Being ignored by everyone around you is unpleasant enough. But why should Coventry have anything to do with it? The answer may involve Royalist prisoners, angry townspeople, military discipline — and six bottles of claret.
THE SHORT ANSWER
To be “sent to Coventry” means to be deliberately ignored by a group: nobody speaks to you, answers you or acknowledges your presence.
The expression is often linked to Royalist prisoners taken to Parliamentarian Coventry during the English Civil War. Another explanation involves townspeople refusing to socialise with soldiers stationed there.
Neither story has been conclusively established as the origin. What we can document is the figurative expression in an eighteenth-century hunting-club record, followed by a remarkably detailed description of military ostracism.
Coventry’s role in the story remains uncertain. The silence is much better documented.
WHAT WE KNOW
The most entertaining early evidence concerns a man who sent the hounds to the wrong place.
An entry dated 4 November 1765 in the proceedings of the Tarporley Hunt records that Mr John Barry had dispatched the foxhounds somewhere other than the agreed location and had failed to meet them there himself.
His companions responded by sending him to Coventry.
He was readmitted after supplying six bottles of claret.
This is an early recorded figurative use, reproduced by historical researchers. The wording assumes the reader understands the punishment; it does not explain why Coventry supplied its name.
Nor should we imagine Barry boarding a coach to Warwickshire. His departure and return were social rather than geographical.
Twenty years later, Francis Grose included the expression in A Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue, published in 1785.
His entry places it among army officers. A colleague whose conduct fell short of requiring a court martial could instead be subjected to organised silence.
For the Tarporley hunters, reconciliation apparently required something rather more drinkable than an apology.
HOW IT BECAME A HABIT
The military arrangement survives in the dictionary’s 1811 edition too.
An excluded officer was treated as though he were absent. Conversation about duty remained permissible, but ordinary social exchanges were withheld. Anyone who broke the rule risked receiving the same treatment.
After an acceptable submission, the offender could be welcomed back as though returning from a journey.
The imagined destination gave an informal punishment a surprisingly elaborate geography. Everyone remained in the room; one man had supposedly gone away.
By 1821, John Wilson Croker was using the expression about a civilian acquaintance, the Irish judge William MacMahon. Croker recalled being warned against continuing their friendship because MacMahon had been socially excluded.
That example shows the phrase operating beyond an officers’ mess. It does not prove exactly when or how it crossed into wider conversation.
THE STORY EVERYONE TELLS
The familiar explanation takes us back to the English Civil War.
Coventry supported Parliament. In the usual account, Royalist prisoners were sent there and encountered townspeople who refused to speak to them.
An actual journey supposedly became a metaphorical one: being sent to Coventry meant finding yourself among people determined to ignore you.
There is a historical foundation beneath part of this story.
Edward Hyde, Earl of Clarendon, described Birmingham inhabitants capturing members of the King’s forces and sending the prisoners to Coventry. His account concerns events around the campaign of autumn 1642.
Clarendon wrote from the Royalist side, with little affection for Birmingham’s political choices.
But his passage describes prisoners being moved. It does not describe a collective refusal to speak to them, or explain an established idiom.
The prisoners are in the record. The explanatory silence is missing.
WHAT THE EVIDENCE ACTUALLY SAYS
The evidence label is DISPUTED because the expression’s recorded meaning is clearer than the reason for its place-name.
The Civil War explanation is plausible, but the sources reviewed here leave more than a century between the events Clarendon describes and the figurative Tarporley example.
That gap does not make the explanation impossible. Expressions can circulate orally long before entering surviving records.
It does mean that a literal destination and a later metaphor cannot simply be joined together as a proven chain.
There is also a rival military story.
Brewer’s Dictionary of Phrase and Fable, in its 1870 edition, repeated an account attributed to Chambers: Coventry’s inhabitants supposedly disliked soldiers so much that they refused social contact with the garrison. A woman seen speaking to a soldier was allegedly excluded herself.
In that version, an unpopular posting supplied the metaphor.
Brewer also recorded the Civil War explanation. The existence of competing accounts in a Victorian reference book demonstrates uncertainty; it does not authenticate either story.
Grose provides firmer evidence for the punishment than for its origin. His dictionary tells us how officers practised exclusion, but not why they called it Coventry.
The safest conclusion is therefore limited but useful: the saying was established by the later eighteenth century, and military usage is explicitly documented. Coventry’s Civil War history offers a possible explanation for the name, rather than a settled answer.
WHY IT STUCK
The expression makes social exclusion sound like banishment.
You have not merely received an unfriendly answer. You have been removed from the group’s conversational world while remaining physically among its members.
That is what distinguishes being sent to Coventry from someone simply being quiet, distracted or unwilling to discuss a particular subject. The silence is deliberate and collective.
The place-name gives the punishment a destination. Grose’s description even supplies a return journey.
For Mr Barry, at least, the route home appears to have passed through the wine cellar.
RELATED CURIOSITIES
Does “Give Someone the Cold Shoulder” Really Come From Serving Unwanted Guests Cold Meat?
Why Do We Say “Cat Got Your Tongue?”
Who Was Hobson — and Why Didn’t He Give You a Choice?
SOURCES & FURTHER READING
Francis Grose — A Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue (1785), entry “Coventry”. Digitised first edition; documents the punishment among army officers.
Project Gutenberg — 1811 Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue, entry “Coventry”. A later edition preserving the detailed description of military ostracism.
https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/5402
Edward Hyde, Earl of Clarendon — The History of the Rebellion and Civil Wars in England, Volume II, Book VI, section 83. Describes Royalist prisoners captured at Birmingham and sent to Coventry during the 1642 campaign; does not establish the figurative expression.
https://archive.org/stream/historyofrebelli0002clar/historyofrebelli0002clar_djvu.txt
Pascal Tréguer, Word Histories — “Meaning and origin of the phrase ‘to send to Coventry’”. Reproduces the Tarporley Hunt entry dated 4 November 1765, Grose’s definition and Croker’s 1821 diary passage.
https://wordhistories.net/2017/06/11/send-to-coventry-origin/
The Phrase Finder — “Sent to Coventry”. Surveys the competing origin accounts, including Brewer’s 1870 explanations. Its preference for a Civil War origin should be distinguished from conclusive proof.