The impact of the British Civil Wars on the experience of disability, 1640-1700

The brutal conflict between 1642 and 1651 required the country to adapt to a large rise in its disabled population and in doing so it needed to create a more robust infrastructure to support disabled veterans and civilians. My thesis will address how post-war society catered to the needs of these disabled people, how disabled people advocated for themselves, and how others represented their needs on their behalf.

This study will assess how the Civil War changed the experience of physical disability in the seventeenth century. This is supported by subsidiary research questions including: how did disabled veterans learn to navigate the world with their impairment? How effective were government strategies in catering to disabled people? How did changes brought about by the Civil War affect disabled civilians? What can we learn from Civil War petitions about the lives of the disabled poor?

To identify the experience of physically disabled individuals in the seventeenth century, this study will focus around three main themes: poverty, work, and mobility. In order to do this, it will use civil war petitions digitised by the Civil War Petitions Project team alongside other sources. Regarding the theme of poverty, Geoffrey Hudson has identified that as disabled veterans grew older, their approach to claiming support changed. Therefore, this study will explore survival strategies of the disabled poor to negotiate life-cycle poverty and life with a disability. In order to explore the theme of work, this study will read against the grain of petitions to identify how disability affected an individual's ability to participate in a labour driven society. Daniel Blackie has highlighted that there were two categories of work-limiting disability: occupational disability and general disability. This research will expand Blackie's framework to include the Civil War period. This study will also assess how individuals worked to make the world more accessible to them through the theme...