the experience that over the years it became ever more deeply embedded in England’s rich tradition of ghost stories. It is the aim of this book to analyse how this process came about and at the same time to examine what such tales reveal about the workings of historic memory.