[00.00]
Mike Gibbs: Mandy, can we begin by getting a picture of the landscape of the English Midlands at the time of the Civil Wars in the seventeenth century?
Mandy de Belin: Well, it’s an area that was very much dominated by open field agriculture. It’s part of what is known by historians as the ‘central province’, which -, where this form of agriculture dominated. But, having said that, there were changes that were beginning to manifest in this period. It was a landscape in transition.
[00.38]
Mike Gibbs: While the topography of the area hasn’t changed, the landscape would be unrecognisable today. Can you -? Please can you describe it?
Mandy de Belin: Yeah. I mean it’s true to say that the bones of the landscape, the hills and the valleys, they’re still there to be observed and experienced, just as they were back then, but if we were transported to Northamptonshire in 1645, we’d find the landscape to be totally unrecognisable to our modern eyes.
Naseby, like many of the surrounding parishes, was divided into three vast open fields, and in the case of Naseby, quite a large parish, each of these fields was about a thousand acres. The agriculture was largely dedicated to the growing of arable crops and that’s to feed both the village population and any livestock that they were keeping.
So each of these enormous open fields had its own substructure. It was divided into furlongs, and a furlong is, you know, about ten acres, more the size of what we think a modern field to be, and each of those furlongs was further sub-divided into a number of individual strips. So, any individual in the parish farming in the parish, his landholdings were made up of these strips, and they were intermingled in each of the furlongs in one field and again, in furlongs in the other open fields.
[02.17]
So, when a field was cultivated, it was ploughed by a team of oxen or horses, and it was more often horses by the time of the Civil War, and they were pulling this single direction, simple, single, Mouldboard plough. So, the team would start at the outside of a strip and work inwards in a clockwise direction, if you can picture that, and so the earth would be piled continuously to the right by the Mouldboard, and the result of this was the characteristic ‘ridge and furrow’ pattern that we see fossilised nowadays in some pasture landscapes, and that includes parts of Naseby.
This ridge strip has got a sinuous curve which is a sort of reverse S-shape, and it’s that shape because as you neared the edge of your strip, you had to start turning the plough team to give you room to go along the headland and kind of turn around and come back the other way.
[03.21]
So these ridges, they served multiple purposes because they obviously, they delimited the strips. You could see, you know, ‘this is Adam’s strip, this is John’s strip’, whatever, but they also provided what drainage the fields had because the ridges were always positioned to run downhill, so the furrows would act like drains.
One of the most striking features of this landscape to modern eyes would be the absence of hedges and trees, and it’s nothing like the patchwork appearance that we’re used to, particularly in sort of Midland rural scenery nowadays. And, it was also all open access. The furlongs were delimited by tracks and there were grass slades running around, and these gave everyone access to the entire field system, so, you know, it was open in every way that you can think.
[04.21]
Mike Gibbs: And how was this landscape that you’ve just described, this field system, how was this shaped by land ownership and renting at this time?
Mandy de Belin: So, the whole purpose of the open field system was to implement a rotation of crops, so, you know, crop rotation isn’t something that just appeared with, in the eighteenth century with the agricultural revolution; it was already practised. So, with the three-field system, you typically had one field under wheat and barley, one under a nitrogen-fixing crop like peas and beans, and the other, the third, would be left fallow for a year.
The livestock of the village, sheep, cows and horses, were folded on this fallow so that their manure replaced the nutrients that the growing crops had taken away the year before, and of course, at the end of the year, the rotation moved round so the fallow would be under wheat and barley, and so on.
So, this -, you know, talking about land ownership and renting and everything, this, this brings us to a crucial point about that, and it’s another aspect that would seem very strange to our modern notions of farming. It was of necessity a cooperative and a collaborative system.
[05.49]
So, throw away modern notions of individuals owning or renting discrete parcels of land, fenced round against two-legged or four-legged intruders, you know, the ‘get off my land’, cliché. Instead, the landholding is comprised of the strips dotted round the open fields like we said. The individual strips at this period, they could either be freehold or copyhold, different land holdings that emerged from the sort of feudal system, but they could also just be rented from the landholder. It was getting more flexible by then.
Now, the whole system, field system, is identified as a township. That’s the term most commonly used, and all the landholders had rights over land, across the whole township, in different parts of the agricultural cycle. So there were wide common property rights involved in this system, and there was collective management of all aspects of agriculture, including the crop rotations. There was collective cultivation. For example, they would pool resources to make up plough teams, you know, they really were collaborating.
There were also extensive rights of common grazing, and this was -, this collaboration was administered primarily through manorial courts. These were regular assemblies which everyone was expected to participate, or everyone who was cultivating. Decision was made by consensus, and there was an emphasis on custom and practice that was maintained in oral tradition, and a phrase that you’ll hear reported, repeated in these records all the time is ‘beyond the memory of the oldest inhabitant’.
[07.40]
So there was often additional types of land in the parish, in addition to the arable. Most settlements had access to some wood or wasteland, and don’t be misled by that pejorative term, ‘wasteland’. Wasteland was really valuable to communities because it provided resources like fuel and extra common grazing, and there might also be meadowland included, and this would be dedicated to growing grass for the first half of the year, but then it would be opened for grazing and consequent manuring after the hay had been made.
[08.21]
Mike Gibbs: Mandy, you, you made a specific and detailed study of the battlefield at Naseby which, of course, was a major -, which was of course a major turning point in the Civil Wars in 1645. What was the topography, what was the agriculture of Naseby like at the time the battle was fought?
Mandy de Belin: So, that’s a general description of over-field agriculture. We can recover some specific information about Naseby’s particular field system from a 1630 estate map and from the work of the Vicar of Naseby, the Reverend John Mastin. He wrote a book called The History and Antiquities of Naseby. That first appeared in 1792.
We also have Streeter’s famous illustration of the Battle of Naseby and that gives valuable information, and although it’s deemed inaccurate so far as the deployment of the troops is concerned, his depiction of the landscape is generally accepted as being representative. He apparently actually visited the site of the battlefield a year after the actual battle.
[9.51]
So, Naseby had a three-field system, and these fields were known by different names at different times, but in the seventeenth century they were called Turmoore, Shedshocks and Southfield. The battle was fought on Turmoore field.
So, Naseby was a bit unusual in that it had no common or wasteland, apparently. Mastin described all the land as being ‘known’ land. It’s notable, however, that at the time of battle, Naseby had a rabbit warren because rabbits were farmed then. You had a sort of structure called a warren that was surrounded by a wall, so that was right on the east side of Turmoore field and there was apparently a patch of rough ground covered in gorse just to the north of this.
So, Mastin described the Naseby crop rotations at the end of the eighteenth century, but he complained bitterly about the backward nature of the village agriculture and how it hadn’t changed, you know, since time immemorial, how reluctant they were to adopt the new improved methods, so we can surmise from his description that the rotation hadn’t been much changed from the seventeenth century.
So, one of the open fields would have been sown with wheat, rye and barley, one with beans and oats, and one left fallow, and the crop grown was situated according to the nature of the land. Each field had a proportion of what Mastin called ‘red’ or ‘kiely’ soil, and the rye was sown on that. Wheat and barley were sown on what he called the stronger and blacker lands, and then oats were sown after rye the following year, beans after wheat and barley, and of course that was then followed by a year in which the field lay fallow. Significantly, Turmoore field, in 1645, was lying fallow so it would just have had rough grass on it.
[11.51]
Even by the standards of the open landscape that we’ve already described in general terms, the landscape of Naseby fields seemed to have been exceptionally open, exceptionally free of trees and hedges. Mastin described the fields as having ‘not a hedge or tree for more than a mile together, a few scattered thorns only and patches of gorse or firs’.
He also observed that the boundaries between the open fields were delimited by field marks, not by hedges or any other solid structure. You know, even the parish boundary wasn’t necessarily marked by a structure.
[12.33]
Mike Gibbs: But this was a time of transition. More and more land was being enclosed.
Mandy de Belin: Yes, it certainly was undergoing a transition, this landscape, albeit quite a slow one. Social and economic forces were pushing the transformation in areas like north west Northamptonshire, where Naseby is situated, because it was characterised by extremely heavy, difficult-to-work clay soil. So, the move was away from arable and towards livestock. In the first instance, this was sheep for wool production. This move to livestock entailed the reorganisation of the landholdings from the scattered strips that we have described into consolidated ringfenced holdings, and the blanket term for this process, the land reorganisation, is ‘enclosure’.
So by 1645, this process was already visible in some of the parishes around Naseby. At one extreme, to the west, we have Sulby parish, and Sulby Abbey had turned the entire parish over to sheep roundabout the fourteenth century, possibly the early fifteenth, and they depopulated the entire village.
[14.01]
Another neighbouring village, Thornby, which is to the south of Naseby, was enclosed in the early 1620s, and there, there were several freeholders and they sort of put all of their land into one bucket, if you like, and then what emerged the other side was enclosed holdings of the appropriate size, commensurate to the land they had held in strips. And there doesn’t seem to have been much opposition to that process in Thornby, but if you contrast it with Haselbech, which was to the east of Naseby, that was enclosed in the 1590s, but this enclosure was imposed by two majority landowners, Thomas Tresham and John Reade. And there was a general insurrection against this enclosure because it was going on quite widely through the Midlands at this point. There was a widespread insurrection against it in around 1607, and Haselbech was part of this insurrection, and some of the enclosure fencing was torn down by the villagers but, with the march of progress, needless to say the enclosure stood, they didn’t get their land back.
[15.17]
By this time, the time we’re getting these enclosure movements, the landholdings had already begun to be concentrated into the hands of fewer, larger landowners. Under the process, anyone with freehold or copyhold land would receive something under the enclosure process and people who held only common grazing rights didn’t actually hold any land. They’d also get some compensation. But the people who lost out were the common agricultural labourers because they didn’t need that intensive labour any more. And there are also reports of farmhouses becoming derelict and other buildings falling into decay, and that was recorded as happening in Haselbech.
So the driving force behind all of this enclosure was conversion to pasture, and it was the greater profitability of land -, livestock on the heavy clay soil and, which was undrained at this point. But this conversion to grass and to grazing and pasture actually predated the enclosure process. Thornby farmers had many of their strips recorded as ‘grass lays’ in a document dating from about – oh, I think it’s about 1605 off the top of my head – before actually round to enclosing in the 1620s.
[16.42]
Naseby evidently did the same, but they found this practice quite ruinous and you imagine trying to confide grazing animals to these strips of land that you have sown to grass – quite difficult. So, in Naseby they eventually compromised. Rather than enclosing early, they turned the outermost areas of their common fields, the ones furthest from the village, into pasture and they didn’t undergo full enclosure, and they did that as an actual Parliamentary enclosure and that was at the comparatively late date of 1820.
So, even though it wasn’t enclosed until then officially, some two-thirds of the land were given over to pasture, but again, this, this was a bit later than our Civil War battle.
So, this kind of early enclosure had been recognised as a social evil under the Tudors, because of it’s, it’s tendency to displace agricultural labourers and lead to dereliction of buildings, right up to the depopulation of entire villages, as we saw at Sulby. But, economic and social forces were driving the process, and you know, it just ended up being the only way to go really.
[18.05]
Mike Gibbs: And if we look now at the landscape of the battlefield of Naseby, what, what’s it like today?
Mandy de Belin: Well, it confirms, conforms really to what you’d expect of a Midlands rural landscape. It’s largely dominated by arable cultivation. Certainly the battlefield itself is, but there are also pasture fields around Naseby which are used both for sheep and for beef cattle. But the landscape the two armies encountered was very different from how it is nowadays, and we’ve already talked about how open it was, exceptional openness of Naseby even by seventeenth century standards.
And going back to Mastin again, he actually boasted of how many churches you could see from the windmill mound in the village. We’ll come back to the windmill mound because that was where the Parliamentary army rendezvoused on the morning of the battle. It is the sort of, one of the high spots of Naseby. So he would say you could see 40 churches from there. I’m not sure that wasn’t a bit of an exaggeration even then, but you certainly can’t see that many nowadays because the vista is filled with hedges and trees.
[19.24]
Mike Gibbs: And how did the armies come to actually be there in Naseby and around Naseby at that time?
Mandy de Belin: So, the night before the battle, the New Model Army was camped around Guilsborough, which is a village a few miles to the south west of Naseby. The Royalists meanwhile were in Market Harborough, which was a few miles to the north east. In fact, some of Ireton’s troopers surprised and captured some of the Royalist guards in Naseby the evening before the battle. Some escaped which is how the King and Rupert came to be aware how close the Parliamentary army were.
But the exact story of how the New Model came to be in Guilsborough and how the King’s forces came to be in Market Harborough is actually probably the subject of an episode in its own right. There were a lot of manoeuvrings and events, including the sack of Leicester that sort of led up to this confrontation, but one things that is useful to note, Fairfax very much wanted to bring about a big set piece battle with the Royalists at this point. The Royalists were waiting for reinforcements from Goring’s Cavalry in the west, and Fairfax definitely wanted to bring on the battle, you know, while he still had the numerical advantage.
[20.53]
As for Naseby, how they ended up there, as well as being open, it was also very high. It’s the highest land for quite a way round, you know. To demonstrate this, the Warwickshire Avon rises there, as does the northern arm of the Nene, and there’s four other streams that flow out of the parish. The windmill would have been a very visible landmark and it was an obvious rendezvous spot for the Parliamentary army because they were marching from their camp near Guilsborough towards the known location of the Royalist army which was Market Harborough.
So the Royalist army meanwhile marched away from Market Harborough, away from the Welland Valley, up to another high spot at East Farndon, and when they got there – this is the morning of the 14th – they drew themselves up into a battalia, and they could be seen by both Fairfax and Cromwell because they had ridden forwards like this. There’s a sort of slight hill that goes up from the windmill mound. They had ridden to the edge of that so they would have had a very good view across the valley to East Farndon and they would have been able to see the Royalist army drawn up.
[22.09]
The Parliamentary army, on the other hand, they were actually behind a slight ridge, so Prince Rupert had to work a bit harder to establish exactly where they were, but at this point we had the two armies about three or four miles apart, on two high spots, with this kind of rippled valley between them. But, I mean, coming to battle, bringing about a pitched battle like this, is a bit of a flirtation. You both have to want to do it, and both of the positions that the armies were in were too favourable for the other leave their position and come forward to engage. So, you know, they had to move.
[22.48]
Mike Gibbs: You say it was a ‘flirtation’, so why did the two sides choose to actually fight the battle there?
Mandy de Belin: Well, they’d, they’d come to an approximate location. I mean, Fairfax definitely wanted to fight the battle. It was a bit less of a clearcut decision for the Royalists, and a lot of people will argue that they made the wrong decision, they should have marched away to the north, they shouldn’t. But they came to these sort of two initial deployment points and then had to decide where, you know, what they could do to actually make one of the other sides engage with them, but at that point, East Farndon and the windmill mound, two favourable positions, they were on really steep hills. No army in their right mind would advance upon them and attack them there, so they had to move. It wasn’t going to happen where they were.
We should observe here that there was a very particular requirement for the landscape for a pitched battle of this period, and we don’t know the exact numbers of the two armies. Estimates vary between seven thousand and twelve thousand for the Royalists, and between about twelve thousand and seventeen thousand for the New Model Army. But we do know that whatever the exact size, it would require the width of about one mile to deploy a battalia.
I mean, think how long it takes you to walk a mile. It’s quite a distance! Ten minutes, something like that, at least, probably more. So, it’s no accident that the pitched battles of the Civil Wars took place on moorland or in the open fields of the Midlands, as at Naseby. They required a very large open space.
[24.45]
So, still seeking to bring the Royalists to battle, the Parliamentary army turned. They turned to the west and they marched about one mile to another area of Naseby which was known as Broadmoor. Local knowledge and skilful scouts would have guided them to this more suitable place, and there, the New Model drew up just behind the ridge of a much shallower hill in Turnmoore field which, as we said, that year lay fallow, making it even more suitable. And then they marched slightly forward so their front ranks would have been visible.
The Royalists, on the other hand, they had a much longer march to try and sort of shadow the Parliamentary army and reach this point. It was about seven miles and they drew themselves up opposite, just over the parish boundary, in Sibbertoft on Dust Hill. They were in plain sight while they drew up. So, at this point, they had a parish boundary in between them, but it was only a small stream so it wasn’t a big obstacle.
And it’s a nice little story that, on their way, some of the King’s army picked some beanstalks from the fields that they were crossing, and they put these in their hats to help identify themselves to each other, so, you know, there wouldn’t be any friendly fire going on!
[26.11]
Mike Gibbs: How did the two armies then face each other, and did the landscape give either side an advantage over the other?
Mandy de Belin: So, the New Model drew up with Ireton’s Cavalry on the left, Skippon’s infantry in the centre, and Cromwell’s Cavalry on the right, and there was a reserve, just tucked outside behind the hill. The Royalist army drew up opposite them, with Rupert’s Cavalry on their, on their right, which is opposite Ireton, the infantry in the centre, and Langdale’s Horse on the left, opposite Cromwell.
So really, you know, it was the important thing about this landscape, where they then drew up, was it that didn’t give either side too much of an advantage. They were, there were sort of little features but they were basically evenly balanced. So, for example, the Parliamentary army, Ireton’s Cavalry, anchored their left flank against the hedges of the enclosed parish of Sulby, and this would stop, you know, the Cavalry being able to ride round them. You know, the hedge was in the way, so Rupert wouldn’t be able to sort of outflank them that way.
And as the Parliamentary battalia filled from left to right, by the time they got to Cromwell’s Horse, they found that they’d run out of room, so they actually sort of drew up in deeper ranks than might have been normal. They were constrained by this rabbit warren we talked about, and some rough ground on their right side. And because it was very much Fairfax’s desire, not only to bring the Royalist army to battle, but to have them attack them, he wanted the Royalists to start the action. With Rupert’s normal tactics, they were pushing an open door there, that’s exactly how Rupert liked to engage, but to help things along a bit they actually sent their Dragoons to the far side of Sulby Hedges, up level with the Royalist Cavalry, so they could get off their horses and fire through the hedge to make sure the Cavalry charged, and there is a suggestion, that, you know Rupert’s Cavalry might have charged before they were quite ready because of that.
So, those are the sort of nuances of the landscape but there wasn’t any huge advantages.
[28.45]
Mike Gibbs: And how did the battle evolve, and what role did landscape play in that?
Mandy de Belin: Well, Fairfax got his wish. The Royalist army advanced upon the Parliamentary army, and for that reason, the battle took place in Naseby and not in Sibbertoft. In the early stages, it looked very much to be going Rupert and Charles’ way. After two charges, Rupert broke Ireton’s Cavalry, and some of them ran away, some of them reformed, and, you know, at the same time, the left side of the Parliamentary infantry was similarly broken, and they retreated to reform behind the reserves. But in the meantime, Cromwell’s Cavalry had routed Langdale’s Horse, and they turned to attack the Royalist infantry, and so the infantry was in fact, you know, by the time sort of Ireton’s Cavalry had come back as well, the Royalist infantry was surrounded. So, greater numbers, greater discipline, well placed reserves and the strength of Cromwell’s Ironsides prevailed.
They’ve estimated about 4,500 of the Royalist infantry were actually surrounded and captured, and so that ended their war, certainly as Royalist soldiers, some of them actually went on to fight on the Parliamentary side, but they were no longer Royalist soldiers.
The Royalist cavaltry, Cavalry in the meantime staged a fighting retreat, so they rode away, but every so often, they would turn and fire just to sort of protect themselves and protect other soldiers. But, you know, there was a lot of chaos, a lot of casualties. Yeah, it was quite a resounding victory.
[30.44]
Mike Gibbs: So what do you consider to be the significance of the battle of Naseby?
Mandy de Brelin: Well, in military terms, it was the, it was really the end of the First Civil War, because although it dragged on for another year, there wasn’t any way that the Royalists had enough experienced troops, had enough troops. They weren’t going to win.
The other thing that happened is that there was a very -, they captured, the Parliamentary army captured the Royalist baggage train, and they captured all of Charles’ correspondence, and that included some very, very damaging information that was shared. Nowadays, they’d be going ‘no, no, fake news, fake news’, but yeah, it was, it was a heavy defeat and it was the turning point.
[31.37]
Mike Gibbs: The landscape, as you have described it, over which the battle was fought, is very different to that that we saw today. What has effected those changes, what’s made these changes visible in the landscape?
Mandy de Brelin: So, the landscape of course, it’s moved on, both Naseby and the surrounding parishes have moved on since the battle, and I think we had already mentioned that, even by the time Mastin wrote, fully two-thirds of Naseby’s open fields were given over to pasture, and at that time, he estimated the stock kept by the Naseby farms as being about 2,800 sheep, 350 cows, and 300 mares, so Naseby, in common with the rest of its neighbours became overwhelmingly a pastoral landscape, initially raising sheep and then more and more raising beef cattle.
But it’s also, it also became a fox-hunting country, and we learn a lot about this corner of Northamptonshire in the nineteenth century from fox-hunting literature. So, Naseby was situated in the favoured part of the Pytchley Hunt country and as such, it was part of the venerated shire’s hunting district of England, which was such a magnet to English society in the nineteenth century. I mean, this part of Northamptonshire was really fashionable. I mean, you could see some really wealthy businessmen buying some big houses and converting them, and this is what happened to Thornby Hall, just to the south of Naseby.
[33.25]
The great appeal of the landscape was all for grass. As the famous fox-hunting writer, Surtees, put it ‘grass, grass, grass, nothing but grass for miles and miles’.
So as the sub-division of enclosed fields continued, because originally the enclosed fields were quite big, but as they got money and the time and the effort and ideas about keeping livestock changed, they sub-divided them, and the fences in this part of the country, they became quite infamous for their difficulty and that made them quite attractive because, you know, it’s like blokes with sports cars, you know, they like to show off a bit! So, you’ve got these fearsome, so-called ‘?ox fences’ which was a ditch, rails, hedge and more rails beyond, which you needed to keep bullocks in. They were much harder to contain than sheep. And the other thing that enclosure bought was the installation of drainage, and we should remember that fox-hunting’s a winter pastime.
[34.30]
So the side of the battlefield that we talked about being dominated by the rabbit warren and gorse, that became the site of fox covers. So, the woodland that you can still see there, that still survives there. That was planted deliberately to breed and preserve foxes because otherwise there’s be nothing to hunt.
Naseby Cover was created in 1797 which makes it one of the earliest purpose planted fox covers in the area, and there’s a couple more woodland called Paisnell Spinney and Long Hold Spinney that have been planted since.
So the area is still part of the Pytchley Hunt country, but of course that’s a lot more controversial nowadays. I wouldn’t say that the Hunt was nearly so popular or applauded as it was back in the nineteenth century, but we’ve still got to go on a bit further to get back, so we know what we’re rolling back to get to the sort of seventeenth century landscape, so we need to look at what’s happened to Naseby since the nineteenth century, and you won’t find an uninterrupted sea of grass nowadays.
[35.45]
Change came initially with the First World War and the consequent drive for greater food production. That resulted in many acres of pasture going under the plough again, and the production of more cereals and food crops, but this intensification was temporary, and in the ‘20s and ‘30s, the land reverted to pasture again, and there was reportedly a general air of neglect and underuse. You know, Naseby wasn’t prime agricultural land, and where they were growing any crops, there were oats and barleys for feeding horses and pigs.
And of course, it was war once again that led to agricultural revival. Mechanisation, you know, in the late ‘30s and the ’40s was increasing, and land was once again going under the plough. Under the direction of the War Agriculture Ministry, flax was planted along with potatoes and sugar beet, and the War Ag even terminated the tenancy, or had the tenancy, of one Naseby farmer terminated using its powers, because, you know, what he was doing wasn’t up to it, he wasn’t up to snuff.
So the years after the Second World War led ultimately to the period of intensification and specialisation that bring us to the landscape that more of us are familiar with, the landscape that’s there now. The battlefield itself is under arable cultivation, but it’s got many more hedges. It’s -. The fields are much smaller so if you stand where Cromwell’s Cavalry would have been, there’s another five hedges before you get – so that’s five fields before you get to where Ireton would have been.
[37.33]
Mike Gibbs: And how, over the years, was the Battle of Naseby this major global event memorialised, particularly by local landowners?
Mandy de Belin: Well, I have to say that I recommend Glenn Foard’s book on Naseby because there’s a very good chapter about how the battle was memorialised and certainly, initially, the large local landholders took an interest in it. They paid, you know, the local boys, the local youths for any artefacts that they could recover from the battlefield and some of them built little museums and things like that.
Initially most of these big landowners were Royalists, they were on the King’s side, but later on, as Cromwell became something of a figurehead for Radicals towards the end of the nineteenth century, and his reputation was being restored, they, they looked to Naseby as a site of commemoration for him, and as a site of one of his great triumphs.
Two of the major Naseby landowners in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries were very active in commemorating the battle. Fitzgerald erected the obelisk which is at the site of the windmill mound, he put that up in 1823, and although it’s about a mile from the battlefield, it was the rendezvous for the Parliamentary army so it makes kind of sense.
In 1936, there was a monument placed on the actual battlefield itself, and that’s at the approximate position where Cromwell’s Horse were drawn up.
There’s also a tradition of information boards for the battlefield, with the earliest being erected in 1908 by Naseby Parish Council, and nowadays the Naseby Battlefield Project maintains both viewing platforms and information boards across many of the major sites associated with the battle, not just the battle itself, but like East Farndon where Rupert initially drew up, you know, where Fairfax and Cromwell were viewing, the opposition, and even, there’s a really good site at Sulby Hedges with a lot of information boards there.
So anyone wishing to understand the battle and to experience the landscape could do a lot worse than to attend one of the several public battlefield tours that are organised by the Naseby Battlefield Project each year.
[40.12]
Mike Gibbs: So, finally, Mandy, can I ask you to summarise what you consider to be the importance and understanding of landscape history for the military historian and for, specifically, the military history of the British Civil Wars?
Mandy de Belin: Well, I’d say the landscape is like the third participant in any battle, and it plays both a general and a particular role in the narrative, so as we’ve observed, there are particular needs for a pitched battle such as that fought at Naseby, namely an open space, large enough for two battalia, each a mile wide, to draw up facing each other.
Again, in more particular, it had to be terrain that did not give one site a great advantage over the other, as we’d seen was the case with their initial deployments. The gentle valley provided by Broadmoor was eminently suited to tempt both sides to battle. Then there are more specific landscape features that can be seen to have affected the course of the battle. Sulby Hedges, for example, provided an anchor for Ireton’s Horse, but also cover for the Dragoons to fire through the hedge and get the battle started.
And on the other wing, it’s been speculated that the rabbit warrens in the rough ground were instrumental in slowing the Parliamentary Cavalry charge and helping them to wheel round to attack the flanks of the Royalist infantry and effectively surround them.
And we should also sort of try and recover very specific details, like the condition of the ground. We know that the month of June had been very wet in 1645, and we know, we’ve talked about Northampton’s deep clay soils, and they were even worse in those days before field draining. And we should think, you know, the Royalist army had to march seven miles over these sort of, probably, wet and boggy fields before they even got to the battle. What effect would that have had on them? So, I’d argue that a study of the landscape at the time is important for understanding any civil war confrontation, and it is certainly desirable to be able to look at the landscape as we find it now and to be able to roll back its history so we can understand the role that it played back then in any actual conflict.
[42.44]
Mike Gibbs: Mandy, thank you very much indeed for giving us a totally new perspective on, not only the Battle of Naseby, but the vital importance of the ground on which it was fought. I also, as you suggest, think that the best way of actually really getting to grips and getting the feel of what that battle must have been like, is to go on one of the splendid guided tours that the Naseby Battlefield Project are organising, a really spectacular day. So, thank you again.
Mandy de Belin: My absolute pleasure.
[Ends]