Hiya Kim - Smales is an old Lancashire name ie
Marriage: 1 May 1604 St Luke (formerly St Wilfrid), Farnworth (Widnes), Lancashire, England
Willmus Robinson - par. de Tarvin
Elizabetha Smale - de Widnes
Source: Private Transcription
Widnes is 5 miles from Liverpool Airport
this record is 40 years before the English Civil War
On 14 June 1645, parliament’s New Model Army, under the command of Sir Thomas Fairfax, Oliver Cromwell and Philip Skippon, utterly defeated Charles I’s main field army at the battle of Naseby. As every history of the Civil War attests, it was a decisive engagement: one which resulted in the destruction of the king’s veteran infantry force, the flight of his cavalry and the capture of his baggage-train, together with all of his personal correspondence. What is too often forgotten is that the battle of Naseby also resulted in perhaps the single worst atrocity of the Civil War in England, for, as the victorious Parliamentarian soldiers pursued their beaten enemies from the field, they fell upon the king’s female camp-followers, who, having seen that the day was lost, had set off in headlong flight towards the royalist garrison at Leicester. According to a later account, the parliamentarian troopers caught up with the terrified fugitives ‘in the south part of Farndon-field, within the gate place in the road between Naseby and Farndon’. Here a dreadful slaughter ensued, as the soldiers set about the Royalist women with their swords, killing at least a hundred of them, and savagely mutilating many more. In the aftermath of the battle, parliamentarian pamphleteers in London made no apology for what their soldiers had done, but rather triumphed in their murderous actions: some claiming that the killed and injured women had been ‘whores’, others that they had been Irish women, ‘wives of the bloody rebells in Ireland’, who had – according to earlier, exaggerated, accounts – slain thousands of Protestant men and women during the Irish Rebellion of 1641.
RE the slaughter of Royalist Women - 6 Smale children were left orphaned as Cromwell killed their mother ...
the surname Smale is Norwegian according to Wikitionary - so presumably Viking origin