In Thrall to the Past

This September will mark the five hundredth anniversary of the Battle of Flodden, fought in the county of Northumberland close to the Anglo-Scottish border.  In terms of the numbers engaged it is a good candidate to be the largest ever fought on English soil, though most people broadly acquainted with the battle history of this country would probably select either Towton from the Wars of the Roses or Marston Moor from the Civil Wars in preference.  The fact is, so far as the English are concerned, Flodden is a forgotten epic, no matter that it was the most complete victory ever won over Scottish invaders.

It’s better remember in Scotland as a catastrophic defeat and tragic memory.  King James IV headed the company of the dead, joined there by men from virtually every family in the land, including many of the leading nobility.  Their sacrifice is recalled in a lament known as The Flowers of the Forest.  It is also recalled in Marmion, Sir Walter Scott’s epic poem

I know many Scots will resent me for saying this, but James, often perceived as their best and most enlightened king, was a vainglorious and shallow individual, with ambitions far too big for his small country.  It was his disastrous invasion of 1513 – mounted when Henry VIII was abroad campaigning in the Low Countries – that ended all pretence that Scotland was a major independent power.  No significant purpose was served by his military adventurism.  He was aiding France, Scotland’s old ally, though the French time and again had used this partnership of unequals to serve their own cynical ends.  As it was Scotland never recovered from the disaster.  Within a few decades the country was to find that its French ally was a far greater danger to its independence than its English enemy. 

As Scotland heads blindly towards a new pretence of independence (Independence in Europe – what a joke!) it’s as  well to remember Flodden, along  with the political illusions and national vanities that preceded the disaster  At the present it is commemorated by a simple stone cross, erected in 1910, I believe, dedicated to the brave of both nations.  Now there are proposals for a new ‘ecomuseum’, England’s first, a project linking several pertinent sites across a wide area, places and features in the landscape related to the battle on both sides of the Border.  Each site will have its own visitor information and resources. 

I understand also that September pilgrimages are being planned from Durham and from Edinburgh to the battlefield.  I’ve been there myself.  The landscape itself, although a lot of it is now farmland, is largely as it was in the early sixteenth century.  Although the encounter is known as the Battle of Flodden, it was actually fought at Branxton, to the north of the hill known as Flodden Edge.  Tree covered Flodden Edge, the site of the first Scottish camp, is a mournful place.  It least it was that day I walked up, passing the Well of Sybil Grey, marking the place where Marmion, Scott’s knight, died of his wounds.  The sound of the wind lightly passing through the trees was as hauntingly sad as any lament. 

Speaking of which, The Flowers of the Forest is an ancient Scottish folk tune with battle lyrics added in the eighteenth century by Jean Elliot, another Scottish poet.  The English, we are told, “...for ance, by guile wan the day.”  No, they did not!  They ‘wan’ with inferior numbers by superior leadership, superior gunners and superior weaponry.  The Scots, atrociously led, charged in to the affray in an age old manner, lacking all discipline and co-ordination.  Bravery did not compensate for folly. It very rarely does. 

I am fond of Scotland, a country I have visited more than any other.  But if this is a country where the past is paid proper reverence it is also a country in thrall to past illusions.  Perhaps in the end the myth of Bannockburn, Scotland’s one and only great victory over England, will serve to be the most significant illusion of all.  Next year will see the seven hundredth anniversary of this seminal encounter, a high tide which the present Nationalist administration in Edinburgh hopes will float their referendum on independence all the way into a triumphant harbour.  Alex Salmond, Scotland’s first minister, is preparing, in the style of King Robert Bruce, the victor of Bannockburn, to mount his own pale horse.  He is hoping for one battle; he might very well find another.  

The Ghosts of Towton

Not much has changed since that bleak Palm Sunday long ago. The land between the villages of Saxton and Towton in Yorkshire is still largely open country, just as it was on 29 March, 1461. It was here, on a day churned with driving snow and freezing winds, that Englishman faced Englishman in the bloodiest battle ever fought on English soil, though the event is now largely absent from popular imagination. Even the battlefield memorial, a fifteenth century stone cross, is easy to miss, situated behind a hedge just off the B1217, a minor road leading from Towton to Garforth.

The Battle of Towton was part of the dynastic struggle between the houses of Lancaster and York that we now refer to as the Wars of the Roses. The origins of the conflict go back to 1399, when Henry Bolingbroke, duke of Lancaster, deposed his cousin, Richard II, ruling in his stead. It was an act that broke established notions of primogeniture and legitimate, divinely ordained, succession, with consequences that were still being felt deep into the reign of Henry VIII in the sixteenth century.

The immediate cause of the struggle was the complete incapacity of Henry VI, Bolingbroke’s grandson, for government. A rival party grew up headed by Richard, duke of York, whose claim to the throne was as strong, if not stronger, than that of Lancaster. The war began as a kind of aristocratic family quarrel. The early battles had really been no more than a series of skirmishes: the casualties had been modest and the rank and file largely spared.

All this changed in December 1460. Richard of York, who had previously been proclaimed as Henry’s heir, an uneasy political compromise, was killed in battle at Wakefield. Not just that but his head was then removed and, adorned with a paper crown, displayed in the city of York. His eldest son then threw off all pretence of loyalty to Henry VI, taking the crown as Edward IV and marching north in pursuit of the Lancastrian army, finally intercepted at Towton. There would be no quarter that day.

Towton was a crushing victory for the Yorkists, a battle fought with murderous bitterness. If the fighting, which lasted all day, was bad the pursuit was even worse, little more than a bloody slaughter. In the late 1990s a mass grave was discovered at Towton Hall, whole skeletons, in some cases. Subsequent investigations have shown how these men died. Details are given of the findings in the December issue of The Economist (Nasty, brutish and not that short). One soldier, known simply as Towton 25, suffered eight head wounds from a variety of weapons. The details are truly grisly;

The precise order can be worked out from the directions of the fractures on his skull…the first five blows were delivered by a bladed weapon to the left-hand side of his head, presumably by a right-handed opponent standing in front of him. None is likely to have been lethal.

The next one almost certainly was. From behind someone had swung a blade towards his skull, carving a down-to-up trajectory through the air. The blow opened a huge horizontal gash into the back of his head – picture a slit you could post an envelope through. Fractures raced down to the base of the skull and around the sides of his head. Fragments of bone were forced into Towton 25’s brain, felling him.

His enemies were not done yet. Another small blow to the right and back of his head may have been enough to turn him over on to his back. Finally another blade arced towards him. This one bisected his face, opening a crevice that ran from his left eye to his right jaw. It cut deep: the edge of the blade reached the back of his throat.

The conclusion is simple enough: this was a methodical slaughter, far too sustained and systematic to be mere battlefield blows. Towton 25 and his comrades are almost certainly a party of Lancastrians on the run from the battle, intercepted and massacred in the vicinity of the Hall and then buried in a mass grave. Even at this distance the violence is shocking – “It’s almost as if they were trying to remove their opponents identities”, one of the field archaeologists said of the attacker’s savage assault.

Close up his eyes, and draw the curtain close;
And let us all to meditation.

The Mountains look on Marathon

This August marks the anniversary of the Battle of Marathon, fought exactly 2,500 years ago on the plains of Attica. It was a victory for a small Athenian army over a Persian host, said by Herodotus to be carried to Greece in six hundred triremes. Plutarch and Puasania, later historians, were to estimate the number of Persians at 300,000, clearly a wild exaggeration. Even so, the victory was incredibly significant. For once I do think it possible to say that Marathon was indeed one of the decisive battles of world history.

Darius, emperor of the Persians, had been angered that the Athenians had given help to Ionian rebels on what is now the western coast of Turkey. Although the rebellion had been crushed he was still determined on a major reprisal against the Greeks. The size of the force he sent makes it clear that he was determined on something more systematic than a mere punitive raid, evidenced by attacks on both Naxos and Euboea.

No sooner had the Persians landed at Marathon, just twenty-five miles to the north of Athens, the city set about mustering all the soldiers that it could find, a mere 10,000 according to the ancient sources. A runner by the name of Pheidippides was sent south to ask for help from the Spartans, some one hundred and forty miles from Athens. But they were in the middle of one of their religious festivals, saying that it would be another ten days before their forces could be mustered. Pheidippides at once ran back with the news.

As always number can be a liability in battle as much as an advantage. The Persian host, as big as it was, could only bring a fraction of its power to bear, because the Greeks had blocked the narrow passes that lead south from the plain of Marathon to Athens. Seizing the initiative, and deciding to break the deadlock, Militiades, one of the two generals in command of a joint Athenian and Plataean force, decided to attack, surprising the Persians not just with the boldness of the move, but the ferocity of his citizen soldiers. Herodotus says that they ran into battle.

No sooner were the weak Persian flanks broken than the Greeks turned on the centre. In confusion the Persians broke, hurrying back to the ships, many drowning in the marshes adjacent to the coast. Once embarked what was left of the Persian host sailed south to Athens, only to find the Greeks ready for them in full battle array, the army having marched south from Marathon. Not willing to risk a second encounter the Persians sailed for home.

Marathon is still remembered today in the long-distance Olympic running event. This supposedly commemorates Pheidippides running to Athens with news of the victory, after which he promptly dropped dead! But the only running that he did according to Herodotus, the closest source we have to the battle, was to Sparta and back. It is not until three centuries later that the story of a single runner from Marathon was set down, and not until 180AD was the runner named by Lucian as Pheidippides, an event eventually commemorated by Robert Browning in a poem of the same name.

The words about Marathon that moves me most come from Byron’s The Isles of Greece, written shortly before the outbreak of the Greek War of Independence in 1821;

The mountains look on Marathon---
And Marathon looks on the sea;
And musing there an hour alone,
I dream'd that Greece might yet be free
For, standing on the Persians' grave,
I could not deem myself a slave.

Finding King Richard

Last November I wrote a piece headed My Kingdom for a Gun; finding Bosworth Field, focusing on the attempt to pinpoint the precise location of this seminal battle. According to the latest reports the task is all but complete. A thumbnail-sized silver gilt boar has been uncovered by the archaeological team. The boar-badge was, of course, the personal emblem of Richard III, the last English king to be killed in battle, and is thought to have been worn by one of his close retainers at the spot where he fell.

The evidence uncovered in the fields straddling Fen Lane in the Leicestershire parish of Upton also includes the badges of the supporters of both Richard and Henry Tudor, as well as twenty-eight lumps of roundshot, in a site that is nearly two miles south-west of what has traditionally been regarded as the centre of the battle.

Frank Baldwin, chairman of the Battlefields Trust charity, has described the discovery as “important to us as Schliemann discovering Troy.” My reaction was that he was, perhaps, allowing himself to be carried away by boyish enthusiasm, but I quite agree with Professor Richard Holmes, a historian for whom I have considerable respect, that “this is certainly the most important discovery about Bosworth in my lifetime.”

On Richard himself my feelings are somewhat ambivalent. I do not share the enthusiasm of the Ricardians for the ‘lost cause’ of their hero king. There is absolutely no doubt in my mind that the Princes in the Tower, King Edward V and Richard duke of York, were indeed murdered on the orders of their uncle; they were simply too dangerous to remain alive. Moreover, I can’t but admire the Tudor dynasty that brought us in Henry VIII and Elizabeth I two of the greatest monarchs in English history.

Still, the romantic in me regrets the loss of the old England, the England of the Plantagenets, the England of Richard III, an enduringly fascinating man for all of his brief flight with destiny.

But yet I know, where’er I go,
That there hath pass’d away a glory from the earth

My Kingdom for a Gun: Finding Bosworth Field

Battlefields are notoriously difficult to pinpoint for the simple reason that the action often took place over a widely scattered area and because of subsequent agricultural development. Bosworth Field in Leicestershire, arguably the most famous battle in English history, the dusk of the Plantagenets and the dawn of the Tudors, has presented particular difficulties. In the 1970s the County Council officially designated the site to be in the vicinity of Market Bosworth, building the heritage centre on Ambion Hill, where Richard III charged into death and immortality, following a report by David Williams, a historian. But it now seems that it’s all wrong, that the wandering battlefield may at last have found a permanent and true home some two miles to the south-west of the present site.

After a three-year archaeological investigation headed by Glenn Foard on behalf of the Battlefields Trust, significant battle debris has been found in an area to the north-east of Stoke Golding, though the exact location is still being kept secret. The finds include some obvious things, the kind of things one would expect, like the remains of swords and buckles, but there is also a higher than expected proportion of cannonballs and lead shot of various calibres from handguns.

The whole thing is still to be subject to peer review, but it looks quite promising. For me the particular point of interest is the suggestion that firepower played an important part in the conflict, distancing Bosworth from the other flashpoints of the Wars of the Roses, making it the first modern battle in English history.

The work of Foard’s team has been praised, amongst others, by Jon Humble of English Heritage, who said;

This is the second epic victory on Bosworth’s history-steeped soil. It has taken more than 500 years to reveal one of Leicestershire’s greatest and most elusive secrets, but this is a world-class example of what can be received through archaeological research.

Professor Richard Holmes of the Battlefields Trust added his own praise;

There is still much more to discover, but at last we have a site that goes beyond scholarly speculation and passionate local controversy. We can now see where those round-shot thudded into Leicestershire soil when Richard Plantagenet was still King of England and Henry Tudor was a mere pretender. We are given to using expressions like exciting and ground breaking too easily, but no historical discovery has elated me more than this one, and I have seldom felt more conscious of being able to touch the past

King Richard may not have found a horse but perhaps he has at last found a home.

I would like to add my own forlorn plea to this story: Bosworth was not, as so often said, the end of the Wars of the Roses. Conflict and subversion continued through a good part of the reign of Henry VII, from the Battle of Stoke to the rising of Perkin Warbeck. In a sense the dynastic dispute only really ended in 1509 with the accession of Henry VIII, whose blood combined the strains of Lancaster and York.

Battle Thoughts from Abroad

My boyfriend and I are actually in Edinburgh at the moment-we have been since Saturday-for the International Festival. It’s an exciting place to be at this time of year, with so much to do and to see, lots and lots of shows, too much, really, to take in properly. Edinburgh itself is a lovely city, in my opinion one of the three most beautiful in Britain, along with York and Bath. It’s a bit grimy at the moment (I think there is a local bin strike or a go slow) and-my God-the seagulls, what a racket they make! From our hotel in the centre we can hear them kaa, kaa kaaing right through the night: they never seem to sleep!

What I really wanted to talk about was a piece I caught in the Saturday edition of The Daily Telegraph about the Battle of Culloden. I’m not sure if this appeared nationally or in the Scottish edition only. Anyway, it was a report on plans to offer a better commemoration of those who died on the government side, often described wrongly as either ‘Hanoverians’ or English. Indeed, at the moment all there is to compare with the many clan memorials a rather sad stone on the so-called ‘field of the English.’ So, it’s time to explode a few more myths and recall the brave men, Scots as well as English, who fought and died on that day in April 1746 for King and Country.

Culloden, fought on 16 April 1746 on Drumossie Moor close to Inverness, is usually celebrated as the last major land battle to take place on British soil. In essence it was a struggle for the throne, between those who supported George II and the Hanoverian succession and those who supported the Jacobite pretenders, the descendants of James II, whose grandson, Charles, commanded the rebel troops that day. It was a straightforward dynastic war, though complicated by the fact that the Jacobites had rather cynically attached a Scottish nationalist gloss to their campaign. It is through this glass darkly that a great many Scots still perceive Culloden, as a struggle between themselves and the wicked English, who did the most awful things during and after the battle.

Sorry, I really do not wish to be facetious: the government troops did behave abominably, bayoneting many of the wounded as they lay on the field. But the point is these government troops contained a large number of Lowland Scots, as many as three full regiments, as well as a significant body of anti-Jacobite Highland militia. And if anyone hated the Jacobite Highlanders it was these men, not the English. Some of the worst post-battle atrocities were committed by Scots, in times and in places were they could not be excused by heightened passions. You see, for centuries past, even before the Union of the Crowns, the English-speaking Lowlands had demonstrated an intense dislike of the Gaelic-speaking Highlands. Governments in Edinburgh had even considered what would now be described as forms of genocide or ethnic cleansing.

The other thing some Scots tend to overlook in a view of the past that is both romantic and maudlin is that the crimes committed after the battle were fairly typical of the times. The Highlanders were massacred not because they were Sots but because they were rebels. It’s all very well to damn the memory of Butcher Cumberland but, for the sake of balance, have a look at what the Stuarts did to the English rebels of the West Country after the Battle of Sedgemoor in 1685. It’s time for a more realistic view of the past; time for Scotland to dispense with the myths.

So, that’s it, just some thoughts from 'abroad'. I really hope I haven’t made some fresh Scottish enemies because I really do love the country, its past and its exciting present. And Edinburgh would be so much nicer to live in than London if only it wasn’t for those blasted seagulls!

The Battle of Adrianople-the Beginning of the End of the Roman World

It is not too much of an exaggeration, I think, to suggest that the Roman defeat by the Goths, and the death of the Emperor Valens, at the Battle of Adrianople in August 378AD was truly one of the decisive events of the western world. Ammianus Marcellinus, the Roman historian, was to write of, "Those ever irreparable losses, so costly to the Roman state." It changed the character of the Empire: the Goths, though partly tamed by Theodosius I, were to remain as a distinct entity within its frontiers; sometimes allies; other times enemies. Roman losses could only be made good by co-opting Barbarians into the army as Foederati under their own commanders; and, as always, military power has ways of translating into political influence.

Adrianople also changed forever the essential character of the Roman military. It was to end the reliance on the infantry legions, the formations that had proved so formidable in the past, and upon which the Empire had been built in the first place. Less than a hundred years after the battle heavy cavalry had become the main offensive arm in the Imperial army, changing by stages into the Byzantine cataphracts and the armoured horsemen of the Middle Ages