During the later years of the Civil War the subversive potential of Birmingham's manufacturing-based society was personified by the local parliamentarian colonel John "Tinker" Fox, who recruited a garrison of 200 men from the Birmingham area and occupied Edgbaston Hall from 1643. From there he attacked and removed the Royalist garrison from nearby Aston Hall, established control over the countryside leading out to Royalist Worcestershire, and launched a series of audacious raids as far afield as Bewdley. Highly active, and operating largely independently of the parliamentarian hierarchy, to Royalists Fox came to symbolise a dangerous and uncontrolled overturning of the established order, with his background in the Birmingham metal trades seeing him caricatured as a tinker. By 1649 his national notoriety was such that he was widely rumoured to have been Charles I's executioner.