The English Civil War: Myth, Legend and Popular Memory

How Cavaliers and Roundheads in English ghost stories reflect historical trauma, integrating detailed regional history of the 1642-1651 conflicts.

Cavaliers and Roundheads are figures who appear in hundreds of English ghost stories. In this innovative account, Charles Esdaile argues that such tales are in reality folk memories of an episode of English history that was second only to the Black Death in terms of individual and collective suffering alike, and, further, that they reveal important truths about the way in which the conflict was represented: it is no surprise, then, to find that spectral Cavaliers are often romantic figures and revenant Roundheads grim ones full of menace. Yet, the book is no mere catalogue. On the contrary, rather than being discussed in a vacuum, the tales of haunting are rather set within a detailed regional history of the conflicts of 1642-1651 of a sort that has never yet been attempted, but is, for all that, badly needed.

Professor Charles J. Esdaile is one of the leading historians of the Napoleonic era and holds a personal chair at the University of Liverpool. His wide-ranging history of Napoleon's attempt to conquer Spain and Portugal, The Peninsular War: A New History, and his international history of the Napoleonic period, Napoleon’s Wars, are classic works on the subject. In addition to his many articles and books on the Peninsular War and the Napoleonic Wars in general, he has made a special study of the Waterloo campaign.