West Riding of Yorkshire

The West Riding was England’s largest county and the most populous part of Yorkshire. It witnessed heavy fighting as both sides recruited thousands of soldiers there in their struggle for control. The parliamentarians under Ferdinando, Lord Fairfax, began by defending their support base in the central western districts around Leeds, Bradford and Halifax. Badly outnumbered, they were defeated at Adwalton Moor on 30 June 1643 by the Marquis of Newcastle’s northern royalist army. Thereafter, the entire county fell under royalist control before a parliamentarian resurgence in spring 1644 brought about the Civil War’s largest battle at Marston Moor on 2 July 1644. The resulting slaughter was a catastrophe for northern royalism, whose adherents spent 1645 defending their remaining garrisons at the castles of Pontefract, Sandal and Skipton.

Only one parliamentarian petition survives, but there are 106 petitions and certificates for royalists submitted between 1668 and 1709. Eleven order books covering 1647 to 1710 constitute some of the richest county payment records that survive nationwide. They enable us to locate royalist recipients in very large numbers. Royalist strength appears evenly distributed across the Riding. Yet there were notable clusters around their long-standing garrisons at Pontefract, Knaresborough and Skipton castles, as well as within the deaneries of Doncaster and Pontefract where large numbers of ‘scandalous ministers’ were ejected from their benefices. Before 1660 the clerk of the peace omitted recording claimants’ home settlements, so we know far less about the distribution of parliamentarian recipients. However, we do know from other sources that during 1643 the parliamentarians recruited most heavily in the districts around Leeds, Bradford and Halifax, where cloth manufacturing and Godly preaching were firmly established, as well as southwestern parishes such as Sheffield, Ecclesfield and Penistone where royalists were thinner on the ground. See chapters 2 and 7 of Andrew Hopper, ‘Black Tom’: Sir Thomas Fairfax and the English Revolution (Manchester University Press, 2007).

Royalists were claiming during a 49-year period (1660-1709), compared to a 13 year period for the parliamentarians (1647-1660). Therefore, it is unsurprising parliamentarian claimants were fewer: 309 compared to 722 royalists. The three ‘others’ identified in the table were turncoats stripped of their pensions for having formerly been in arms for the enemy.

Gratuities paid in the West Riding of Yorkshire

	Min	Max	Mean	Median	Mode	TOTAL
Maimed Soldiers	2s 6d	£20	£1 2s 2d	10s	10s	£154 18s 8d
Royalists	2s 6d	£20	£1 3s 3d	10s	10s	£130 2s 6d
Parliamentarians	3s 4d	£6	17s 9d	10s	5s AND 20s	£24 16s 2d
War Widows	5s	£5	11s 11d	10s	10s	£51 1s 8d
Royalists	10s	£2	£1 8s 9d	£1 15s	£2	£11 10s
Parliamentarians	5s	£5	10s 2d	10s	10s	£39 11s 8d
Other Dependents	£4	£25	£14 10s	n/a	n/a	£29
Royalists	£4	£25	£14 10s	n/a	n/a	£29
Parliamentarians	0	0	0	0	0	0
ALL	2s 6d	£25	£1 7d	10s	10s	£235 4d
Royalists	2s 6d	£25	£1 8s	10s	10s	£170 12s 6d
Parliamentarians	3s 4d	£6	12s 2d	10s	10s	£64 7s 10d

Pensions paid in the West Riding of Yorkshire

	Min	Max	Mean	Median	Mode
Maimed Soldiers	10s	£13 6s 8d	£1 17s 4d	£2	£2
Royalists	10s	£13 6s 8d	£1 17s 3d	£2	£2
Parliamentarians	10s	£5	£1 17s 9d	£2	£2
War Widows	10s	£20	£1 8s 2d	£1	10s
Royalists	£2	£20	£8 3s 9d	£2 11s 4d	n/a
Parliamentarians	10s	£3	£1 4s 5d	£1	10s
Other Dependents	10s	£3 18s	£1 8s 9d	15s	10s
Royalists	£3 12s	£3 18s	£3 15s	£3 15s	n/a
Parliamentarians	10s	£1	13s 4d	10s	10s
ALL	10s	£20	£1 16s 6d	£2	£2
Royalists	10s	£20	£1 17s 9d	£2	£2
Parliamentarians	10s	£5	£1 13s 1d	£1 10s	£2

The average (mean) pension awarded to parliamentarian soldiers of £1 17s. 9d. per annum was very slightly higher than that of £1 17s. 3d. per annum given to their royalist counterparts. Parliamentarian widows received an average (mean) annual pension of £1 4s. 5d. The local parliamentarian practice of awarding 10s. per annum to widowed mothers for each of their orphaned children under seven years old augmented some widows’ pensions considerably.

War widows constituted nearly 36% of parliamentarian recipients, but less than 2% of royalist claimants, underlining how difficult it was for royalist war widows to access county relief. A comparison between mean pensions awarded to parliamentarian and royalist widows is less illuminating because the royalist mean is heavily skewed by the dominating presence of officers’ widows. The pension of £20 per annum awarded to Grace, the widow of Colonel Robert Portington amounted to £300 over a fifteen-year period. It dwarfs the paltry total of £4 11s. 4d. allotted to other West Riding royalist widows. The royalist justices after the Restoration appear to have been more comfortable with awarding one-off gratuities than with allowing state pensions, and happier to relieve the widows of their officers than their rank-and-file soldiers.

Further Reading

Andrew Hopper, ‘Black Tom’: Sir Thomas Fairfax and the English Revolution (Manchester University Press, 2007).

Jack Binns, Yorkshire in the Civil Wars: Origins, Impact and Outcome (Pickering: Blackthorn Press, 2004).