Fleshing out a massacre: the storming of Shelford House and social forgetting in Restoration England*

Abstract

This article investigates the circumstances behind the slaughter of a royalist garrison in Nottinghamshire in November 1645, using the case study as a window into wider issues regarding the relationship between the memorialization of the British civil wars and the fragility of Charles II’s regime in the years following the Restoration. Contemporary sources illustrate how the factors which led to the massacre gave both parliamentarian and royalist leaders impelling motives to wipe the incident from their respective narratives of the conflict.