Cheriton - location of the Battle

After my diversions in the 18th and 20th centuries, I now return to the 17th. I'm itching (Itchen?) to get Cheriton on to the wargaming table but have a couple of loose ends to tie up. One is the location of the battle and the other is the order of battle. Rather innovatively, I'm taking first things first and I'll come back to the orders of battle in the next post.

Thanks to Steve-the-Wargamer and the Polemarch, I got hold of Adair's book on Cheriton and Wanklyn's Decisive Battles of the ECW. Both of which, as Steve said, favour the hypothesis that the battle was fought further south than the 'traditional' site of the battle.

Most of the books and websites I quoted on the previous post More on Cheriton - Orders of Battle state that the battle was fought in the 'Arena' immediately to the west of Cheriton Wood. One thing that always puzzled me about this was that the battle started with two of the London Trained Bands regiments of Waller's Parliamentarian army trying to gain the flank of the Royalist position by occupying Cheriton Wood. The northenmost extent of the wood was still some way south of the Royalist starting position. So not quite outflanking. If they came out of the north side of the wood they still had some ground to cover and would then be isolated from the rest of the Parliamentarian army by a large expanse of wood. Not a killer blow to the traditional site of the battle, but enough to get me thinking.

The other factor I puzzled over is that there is a spur of higher ground jutting west into the 'Arena' from the direction of Cheriton Wood, which as I noted on my battlefield walk, was on noticeably higher ground. This didn't get mentioned in any of the previous accounts of the battle I'd read. Not a showstopper, but surprising nontheless as this spur creates dead ground on either side from the point of view of the ridges north and south of the arena and looks like it would be significant ground in a battle.

Anyway, Adair and Wanklyn both come down in favour of the battle being fought between what Wanklyn calls the South Spur* and the ridge where Hinton Ampner is located. Wanklyn is much less certain about this than Adair, and, as any good professional historian would, hedges his opinion with various caveats, ifs ands and maybes. The map in the link below to the Battlefields Trust site shows the traditional view:
http://www.battlefieldstrust.com/media/576%2Epdf

* The North Spur being the ridge where the Royalists started the day, with the 'Arena' being between the North and South Spurs.

So where the Battlefields Trust (and most other websites and authors) have the Parliamentarians, Adair and Wanklyn have the Royalists. I won't go into all the reasons they give for this, but it explains why the London Regiments' occupation of Cheriton Wood was so dangerous to the Royalists. Adair and Wanklyn have the Royalists marching down from their position on the North Spur to occupy the South Spur.


From a wargaming point of view this suits me because the distance between the two positions would then be about half a mile which conveniently is the depth of my table at the normal ground scale I use (1mm to the yard). I've taken the simplified contour map from the Battlefields Trust site (see link above) and superimposed a rectangle the size of my scaled up table (8ft x 3 ft) and marked on the approximate start positions of the two armies. I've done the same on the section of the OS map shown on the Battlefields Trust site too, for more detail on the slopes and possible tracks and hedge rows (which will be conjectural for the 1640s because I don't know exactly where hedges where then. For my game I'll start after the London brigade has been chased out of Cheriton Wood to simplify things.

Approx table layout. Cavaliers are on the 'South Spur'. Cheriton Wood is just at the table edge behind the Royalist left flank, Hinton Ampner to the south of the Parliamentarians.The small red rectangles are Roundhead positions from the Battlefield Trust map.

More detailed view from the OS map extract. The Parlies are along the A272, Petersfield Road, the red road entering from the bottom right.

I'll do an update on the orders of battle gleaned from Adair, and how I propose to translate these to the tabletop in the next post. The aim is to play it Billy Nomates style on Saturday, as the eldest offspring has returned to the North West where he is a 'stewwdent'. My homemade rules will get their 5th run out, having given a good game for Edgehill, Adwalton Moor as well as two lesser known Grim encounters in Lincolnshire.

One final thought before I bid you adieu. If I'd read Wanklyn and Adair before, I might not have traipsed so far on my battlefield visit last year! Still it's beautiful countryside so no real harm done.