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Bloody Marsh: A Seventeenth-Century Village in Crisis
Bloody Marsh A SeventeenthCentury Village in Crisis Author:Peter Warner, Pete Warner, Nick Catling It is a riveting tale; and I thoroughly enjoyed reading it. The strong personalities and the passionate sense both of self-righteousness and of injustice burn brightly throughout.' (Professor John Morrill, University of Cambridge) In April 1644, with the English Civil War at its height, a man walked into the coastal town of Walberswick in... more » Suffolk, got into a fight with some locals, and was killed. The local Justice of the Peace, Robert Brooke, exacted swift retribution, and the three perpetrators were hanged. Thereafter, the event became known as The Battle of Bloody Marsh'. Why did this battle' happen, and what does it tell us about what life was really like in an English rural community in the seventeenth century: Peter Warner draws upon an extraordinarily rich set of primary sources to reconstruct the causes and consequences of this violent episode. He unravels a tale of crisis in a social landscape a story of rising poverty, enclosure, accusations of rape, and the brutal confrontation of the landed and the dispossessed. Like Le Roi Ladurie's Montaillou and Gough's History of Myddle, the story of Bloody Marsh explores in microcosm great historical events, and show how they transformed the lives of real people. Nick Catling's black and white photographs also show how the story is grounded in a beautiful, living landscape: a real place where the visitor can sense in an almost visceral way the presence of the past. Peter Warner is Dean of Homerton College, Cambridge, where he teaches archaeology. Nick Catling is a professional photographer and runs a gallery in Southwold, Suffolk.« less