Dr Jonathan Worton
Lecturer
I am a life-long History enthusiast who is privileged to work as an academic Historian. My take on History respects and is informed by multi-disciplinary approaches.
The Historian 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 History began as a young boy, when upon returning home from holidays in Wales I would build Lego models of the castles I had visited. Having a father and uncles who served in the British armed forces during the Second World War, and growing up among the ‘Airfix generation’, it was inevitable that I would develop an enduring interest in Military History in particular. 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.
I currently lead the Military History programme and contribute to its teaching. I also teach across the undergraduate History programme at University Centre Shrewsbury.
I am especially interested in the military and related socio-political history of Britain during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Wider research interests include the military and social history of Britain’s armed forces, and also the histories of fortifications.
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