In the summer of 1640 King Charles I planned a second campaign against the Scots whom he had failed to defeat the previous year. The war was unpopular and few volunteers were forthcoming so the King resorted to conscription. The local authorities who were charged to provide quotas of men generally took care to exempt the settled and responsible members of their communities and consequently the new "army" contained a high proportion of misfits and vagabonds, naturally inclined to unruliness.

In June a body of some six hundred of these unfortunates, pressed in Dorset and en route to the North, was quartered in and around the Berkshire market town of Faringdon. Barracks being unknown in the seventeenth century, the practise was to billet soldiers in taverns and inns and then, as now, Faringdon possessed several of which the most important was The Crown Inn. In one of these inns (although which one is not known), was billeted Captain Lewknor's company. The soldiers of this unit had conceived a particular dislike for one of their officers, Lieutenant William Mohun, a man inclined to treat his unwilling charges severely. Discontent turned to violence on Wednesday the 17th after Mohun drew his sword on his men, killed one soldier and almost severed the hand of another. The latter, a drummer, had clearly provoked Mohun by disobeying orders and striking him with a drumstick, but the lieutenant's action was both outrageous and illegal. Foolishly his superior, Lewknor, ignored the incident and retired to an upstairs chamber at the inn in company with Mohun and a third officer, an ensign.

When the drummer died shortly afterwards the soldiers mustered, surged up the stairs and broke into the chamber, obliging the three officers to retreat out of the window and sit astride the inn's sign pole where, due to the fact that the conscripts had not yet been issued with weapons, they were pelted with stones. At this stage Lewknor and the ensign contrived to escape, but Mohun was dislodged by a soldier in the chamber who struck him with a large piece of wood. Falling into the street, he was mobbed and severely beaten with cudgels, dragged by the hair to a public sewer and thrown in. Liberally covered with the contents, he was then paraded through the town and finally left unconscious in a ditch. After his assailants moved on, Mohun managed June 1640 to crawl to a nearby house and perhaps thought himself safe, but a boy revealed his hiding place to the mob. They rushed to the house crying that he was a devil, apparently because they believed him to be dead, and trapped him. Gamely Mohun drew a knife but this was knocked out of his hand by a blow from a club and, as the contemporary report puts it, "his brains were beaten out". His corpse was dragged back to the town square and hung upon the pillary.

Efforts to restore order and apprehend the perpetrators of this incident were tardy. All the officers fled from the town during the uproar fearing for lives (although a few returned secretly that night to recover Mohun's body and bury it in the churchyard). The Sheriff of Berkshire, George Purefoy, claimed not to have known of the incident until 7 o'clock on the following evening, which seems incredible given that his home, Wadley Manor, was barely a mile from Faringdon. However, once alerted he called out the Trained Bands and these arrived from Abingdon at five in the morning of the 19th. After a further delay to await reinforcements, the militiamen ventured into Farmgdon to find that, not surprisingly, most of the conscripts had deserted and were well on their way back to Dorset. No more than fifty two stragglers were rounded up and placed in the custody of a Lieutenant-Colonel Gibson. Conveniently for Purefoy, one was identified as "the chief incendiary of the rebellion" and another captured at Abingdon, as "the chief actor in the murder of Lieutenant Mohun". Subsequently these and several others were tried and executed.

News of the "outrage" at Faringdon soon spread and similar, although less bloody, disorders are recorded amongst other elements of the army. King Charles' Scottish venture was another miserable and embarrassing failure which obliged him to give way to demands for reform and ultimately led to the outbreak of civil war.

SOURCES

Victoria County History of Berkshire Vol IV p.460. Calendar of State Papers Domestic 1640 pp316, 323, 334, 513.