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 of mobility. Petitions often mention the use of mobility aids such as wooden legs, crutches, and even horses to help disabled individuals navigate society.

Disability history is an often overlooked yet significant historical discipline, and this study would make a large impact on a growing community of historians studying the consequences and memory of the Civil Wars. Despite this, there are very few studies on disability in this period and no monograph. As a result, my thesis will be the only extended piece of work on the experiences of disability in this period.

The project will redefine how we understand disabled people's experiences during the seventeenth century and in doing so will advance significantly the growing discussion about the lives of disabled people through history.

This study will use a mixed methods approach. It will rely primarily on qualitative thematic analysis; however, it will also use qualitative language analysis and some quantitative financial analysis to contextualise different pension payments. Combining these methods will ensure that this research is as effective as possible in its depiction of disability in the early modern period by approaching the topic from multiple angles creating a comprehensive picture.

This study will apply the social model of disability to examples of disability in the era of the Civil Wars. This model describes disability as a social construct; that people with impairments are disabled by features of society such as discrimination, economic and social dependence, inaccessibility, and unemployment. By applying this model, this study will gain a greater insight into how disabled individuals navigated the barriers they faced to participate in society and in doing so, it will assess the medical and religious models of disability they encountered.