To be sent to Coventry is to be shut out by a group who refuse to speak to you and behave as though you are not there. Coventry’s part in the English Civil War is the leading explanation for the phrase, but the words are not recorded in this sense until 1765, and the first dictionary to define them treats the shunning as a piece of army discipline.
What’s the origin of the phrase ‘Sent to Coventry’?
The expression ‘Sent to Coventry’ probably derives
from Oliver Cromwell sending out of favour soldiers
there in the 17th century.
The origins of this phrase aren’t known beyond doubt, although it is quite probable that events in Coventry in the English Civil War in the 1640s are the source.
For those not familiar with the UK, Coventry is an industrial city in Warwickshire, England. It is well-known for its two cathedrals; the modern cathedral being built in 1962 to replace the old cathedral, which was destroyed during an intense German bombing raid in 1940.
In the 17th century, when this phrase is supposed to have originated, Coventry was a small town. It has been suggested that the phrase, which we now use figuratively, originated from people being actually sent there.
The story is that Cromwell sent a group of Royalist soldiers to be imprisoned in Coventry, around 1648. The locals, who were parliamentary supporters, shunned them and refused to consort with them.
Edward Hyde, Earl of Clarendon, who lived through the war, describes exactly that kind of despatch, and dates it earlier. In a passage of The History of the Rebellion and Civil Wars in England about the King’s march to Edgehill in the autumn of 1642, he calls Birmingham “a town so generally wicked that it had risen upon small parties of the King’s, and killed or taken them prisoners and sent them to Coventry”. In Clarendon the sending is literal, and it is the townspeople of Birmingham who are doing it rather than Cromwell.
The first known citation of the allusory meaning is from the Club Book of the Tarporley Hunt, 1765:
“Mr. John Barry having sent the Fox Hounds to a different place to what was ordered … was sent to Coventry, but return’d upon giving six bottles of Claret to the Hunt.”
By 1811, the then understood meaning of the term was defined in Grose’s Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue:
To send one to Coventry; a punishment inflicted by officers of the army on such of their brethren as are testy, or have been guilty of improper behaviour, not worthy the cognizance of a court martial. The person sent to Coventry is considered as absent; no one must speak to or answer any question he asks, except relative to duty, under penalty of being also sent to the same place. On a proper submission, the penitent is recalled, and welcomed by the mess, as just returned from a journey to Coventry.
That entry was not new in 1811. The same army definition already stands in the first edition of Grose’s A Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue, 1785, where the man sent to Coventry is likewise considered as absent and no one may speak to him. Grose therefore had the military sense on record within twenty years of the Tarporley note.
Within another generation the phrase had left the barracks. John Wilson Croker, in a diary entry of 18 August 1821 recalling his first circuit, wrote that he had found MacMahon “in a kind of Coventry, and was warned not to continue my acquaintance with him”. The man being shunned there is a private acquaintance rather than a soldier, and Croker uses the expression without stopping to explain it.
The Victorian reference books did not settle the origin either. Ebenezer Cobham Brewer set out two rival explanations in his Dictionary of Phrase and Fable, 1870. The first, which he took from Chambers’s Cyclopaedia, has nothing to do with prisoners: “The citizens of Coventry had at one time so great a dislike to soldiers, that a woman seen speaking to one was instantly tabooed”, so that “when a soldier was sent to Coventry, he was cut off from all social intercourse”. The second, which Brewer credits to William Hutton’s History of Birmingham, is that Coventry was a stronghold of the parliamentary party in the civil wars and that all troublesome and refractory royalists were sent there. Brewer preferred the first: “The former explanation meets the general scope of the phrase the better.”
So the documentary trail leaves a gap. Clarendon’s literal sending belongs to 1642, while the figurative use is not attested until 1765, and its first home in a dictionary is Georgian army discipline rather than the Civil War. That gap of more than a century is why no account of the origin can be put higher than probable.
A well-known example of someone being sent to Coventry is Charles Dodgson (Lewis Carroll), after his falling out with the Liddell family. Dodgson had developed a close relationship with the Liddell’s daughter Alice. In 1863, when Alice was 11, something happened to cause the family to ostracise him. Whatever it was we can’t now be sure as, although Dodgson recorded it in his diary at the time, the entry was later cut out by a Dodgson family member. This has led to widespread but unproven speculation that the relationship between Dodgson and Alice was inappropriate in some way - possibly what would now be called paedophilic.
This phrase was common in industrial disputes in Britain in the mid-twentieth century. Anyone who was considered to be unsupportive of the workforce was in danger of finding that his/her workmates refused to acknowledge their existence. Co-incidentally this was centred on the highly unionised car industry and especially British Leyland, which was largely based in Coventry. That gave rise to people who had in fact lived and worked in Coventry all their life being sent there figuratively by their workmates.
There’s no substance in the suggestion sometimes put about that this relates to the disgrace of that well-known (if imaginary) Coventry resident - Peeping Tom.
