Worcestershire in the English Civil War Gloucestershire, made the county vulnerable to raiding and requisitions. Nevertheless, the county was strategically vital to the Royalists, as a bridge from their mostly Western territories including Wales and Ireland back to their headquarters in Oxford. Worcestershire also provided the Royalists with industrial capacity to produce armaments and munitions. In June 1644, General William Waller's force of around 10,000 men pursued the King's army into Worcestershire as it retreated from Oxford. Waller was supported by the residents of Evesham, who repaired their bridge which had been broken to slow his passage into Worcestershire; the town was heavily fined and the
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