Professor Andrew Hopper

Andrew Hopper is a historian of religion, politics and society in early modern England with research expertise on the British and Irish Civil Wars. Andrew graduated from the University of York in 1999 with a doctoral thesis examining the nature of parliamentarian allegiance in civil-war Yorkshire. Thereafter he worked as a researcher for the JISC-funded Virtual Norfolk Project at the University of East Anglia (2000-2003) and the AHRC-funded High Court of Chivalry Project at the University of Birmingham (2003-2006). He was appointed Lecturer in the Centre for English Local History at the University of Leicester in 2006, where he was promoted to Professor (2018) and Director of the Centre (2020). Andrew moved to the Department for Continuing Education in September 2021. In 2023, Andrew was elected as a Fellow of the Society for Army Historical Research in recognition of the achievements of the Civil War Petitions project.

Research Interests

Andrew has a passion for teaching early modern and local history, as well as public engagement and collaborative projects with schools and museums. He is keen to supervise postgraduate research into early modern British history. He is best known for his two monographs 'Black Tom': Sir Thomas Fairfax and the English Revolution (Manchester University Press, 2007) and Turncoats and Renegadoes: Changing Sides in the English Civil Wars (Oxford University Press, 2012). He is currently working on his third monograph Widowhood and Bereavement in the English Civil Wars under contract with Oxford University Press, which is based on the AHRC-funded Civil War Petitions Project (2017-2022) for which he is Principal Investigator. He is also chair of the editorial board of Midland History, a patron of the Naseby Battlefield Project, and Academic Director of the National Civil War Centre, where he was co-curator of the Battle-Scarred exhibition.

Select Publications

Books

Widowhood and Bereavement in the English Civil Wars (Oxford University Press, forthcoming)

With David J. Appleby (eds), Battle-Scarred: Mortality, Medical Care and Military Welfare in the British Civil Wars (Manchester University Press, 2018)

With Jean Agnew and Emily Wilbur Alley (eds), The Great Blow: Examinations and Informations relating to the Great Blow in Norwich, 1648 (Norfolk Record Society, 82, 2018)

With Philip Major (eds), England’s Fortress: New Perspectives on Thomas, 3rd Lord Fairfax (Ashgate, 2014)

With Jacqueline Eales (eds), The County Community in Seventeenth-Century England and Wales (University of Hertfordshire Press, 2012)

Turncoats and Renegadoes: Changing Sides in the English Civil Wars (Oxford University Press, 2012)

The Papers of the Hothams: Governors of Hull during the Civil War (Camden Society, 5th series, 39, 2011)

The World of John Secker, 1716-1795, Quaker Mariner (Norfolk Record Society, 75, 2011)

With Christopher Dyer, Evelyn Lord and Nigel Tringham (eds), New Directions in Local History Since Hoskins (University of Hertfordshire Press, 2011)

'Black Tom': Sir Thomas Fairfax and the English Revolution (Manchester University Press, 2007)

With Richard Cust (eds), Cases in the High Court of Chivalry, 1634-40 (Publications of the Harleian Society, new series, 18, 2006)

Articles

‘ “The great blow” and the politics of popular royalism in Civil-War Norwich’, English Historical Review, 133:560 (2018), pp. 32-64

‘The reluctant regicide? Thomas Wayte and the civil wars in Rutland’, Midland History, 39:1 (2014), pp. 36-52

‘Social mobility in the English Revolution: the case of Adam Eyre’, Social History, 38:1 (2013), pp. 26-45

‘The self-fashioning of gentry turncoats during the English Civil Wars’, Journal of British Studies, 49:2 (2010), pp. 236-57

‘The Wortley Park poachers and the outbreak of the English Civil War’, Northern History, 44:2 (2007), pp. 93-114

‘The Farnley Wood plot and the memory of the civil wars in Yorkshire’, Historical Journal, 45:2 (2002), pp. 281-303

‘ “Fitted for desperation”: honour and treachery in Parliament’s Yorkshire command, 1642-3’, History, 86:2 (2001), pp. 138-54

‘A directory of parliamentarian allegiance in Yorkshire during the British Civil Wars’, Yorkshire Archaeological Journal, 73 (2001), pp. 85-122

‘The clubmen of the West Riding of Yorkshire during the First Civil War: “Bradford club-law”’, Northern History, 36:1 (2000), pp. 59-72

‘ “The popish army of the north”: anti-catholicism and parliamentary allegiance in Yorkshire, 1642-6’, Recusant History, 25:1 (2000), pp. 12-28

‘ “Tinker” Fox and the politics of garrison warfare in the West Midlands, 1643-50’, Midland History, 24 (1999), pp. 98-113

'The Readiness of the People’: The Formation and Emergence of the Army of the Fairfaxes, 1642-3 (University of York: Borthwick Papers, 92, 1997)

Chapters in Edited Volumes

‘The Farnley Wood plot and the memory of the civil wars in Yorkshire’, in Lloyd Bowen and Mark Stoyle (eds), Remembering the English Civil Wars (Routledge, 2021)

‘William Cavendish as a military commander’, in Peter Edwards and Elspeth Graham (eds), Authority, Authorship and Aristocratic Identity in Seventeenth-Century England: William Cavendish 1st Duke of Newcastle, and his Political, Social and Cultural Circle (Brill, 2016), pp. 216-236

‘The armies’, in Michael Braddick (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of the English Revolution (Oxford University Press, 2015), pp. 260-275

With Stuart Carroll, ‘A Yorkshireman in the Bastille: John Harwood and the Quaker mission to Paris’, in Nadine Lewycky and Adam Morton (eds), Getting Along? Religious Identities and Confessional Relations in Early Modern England - Essays in Honour of W. J. Sheils (Ashgate, 2012), pp. 185-212

With Richard Cust, ‘Duelling and the Court of Chivalry in early Stuart England’, in Stuart Carroll (ed.), Cultures of Violence: Interpersonal Violence in Historical Perspective (Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), pp. 156-174

‘The civil wars’, in Carole Rawcliffe and Richard Wilson (eds), Norwich since 1550 (Hambledon, 2004), pp. 89-116