Parliamentary Tyranny? Indemnity Proceedings and the Impact of the Civil War: A Case Study From Warwickshire

Recent research into the impact of the Civil War on provincial England has pointed to extensive economic and social dislocation, in the short term at least. We are no longer so certain that the English experience was qualitatively different from continental sufferings in the Thirty Years War. Formal taxation levels, for example, were higher in the 1640s and even in the 1650s than they were to be again until the French wars of the 1690s. In Warwickshire during the war itself the main parliamentarian levy, the weekly assessment paid to local troops, amounted in a year to ten times the annual ship money levy of the 1630s. In addition the county's inhabitants paid taxes for the New Model Army, for the British Army in Ireland, and a whole host of local, ad hoc levies, to provide horses or supplies for particular forces, or labour and animals for the fortifications of local garrisons. There was an unprecedented purchase tax, the excise, levied on many essential commodities; there were compulsory ‘loans’ to the Parliament of a fifth of landed income or a twentieth of personal estate; while property owners who were catholics or royalists (a group very broadly defined by Warwickshire's Parliamentarian authorities) faced the temporary or permanent confiscation of their estates.