Transcript

Battlefields are integral to ‘our nation’s story’. Battles determined the fate of individual kings, changed the country’s linguistic and cultural character, and defined our very identity. As such, the places where these clashes of arms took place are contested spaces whose meaning and significance – and even their location – is hotly debated and, even today, fought over. While the swords, arrows and guns of the past have been replaced by academic debate and popular argument, there is no doubt that battlefields remain significant sites of history, memory and heritage.

Historic England, the body responsible for maintaining and curating England’s historic landscapes, lists 47 historic battlefields in its database. These range from the Battle of Maldon in 991, where the Vikings defeated the Anglo-Saxon army of King Aethelred the Unready, to the Battle of Sedgemoor in 1685, where the rebellious Duke of Monmouth was defeated by the forces of King James II. Most of the battlefields are identified with the two great English civil wars: that of the 1640s, fought between the forces of King Charles I and Parliament, and the dynastic struggle between the Houses of Lancaster and York in the mid-fifteenth century, that we now know as the Wars of the Roses. Organisations like the Battlefields Trust and a host of local associations also work hard to raise awareness of Britain’s military heritage. Annual festivals, like that held on the site of the Battle of Tewkesbury, commemorate the events of centuries past, bringing together reenactors, ‘Living History’ enthusiasts and the wider public as part of a burgeoning heritage industry. Yet the history relating to historic battlefields is often hard to unravel. There is often little to see above ground and few, if any, traces of the battle remain today, while the historical record is often biased in favour of the victors. This is especially the case with the battles of the Wars of the Roses.

The Wars of the Roses

The Wars of the Roses were a series of rebellions, skirmishes and pitched battles between 1455 and 1485 between rival factions for the English throne. In 1461 the Yorkist claimant, Edward IV, defeated the Lancastrian king, Henry VI, at the Battle of Towton near Thirsk in Yorkshire. Nine years later, Edward was forced into exile by the treachery of his closest ally, Richard, Earl of Warwick – the Kingmaker – and Henry VI temporarily restored to the throne. In 1471 at the battles of Barnet and Tewkesbury Edward recaptured his throne. More than a decade of relative peace and prosperity followed until, after Edward’s premature death, his brother, Richard, Duke of Gloucester, usurped the throne as Richard III. Richard was in turn defeated and killed in August 1485 by the obscure claimant to the throne, Henry Tudor, at the Battle of Bosworth. Tudor, now King Henry VII, consolidated his victory over Richard’s old supporters at the Battle of Stoke two years later, bringing an end to 22 years of intermittent civil war which had seen the English throne change hands no fewer than six times.

The battles of the Wars of the Roses ranged from relatively small skirmishes involving a few hundred men, like St. Albans in 1455 or Hexham in 1464, to large, pitched battles involving many thousands of combatants. The Battle of Towton in 1461 is usually credited with being the largest and bloodiest battle in English history, with the unlikely number of 75,000 participants and 28,000 casualties often cited. In reality, the numbers of men involved were much smaller and those killed in action or as a result of wounds suffered there were likely far fewer. Yet, there can be no doubt that Towton, Barnet, Tewkesbury and Bosworth were major battles that certainly changed the course of English history.

Battlefield Commemoration

Battlefields have always been sites of commemoration. First, it was necessary to remember and honour the dead, on both sides, that had fallen there. Second, battlefields became sites of political and cultural importance where the legitimacy of the winning side, particularly during the Wars of the Roses, was established and maintained.

Contrary to what we might think, those killed in battle during the Wars of the Roses were usually treated to Christian burials. The battles of the Wars of the Roses were not a murderous free for all, with those slain thrown carelessly into mass graves and forgotten about (or worse still left on the battlefield to rot). Mass graves were a necessity, but they were meant to be a temporary expedient until proper burial in consecrated ground could be arranged. This is true even at Towton where the bodies excavated between 1996 and 2005 show evidence of internment according to Christian burial practices. Both Edward IV and Richard III planned to build chapels to commemorate the dead at Towton. Elsewhere in England there are examples of chapels being established to pray for the souls of those killed during the Wars of the Roses.

For battlefields to be commemorated and their significance remembered, they had to be named. Naming a battlefield is one of the most important steps in a battle becoming part of our national heritage. Yet the process of naming a battlefield could often take many years. Towton was most frequently referred to as ‘Palm Sunday Field’ in the years immediately after 1461, a reference to when it took place, not its geographical location. It was also known as the ‘York Field’ and ‘the battle at Shirbourne beside York’, before being settled upon as the battle of Towton in the nineteenth century. The Battle of Losecote Field, where Edward IV defeated a rebel army in 1470, had no name at all originally. It was recorded in the attainder of Richard, Lord Welles, the rebel leader, as the battle that had taken place ‘in a field called Horn Field in Empingham’. The name ‘Losecote Field’ only became popularised in the nineteenth century as a reference to the fact the rebels discarded their livery jackets when fleeing to avoid capture. The battlefield is now commemorated by the area known as ‘Bloody Oaks Quarry’. The Battle of Bosworth in 1485, perhaps alongside Hastings, our best remembered medieval battle, was variously known as ‘Redemore’, ‘Sandford’, ‘Dadlington’ and ‘Brownheath’ until the name Bosworth seems to have been settled on in the early sixteenth century.

Battlefields, Heritage and Public History

In 1994 Dr Andrew Brown of English Heritage said, when establishing the Register of Battlefields: ‘Battlefields may not be as obviously “presentable” as castles or abbeys, but they do create feelings of contemplation and empathy with visitors.’ Battlefields are thus a vital part of the Heritage industry or what we might call ‘Public History’. In July in the grounds of Delapré Abbey near Northampton, a rebel Yorkist army met a royal army. The battle ended in a Yorkist victory and the capture of Henry VI by the rebels. For centuries the battlefield was largely forgotten until it was threatened with development. In 2014 the Northamptonshire Battlefield Society was established with the aim of preserving the historic battlefields of the county. Their efforts culminated in 2022 with the placement of several information boards telling visitors to the park of the historical importance of the ground beneath their feet.

An information board marks the site of the Battle of Edgcote in Northamptonshire. (Graham Evans)Show descriptionAn information board marks the site of the Battle of Edgcote in Northamptonshire. Research on these sites is ongoing, evident in the fact that the board states the battle took place on 26 July, although historians now generally agree it took place two days earlier! (Graham Evans)

Historic battlefields matter today as part of our public history and sometimes they can arouse quite heated debates. In 2021 Royal Mail issued a set of stamps commemorating the 550th anniversary of the Battle of Tewkesbury and featuring paintings by the renowned historical artist Graham Turner of several battles of the Wars of the Roses. One featured the Battle of Edgcote in Northamptonshire, fought on 24 July 1469 between Yorkist forces led by the Earl of Pembroke and northern rebels led by ‘Robin of Redesdale’. The title on the stamp read ‘the Battle of Edgecote Moor, 1469’, something that drew an angry response from many local historians and even featured on the BBC’s news website.

Conclusion

Battles do not end when the fighting has stopped. In the Middle Ages, as today, the meaning and significance of a battle is argued over and contested as soon as it is over. Establishing where a battle took place and naming it is a crucial part of that process of attaching cultural and historical significance. The battles of the Wars of the Roses are mysterious affairs, and in some cases, we cannot even be sure where they took place. Yet their significance to local communities then and now cannot be doubted. Locating and naming a battlefield is an important part of the process by which the past is owned and made sense of, thus becoming History and part of our shared national heritage. These historic battlefields, as the work of the Northamptonshire Battlefields Society and the Battlefields Trust show, are not just restricted to the great battles of British history – Hastings, Bosworth, Naseby – and they cover some 2,000 years of our shared heritage. The work done recently to identify, preserve and remember the historic battlefields of the Wars of the Roses is a good example of this. These sites are indeed an integral part of both our national and local story.