Reliving the Civil War

Civil War England by Peter Young

(185pp. Longman)

There is no better guide to a Civil War battlefield than Brigadier Peter Young. He has immersed himself in the period for aver forty years and he possesses an unrivalled knowledge particularly of the soldiers who took part in that conflict. He combines historical understanding and sympathy, especially, it must be admitted, for the Cavaliers, with a lively sense of what it is like to be a combatant, derived from his own distinguished, first-hand and varied experience in the last war. As those who have accompanied him round any stricken field or once beleaguered fortress will confirm, his enthusiasm is infectious. A lone figure in the mid-1960s, he was quickly joined by those for whom his study of Edgehill had first made the Civil War come alive again. He began to organise his followers to take more than a passive interest in the subject, leading them in the carefully staged re-enactments of the battles and sieges for which the Sealed Knot, of which he was the founder and is now the Captain General, is justly celebrated.