Britain has a long and bloody history, and the battlefields that dot the length and breadth of the nation are proof of that.
From the Battle of Watling Street (60 or 61, when Boadicea attacked the Romans) and the Battle of Deorham (577, when a Saxon [English] force defeated a native Briton [Welsh] force) to the Battle of Towton (1461, the bloodiest battle to have taken place on English soil when 28,000 people - 1% of the entire population at the time, or equal to an incredible 600,000 people today - were killed in one DAY), to the Battle of Worcester (1651, when the future King Charles II hid in an oak tree to escape capture from the victorious Parliamentarians), they are battles that have shaped and defined our island kingdom.
But, shamefully, many of these historic battlefields have faced neglect over the years, and some of them have even been built on.
But now, help is at hand. The Battlefields Trust will employ its first full-time development officer to help amateur enthusiasts up and down the country form a 'neighbourhood watch' to monitor threats or damage to sites all over England and Wales.
It eventually hopes to do the same in Scotland.
And English Heritage is pushing for restrictions on unauthorised metal- detecting in the Government's forthcoming Heritage Protection Bill.
Hopefully, these measures will ensure the country's historic battlefields are preserved for decades to come.
Battles of Britain: They are the sites of bloody clashes that shaped this nation, now you can fight to save them
By Robert Hardman
10th April 2009
Daily Mail
More British soldiers died on a bleak Yorkshire field on one Sunday than were killed in the Battle of Britain, Dunkirk and the Normandy landings combined. And yet most people have no idea what happened at Towton during a Palm Sunday blizzard in 1461.
They won't know that the Lancastrian forces loyal to King Henry VI found themselves shooting their arrows into the wind and the driving snow, with such poor results that their Yorkist enemies picked up the arrows and shot them back with lethal results.
They won't know that both sides were so hell-bent on slaughtering each other - few prisoners were taken - that the combatants had to pull corpses out of the way to get at the opposition. By the end of the day, so the accounts tell us, 28,000 people lay dead.
That works out at 1per cent of the English population of the age. Imagine the carnage of, say, the Somme packed into a single day.
A country at war: Britain's endangered battlefields
Even if that figure is exaggerated, it was arguably the bloodiest battle on British soil (though some Boudica fans will argue that the old girl led more to their deaths against the Romans at Watling Street).
It was also one of the most significant, a turning point in the War of the Roses when Edward IV took on the Lancastrian force of Queen Margaret (wife of the deposed Henry VI).
And yet, the average visitor to Towton, near Tadcaster, would find it hard to grasp any sense of what happened there. Apart from a medieval memorial and a pair of crossed swords on an Ordnance Survey map, the Battle of Towton is largely forgotten.
There is plenty of history under the soil. Recent ploughing has disturbed at least one mass grave. But if someone decides to build another road or housing estate here, there is not a lot anyone can do about it.
Now, if those 28,000 people had died in a building, you can rest assured that it would have every preservation order in the book slapped on it.
Even the most dismal 'iconic' structures from the Seventies are listed buildings that almost need a permit before anyone can change a lightbulb.
But battlefields, which have shaped our national story more than any structure, have almost no protection at all. Indeed, until 15 years ago, there was not even a proper list of them.
And that is why a small charity has teamed up with English Heritage to create a national network of volunteer patrols to prevent any more crucial chunks of our martial history disappearing under Tarmac.
On Tuesday, the Battlefields Trust will employ its first full-time development officer to help amateur enthusiasts up and down the country form a 'neighbourhood watch' to monitor threats or damage to sites all over England and Wales.
An English warrior in the style of soldiers at the Battle of Maldon, 991
In due course, it hopes to do the same in Scotland.
At the same time, English Heritage is pushing for restrictions on unauthorised metal- detecting in the Government's forthcoming Heritage Protection Bill.
'Do you know that in France it is illegal to remove anything from a battlefield? Or that one corner of Normandy has ten times more battlefield museums than the whole of Britain?' says Frank Baldwin, chairman of the trust.
'Battlefields are why we are what we are. We keep hearing these debates about what it means to be British, but we seem to ignore what Churchill called "the punctuation marks" of history.'
The trust was born out of a struggle to stop the Ministry of Transport bulldozing a main road right through the site of the Battle of Naseby, the decisive battle of the English Civil War.
The future King Charles II hid in an oak tree from the victorious Parliamentarians, who had just defeated his Scottish Royalists, after the Battle of Worcester in 1651 during the English Civil War
Since then, the charity has attracted everyone from academics and archaeologists to members of the public who have simply wondered why there is a funny hump on a local hill. Its first trustees included the actor Robert Hardy, a world authority on the longbow.
Among the trust's early successes was helping English Heritage - the Government's heritage advisers - compile the first official register of important English battlefields.
They singled out 43 sites for recognition, eight of which are deemed to be at 'high risk' from threats such as housing and looters with metal detectors.
These sites do not command any special status, merely an obligation on local authorities to 'consider' them before granting any planning permission.
The Battlefields Trust wants recruit a custodian for each one, one local who will keep tabs on planning applications, vandalism, rogue metal detecting or fresh archaeological discoveries. And they want to include many more battlefields.
'The current register accounts only for about 10 per cent of our battlefields,' says Frank, a former Royal Artillery officer who is now a battlefield guide. With an English Heritage backing of £125,000, the trust aims to have custodians and support groups for 100 known battlefield sites by 2011. There are also 'lost' battles, such as the great Saxon versus Briton conflict at Dyrham, or Deorham, near Bath.
Mentioned in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, its precise location is still a mystery.
But that has not stopped local authority archaeologist, David Evans, volunteering to be its custodian.
'I'm not sure we'll ever find it, but we'll keep on looking,' he says. 'We will probably need to find a burial ground to be sure.'
The older the battle, the more debate there is likely to be about its exact location.
A burial ground is always a good indicator. Then there are known battles whose locations remain a matter of dispute.
It was a guided tour of the supposed site of the 1471 Battle of Barnet, during the War of the Roses, that drew Frank Baldwin into the Battlefields Trust in 2001.
He met a diligent local historian whose study of local land records suggested that the battlefield was almost certainly not on the spot that historians had always accepted, but a mile away in the grounds of Wrotham Park (the stately setting for films such as Gosford Park).
'When you get local people with real knowledge of the ground and the topography, you can find out all sorts of new things,' he says.
Soon a local group was formed and, in due course, they called in the expertise of the trust. Now, even English Heritage has acknowledged the 'new' location of the Battle of Barnet. A handful of local enthusiasts has shifted centuries of received wisdom.
This is not mere historical pedantry. A tiny discovery can speak volumes.
'A man with a metal detector might pick up a musket ball, put it in his pocket and think: "What a clever chap I am",' says Frank Baldwin.
'But it's stealing history because we have technology that can tell us whether that ball was shot from a musket, a pistol or a carbine, if it was dropped or fired and whether it hit someone or something.
'If we know that, we can work out where the cavalry was, where the infantry was and what was happening in the battle at that point.'
It's an infectious subject. Last September, Vicky Gilchrist, a corporate events director from Berkshire, spotted an item in her local paper about a guided walk around the remains of the First Battle of Newbury of 1643. It ranks among English Heritage's most at risk sites.
Some of the battlefield is already road and buildings, and the local authority is about to announce a location for thousands of new homes.
When that walk ended in a pub lunch, Vicky volunteered to join a fledgling support group. Seven months on, she is the custodian and the group has amassed 25 supporters.
'We have all this history and so many people don't know about it,' she says.
'We want to raise awareness about the battlefield and then, once we know where the council wants to place its new homes, we will do what we can to make sure the battlefield is taken into account.'
As the Government prepares to dumb down the history curriculum even further (World War II is no longer required reading, apparently), the future looks bleaker than ever for the past. Now is the time to do battle for our battles.
THE BATTLEFIELDS UNDER THREAT
1. BATTLE OF PRESTONPANS, 1745
Scotland puts England to shame when it comes to local battlefield knowledge, but the threats are as severe. Prestonpans is the most at-risk battlefield in Scotland.
Much of the site is under Tarmac. Here, the Jacobite forces of Bonnie Prince Charlie achieved a fast victory over government forces, leading to huge support for the Jacobite cause. It ended in blood and tears a year later at Culloden, the last hand-tohand battle on British soil.
2. MYTON, 1319
If this one was in Scotland, we would never hear the end of it. But this was a Robert the Bruce win in England. And the people of Yorkshire seem reluctant to make a big thing of being thrashed by the Scots on their own patch. In 1319, while Edward II was besieging Berwick (then in Scotland, now in England), the Earl of Moray led a force into England to distract him. The Archbishop of York sent an army to deal with them, but they were beaten on the banks of the River Swale. Edward abandoned Berwick and the Scots went home.
3. STAMFORD BRIDGE, 1066
King Harold is remembered as having allowed England to be invaded for the last time. But shortly before his showdown with William the Conqueror he pulled off a brilliant victory. Having landed in Yorkshire, the Viking King Harald took York and was heading south. Harold dashed north to deal with this threat. At Stamford Bridge, his army defeated Harald's force and sent the Viking survivors packing, having made them promise they'd never return. Much of the site is now houses.
4. TOWTON, 1461
Generally regarded as the bloodiest battle in English history with up to 28,000 dead. This equates to 1 per cent of the population of the time - 600,000 deaths in today's terms. Edward IV wanted to affirm his position as king and rode north to take on the Lancastrian army of Queen Margaret. The two sides met on Palm Sunday.
Driving snow gave Edward's archers extra range over the Lancastrian archers, who found it hard aim with the wind and snow in their eyes. Savage hand-to-hand fighting lasted all day until the Lancastrians fled and were butchered all the way to Tadcaster. Mass graves have recently been discovered in the area, but ploughing and metal detecting threaten this crucial site.
5. WORCESTER, 1651
Little remains of the final battle of the English Civil War, even though this battle sealed the fate of the Royalists, drove Charles II into exile and allowed Oliver Cromwell to become Lord Protector. Two years after the execution of his father, Charles gathered an army of Scottish Royalists and marched to London. Having holed up in Worcester for five days, he was attacked by Oliver Cromwell, who built bridges over the Severn and the Teme to attack the city. By nightfall, Worcester had fallen and Charles fled - hiding in an oak tree en route to French exile. The site is now, largely, built over.
6. NORTHAMPTON, 1460
A king was captured here. Henry VI and his 15,000-strong Lancastrian army were dug in against an assault by the Earl of Warwick and his Yorkist forces. But when one of Henry's generals switched sides and let the Yorkists through the defensive line, the game was up. Henry was captured, many of his nobles were killed and hundreds of his soldiers drowned fleeing across the adjacent river. Today, much of the battlefield is a golf course.
7. WATLING STREET, 60 OR 61
Historians cannot agree on a precise date, let alone a location for Queen Boudica's final showdown with the Romans. The best bet is that it was somewhere in the West Midlands. According to the Roman historian, Tacitus, the warrior queen and her force of 100,000 had torched Colchester, London and St Albans when they finally met 10,000 Roman troops on Watling Street. The Britons were slaughtered. Legend puts the death toll at 80,000.
8. MALDON, 991
Having raped and pillaged parts of East Anglia, a large Viking force was heading for Maldon in Essex when it was confronted by a militia led by the local Anglo-Saxon chief, Brihtnoth. The Vikings offered to sail home if they were paid off with treasure. Brihtnoth refused a deal and was killed in the ensuing battle. Although the Vikings won, their losses were so great that they had barely enough men to sail their ships home. They never reached Maldon, the earliest battlefield on English Heritage's register of battlefields.
9. FIRST BATTLE OF NEWBURY, 1643
King Charles I might never have lost his head if he had got this one right. With Prince Rupert, he led a force of 15,000 men to intercept the Earl of Essex's Parliamentarian army as it returned from Gloucester. The Royalists had far superior cavalry but allowed Essex to lure them into tight lanes and hedgerows where they were picked off by the Roundhead infantry. The result was a bloody draw and Charles withdrew. Today, there is little to suggest what happened here and pressure from developers puts the site on the list.
10. DEORHAM OR DYRHAM, 577
The details of this event are so sketchy that some historians are not even sure it happened. According to the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, a Saxon (English) army from Wessex defeated a large force of Britons (Welsh) in a decisive battle which led to Saxon domination of the West. Three British 'kings' - of Bath, Gloucester and Cirencester - were killed. The battle is thought to have taken place in South Gloucestershire, near Dyrham Park, a stately home.
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From the Battle of Watling Street (60 or 61, when Boadicea attacked the Romans) and the Battle of Deorham (577, when a Saxon [English] force defeated a native Briton [Welsh] force) to the Battle of Towton (1461, the bloodiest battle to have taken place on English soil when 28,000 people - 1% of the entire population at the time, or equal to an incredible 600,000 people today - were killed in one DAY), to the Battle of Worcester (1651, when the future King Charles II hid in an oak tree to escape capture from the victorious Parliamentarians), they are battles that have shaped and defined our island kingdom.
But, shamefully, many of these historic battlefields have faced neglect over the years, and some of them have even been built on.
But now, help is at hand. The Battlefields Trust will employ its first full-time development officer to help amateur enthusiasts up and down the country form a 'neighbourhood watch' to monitor threats or damage to sites all over England and Wales.
It eventually hopes to do the same in Scotland.
And English Heritage is pushing for restrictions on unauthorised metal- detecting in the Government's forthcoming Heritage Protection Bill.
Hopefully, these measures will ensure the country's historic battlefields are preserved for decades to come.
Battles of Britain: They are the sites of bloody clashes that shaped this nation, now you can fight to save them
By Robert Hardman
10th April 2009
Daily Mail
More British soldiers died on a bleak Yorkshire field on one Sunday than were killed in the Battle of Britain, Dunkirk and the Normandy landings combined. And yet most people have no idea what happened at Towton during a Palm Sunday blizzard in 1461.
They won't know that the Lancastrian forces loyal to King Henry VI found themselves shooting their arrows into the wind and the driving snow, with such poor results that their Yorkist enemies picked up the arrows and shot them back with lethal results.
They won't know that both sides were so hell-bent on slaughtering each other - few prisoners were taken - that the combatants had to pull corpses out of the way to get at the opposition. By the end of the day, so the accounts tell us, 28,000 people lay dead.
That works out at 1per cent of the English population of the age. Imagine the carnage of, say, the Somme packed into a single day.
A country at war: Britain's endangered battlefields
Even if that figure is exaggerated, it was arguably the bloodiest battle on British soil (though some Boudica fans will argue that the old girl led more to their deaths against the Romans at Watling Street).
It was also one of the most significant, a turning point in the War of the Roses when Edward IV took on the Lancastrian force of Queen Margaret (wife of the deposed Henry VI).
And yet, the average visitor to Towton, near Tadcaster, would find it hard to grasp any sense of what happened there. Apart from a medieval memorial and a pair of crossed swords on an Ordnance Survey map, the Battle of Towton is largely forgotten.
There is plenty of history under the soil. Recent ploughing has disturbed at least one mass grave. But if someone decides to build another road or housing estate here, there is not a lot anyone can do about it.
Now, if those 28,000 people had died in a building, you can rest assured that it would have every preservation order in the book slapped on it.
Even the most dismal 'iconic' structures from the Seventies are listed buildings that almost need a permit before anyone can change a lightbulb.
But battlefields, which have shaped our national story more than any structure, have almost no protection at all. Indeed, until 15 years ago, there was not even a proper list of them.
And that is why a small charity has teamed up with English Heritage to create a national network of volunteer patrols to prevent any more crucial chunks of our martial history disappearing under Tarmac.
On Tuesday, the Battlefields Trust will employ its first full-time development officer to help amateur enthusiasts up and down the country form a 'neighbourhood watch' to monitor threats or damage to sites all over England and Wales.
An English warrior in the style of soldiers at the Battle of Maldon, 991
In due course, it hopes to do the same in Scotland.
At the same time, English Heritage is pushing for restrictions on unauthorised metal- detecting in the Government's forthcoming Heritage Protection Bill.
'Do you know that in France it is illegal to remove anything from a battlefield? Or that one corner of Normandy has ten times more battlefield museums than the whole of Britain?' says Frank Baldwin, chairman of the trust.
'Battlefields are why we are what we are. We keep hearing these debates about what it means to be British, but we seem to ignore what Churchill called "the punctuation marks" of history.'
The trust was born out of a struggle to stop the Ministry of Transport bulldozing a main road right through the site of the Battle of Naseby, the decisive battle of the English Civil War.
The future King Charles II hid in an oak tree from the victorious Parliamentarians, who had just defeated his Scottish Royalists, after the Battle of Worcester in 1651 during the English Civil War
Since then, the charity has attracted everyone from academics and archaeologists to members of the public who have simply wondered why there is a funny hump on a local hill. Its first trustees included the actor Robert Hardy, a world authority on the longbow.
Among the trust's early successes was helping English Heritage - the Government's heritage advisers - compile the first official register of important English battlefields.
They singled out 43 sites for recognition, eight of which are deemed to be at 'high risk' from threats such as housing and looters with metal detectors.
These sites do not command any special status, merely an obligation on local authorities to 'consider' them before granting any planning permission.
The Battlefields Trust wants recruit a custodian for each one, one local who will keep tabs on planning applications, vandalism, rogue metal detecting or fresh archaeological discoveries. And they want to include many more battlefields.
'The current register accounts only for about 10 per cent of our battlefields,' says Frank, a former Royal Artillery officer who is now a battlefield guide. With an English Heritage backing of £125,000, the trust aims to have custodians and support groups for 100 known battlefield sites by 2011. There are also 'lost' battles, such as the great Saxon versus Briton conflict at Dyrham, or Deorham, near Bath.
Mentioned in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, its precise location is still a mystery.
But that has not stopped local authority archaeologist, David Evans, volunteering to be its custodian.
'I'm not sure we'll ever find it, but we'll keep on looking,' he says. 'We will probably need to find a burial ground to be sure.'
The older the battle, the more debate there is likely to be about its exact location.
A burial ground is always a good indicator. Then there are known battles whose locations remain a matter of dispute.
It was a guided tour of the supposed site of the 1471 Battle of Barnet, during the War of the Roses, that drew Frank Baldwin into the Battlefields Trust in 2001.
He met a diligent local historian whose study of local land records suggested that the battlefield was almost certainly not on the spot that historians had always accepted, but a mile away in the grounds of Wrotham Park (the stately setting for films such as Gosford Park).
'When you get local people with real knowledge of the ground and the topography, you can find out all sorts of new things,' he says.
Soon a local group was formed and, in due course, they called in the expertise of the trust. Now, even English Heritage has acknowledged the 'new' location of the Battle of Barnet. A handful of local enthusiasts has shifted centuries of received wisdom.
This is not mere historical pedantry. A tiny discovery can speak volumes.
'A man with a metal detector might pick up a musket ball, put it in his pocket and think: "What a clever chap I am",' says Frank Baldwin.
'But it's stealing history because we have technology that can tell us whether that ball was shot from a musket, a pistol or a carbine, if it was dropped or fired and whether it hit someone or something.
'If we know that, we can work out where the cavalry was, where the infantry was and what was happening in the battle at that point.'
It's an infectious subject. Last September, Vicky Gilchrist, a corporate events director from Berkshire, spotted an item in her local paper about a guided walk around the remains of the First Battle of Newbury of 1643. It ranks among English Heritage's most at risk sites.
Some of the battlefield is already road and buildings, and the local authority is about to announce a location for thousands of new homes.
When that walk ended in a pub lunch, Vicky volunteered to join a fledgling support group. Seven months on, she is the custodian and the group has amassed 25 supporters.
'We have all this history and so many people don't know about it,' she says.
'We want to raise awareness about the battlefield and then, once we know where the council wants to place its new homes, we will do what we can to make sure the battlefield is taken into account.'
As the Government prepares to dumb down the history curriculum even further (World War II is no longer required reading, apparently), the future looks bleaker than ever for the past. Now is the time to do battle for our battles.
THE BATTLEFIELDS UNDER THREAT
1. BATTLE OF PRESTONPANS, 1745
Scotland puts England to shame when it comes to local battlefield knowledge, but the threats are as severe. Prestonpans is the most at-risk battlefield in Scotland.
Much of the site is under Tarmac. Here, the Jacobite forces of Bonnie Prince Charlie achieved a fast victory over government forces, leading to huge support for the Jacobite cause. It ended in blood and tears a year later at Culloden, the last hand-tohand battle on British soil.
2. MYTON, 1319
If this one was in Scotland, we would never hear the end of it. But this was a Robert the Bruce win in England. And the people of Yorkshire seem reluctant to make a big thing of being thrashed by the Scots on their own patch. In 1319, while Edward II was besieging Berwick (then in Scotland, now in England), the Earl of Moray led a force into England to distract him. The Archbishop of York sent an army to deal with them, but they were beaten on the banks of the River Swale. Edward abandoned Berwick and the Scots went home.
3. STAMFORD BRIDGE, 1066
King Harold is remembered as having allowed England to be invaded for the last time. But shortly before his showdown with William the Conqueror he pulled off a brilliant victory. Having landed in Yorkshire, the Viking King Harald took York and was heading south. Harold dashed north to deal with this threat. At Stamford Bridge, his army defeated Harald's force and sent the Viking survivors packing, having made them promise they'd never return. Much of the site is now houses.
4. TOWTON, 1461
Generally regarded as the bloodiest battle in English history with up to 28,000 dead. This equates to 1 per cent of the population of the time - 600,000 deaths in today's terms. Edward IV wanted to affirm his position as king and rode north to take on the Lancastrian army of Queen Margaret. The two sides met on Palm Sunday.
Driving snow gave Edward's archers extra range over the Lancastrian archers, who found it hard aim with the wind and snow in their eyes. Savage hand-to-hand fighting lasted all day until the Lancastrians fled and were butchered all the way to Tadcaster. Mass graves have recently been discovered in the area, but ploughing and metal detecting threaten this crucial site.
5. WORCESTER, 1651
Little remains of the final battle of the English Civil War, even though this battle sealed the fate of the Royalists, drove Charles II into exile and allowed Oliver Cromwell to become Lord Protector. Two years after the execution of his father, Charles gathered an army of Scottish Royalists and marched to London. Having holed up in Worcester for five days, he was attacked by Oliver Cromwell, who built bridges over the Severn and the Teme to attack the city. By nightfall, Worcester had fallen and Charles fled - hiding in an oak tree en route to French exile. The site is now, largely, built over.
6. NORTHAMPTON, 1460
A king was captured here. Henry VI and his 15,000-strong Lancastrian army were dug in against an assault by the Earl of Warwick and his Yorkist forces. But when one of Henry's generals switched sides and let the Yorkists through the defensive line, the game was up. Henry was captured, many of his nobles were killed and hundreds of his soldiers drowned fleeing across the adjacent river. Today, much of the battlefield is a golf course.
7. WATLING STREET, 60 OR 61
Historians cannot agree on a precise date, let alone a location for Queen Boudica's final showdown with the Romans. The best bet is that it was somewhere in the West Midlands. According to the Roman historian, Tacitus, the warrior queen and her force of 100,000 had torched Colchester, London and St Albans when they finally met 10,000 Roman troops on Watling Street. The Britons were slaughtered. Legend puts the death toll at 80,000.
8. MALDON, 991
Having raped and pillaged parts of East Anglia, a large Viking force was heading for Maldon in Essex when it was confronted by a militia led by the local Anglo-Saxon chief, Brihtnoth. The Vikings offered to sail home if they were paid off with treasure. Brihtnoth refused a deal and was killed in the ensuing battle. Although the Vikings won, their losses were so great that they had barely enough men to sail their ships home. They never reached Maldon, the earliest battlefield on English Heritage's register of battlefields.
9. FIRST BATTLE OF NEWBURY, 1643
King Charles I might never have lost his head if he had got this one right. With Prince Rupert, he led a force of 15,000 men to intercept the Earl of Essex's Parliamentarian army as it returned from Gloucester. The Royalists had far superior cavalry but allowed Essex to lure them into tight lanes and hedgerows where they were picked off by the Roundhead infantry. The result was a bloody draw and Charles withdrew. Today, there is little to suggest what happened here and pressure from developers puts the site on the list.
10. DEORHAM OR DYRHAM, 577
The details of this event are so sketchy that some historians are not even sure it happened. According to the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, a Saxon (English) army from Wessex defeated a large force of Britons (Welsh) in a decisive battle which led to Saxon domination of the West. Three British 'kings' - of Bath, Gloucester and Cirencester - were killed. The battle is thought to have taken place in South Gloucestershire, near Dyrham Park, a stately home.
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