Besieged: Warwick Castle and its People
Tuesday 8th April, 2025.
6:30pm.
Great Hall, Warwick Castle
£15.
Revealing the untold story of Warwick Castle and its people during the British Civil Wars.
Robert Greville, 2nd Lord Brooke, was a prominent figure amongst the opposition to Charles I, a religious radical and intellectual who emerged as a successful popular leader in the early months of the English Civil War. This volume publishes the richly detailed household accounts kept for Brooke and his widow, Katherine, on an annual basis between 1640 and 1649. These texts have scarcely been studied by historians. They are an illuminating source for Brooke’s capacious intellectual, religious, and political networks, and for his mobilisation of support for Parliament in 1642.
They also uncover the administration of his estates and households in London, Warwickshire, and the Midlands before and after his premature death. These accounts are crucial sources for political, economic, and military historians, and equally important for social and cultural historians interested in the history of the family, childhood, and widowhood, as well as consumption and material culture.
For the first time a group of historians have transcribed the household accounts of Robert and Catherine Greville, Lord and Lady Brooke of Warwick during the tumultuous years of the Civil Wars between 1640 and 1649.
This research has allowed the editors to construct a detailed and fascinating picture of the lives of not only the Grevilles but also their household at Warwick Castle, that became a Parliamentary stronghold and survived a Royalist siege.
Join the distinguished editors in the Great Hall of Warwick Castle on 8th April 2025 to hear what their research has revealed about the fascinating story of the castle and its defenders.
- Entry to the book launch from 6.30pm for talks to commence at 7pm
- Talks by the three co-editors and a Q&A session
- Drinks available throughout the evening for purchase
STEWART BEALE completed his PhD at the University of Leicester in 2018. His research examines the experiences of war widows, orphans, and maimed soldiers during the British civil wars.
ANDREW HOPPER, formerly Director of The Centre for English Local History at the University of Leicester, is Professor of Local and Social History in the Department for Continuing Education at the University of Oxford. He is known for his two monographs ‘Black Tom’: Sir Thomas Fairfax and the English Revolution (Manchester, 2007), and Turncoats and Renegadoes: Changing Sides during the English Civil Wars (Oxford, 2012). He is the principal investigator of the Civil War Petitions Project and co-editor of the World Turned Upside Down podcast. He is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society and a Fellow of the Society for Army Historical Research. Andrew also serves as chair of the editorial board of Midland History and as a council member of the Worcestershire Historical Society.
ANN HUGHES is Professor (Emerita) of Early Modern History at Keele University. Her research focuses on the religious, cultural, and political implications of the revolutionary crisis in mid seventeenth-century Britain, with recent interests in print culture and modes of communication, preaching, gender, and the complex engagements of men and women with the parliamentarian wartime state. Her publications include Gender and the English Revolution (London, 2011); Gangraena and the Struggle for the English Revolution (Oxford, 2004); The Causes of the English Civil War (Basingstoke, 2nd edition, 1998), and a co-edited edition of the works of Gerrard Winstanley (Oxford, 2009). Lord Brooke features in her fi rst book, Politics, Society and Civil War in Warwickshire 1620–1660 (Cambridge, 1987).
