My purpose in this pamphlet is to tell a story: that of the experience of the people of Coventry during the crisis of English society in the seventeenth century which resulted in the Civil War of 1642-46, the execution of Charles I in 1649 and the abolition of the monarchy for over a decade until the Restoration of 1660.

There· has already been some excellent writing on Coventry during this period, notably by Dr. Ann Hughes, and my debt to her study of Warwickshire's politics and societ y (1620-1660) in book and article form and her essay on Coventry(* See Bibliography) is immense. However, much of the work is not easily accessible to the general public, and I have always believed that history is too good to be left just to the historians, so I have tried to write for a different readership from the scholars. If I whet any appetites, then the serious readers must go to the works of the academics to satisfy them fully. "Coventry's Civil War" is a big and complex topic, difficult to confine within the limitations of a pamphlet: this is by no means the last word.

I was honoured to be asked to give the Shelton Memorial Lecture for 1992 on the coming of the Civil War to Coventry. f had worked on the history of Warwickshire during the Civil War and Interregnum spasmodically over a number of years, and taught it to my long suffering students in the Arts Education Department of Warwick University. It was the spur of the public lecture which prompted me to pull my notes together and present my version of what happened to Coventry and its locality during that turbulent time over three hundred years ago.