Bosworth: The Birth of the Tudors (60 page)

Burton’s own words, depicted as they are with distances in miles in mind, sound like those of someone who had studied a map of the area. Yet the emergence of cartography was to play an important part in shifting perceptions of the battle’s location away from its accepted site at Redemore and instead to up on Ambion Hill. Through subtle, almost unnoticeable changes, Redemore was to become divorced from the battle site, known as ‘King Richard’s Field’. In 1576 Christopher Saxon published the first map of Leicestershire and Warwickshire that showed ‘Kinge Richards feild’ as a pear-shaped area; the map lacks any further detail, yet this was supplied in 1602, when a map of Leicestershire and Rutland was drawn up, with Burton’s assistance, which drew a pear-shaped boundary around what it described as ‘K. Ric: feild’, in the precise location that Burton describes. The field in question is bisected by a tributary of the river Sence, a branch of the Tweed which has its source near Stapleton. Eight years later, however, John Speed’s map of the county made significant changes, separating the area known as ‘Red More’ from ‘Kinge Richards field’, on a separate orientation. Speed clearly shows ‘Redmore’ as taking up only a part of the field, to the north-east of the river, nearer the area around Sutton Cheney.

These subtle changes were to have a significant impact on the ideas of future historians, not least William Hutton, who published his
Battle of Bosworth Field
, the first book dedicated solely to the battle, in 1788. It was Hutton’s supposedly comprehensive account which would influence historians for centuries to believe that Bosworth had been fought around Ambion, with Hutton himself publishing a plan of the battle that went much further than Speed’s map and pushed the battle site entirely north of the river Sence, imagining the confrontation to take
place on Ambion Hill itself, with Hutton himself discounting any evidence that seemed not to fit in with his own designs, declaiming that ‘there neither is, nor ever was’ a marsh, in spite of its almost universal feature in all early accounts of the battle.

For Hutton, describing in detail the terrain as it existed in the late eighteenth century, ‘Redmore Plain’, where the battle had been fought, was to be placed a mile from Market Bosworth, with its name derived ‘from the colour of the soil’. In believing Redemore had been named after its red soil, Hutton was following in a tradition stretching back to the sixteenth-century poet Michael Drayton who used the analogy in his poem ‘Poly-Olbion’ to lament how ‘then it seemed, thy name was not in vain, when with a thousands blood, the earth was coloured red’. Hutton placed Redemore in the parish of Sutton Cheney, with the village lying to its east.

Hutton’s depiction of the battle being fought in the area was embellished further by John Nichols in his
Description of Leicestershire
, published in 1811, with another detailed map of the formations of Henry and Richard’s battles opposing one another on Ambion Hill, supposedly synonymous with Redemore Plain.

The recent researches of Peter Foss have comprehensively unpicked Hutton’s theory: to begin with, the name Redemore has nothing to do with it being a ‘Red Moor’; instead, the etymology of the word
comes from the Anglo-Saxon word for ‘reed’, and is used to describe an area adjacent to wetland. There are references in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries to ‘Redelondes’ and ‘le Redehull’ in the parish of Market Bosworth, yet to locate precisely where Redemore is, we need to go back several centuries to an agreement concerning the allocation of tithes made in the parish of Hinckley, dated 1283. This document refers to ‘six roods of meadow in Redemor in the fields of Dadlington’.

If Redemore should be placed near Dadlington, then we might expect evidence for the battle having been fought around the fields near the village. In particular, an important clue to where the battle took place can often be found in the location where the bodies of the battle dead are buried. Unlike at Towton, no identifiable grave-pits have been discovered, though successive historians have been keen to identify various surrounding tumuli or raised earth as signs of mass graves. Where are the Bosworth dead? Putting aside the most exaggerated claims that 10,000 men were killed, Vergil’s estimate that a thousand were slain on Richard’s side and a hundred on Henry’s seems the most realistic. Nevertheless, the number is sizeable enough that a mark or sign of their burial might have been noted. Some of the more illustrious victims of the battle, such as John, Duke of Norfolk, would have been taken away from the site to be buried in their family chapels and churches. But the majority would have been buried near the battle itself. Henry gave orders that they should be buried ‘with honour’ at the field itself, with the tradition that the dead should be buried in the parish in which they fell persisting. It is here that the rediscovery of Henry VIII’s signet letter of 1511 and the printed letter of confraternity by the churchwardens of St James’ chapel at Dadlington by Colin Richmond in 1985, provided the crucial evidence that it was at Dadlington that the dead were buried. Henry VIII’s signet letter reveals that St James’ chapel stood ‘upon a parcel of the ground where Bosworth field, otherwise called Dadlington field, in our county of Leicester was done’, while the printed letter of confraternity is insistent that it was at St James’ chapel where ‘the bodies or bones of the men slain in the said field be brought and buried’. Yet whereas Henry VIII had stated that Bosworth Field was known also as ‘Dadlington Field’, the churchwardens seem to have taken little interest in having
the battle renamed for their own benefit, preferring instead to keep the battle’s name of Bosworth Field in their letter appealing for alms. Perhaps by 1511 Bosworth had already become the accepted name for the battle.

Though unsubstantiated by modern archaeological investigation, there is a wealth of anecdotal evidence of discoveries of the remains of those killed in battle being unearthed around Dadlington over the centuries. William Burton described how it was ‘in the churchyard whereof many of the dead bodies (slain in the said battle) were buried’. In his history of Leicestershire, published in 1811, John Nichols further noted that ‘indented spaces of ground, probably the graves of victims in this bloody battle, are visible in several spots’ around Dadlington. A succession of finds seem to suggest a number of mass burials being found in its churchyard. In 1868, when a grave was being prepared to the right of the entrance gate in the churchyard of the chapel, ‘a quantity of human bones’ was uncovered two feet beneath the ground, ‘many of which were of full size and in a good state of preservation. ‘Amongst them were counted as many as 20 skulls’, with another account of the find describing how the layer of bones ‘was a yard thick’. When a carpenter was employed in the restoration of Dadlington church in 1889, a compact mass of bones was discovered in the north-eastern end of the churchyard. In 1950, the sexton at Dadlington chapel uncovered layers of compacted skeletons when digging a grave on the right of the church path just inside the gate, the same location of the 1868 finds. Reports of other burial finds in the local area were noted by John Nichols in his history of Hinckley, published in 1782, that recorded in the field known as Crown Hill ‘whence gravel is sometimes fetched to repair the highways … there have been dug up many skeletons, which are said to be very common on breaking fresh ground’. Other local testimonies, unfortunately unproven and now lacking comprehensive evidence, include a ‘man in armour’ being unearthed two feet below ground on land belonging to Stoke Lodge in Stoke Golding around 1900, which was reported to have ‘crumbled to dust’ soon after.

If the battle was fought around the surrounding area of Dadlington, it seems also clear that the tradition that Henry was crowned at nearby Stoke Golding on ‘Crown Hill’ suitably fits this assertion. Tradition
records that villagers scaled the tower of St Margaret’s church to watch the battle; the fields below, lying off Fenn Lanes and stretching across to Dadlington towards the right, are clearly visible, unlike the fields surrounding Ambion Hill. The evidence of place names is of central importance to understanding where exactly Henry may have been crowned after the battle. The village was called Stoke in the fifteenth century, with its name being changed to ‘Stoke Manfield’ in a subsidy roll of 1505, finally settling upon its present name sometime between 1563 and 1576, when ‘Golding’, the term itself suggestive of a crowning, was added. The name ‘Crown Hill’ can be traced back in local records to the early seventeenth century, with one field being called ‘Crown Hill Field’ and another ‘Le Gulden’ in a document detailing the sale of the lordship in 1605. The recent discovery of a list of lands and field names from the 1480s indicates that the same piece of land, an open field jutting out in a triangular shape, was known as ‘Garbrodfelde’, revealing that its name had been deliberately changed to reflect its role in the battle. The same document also mentions, in the western end of the parish, an area of land known as ‘the brown heath’ that Peter Foss has suggested local records accurately locate nearby Fox-cover Farm; it is perhaps telling that one of the earliest mentions of the battle, contained in a genealogy, records Henry as defeating Richard ‘super brownehethe’.

The document also contains numerous mentions of another significant feature, a quagmire or fen hole known as the ‘Holow’, located in the valley below Crown Hill on the boundary of Stoke Golding and Dadlington. Foss’s exhaustive researches into the local documentary records and topography of the area have revealed references to several ‘fen holes’ around the boundaries of Shenton, Dadlington, Stoke and Upton in an area one and a half miles from Dadlington, stemming from tributaries of the Sence river, including an area of wetland on the Shenton and Upton parishes area known as ‘Foomeers’, which Foss suggests derived from the word ‘foul mere’ – it was known as ‘fowlismeres’ in 1307, also indicating that it was a permanent feature on the landscape. Evidence of wetland terrain and fen holes in the area brings with it proof that, as most of the contemporary sources of the battle agree, the battle had been fought alongside a marsh.

The problem of locating the exact site of the marsh is that so much
of the landscape has subsequently changed in the intervening centuries. While the landscape would have been open countryside in the fifteenth century, the ground has since been divided into fields with fences and hedgerows, with woods having grown up across the area surrounding Ambion Hill. The construction of the Ashby-de-la-Zouche canal in the late eighteenth century, bisecting straight across the land, together with the construction of the Nuneaton to Ashby-de-la-Zouche railway line, with its cuttings and embankments, have radically altered the appearance of the battle site. Yet dramatic changes to the land began as early as the sixteenth century, with its marshy landscape being drained, to the extent that by 1577 the chronicler Raphael Hollinshed stated that the once marshy site of the battle ‘is grown to be firm ground by reason of ditches cast’. This had taken place as early as 1530, when the Dadlington Court Roll records that ‘Redmore dyke should be scoured before All Saints on pain of 12d’. While the testing of soil samples in the area has detected where alluvium and peat, signs of former areas of marshland, had gathered, creating a virtual map of the appearance of the landscape’s original medieval appearance, once again the surviving documentary evidence points to the fact that there must have been a marsh and fen lands in the area known as Redemore, its plain located west of Dadlington and north of Stoke Golding. In particular, the surviving manorial records for Dadlington, surviving only in a transcript made by William Burton in the seventeenth century, make clear that ‘le Fenmore’, which must have been one of the names for the site of the marshy Fen hole, was located between ‘Dadlington, Upton and Shenton’.

One source also mentions another notable feature that marked out the landscape at the time of the battle. According to the ‘Ballad of Lady Bessie’, the Duke of Norfolk retreated during the battle of the vanguards, and ‘went up to a wind-mill and stood upon a hill so high’ where he was confronted by Sir John Savage who killed him on the spot. Standing out across the plain, this windmill would have been the most visible feature on the landscape as the armies confronted each other. The windmill is mentioned in an agreement concerning tithes in Dadlington made in 1479, six years before the battle, where it is described as a ‘new windmill in the same Lordship’. It seems that the windmill was demolished in the sixteenth century, with a later
chancery document dating from the reign of Elizabeth I revealing that by the 1570s the mill had been ‘taken down and sold unto divers persons unknown the timber and stones of the said mill’ by Robert Holte of Mancetter and his wife Katherine. It is worth noting that the owner of the windmill and surrounding land was Lord Ferrers of Chartley. One of his ancestors, an earlier Lord Ferrers, had fought and died on Richard’s side, and there is evidence in the stained glass at Merevale church of his coat of arms, possibly a memorial to Ferrers’ death in the battle. It raises the question of whether Richard had been guided by Ferrers himself to pitch his tents around Ambion, thanks to Ferrers’ unique local knowledge of the area.