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In the following pages I have endeavoured to show, not so much what was the part of each individual member of the Eastern Counties Association in the Civil War, as what was their general contribution to the War, and what were the temper and the experience of the people of these Eastern Counties. To have told the story of each of the seven counties separately would have required as many volumes, and, besides, would have been inconsistent with the unity of this famous area of East Anglia, which, stirred by one common impulse, and having sufficient in common in situation and surroundings, assumed a distinctive character of its own, such as no individual county and no other part of the country could show. Nor will the reader find any attempt to compile a history of families and places concerned in the Civil War within the Eastern Counties. Frequent references of this character there will be, but my aim has been rather to present, in as interesting a form as a regard for historical accuracy of detail will allow, the main features of the remarkable story of that East Anglian unity which gave so sturdy an account of itself in the great Puritan Revolution under Cromwell.
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