We are thrilled to publish the next in our series of blogs in which academic users of the Dorset History Centre reflect on the archival collections they have accessed here, and how these have assisted, and added to, their particular research.
Here, Professor Mark Stoyle from the University of Southampton discusses some of our Quarter Sessions records.
Professor Stoyle writes:
I spent a good deal of time in late 2017 and early 2018 working on the late seventeenth-century Quarter Sessions Order Books (Q/S/M /1/2 and Q/S/M/1/3) which are housed in the Dorset History Centre. I was drawn to these particular volumes because of the fascinating light which they shed on the aftermath of the English Civil War of 1642-46 – and more specifically on the financial provision which the county authorities made for soldiers who had been wounded in that conflict and for the widows of men who had been killed while fighting for king or parliament.
The evidence contained in these volumes helps us to appreciate just how much ordinary people in Dorset were touched by the tragedy of the Civil War. It also helps us to understand the complicated processes through which the members of the Dorset ‘county community’ attempted to alleviate the sufferings of some former soldiers and war widows during the half century or so between 1646 and 1700.
The material which has been culled from these volumes will be vital to the findings of the ongoing AHRC-funded project ‘Conflict, Welfare and Memory during and after the English Civil Wars’ which is currently being undertaken by a team of historians based at the universities of Cardiff, Leicester, Nottingham and Southampton. (See the website ‘Civil War Petitions‘ for more details).
The joy of working with original primary sources is that they enable you to get closer to the people who lived in the past and, occasionally, to turn up new evidence which has never been commented upon by historians before. While I was working in Dorchester, I was especially excited to learn that an original list of ex-Royalist soldiers from Dorset – which I thought had been lost since it was last spotted, in private hands, in the 1920s – had subsequently been gifted to the DHC and was available for me to consult. Seeing this document in the flesh, as it were, after I had read about it so often in the past was perhaps the highlight of my recent stint in the DHC for me!