Customer Reviews

The Civil Wars: A Military History of England, Scotland, and Ireland 1638-1660 (Oxford Illustrated History)

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Unlike the previous reviewer, I thought this book did a pretty decent job in going through the entire aspect of the English Civil War from the very beginning to the Restoration of Charles II.

The book is a collection of essays written by seven different authors, edited by two people. I don't expect consistancy under these conditions and expect more diverse opinions and facts relating to the matter at hand. Each essay covered certain part of the long conflict that engulfed the British Isles between 1638-1660.

The book comes well armed with maps, illstrations and I thought it was quite readable. Anyone who read this book should have a decent background reading on the English Civil War prior since you will be reading an essay which don't give you much introduction space.

The subtitle of this book is misleading. It would be better to call it something like "Aspects of current research into the English Civil War era." There is no coherant narrative of the period, no summary of events, rather a series of separate chapters by workers in the field. If you do not already have a basic knowledge of the war in a little detail, you will be at least a little confused; certainly you will not get it from this book. As a collection from various authors, it also suffers from the incoherancy of that form; for instance, we are told early on that the New Model Army was extremely well-bahaved toward civilians, indulging in no looting or assaults, while later on we are told that both sides were responsible for many rapes of civilian women. Finally there is the tendency toward journalistic prose: several things "allegedly" happened, but we are not told by whom, or given any way to judge how reliable the allegations are. Such an abdication of the historian's responsibility (to non-historians, at any rate) makes the statement quite meaningless.