The Maligned Militia

Drawing upon private papers, letters, financial records, diaries and memoirs, this book revisits the Monmouth Rebellion of 1685 to assess the militia’s performance in helping to defeat the ’pitchfork rebellion’. The study sets a benchmark for what could have been realistically expected of these part-time soldiers, and then sets this against the actual tasks that were asked of it. The results that emerge from this exercise paint a very different picture of the militia’s role in the rebellion than has hitherto been accepted by historians.