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Yeomanry

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In the 1790s, the threat of invasion of England was high, with the French Revolution and the rise of Napoleon Bonaparte. In order to maximise the country's defences, a number of volunteer regiments were raised in many counties by yeomen. These regiments became known as the Yeomanry.

While this was certainly true in most cases it was also the fact that the new regiments were sometimes used to in support of the civil authority to fight rebellion as in the Irish rebellion or suppress civil unrest — as in the Peterloo Massacre; so their equipping and maintenance by local landowners was by no means entirely altruistic in post-revolutionary, but pre-police, England and Ireland.

Current Yeomanry Regiments

Today, in the modern Territorial Army, there are many of the old Yeomanry regiments serving in one form or another, usually as a squadron/battery that is part of a larger regiment:

Royal Armoured Corps

  • Warwickshire and Worcestershire, Staffordshire Yeomanry
  • Shropshire Yeomanry
  • Cheshire Yeomanry (Earl of Chester's)
  • Duke of Lancaster's Own Yeomanry

Infantry

Independent Squadrons

32 (Scottish) Signal Regiment

33 (Lancashire and Cheshire) Signal Regiment

35 (South Midlands) Signal Regiment

37 (Wessex and Welsh) Signal Regiment

39 (Skinners) Signal Regiment

40 (Ulster) Signal Regiment

71 (Yeomanry) Signal Regiment

100 Regiment

104 Regiment

106 (Yeomanry) Regiment

101 (City of London) Engineer Regiment

71 Engineer Regiment

157 Transport Regiment

Yeomanry Regiments with more than one unit

Most of the old yeomanry regiments are perpetuated through a single unit, be it an armoured, engineers or signal squadron, or an artillery battery. However, there are six yeomanry regiments that maintain more than one unit:

See also

Imperial Yeomanry

 


From Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia. Original article here. Support Wikipedia by contributing or donating.
All text is available under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License See Wikipedia Copyrights for details.

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