Life in a Revolutionary Decade in Britain (1649-1660)
Gresham College Lectures
00:00
What Was the Cause of the English Civil War?
The leaders of both sides were on the whole gentry. There wasn't one class against another class. As my book tries to show somebody like John Bradshaw, he tries the king. He's not part of the sort of dispossessed, toiling urban classia population or something. Dr Kay: I was fascinated by what you said about the mapping of Ireland - why didn't that centralised government want to have their land mapped with a similar degree of accuracy and detail?Dr Kay: It would have improved a lot of people rather than another. But there was clearly an appetite for wider social change, not at least voiced by groups like the levelers.
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