Wednesday, 18 November 2020
Research by a University of Nottingham Civil War expert has shone new light on a little-known massacre that took place in Nottinghamshire 375 years ago this month.
Dr David Appleby has been digging into historical archives to piece together a fuller picture of the shocking story of a Parliamentarian attack on a Royalist garrison at Shelford, on the River Trent near Nottingham.
Shelford Manor, on the site of the old Shelford Priory, was stormed on 3rd November 1645 when the garrison’s Royalist defender Philip Stanhope refused to surrender to forces led by Colonel John Hutchinson and Colonel-General Sydenham Poyntz. In a frenzied attack Stanhope was killed and around 160 Royalist soldiers were brutally massacred, allegedly along with several women and children.1
Although the scale of the Shelford massacre was already known, no detailed historical investigation into the event has ever been carried out. Dr Appleby also set out to find out why the massacre has not been more widely reported throughout history, and why the atrocities in this small Nottinghamshire village seem to have been erased from social memory.
The research adds weight to the modern-day perception that the Civil Wars in England, Scotland and Ireland between 1642 and 1651 were far from civil. They were a series of violent battles and political wrangling between Parliamentarians known as Roundheads, and Royalists (Cavaliers) over who should rule the country and how it should be governed. In England and Wales alone, a larger proportion of the population died in the Civil Wars than in the First World War.
Dr David Appleby said: “The storming of Shelford Manor was as violent and nasty as any of the more famous battles of the British Civil Wars. I was prompted to look into it in depth as the name Shelford kept cropping up in the documents I was transcribing for our Civil War Petitions project. (This focuses on the personal pleas for state financial aid from victims and families of the war for decades afterwards.) Shelford lies just off the A52 on my way into work, so I’ve driven past it hundreds of times, completely unaware it was the site of a massacre. I wondered why I’d never heard of it, and why it wasn’t mentioned in the two main works on Civil War atrocities in England
Having reconstructed the event using all available archives and historical writings, I began to discover how and why both the Royalists and the Parliamentarians covered up the massacre. It begs the question; how many more cover-ups of violent episodes were there during the Civil Wars?”
In an extensive research paper published in the OUP journal Historical Research, Dr Appleby argues that the paucity of historical writing on Shelford was to all intents and purposes a cover up. The cover up, and the resulting social amnesia, were stemmed partly from serious divisions within the Royalist ranks about the recruitment of foreigners and Catholics in Charles I’s armies.
There were few recorded mentions of the Shelford massacre in the decades that followed the Civil War years and even fewer as the centuries passed. I believe that the frenzied nature of the attack was partly driven by anti-Catholic prejudice and partly by a desire for revenge. The Parliamentarians’ home communities – places such as Trent Bridge and Leicester - had suffered badly at the hands of these same Royalists only months earlier. The subsequent burying of the Shelford story is perhaps a reflection of both sides’ shame and embarrassment at the bloodshed and viciousness of the supposedly ‘civil’ Civil Wars.
The above image is a Satellite image of the Royal garrison site today © Google Earth
The most intriguing evidence of social forgetting comes from the village of Shelford itself. General Poyntz had intended to install a garrison in Shelford House after the storming, but during the night of 3 November the building was set alight. It was claimed that the fire had been started deliberately by the villagers. Like so many communities the local inhabitants had found living cheek-by-jowl with a military garrison highly unpleasant, and ultimately dangerous. The impulse to remove Shelford House from the physical landscape appears to have been matched by an equally strong desire to erase it from the communal memory. The only evidence that the body of Philip Stanhope was laid to rest in Shelford parish church is a short mention on his mother’s memorial stone.
“Given that Shelford is still a small, close-knit community,” said Dr Appleby, “it is strange that even long-established families appear to possess no discernible folk memory of the most important event in the village’s history; neither are there any local ghost stories or commemorative place-names to parallel those found in abundance at other civil-war sites.”
‘Fleshing out a massacre: the storming of Shelford House and social forgetting in Restoration England’ by David J. Appleby, is available online here or from the contacts below.
The research is part of a large AHRC-funded project, Civil War Petitions – Conflict, Welfare and Memory during and after the English Civil Wars, 1642-1710.
Story credits
1 The Shelford massacre – an untold story
Shelford Manor was a moated estate owned by Philip Stanhope, Earl of Chesterfield, a supporter of King Charles from the outbreak of the Civil War. It lay between the Parliamentarian garrison at Nottingham and their strategically important Royalist target, Newark. Shelford was part of a network of garrisons, including Belvoir Castle, Wiverton Hall and Thurgarton House, to shield Newark against hostile attacks.
The garrison at Shelford was made up of an understrength cavalry regiment and a small number of foot soldiers, most of whom were not local to the area. They were protected by a wide and boggy moat, with the River Trent forming one of its three sides. It was also shielded by half-moon shaped banks of earth that could be defended by musketeers firing from the upper floors of the central Manor House.
In the summer of 1645 as King Charles retreated across the Midlands after defeat at Naseby and Cheshire, he was chased by Parliamentarian forces led by Colonel-General Sydenham Poyntz to Newark. Some of Charles’ battered army were billeted at Shelford, namely the Queen’s Regiment who were mainly European Catholics with a very bad reputation among fellow Royalists, as well as the xenophobic and anti-Catholic parliamentarian press. The Queen’s Regiment at Shelford was boosted by Catholic royalists from Lancashire.
Shelford became the ideal target for Poyntz’s parliamentarian forces in his bid to get closer to the strategic target of Newark. An assault on Shelford House would keep his troops occupied; victory would boost their morale and provide parliament with a useful new stronghold. The parliamentarians surrounded the Royalist position on 1 November 1645 and two days later formally demanded that Philip Stanhope surrender the garrison to avoid bloodshed. Stanhope replied that he held Shelford for the king and was willing to die in its defence.
At 4pm that same day, Poyntz began his attack and reported that for the first half hour the Shelford defenders fought with courage but once the drawbridge had been hacked down the Parliamentarians poured in and the slaughter began in earnest. Documents in the Nottinghamshire Archives revealed that Poyntz whipped up his soldiers into a state of urgency and frenzy, fearing the arrival of a Royalist relief force.
Records of the Royalist casualties are vague, but it’s estimated Stanhope died with the bulk of his garrison, around 160 men, their bodies mutilated after death and buried together in hastily dug pits on the battle site. There is also a claim in a petition by the Earl of Chesterfield for financial aid, after two of his sons were killed, that several women and children in the garrison had also been murdered, but this was never mentioned in the few other sources.
To this day, the site remains largely unexcavated.
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For more information please contact Dr David Appleby, Department of History, University of Nottingham via email david.appleby@nottingham.ac.uk or Katie Andrews in the Press Office at the University of Nottingham on 0115 9515751 or katie.andrews@nottingham.ac.uk
Notes to editors:
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