Book digs up bloodiest battle

THE Battle of Marston Moor was one of the bloodiest ever fought on British soil. On July 2 1644, 40,000 men engaged in a fierce conflict on the moor between Tockwith and Hessay, just outside York. Somewhere between four and six thousand men were killed or left dying from their wounds on that summer's evening in a battle that proved to be the decisive conflict in the Civil War.

An entire Northern Royalist army was crushed and the reputation of King Charles I's foremost general and nephew, Prince Rupert, was left in tatters.

As battles go, Marston Moor is up there with Hastings, and Bosworth. It changed the face of our history.

Many accounts have been written of the battle and the basic story is well known.

Around the time of the clash, matters were going badly for the Royalists in the north. The Marquess of Newcastle had been forced to take refuge in the city of York, where the Parliamentarian Sir Thomas Fairfax set about him with his Parliamentary armies. Prince Rupert marched to Newcastle's aid but Fairfax broke his siege and marched south to stop Rupert's attempt to relieve Newcastle's army.

A crafty Rupert marched around Fairfax's troops and reached York nonetheless. But the Parliamentary army finally surprised the Royalists at Marston Moor and defeated them in a ferocious battle. York was forced to surrender to Parliament and Prince Rupert was shamed.

Now, however, a new book, Marston Moor 1644: The Battle Of The Five Armies, reassesses what we know about the battle and brings to the story something different. The book is based not only on historical records but also on an 18-year survey of the battlefield.

It is a collaboration between two Civil War experts, Dr Peter Newman, who sadly died earlier this year, and Paul Roberts.

Dr Newman first published an account of the battle in 1981, in which he looked at the terrain and the evidence on the ground, as well as historical documentation.

In an introduction to Marston Moor 1644, he describes how he first came to York University in 1973 to do a doctoral thesis on King Charles' northern armies.

"I took a cottage on the edge of the battlefield, and through a chance acquaintance... was alerted to the scope for serious evaluation of all that had been written on the battle for Marston Moor," he writes.

"It was a regular seasonal occurrence for the farmer, and other farmers, to retrieve from their land battle debris in the form, largely, of musket shot - lead balls of varying weight and character - which they kept as curiosities.

"It occurred to me that a comprehensive field-walking programme to find and record such debris, coupled with intensive analysis of the written sources, might well iron out the anomalies in secondary narratives."

That led eventually to publication of his first book in 1981.

In history, however, matters inevitably move on. With his 18-year Battlefield Project, Paul Roberts adapted and built on Dr Newman's original idea of surveying the battle scene.

Dr Newman himself in his introduction describes his co-author's work as a "quietly conducted and comprehensive field survey leading to new conclusions" which "addressed the deficiencies" of his own earlier work and "has important implications for the study of battlefields generally, as well as offering what may be considered to be the most definitive account of Marston Moor that may be possible".

The result is their collaboration on this new account of the battle. So what does it tell us about this key moment in English history?

The authors dig beneath the superficial account of the battle - also known as the York fight, York Battle or Hessay Moor - and claim that the Parliamentarian victory was "the result of a protracted decline in the fortunes of the King's northern army which began in the winter months of that year 1644."

They look in detail at the long process that led up to this clash of five armies and at the importance of York and Yorkshire in the course of the war.

The Civil War had officially broken out two years before Marston Moor, in August 1642. The Royal Court and its entourage had decamped from London to York in late spring of that year, putting York and Yorkshire at the centre of Royalist activism. Royalist supporters of Charles I flocked to York from all over the country, and roads into and out of the city must have been clogged by the movers and shakers of the day.

Ironically, however, the presence of the Royal Court in York did little to strengthen the Royalist position in the county, the authors say. Before the declaration of Civil War, there had been opposition around in the form of Parliamentarian sympathisers visiting York, making preparations in the county and sending their reports back to Parliament in London. York and its environs buzzed with political intrigue and insubordination.

Where the book really wins out, however, is in a detailed account of the battle itself - an account informed not only by a reassessment of the historical record, but also by meticulous mapping of patterns of action revealed by the existence of surviving musket balls.

There is a poignant reminder at the close of this fascinating account.

"When the beaten and dispirited Royalists rode away from York on 4th July, those that could had escaped more or less unscathed from a most terrible and defining experience," the authors write.

"When, on Marston Moor or on any other battlefield of the civil wars, musket shot is gathered up in quantity... it will need always to be remembered that the shot not recovered was what went into the grave with the corpses.

"Now, more than ever before, the study of battles will involve a literal trampling upon dead men's bones."

Marston Moor 1644: The Battle of the Five Armies by PR Newman and PR Roberts is published by Pickering-based Blackthorn Press, priced £19.95. The book was launched at Borders in York last month, in the presence of Fiona Fairfax, the direct descendant of the Yorkshire general who fought in the battle

Updated: 11:22 Monday, May 05, 2003