Dr Jonathan Worton
Lecturer
The early modern Historian, and expert on the English Civil Wars, the late Professor Blair Worden wrote: ‘What should they know of the present who only the present know?’ We can share Worden’s view, in that studying and engaging with History indeed opens and broadens the mind to the wealth and depth of human experience. My fascination with learning about and representing History began as a young boy; including upon returning home from holidays in Wales building Lego models of the medieval castles I had visited. Having immediate family who served in the British armed forces during the Second World War and growing up among the ‘Airfix generation’ it was probably inevitable that I would develop an enduring and wide-ranging interest in Military History. Historic landscapes, buildings, and other places – battlefields and fortifications in particular - and the stories behind the people who once occupied those spaces continually fascinate, inform, and inspire me in my teaching and research. First and foremost, I am an enthusiast for my subject. And if I had to philosophically acknowledge influences from the past, it would be from approaches by eighteenth and nineteenth-century antiquarians – who as enlightened (but largely amateur) polymaths eagerly pioneered interdisciplinary approaches to exploring, studying, explaining, and representing evidence of the past.
At Postgraduate Taught Level, for several years I headed the University’s MA and PG Diploma/Certificate Military History programmes and led the teaching. Currently I contribute to the MSc in Museums and Heritage Practice. In performing those duties, I have successfully supervised numerous research dissertations and research essays. I also teach across the undergraduate History programme at the University’s Chester Exton Park and University Centre Shrewsbury campuses.
I am especially interested in military and related socio-political histories of Britain during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, particularly the British Civil Wars and Jacobitism. Wider research interests include the military and social history of Britain’s armed forces, and histories of fortifications and of the military in the landscape.
Books
Worton, J., The Battle of Glenshiel: The Jacobite Rising in 1719 (Solihull: Helion & Company, 2018).
Worton, J., To Settle the Crown: Waging Civil War in Shropshire, 1642-1648 (Solihull: Helion & Company, 2016). Re-published in paperback in April 2022.
Worton, J., The Battle of Montgomery, 1644: The English Civil War in the Welsh Borderlands (Solihull: Helion & Company, 2016).
Articles and Shorter Contributions
‘Coursing the Tinkerley Fox’: Tactics of Garrison Warfare in the West Midlands during 1643 and 1644, Midland History, 47.1 (2022), pp. 38-56.
Worton, J., 'When the Recruiting Officers came to Town’, The Salopian Recorder (Winter/Spring 2019), pp. 2-5.
“A Voyage into Wales”: Revisiting Sir Thomas Myddleton’s 1644-1645 campaign’, Cromwelliana, the journal of the Cromwell Association, Series III.8 (2019), pp. 58-79.
'My Lord Marischal's ill-conceived expedition': The Jacobite Rising in 1719’, The Stewarts, the journal of the Stewart Society (2019).
Worton, J., “A Crow’s Nest”: The significance of Wem during the English Civil War, 1642-1646’, The Salopian Recorder, 86 (Summer/Autumn 2016), pp. 6-8.
Worton, J., "The Strongest Works in England"? The Defences of Shrewsbury during the Civil Wars, 1642-1651', Transactions of the Shropshire Archaeological and Historical Society, LXXXVII (2012, issued in 2014), pp. 95-112.
Worton, J., "They are all there divided and violently bent for War": The Conflict of War Effort in the English Civil War', in Context - The Journal for History and Archaeology Postgraduate Students at the University of Chester, 1 (2014), pp. 31-8.
Worton, J., 'Ludlow's Trained Band: A Study of Militiamen in Early Stuart England', Journal of the Society for Army Historical Research, 99 (2013), pp. 4-23.
Worton, J., 'Beautifying Shropshire's Churches', The Salopian Recorder, 74 (2012), pp. 2-4.
Worton, J., 'A Constable's lot was not a happy one', The Salopian Recorder, 70 (2011), pp. 4-6.
Associate Editorship
Contributor to ‘The Cromwell Association Online Directory of Parliamentarian Army Officers’.
Exhibition co-Curatorship
'The 1644 Battle of Montgomery', at the Old Bell Museum, Montgomery, Powys (Supported by the International Gregynog Cultural Festival & Cadw, exhibited summer 2014).
- BA (Hons.)
- MA (Dist.)
- PhD