Places of Memory

This chapter explores the ways in which place, and particularly places of war and wartime destruction, acted as sites of memory during the English republics. It considers three distinct memorial practices: local commemorations; folkloric and descriptive discourses; and monuments and memorials. These drew on existing traditions; but they also transformed them, producing new and, in some cases, controversial ways of remembering the recent past. It argues that, though no physical memorials were erected on England’s Civil War battlefields, sites of conflict nevertheless possessed considerable mnemonic power. It also emphasizes the important role that place played in the formation of distinct, geographically specific communities of memory. In London, the shared military experience of a large number of inhabitants provided the impetus for England’s first veterans’ commemoration, while in towns and cities that had been ravaged by war local authorities sought to enshrine their own particular, partisan version of the recent past.