Bloody Meadows E-Book

John Carman

• Herausgeber: The History Press
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2006

Beschreibung

By investigating the sites of historical battlefields, this book shows that an insight can be developed into the minds of those who fought, and into some of our own expectations about war. It reveals differences in landscape type between battlefields from the tenth to nineteenth century in Britain, Belgium, France, Spain and Portugal.

Leseprobe

BLOODY MEADOWS

Dedicated to all Victims of War, Past, Present and Future

BLOODY MEADOWS

INVESTIGATING LANDSCAPES OF BATTLE

JOHN AND PATRICIA CARMAN

First published in the United Kingdom in 2006 by Sutton Publishing Limited

The History Press The Mill, Brimscombe Port Stroud, Gloucestershire, GL5 2QGwww.thehistorypress.co.uk

This ebook edition first published in 2013

All rights reserved © John Carman & Patricia Carman, 2006, 2013

The right of John Carman & Patricia Carman to be identified as the Authors of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyrights, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights, and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

EPUB ISBN 978 0 7524 9538 5

Original typesetting by The History Press

CONTENTS

List of Illustrations, Tables and Figures

Acknowledgements

1 Researching battlefields

2 Understanding battlefields

3 Battlefield reports: fieldwork from 1998 to 2001 on twenty-three sites of battle in western Europe

4 Interpreting battlefields

5 Experiencing battlefields

6 Marking battlefields

7 Going forward

References

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS, TABLES AND FIGURES

COLOUR PLATES

Battlefield Landscapes

1.

Aljubarrota: general view of battlefield

2.

Assandun site 1

3.

Assandun site 2

4.

Bosworth: general view of battlefield from Ambion Hill

5.

Bouvines: general view of battlefield

6.

Corunna/Elviña: general view of battlefield

7.

Courtrai: general view of urban location of battlefield

8.

Cropredy Bridge: general view of battlefield

9.

The Dunes: general view of site today

10.

Fontenoy: general view across battlefield from Antoing

11.

Linton: today, from the point of view of attackers

12.

Maldon: the site today

13.

Naseby: general view of battlefield from site of monument

14.

Northampton: general view of battlefield from south

15.

Oudenaarde: general view across battlefield

16.

Roliça: general view of battlefield

17.

Roundway Down: general view of battlefield

18.

St Albans I: Holywell Street today

19.

St Albans II: Barnard’s Heath

20.

Sedgemoor: general view of battlefield today

21.

Sorauren: general view of battlefield

22.

Stamford Bridge: site of battlefield today

23.

Stoke: general view of battlefield

24.

Tewkesbury: general view of battlefield

TABLES

2.1

Characteristics of battle

2.2

Parameters for studying battlefields

2.3

Battlefields as heritage places

2.4

Bloody Meadows Project: research questions

3.1

Summary table: Aljubarrota

3.2

Summary table: Assandun

3.3

Summary table: Bosworth

3.4

Summary table: Bouvines

3.5

Summary table: Elviña/Corunna

3.6

Summary table: Courtrai/Battle of the Spurs

3.7

Summary table: Cropredy Bridge

3.8

Summary table: Fontenoy

3.9

Summary table: Linton

3.10

Summary table: Maldon

3.11

Summary table: Naseby

3.12

Summary table: Northampton

3.13

Summary table: Oudenaarde

3.14

Summary table: Roliça

3.15

Summary table: Roundway Down

3.16

Summary table: Sedgemoor

3.17

Summary table: Sorauren

3.18

Summary table: St Albans I

3.19

Summary table: St Albans II

3.20

Summary table: Stamford Bridge

3.21

Summary table: Stoke

3.22

Summary table: Tewkesbury

3.23

Summary table: The Dunes

4.1

The shapes of some western European battlefields through time

4.2

Features present on battlefields

4.3

Boundedness and uses of battlefields

6.1

Memorialisation of some western European battlefields

6.2

Commemoration at some western European battlefields

6.3

The location of memorials at some western European battlefields

6.4

Meanings of memorialisation of some western European battlefields

6.5

Aspects of management of some western European battlefields

7.1

Some western European battlefields from past to present: from event to memory

FIGURES

4.1

Establishing boundaries to the battlefield space

4.2

Discourses of battle

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Fieldwork in 1998 and 2000 was generously funded by grants from the McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research, University of Cambridge. An Overseas Conference grant from the British Academy – given to enable John Carman to attend the annual meeting of the European Association of Archaeologists in Lisbon in 2000 – also assisted with the costs of travel to Portugal in connection with fieldwork in 2000. A further Overseas Conference grant from the British Academy assisted with the costs of attendance at the eighth annual meeting of the European Association of Archaeologists in Thessaloniki in 2002 where a report on work was presented. Clare Hall generously supported several attendances at overseas conferences at which presentations related to the project were given, and we are particularly grateful to Professor Gillian Beer, then President of Clare Hall, and Edward Jarron, Bursar, for their support and help.

The origins and work of the Bloody Meadows Project have been reported upon at a number of conferences and in other talks, beginning with the Theoretical Archaeology Group conference in Liverpool in 1996, and we are grateful to Sarah Tarlow and Suzie West for the chance to participate in their session. Subsequent opportunities presented themselves at meetings of the European Association of Archaeologists, especially the third held in Ravenna in 1997, the fifth held in Bournemouth in 1999, and the eighth held in Thessaloniki in 2002. We are grateful to Mark Pearce, Julian Thomas and Christopher Fowler, and Stephanie Koerner – session organisers respectively – for their interest in our work. We are particularly grateful to John Schofield, Bill Johnson and Colleen Beck for the opportunity to present some preliminary theoretical ideas at the fourth World Archaeology Conference in Capetown, South Africa in 1999; and to Anthony Harding for allowing a paper that took his conference on ancient warfare, held in Durham in 1996, beyond the realm of the prehistoric.

Other conferences specifically devoted to warfare include Dressing up for War held in Barcelona in 1999, Fields of Conflict held in Glasgow in 2000, the Sheffield Archaeological Society and Prehistoric Society conference on Prehistoric Warfare held in Sheffield in 2001, the second Fields of Conflict conference held in Åland, Finland in 2002 and the third held in Nashville, Tennessee, USA in 2004. We are grateful to the organisers of all these – especially Phil Freeman and Tony Pollard, Mike Parker Pearson, Vivecka Löndahl and Douglas Scott – for providing space for us to present; and to Phil Freeman and Doug Scott again for kindly delivering our papers at the second and third Fields of Conflict conferences which we could not attend in person. Thanks are due also to Andrew Gardner and Steve Townend for inviting us to participate in their session at TAG in Ireland in 2001, and to Andrew and Simon James for their invitation to take part in their session on violence in the Roman world at TRAC 2003. Other papers were presented at sessions at TAG in Lampeter in 2003 and at the annual IFA conference in 2004, and we are grateful to the organisers for all their help.

Outings in sessions not specifically devoted to issues of warfare include participation in the Anglia Polytechnic University conference on Visual Culture and Tourism held in Cambridge in 2000, in the series of public talks Not the Elgin Marbles held at York University in 2002, the CELAT conference Objets Mobilés held in Quebec, Canada in 2003, and the first CHAT conference at Bristol in 2003. Also at York, a paper was presented as a York Medieval Studies Seminar in 2000. Particular thanks go to Jane Grenville and Laurajane Smith for organising and chairing the York presentations, to Daniel Arsenault for inviting us to go to Quebec and overseeing our stay there, and to Dan Hicks in Bristol. In addition, papers were presented within Cambridge University at the third Cambridge Heritage Seminar on Heritage That Hurts in 1998, to the McDonald Institute in 1998, as Graduate Seminars in the Department of Archaeology in 2000 and 2003, and to the Cambridge University Archaeological Field Club in 2000 and 2002.

We are grateful to all those who have heard us talk upon the work of the Project and all those to whom we have talked over meals or drinks. We are very grateful for particular help to Anthony Harding, Larry Zimmerman, Laurajane Smith and Jane Grenville. We are extremely grateful to Glenn Foard for early advice on the battlefield of Northampton and access to his work on that site. In addition, the support given by a number of friends and colleagues who have shown interest in the project beyond the call of the duties of friendship must be recorded: Chris Evans, Mary-Cate Garden, Helen Geake, Kristian Kristiansen, Marco Madella, Carol McDavid, Phil Mills, Ulla Rajala, Marie Louise Sørensen and Corinne Roughley have all listened politely while we rambled on about our travels and travails. Particular thanks go to some anonymous guides and respondents we have encountered in our travels, and who have been instrumental in helping make some kind of sense of the battlefields we have visited. In addition to these direct personal contacts, we need to acknowledge the help given to us by members of email lists to requests for advice: Paul Courteney, Paula D. Girschick, Maggie Goodall, David Harvey and David Petts, among others whose advice we did not take up, all gave us very useful pointers. Finally, thanks must go to the managers and staff of Suttons for their help in seeing this work into print, and to Dr Helen Geake and the Cambridge University Photographic and Illustration Service for assistance with preparation of photographs.

John and Patricia Carman

Cambridge, December 2005

ONE

RESEARCHING BATTLEFIELDS

The aim of the Bloody Meadows Project is to contribute to current debates upon the place of war in the world by developing an understanding of changes in warfare practice and ideology over the long term. In operation, it is an exercise in the comparative study of battlefields from all periods of history and in all parts of the world. Treating battlefields as landscapes, and drawing upon recent approaches adopted in landscape archaeology, the project focuses on the battlefield as a place. Battles as events are a main focus of military history in all periods, and battlefields are also increasingly being taken up as part of a nation’s ‘official’ cultural heritage and as the focus of research by archaeologists and others who also seek to elucidate the sequence of events at such sites. By placing the focus upon the battlefield itself, however – and by looking at those from all periods – it becomes possible to gain an insight into the underlying cultural imperatives guiding the practice of war, and to discover aspects of war-making in the past that challenge modern perceptions and expectations. From this emerges the possibility of reaching new understandings of war as a cultural phenomenon.

The approach taken to battlefields by the Bloody Meadows Project is to treat them as particular types of landscape because there is more to the human response to landscape than treating it as a purely ‘natural’ phenomenon (Bender, 1993; Tilley, 1994). It is learned sets of taken-for-granted ideas, understandings and responses that provide the framework within which landscapes are experienced, turning landscape from a mere ‘natural’ backdrop into a cultural artefact. These culturally informed ideas, understandings and responses in turn structure the military use or non-use of landscape. Being part of a commonly held cultural frame of reference, attitudes towards landscape, expectations of landscape, and thus understanding of landscape – all of which differ for different peoples in different times and different places – are not usually part of express military discourse and are thus not open to examination. The consequence is that to understand the underlying attitudes towards battlefields held by different peoples at different times requires an investigation of the place itself as well as of the battle as an event. In doing so, we must move beyond the conventional discourses of military history and indeed military archaeology, which so often consider landscape only in terms of its direct effect on the events of battle.

The Bloody Meadows Project therefore takes an explicitly comparative approach to the study of battlefields: rather than devoting efforts to one or a few sites, the aim is to discover how one battlefield differs from another and how they differ across time and across space. The search is not for the decisive, the spectacular or the distinctive, but for the typical ‘norm’ in any period. There is an acute awareness throughout that fighting set-piece battles at particular places is not the only way of conducting wars, and the institution of ‘battle’ as we know it may be a relatively late invention in human history (perhaps no earlier than the Bronze Age of Egypt, c. 1500 BC). The Bloody Meadows Project is therefore concerned with understanding battle as a particular cultural form, and we work from the premise that battlefields have something to tell us about the nature of human violence as expressed in war, and this makes them important as culturally constructed locales.

The contribution of such a study to understanding war as a cultural activity lies in the culturally driven assumptions that lie behind the choice of place in which to fight in particular historical periods. Work from 1998 to 2002 (and reported upon in detail for the first time here) has highlighted the range of different landscapes in which battles are fought: but while similar types of place may be chosen in one period of history, these will differ significantly and noticeably from those chosen in other periods. The choice of battleground, we believe, therefore reflects unstated ideas about how war should be conducted, and these ideas vary across history. By studying the places themselves where these acts took place we can develop an insight into the minds of soldiers in the past, which challenges our own assumptions about the place of war in our society and forces us to look again at our own assumptions and expectations.

The project has its origin in some of the shared interests of the authors. One of these concerns the nature of heritage places of all kinds. Another concerns the place of war in human history. A third concerns the attempt to develop a specifically archaeological contribution to one of the important debates of our time (Carman, 1997b, 1–23). Coming as we do out of archaeology, we are concerned ultimately with the way humans interact with each other and with their physical surroundings, as represented to us by the traces left upon those physical surroundings. Not all such traces are tangible, although these intangible traces may themselves subsequently be represented by physical marks. This is what happens when we return to a place or an object and mark it as a special kind of object or place, by putting a barrier around it, by putting a marker on it, or by (at a place) building a memorial. The relevance of this to the category of place called the ‘battlefield’ will be evident: the mass act of violence constituting the battle may leave little in the way of clear traces, but they are frequently marked out as special, particularly by the construction of monuments to the event and those who died during it.

The very specific focus of the project arose initially out of the interest of one of us (JC) in the way in which particular heritage objects are selected, categorised and given value (an issue addressed in terms of the legal frameworks available in Carman, 1996). The desire was felt to take this theme further – in particular to take it more deeply into specific categories – and also to develop a fieldwork project that would allow some contact with fresh air rather than the stuffy gloom of the academic law library. Accordingly, a suitable category of heritage object was sought for examination, and one that would also provide the opportunity to do more in the way of research than merely note its existence and the bureaucratic arrangements for its treatment, or simply add to its number by identifying new sites that fit the category. At the same time, and in order especially to avoid duplicating the work of others, the category needed to be one not yet being systematically addressed either in terms of heritage or some other possible research question. It needed to be a category sufficiently large – and preferably with some international recognition – to allow a reasonable amount of specific fieldwork time, but not one so broad as to cover almost anything or any place marked as ‘heritage’.

The happy accident of the production of the English Heritage Register of Historic Battlefields (1995) coincided with the period of this search for a focus of fieldwork. Its production combined with both our interests in war as a contemporary and historical problem – especially in the light of the return of war to Europe after the end of the Cold War – and also with the simultaneous rise of battlefield archaeology as a distinct specialism (Doyle and Bennett, 2002; Freeman and Pollard, 2001). A focus on battlefields appeared to be a good way of meeting the needs of the desired fieldwork project and at the same time incorporating a concern with human violence. A project that also expressly combined issues of heritage with research into an aspect of the past would represent a new kind of project: we know of no others that combine these two aspects from the outset and where the two interact so closely.

SOME INSPIRATIONAL TEXTS ON WAR

The Face of Battle (Keegan, 1976) represented a new turn in the traditional military historian’s approach to battle as a historical event. The book concentrates on understanding the reality for combatants at three well-known and well-recorded battles from the past, which were fought within a relatively small distance from one another: Agincourt (1415), Waterloo (1815) and the first day of the Somme (1916). Opening with a sustained critique of the accepted manner of writing military history – and especially the ‘battle piece’ – the book goes on to examine in some detail the sequence of the events of each battle in terms of their experiential aspects: the effects of particular weapons on the human frame, the means of keeping men in the fighting line or of urging them to the attack, and the aftermath. Instead of a distanced, ‘general’s-eye view’ and rationalistic account of battle, the book offers the possibility of constructing a view ‘from the inside’ and of understanding the experience of war at the sharp end. In terms of the interests of the authors of the Bloody Meadows Project, Keegan’s work opened up the possibility of taking an overtly ‘materialist’ approach to battle (see also Carman, 1997b, 1–23) – in the simple sense of looking at its physical characteristics and consequences, rather than dealing with battle as the outcome of purely cerebral activity. Keegan’s directly comparative approach across several centuries also strikes a chord with our own interest in taking a long-term perspective on battles (Carman, 1997c, 220–39).

The Western Way of War (Hanson, 1989) offered something similar to Keegan’s in terms of ancient Greek hoplite warfare. Taking the elements of Greek warfare apart, the book explores the contexts within which Greek city-state wars took place, the place of the hoplite in Greek society, the relationship of men to their weapons and their fellows, the devices used to overcome fear, the organisational systems of command and control, the specific phases of combat, and the aftermath. It also, however, went one step further in attempting to use this as a window to consider the approach to war generally taken in the Western world. Arguing that the single, decisive clash of arms represented by hoplite battle has been taken in the West as the model for how war ought to be, Hanson points up the inappropriateness of such an understanding to modern conditions in an age of long-range weapons of mass destruction. He thus uses an understanding of war in historical times as a means to critique our own age. Keegan develops this theme in his own History of Warfare (1993), which seeks to draw on history for alternative but subordinate models of war which contain elements that may be more appropriate for an age where placing limits on war may be the more rational course. Both of these works thus contain the seeds of investigating the ideology of warfare by an examination of its specific form in particular historical periods.

Archaeological Perspectives on the Battle of the Little Bighorn (Scott et al., 1989) is not (as it is sometimes taken to be) the first application of archaeology to a site of military action. It was, however, the inspiration for the current phase of military archaeology. Taking advantage of the cutting of the grass at the Custer Memorial site, Scott and his colleagues used metal detectors to trace the fall of bullets and the ejection of cartridges across the space of the fight between units of the 7th US Cavalry and Lakota and Cheyenne warriors. Differences in weapons used by one group of participants from those used by others allowed the researchers to identify Native American shot from that of the soldiers, and the distribution especially of cartridge cases across the space identified the movement of men and formations through the space. From this, a model of the sequence of events emerged which confirmed Native American accounts frequently dismissed. Other work on soldier burial sites allowed also the identification of individuals, the opportunity to infer the location of the bodies of missing soldiers, and the chance to develop a picture of the ‘typical’ soldier for the late nineteenth century in North America. The techniques applied and the results achieved have since been taken as a model for similar work in the USA and other parts of the world (as represented in, for instance, Freeman and Pollard, 2001). The work at the Little Bighorn has accordingly made the historic battlefield a suitable object of archaeological enquiry.

Elliot’s Twentieth-Century Book of the Dead is a strange but interesting work, described by its author as ‘a necrology … [meaning] a naming or listing of the dead’ (1972, 11). As such, the book seeks to chart and quantify the various ghastly ways in which human beings have slaughtered each other over a particular period of history. In the case of this work, the title is somewhat of a misnomer, since the ‘twentieth century’ covered ends in 1970, thus comprising a mere 70 per cent of the total. A distinctive feature of the book is its focus less upon the direct experience of individuals than upon charting the types of ‘man-made death’ by orders of magnitude: typically, deaths due to direct military action are far fewer than those caused by public terror, guerrilla action, habitual ‘ethnic’ violence, and privation such as hunger and exposure. Indeed, it is shown that those caused by privation – both deliberate and collateral – by far exceed all the others. The book goes on to analyse the processes by which these deaths were made and draws some preliminary moral consequences from the lessons learned. This last clearly makes a connection with the origins of the Bloody Meadows Project, but there is another aspect of Elliot’s approach which has a more direct link. As Elliot puts it: ‘Much of what is written about violence is based on theories and attitudes extraneous to violence, and I cannot think of anything more lacking and more necessary to the study of violence than a discipline based on the facts of violence’ (1972, 15). A crucial fact at the centre of military activity is the place where that activity was carried out. To the extent that the Bloody Meadows Project is a contribution to the discipline of ‘necrology’, it lies in the focus upon the place of military activity as a constitutive fact of violence.

Like Elliot’s necrology, Postmodern War (Gray, 1997) and Violent Cartographies (Shapiro, 1997) are works coming from disciplines beyond and separate from both archaeology and military history. They represent the return to war as a topic in the social sciences (in these cases sociology and geography), and a new critical approach to the study and understanding of war in our own age. Postmodern War (Gray, 1997) charts the rise of the cyborg-soldier as a part of twentieth-century existence and the domination of a discourse of war in modern Western society. Like Violent Cartographies (Shapiro, 1997) and Keegan’s History of Warfare (1993), it thus seeks to reveal the cultural basis for the modern project of making war appear a realm of rational decision-making and one subject to human control. As Shapiro explains his own purpose: ‘I have had to mount a resistance to many familiar languages of analysis, in particular the rationalistic discourses that dominate “security studies”. [The aim] is to juxtapose such rationalism to a more ethnographic mode of thinking, to make rationalistic and logistical thinking appear to be a peculiar preoccupation rather than an edifying pedagogy’ (1997, xi). Gray (1997) chooses to address the components of modern war systems, unpacking the illogic and untruth that lie at the heart of military organisation and planning. He ends by suggesting alternative futures: one dominated by the out-of-control war machine, the other by the concomitant rise of soldiers who are themselves opposed to wars. Shapiro (1997) addresses the rhetoric of military activity, mapping in a series of chapters the ways in which – at least in the American imagination – enemies have their humanity stripped from them, creating a moral space in which the military preference for violence can prevail. In thus taking a critical perspective upon war in our own time, these works – and others like them – inspire the possibility of a critical examination of war in the past, one not limited to the professional expectations of military history held by the soldier nor to dominant traditions of enquiry. Instead, it opens up the possibility of examining aspects of war in the past in their own terms. It is this that the Bloody Meadows Project aims to do in relation to the places where military violence was carried out.

A SHORT HISTORY OF BATTLEFIELD RESEARCH

While battles as events have been the focus of historical interest since the discipline of history was first invented, a specific interest in battlefields took longer to develop. Foard (1995, 343–82) records the early efforts of Edward Fitzgerald from 1842, whose work at Naseby in England includes the recording of field names and other topographical features, drawing the contemporary appearance of the landscape, noting where local people had found artefacts from the battle, and recording where local tradition placed particular events of the battle. Fitzgerald’s work went on to include the digging of test-pits and finding a mass grave (Foard, 2001). At about the same time, Richard Brooke was pursuing his interest in the battlefields of the Wars of the Roses, inspired in him by his birth near the site of the battle of Stoke. His Visits to the Fields of Battle in England of the Fifteenth Century (Brooke, 1854) is largely a discussion of the historical sources he drew upon and concerns the events of the fight and the names of the prominent killed and wounded. He does, however, provide useful sketch maps of each site, some of which are of more practical use today than more modern ones.

Subsequent interest has largely remained in the realm of Brooke’s primary concern, of identifying the places where battles took place, rather than using them as research objects in their own right. Once identified, the tendency is to assume that the landscape as seen today is similar, if not identical, to that on the day of the battle. Accordingly, Keegan – although aiming to gain an insight into the experience of battle in particular historical periods, which might have included gaining an insight into how the space of the battle might be ‘read’ by participants – makes no attempt to confirm that the location of the woods at Agincourt has not altered since the early fifteenth century (1976, 88) and the topography of battlefields is not discussed anywhere in his text. Similarly, as Foard (2001) makes clear in his criticism of both the standard form of battlefield ‘guide’ and the English Heritage Register (1995) which so closely resembles such guides, most publications on battlefields continue to ‘place stylised battle formations and key topographical features … almost arbitrarily against a modern map base’. Frequently, however, students of military history have taken the trouble to visit the sites of the battles they discuss and to relate the topography to contemporary accounts: accordingly, both Oman (1902) and Weller (1962) travelled extensively through Spain and Portugal to visit the sites of the battles of the Peninsular campaign, and Oman in particular took care to relate General Napier’s recollections of the war to what he saw. Authors of the volumes contained in such popular series as ‘British Battles’ (e.g. Naylor, 1960; Tomasson and Buist, 1962; Woolrych, 1966) have also been assiduous in relating action to landscape features, and the best battlefield guides (among them Burne, 1950; Seymour, 1975) have done the same. However, the primary focus has always been upon the literary evidence for battle action, rather than what the place itself could provide.

However, a group of unrelated twentieth-century researches have moved closer to a direct concern with the battlefield itself, and while all have much to teach us in pursuing this field, only the last has led to the recent explosion of interest in battlefield archaeology. The first exercise in battlefield archaeology in the twentieth century took place in the late 1950s and early 1960s, when the then military government of Portugal sought, among other things, to celebrate Portugal’s military past by promoting the deeds of its medieval chivalry. Excavations in advance of building a monument and a museum at the site of the battle of Aljubarrota, where Portugal first emerged as an independent state, revealed a mass grave (do Paço, 1962, 115–63) and battlefield features. Not widely published, and incompletely at that, this exercise in battlefield archaeology has gone largely unnoticed by the battlefield archaeology community. A decade later in England, work at Marston Moor (Newman, 1981) and roughly contemporary geological work at Maldon (Petty and Petty, 1993, 159–69) testify to the importance of topographical research and careful reconstruction of the historic landscape by revealing how accounts based upon the modern appearance can be highly misleading. At Marston Moor, the realisation that the sunken road which played such a large part in nineteenth- and twentieth-century accounts of the battle was a feature added in the eighteenth century (and therefore was not present on the day of the battle) altered understanding of contemporary accounts. At Maldon, confirmation that a significant change in sea level had occurred from the tenth century to the twentieth forced a reassessment of the one contemporary account of the battle, and the removal from the battle sequence of several events added later to allow the modern appearance of the site to fit the ancient account. Most recently, the combination of careful recording of artefact scatters, topographic research, and the search for remains of the dead at the Little Bighorn site in the USA (Scott et al., 1989) finally brought battlefield archaeology attention, and these techniques have since been applied in the USA at Palo Alto, Texas (Haecker and Mauck, 1997), in the UK at Towton (Fiorato et al., 2000) and elsewhere (for examples, see Doyle and Bennett, 2002; Freeman and Pollard, 2001).

The Bloody Meadows Project is therefore at once an heir to a developing tradition of battlefield research while at the same time aiming to make a distinct contribution of its own. Unlike other battlefield researchers, we do not focus on individual sites. Similarly, we do not focus upon the discovery of artefacts or artefact scatters at sites, but rather upon the shape of the land itself. We are also interested in relating sites to one another in an expressly comparative process, rather than identifying the thought processes of individual commanders in specific circumstances. We are also not exclusively concerned with understanding battle in the past, but with understanding the places where battles have taken place in the present: this is a concern with the historic battlefield as heritage object.

BATTLEFIELDS AS HERITAGE OBJECTS

The term ‘heritage’ as used here covers all those ways in which the past – especially the material remains of the past – is used in the present. The field of heritage as thus defined has grown into a major area of research over the past twenty years. It comprises, among other areas, concerns with the manner in which research into the past – especially archaeology – is carried out, with the dissemination and especially popular presentation of the past, with the relations of archaeologists with others, with issues of identity and the politics of the past, and especially with the ethics of researching into the past in an age of competing interests (see for instance Carman, 2002; Skeates, 2000). Our own interests have concerned especially the manner in which particular objects are selected to be treated as part of a collective community history – a ‘heritage’ – and what kinds of treatments they are subject to once selected. Previous publications in this field have been concerned with the distinguishing characteristics of heritage objects in terms of how they differ from other kinds of object (Carman, 2002, 30–57) and, especially in relation to the category of the archaeological site, how these relate to the study of the human past (Carman, 1999c).

As a category of heritage object, battlefields appear to us to have distinct qualities which make them interesting. At one level, as sites, they share the attributes of all such places. Sites are spatial phenomena that are deemed to be bounded – that is, we understand and apprehend them to be limited in physical extent rather than spilling out into the surrounding vistas. Accordingly, battlefield spaces can in some measure be considered as separate from the land surrounding them, and many are treated in this way. The concept of site is, however, complicated by the fact that as a focus of scholarly attention – and especially in archaeology – it represents two different phenomena, often conflated. The site as a focus of activity in the past represents one such phenomenon. The site as a focus for attention (and especially study) in the present is the other. The fact that they may be located at the same point in space is at once a convenience for the modern student but also serves to hide the fact of the fundamental difference of the two concepts of site. It also serves to make the idea of placing a boundary around the space of scholarly attention – whether in the form of a physical barrier or a merely conceptual border – seem both normal and unexceptional. The battlefield thus appears to us as a place with clear edges to it and clearly separable from the land around it. This capacity to be separated out makes the treatment of the site as a heritage object – its ‘management’ – relatively easy: it can be classed as different from all the objects surrounding it and it can be fixed at a certain stage in its life cycle, to keep it as it is for posterity.

At the same time as they can be considered as sites, battlefields also fall into the category of landscape, which is a category much more difficult to delineate (Carman, 1998, pp. 31–4). Landscapes flow and are not bounded except by the barriers to human vision represented by the curvature of the earth, atmospheric conditions, and the position of obstacles opaque to light. Landscapes are also generally considered to be the containers for other types of phenomena – including sites. As landscapes, battlefields cannot be conveniently bounded and cannot have edges placed to them. Instead, they merge with the movements that brought troops to the place of battle from other more distant locations, and with the movements of troops – both victorious and defeated – away from the battle once it was over. Landscapes are also prone to change over time: their shape has been made by myriads of processes over the long term, some geological, some biological, some agricultural, some industrial. Accordingly, unlike the site which is a point in space and can be frozen in a moment of its history, the landscape is always subject to alteration, if not the alteration of this particular feature, then by changes to an adjacent or more distant one. This makes the management of landscapes very difficult: what is preserved (if anything) is not the condition of the space at a particular moment but the general ‘character’ of the space through time.

In terms of the management of a historic battlefield in the present, the differences between a site and a landscape are highly pertinent. As a site, a battlefield will be treated in one set of ways. As a landscape, it will be treated in other ways. Its apprehension as a site or as a landscape will thus determine what possibilities exist for its future; and will indeed inform the decision-making process in terms of what its future should be. The manner of marking a site is quite different from that of marking a landscape. A site can usually be marked in a physical manner, by placing an object on or near it. As a bounded entity, it can be fenced or edged around, or markers can be placed around the edges to make them evident. A landscape, however, cannot be so marked. Any marking is usually much more intangible, and often conceptual only, as in the designation of an area of land as in some way special. This may be as an Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty or as a Heritage Coastline or some other form of words to emphasise the distinctive quality of the space, but without (necessarily) supplying it with a clear boundary.

Many historic battlefields are clearly marked, especially by the erection of monuments or other features. Some – particularly those from more recent times – are maintained as cemeteries with all the monumental attributes of funerary space. Others are marked as historical places for passers-by to note by the presence of obelisks, plaques and information boards. Others are maintained as fully fledged ‘heritage sites’, sometimes including museum facilities, guided walks and other paraphernalia of the presented past (Stone and Molyneaux, 1994). An aspect of interest here is the type of use they are put to and at whose service the marking of the place as ‘special’ lies. Some are maintained at the service of the descendants – whether biological or institutional – of those who fought there. Others are maintained at the service of the nation in whose territory they lie. Others yet are maintained at the service of those in whose name the battle was fought, or maintained for different purposes entirely. In recording and noting such matters as these, the uses to which historic battlefields are now put – and from this what uses are considered appropriate for them – will become evident.

One of our interests is in whose name – and for what purpose – battlefields are marked and maintained. We are also concerned with understanding why some are marked and maintained while others are not. We are interested too in the type of marking involved – whether physical or conceptual – and to what extent such sites are considered to be either sites or landscapes. Out of such concerns we hope to be able to say something about the management of battlefield sites that will be of use to those responsible for their future.

TOWARDS AN APPROACH TO BATTLEFIELDS

The Bloody Meadows Project emerged out of the range of interests and their history outlined here. The question requiring a clear answer from the outset was how we were to research battlefields. We needed to establish the questions we specifically wished to address, and they needed to be questions that battlefields themselves could answer. Standing in the centre of an empty piece of modern landscape and expecting it to tell us things was all very well, and would no doubt be highly enjoyable, but we needed to be more systematic than that in our approach to our object of enquiry. Out of visits to a number of sites and a critical reading of key military texts some ideas emerged which subsequently became hardened into a workable methodology. These are the topics of the next chapter.

TWO

UNDERSTANDING BATTLEFIELDS

As outlined in Chapter One, the Bloody Meadows Project seeks to explore the phenomenon of the ‘historic battlefield’ in both its historic and its contemporary guises. The former is an exercise in understanding how places were chosen as battle sites in the past and the consequences for the place of that choice. The latter is an exercise in understanding the ongoing and modern interest and significance of such places, with a view to their future treatment. This chapter will discuss the thinking behind the approach to these questions developed for the Bloody Meadows Project and outline the mechanics of the approach itself.

ABOUT BATTLES

Fighting battles is the way Western societies conduct their wars. Our histories are dotted with such encounters, a few capable of being considered significant or ‘decisive’ (Creasy [1851], 1908; Fuller, 1970), or more commonly dismissed as ‘indecisive’ (Weigley, 1991). Battles are the usual focus – and certainly the main punctuation points – of military history (Keegan, 1976; Nosworthy, 1992, 1995; Weigley, 1991) to the almost complete exclusion of other aspects of military organisation and activity. The ideal of battle is ‘a paradox of the highest order, a deliberate attempt to harness, to modulate, and hence to amplify the wild human desire for violence through … order and discipline’ (Hanson, 1989, 16). Battle in the Western tradition is at heart held to be the starkly simple infliction of mass violence, ‘bereft of heroics and romanticism’ (Hanson, 1989, 17), to achieve a particular aim.

Battle as Culture

The violence of battle takes the form of ‘institutionalised combat’, something which needs to be clearly distinguished from ‘an impromptu scrap’ (Jones, 1980, 98). The difference is that the former ‘has rules, and the rules must be followed, otherwise the participants lose, rather than gain, prestige’ (Jones, 1980, 98). Battles – in order to be battles, rather than ambushes, skirmishes, riots, massacres or other kinds of violent events – have to be intensely rule-directed. The purpose of the Bloody Meadows research is to identify those rules as they apply in particular times and places, and how they change through time and across space. This idea is very similar to the charge made by Gray (1997) and others, that war represents a kind of discourse: that is, a way of speaking about and acting towards things. Discourses too have rules that must be followed and an appropriate language in which to ‘speak’. The language of war is that of blood and flesh (Clausewitz [1832], 1976, 149), but Sun Zi (Chaliand, 1994, 221–38) identified five factors of importance in war, of which only three were under human control: from the beginning of the study of war the crucial distinction was always between what was inevitably ‘natural’ and what was deemed to be ‘rational’ or controllable (Gray, 1997, 94).

The rule-bound nature of warfare practice – in the present as in the past – both derives from and simultaneously determines the very definition of ‘battle’ itself. A battle is held to be not the same as a skirmish, which is a mobile encounter between forces who never become fully engaged (English Heritage, 1995, 3). Nor is a battle a siege, which involves cutting off a fortified castle or settlement from outside help in order to force its surrender: for Weigley (1991, 55) the drawn-out formal siege of the seventeenth century is ‘ritualistic’ in form, while the battle is simply ‘bloodshed’. But there are sufficient ritual aspects to battle for this particular distinction to be considered an unnecessary one. English Heritage has determined that, for a battle to be included in its official Register (1995), it must not represent a ‘lesser form of engagement’, such as a skirmish; it must have involved recognised military units, and thus not riotous crowds or other disorganised groups; it must have had political, military historical or ‘biographical’ significance; and it must have been fought over a definable geographical space. Similarly, the functions of battle are closely defined: ‘the purpose of the engagement [is] the destruction of the enemy’ (Clausewitz [1832], 1976, 230); it is ‘a moral conflict … [requiring] the moral collapse of one of the two contending parties’ (Keegan, 1976, 296); it is also thereby designed to curb ‘the horrors of war [by] achieving decisiveness in the conduct of war’ (Weigley, 1991, 73). Battles are also always mutually agreed: ‘There can be no engagement unless both sides are willing’ (Clausewitz [1832], 1976, 245); ‘all battles take place by mutual agreement, although such agreement is usually informal in the modern era’ (Keeley, 1996, 60); battle ‘requires … a mutual and sustained act of will by two contending parties’ (Keegan, 1976, 296). Keeley (1996) in particular points to the highly ritualised elements of modern battle: the complex ‘choreography’ required in acts of surrender by individuals and units, such as white flags, raised hands, proffered or cast-away weapons, the use of certain key words, and sometimes carefully arranged ceasefires (Keeley, 1996, 61); legal and other limitations upon who may be killed by what weapons and under what conditions, rendering the slaughter of prisoners illegal (Keeley, 1996, 62); and the obsession of soldiers throughout recorded time with the capture of enemy standards and correctly worn regalia (Keeley, 1996, 62–3). Clausewitz – the arch-exponent of war as a rational activity – was also highly aware of the ritualised and dance-like movements of early modern warfare: ‘The troops move calmly into position in great masses deployed in line and depth … [and are] left to conduct a firefight for several hours, interrupted now and then by minor blows – charges, bayonet assaults, and cavalry attacks.… Gradually, the units engaged are burned out, and when nothing is left but cinders, they are withdrawn and others take their place’ ([1832], 1976, 226). With a historian’s hindsight, Weigley (1991, 168) sees the same: ‘Battles [of the eighteenth century] were tournaments between serried ranks of colorfully [sic] uniformed toy soldiers come to life, advancing toward each other to the beating of drums … [so] the notion of battlefields as paradegrounds is not altogether deceptive.’

Table 2.1 Characteristics of battle

Organised Violence

Clear Function and Purpose

Ritualised Elements

Recognised military units

Destruction of the enemy

Mutual agreement to fight

Definable geographical space

Moral collapse of one contending party

Limits on behaviour

Limitation of violence

Closely ordered movement

Achievement of decision

These aspects of battle, as set out and summarised in Table 2.1, may seem to us to be grounded in an obvious rationality. But this is much more the effect of an accumulated historical focus on the battle as the epitome of war, and even of philosophical attention in coming to terms with war, than with the objective reasonableness of battle’s practices for all times and places. Battle does not emerge on to the historical stage until the Bronze Age of Egypt (Dupuy and Dupuy, 1970, 3–4; Laffin, 1995, 274; Montgomery, 1968, 45): it becomes something relatively common only as written history develops; indeed, battle is the subject of much early history. The normality of battle to us therefore depends upon its familiarity to us. But we may ask: how reasonable is it really for closely organised and heavily controlled groups of specific individuals to come together at a specific place at a specific time, to stand under what may be a long and lethal bombardment, not to run away and hide, but at a determined time to approach close to others who share the intention of mass slaughter? If Weigley (1991, 73) is right, and violent battles of annihilation serve to curb the other horrors of war, then they do so by a form of magic which has little to do with reason. Instead, they are to do with common understandings about what is appropriate and right. These rules – frequently unwritten, but in modern times transposed into actual laws – concern and determine the nature of battle in any particular period, and indeed the appropriateness of battle itself as a mode of behaviour. The rules concern when it is appropriate to fight: for what reason, over what dispute, and after which declarations of animosity and intent. They concern who it is appropriate to fight: certain categories of foe are not worthy of meeting in battle; these must represent at least one’s equals in some sense. They concern who may be involved in the fighting, who must be involved in the fighting and who must remain a non-combatant. They concern how to fight: which weapons may be used and whether one attacks or defends, stands or moves. All these rules relate to those concerning who may or must fight, and extend beyond mere functionality to questions of social status. In particular, the rules concern where it is appropriate to fight: at what kind of place, on what type of ground, or even that it shall be at a specific location sanctioned by law or custom.

‘Terrain’ and its Uses: the Military Discourse of War

As outlined above, battle is the particular concern of military history, and military history has a particular trajectory of its own and a particular purpose: it is derived originally from studies of war by professional military personnel, and its purpose is to assist the professional soldier in the performance of his duties (Keegan, 1976, 15–22). The discourse of war that has arisen out of this – one also shared in political and strategic studies – is quite distinctive and highly powerful, and can be thought of as containing three elements.

Linear Narrative

The first element is a focus upon linear narrative (Brodie, 1973; Cline, 2000; Fuller, 1970; McPherson, 1990; Wedgwood, 1957; Weigley, 1991), and especially upon the narrative of individual events. Military histories – and there is some very fine military history – seize upon the violent encounters that make up the waging of war, usually to consider them in terms of their level of ‘decisiveness’ (Creasy [1851], 1908; Fuller, 1970; Weigley, 1991). McPherson justifies his narrative version of the history of the American Civil War by reference to a narrative’s ability to ‘do justice [to the] dynamism, [the] complex relationship of cause and effect, [and the] intensity of experience’ of a nation at war (1990, ix). He cites as an example the value of a narrative – as opposed to a thematic approach – in demonstrating the importance of the Battle of Antietam, 1862, which came at the same time as events in the diplomatic, domestic political and economic fields which were all affected by the outcome to the battle (McPherson, 1990, ix). Wedgwood’s history of the Thirty Years War is also written in narrative form, justified by the way in which it reveals ‘the dismal course of the conflict, dragging on from one decade to the next and from one deadlock to the next, [providing] an object lesson on the dangers and disasters which can arise when men of narrow hearts and narrower minds are in high places’ (1957, 10). Keegan – paradoxically also focusing on the single military event in his own work – points out that this approach has led ‘whole squads of modern military historians [to indulge in] an endless, repetitive examination of battles that … can be said to have done nothing but make the world worse [and to ascribe to] strategically piffling, pointless bloodbaths … the cachet “decisive” on the grounds that they must have decided something’ (1976, 62). Keegan is highly critical of the so-called ‘battle piece’, the traditional ‘rhetoric of battle history’ narrative (1976, 36), composed of ‘disjunctive movement … uniformity of behaviour … simplified characterization [and] simplified motivation’ among large numbers of individuals (1976, 65–6).

In essence, military history offers the argument that wars, campaigns and battles can all be reduced to a story of the same basic form. Initial background information concerns the reasons for fighting, the forces available and their relative position in space. Movements to bring the forces closer together are then described and what happens at the point of contact. The third and final phase concerns the outcome: victory for one side, defeat for the other, and the consequences for victor and defeated. The focus is upon the reasons for conflict, the means applied, and the outcome: this is war as a rational means-ends relationship.

Functionalist Interpretations

The second element in the discourse of war derives from the first, since a focus on cause and effect relationships leads to a view of war and the practices of warfare as practical means to practical ends; and this in turn leads to a particular interpretive stance. The focus of attention is placed upon those who organise and lead in war, and who are assessed for their skills as commanders – especially in terms of how they mobilise resources to achieve ends (Montgomery, 1968). In the same vein, landscape features present on a battlefield are treated as having varying levels of functional utility: as objects that are useful to a soldier; as objects that have no utility to a soldier; and as objects that actively present threats to a soldier. The literature of the study of war is accordingly littered with commentary upon landscape representing threat or opportunity: classic writers such as Clausewitz ([1832], 1976, 348–54) and Sun Zi (Chaliand, 1994, 221–38; Tao, 2000, 116–23) refer to it as ‘terrain’; while Montgomery (1968, 307) writes upon ‘obstacles’. The typical – and expected – shape of a battlefield is accordingly of a space containing distinct features.

Warfare as a means-end relationship requires tools to achieve its object. Among these are the people who do the fighting, the strategies and tactics they apply, the equipment they carry, and the ground on which they stand or over which they march. In interpreting war in the past, all these have rational and functional roles to play. Their presence and absence from the battlefield, their effects upon the fighting, the outcomes they produce: all can be explained in utilitarian terms. Among historians of war in the ancient world, Hanson is critical of ‘classical’ military historians who have focused on ‘deployment, drill, weapons and tactics’ (1989, 24), taking a distanced viewpoint ‘as if they were suspended above the killing on the battlefield in an observation balloon looking downward, detached from if not uninterested in the desperate individuals below’ (1989, 23).

‘Ritual’ Versus ‘Real’ War

This dominant and very ‘functionalist’ reading of warfare in the historic period reflects a deeper set of assumptions in the treatment of war which are evident in studies of prehistoric periods. Turney-High’s (1949) distinction between ‘primitive’ and ‘true’ war (although also adopted in part more recently by Keegan (1993)) has in general given way to a distinction between ‘real’ and ‘ritual’ war in the distant past (Carman and Carman, 2001, 275–81; Halsall, 1989, 155–77). This distinction is evident also in Keeley’s (1996) War Before Civilization, which has challenged the general assumption of a ‘peaceful’ past, maintaining for example the highly functionalist ‘defensive’ purpose of large hilltop bank-and-ditch enclosures against those who argue for a more symbolic role for these constructions. In considering what he calls ‘postmodern war’ Chris Hables Gray (1997) also argues for the maintenance of a distinction between ‘ritual’ war and ‘ancient’ war – the latter more akin to our own highly organised and highly technological warfare.