War & Conflict Likely Origin (Disputed)

Sent to Coventry

"To be deliberately ignored or ostracised by a group."

The best-supported explanation comes from the English Civil War. Coventry was a stronghold of Parliamentary support, and Royalist soldiers captured in Birmingham were marched there and held as prisoners. Local residents, hostile to the Royalist cause, refused to speak to or associate with them at all. The historian Edward Hyde, Earl of Clarendon, records something very close to this practice in his account of the rebellion, written in the 1640s-70s and published posthumously. The idiom itself, though, isn't recorded in print until 1765, more than a century after the events it supposedly describes.

Myth vs. FactThe Clarendon connection is often repeated as if it settles the matter. In reality there's a real gap: the historical practice of shunning Royalist prisoners is well documented, but the phrase itself doesn't turn up in print until a century later, so we can't be certain one led directly to the other.

Sources: Edward Hyde, Earl of Clarendon, The History of the Rebellion and Civil Wars in England (written 1646-1671, first published posthumously 1702-1704); earliest citation of the idiom itself from 1765, per the Oxford English Dictionary.

Sent to Coventry

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