English Civil War earl of Essex would put himself in their way". Accordingly, the army left Shrewsbury on 12 October, gaining two days' start on the enemy, and moved south-east. This had the desired effect, as it forced Essex to move to intercept them. The first pitched battle of the war, fought at Edgehill on 23 October 1642, proved inconclusive, and both the Royalists and Parliamentarians claimed it as a victory. The second field action of the war, the stand-off at Turnham Green, saw Charles forced to withdraw to Oxford. This city would serve as his base for the remainder of the war.
English Civil War school, which became popular in the 1940s, and which interpreted the English Civil War as a bourgeois revolution. According to Marxist historian Christopher Hill: In the 1970s, revisionist historians challenged both the Whig and the Marxist theories, notably in the 1973 anthology "The Origins of the English Civil War" (Conrad Russell ed.). These historians produced work focused on the minutiae of the years immediately preceding the civil war, thereby returning to the contingency-based historiography of Clarendon's famous contemporary history "History of the Rebellion and Civil Wars in England". This, it was claimed, demonstrated that factional war-allegiance patterns did not fit