Product Description

One of the bloodiest - and most romanticized - episodes in British history, the Civil War period was also one of the most copmplex. For three hundred years the civil wars have raised as many questions as leading historians could provideanswers; John Kenyon, a leading authority on the Stuart period, interprets that bitter and tormented age for the late twentieth century.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1007878 in Books
• Published on: 1996-06-03
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 288 pages

Synopsis
One of the bloodiest - and most romanticized - episodes in British history, the Civil War period was also one of the most copmplex. For three hundred years the civil wars have raised as many questions as leading historians could provideanswers; John Kenyon, a leading authority on the Stuart period, interprets that bitter and tormented age for the late twentieth century.

Customer Reviews

From a non-academic
If you're interested, like I was, in getting a more general overview of the period and a broad understanding of, say, the reasons for the civil wars, or Cromwell's rise to become Lord Protector, this book falls disappointingly short.

Kenyon assumes deep prior knowledge of the period on the part of the reader and doesn't attempt to enlighten the lay-reader on the background to the wars.

Thus, the high level of detail (the book is really just a long stream of passages about the number of men, the proportion of foot and horse which comprised them, how much they earnt, who led them and where they marched from and to and how many of them deserted and little else besides) is not balanced with enough overarching perspective to provide context or structure.

If you already know your English Civil War, I imagine this supplements your knowledge with rich and interesting detail. If you're looking to build a foundation of knowledge about it from this book, you won't.

An admirable survey.
A good, well-written and pithy intorduction to the complex and controversial arena of Civil War history, John Kenyon's work provides a balanced overview of England in the 1640s, giving suitable emphasis to the military campaigns. My own problems with Kenyon's book come from disagreements, long fought over, about the nature of the Civil Wars/English Revolution. Kenyon's conflict was not an 'English Revolution'; its effect on subsequent English history marginal. Moreover, Kenyon does not place enough emphasis on the roles of Scotland and Ireland in the conflict, nor does he see the wars from the point of view of the 'ordinary' Britons. (Of course, during the revolutionary decades, such men and women were far from 'ordinary'.) But Kenyon's case is well-argued, and, as a starting-point for those coming to read about this most violent, exciting and unpredictable period of history, there are worse places to begin than here.