Edge Hill: The Battle and Battlefield; With Notes on Banbury & Thereabout

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Edwin Alfred Walford. Edge Hill: The Battle and Battlefield; With Notes on Banbury & Thereabout

Preface to Edition, 1904

Preface to First Edition

EDGE HILL: THE BATTLE AND BATTLEFIELD

I

II

III

II. THE GEOLOGY OF EDGE HILL

III. NOTES ON BANBURY AND THEREABOUT

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In the following pages an endeavour has been made to give a concise account of the physical features of the Edge Hill district, as well as to describe the events of the first great battle of the Civil War, with which it is so intimately associated. The intention is to provide a handbook for the guidance of the visitor rather than to attempt any elaborate historical or scientific work. Though Nugent’s “Memorials of John Hampden” has supplied the basis of the information, Clarendon’s “History of the Great Rebellion,” the various pamphlets of the time, and Beesley’s “History of Banbury,” have also been freely used. In order to avoid burdening the pages with foot notes, a catalogue of works upon the subject is printed as an appendix, and the letters and numbers throughout the text refer thereto. The catalogue, it is hoped, may be of use to the future student. The plans of the battle, based upon Nugent’s account, must be looked upon as merely diagrammatic, the scale being unavoidably distorted for the purpose of showing the conjectured positions of the troops. In the plans it may be worth note that the troops then known as “dragooners” are classed with the infantry.

The “Notes on Banbury and Thereabouts” are in part reproduced from a small pamphlet published in 1879. Much of the detail relating to the older buildings has been derived from Skelton’s “Antiquities of Oxfordshire” and Parker’s descriptions in Beesley’s History.

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Hampden had with him three regiments of foot, nine or ten troops of horse, some companies of dragooners, and seven pieces of cannon, with the necessary ammunition train,[PB] perhaps about 4,000 men in all. The troops of the Parliament were quartered in the villages of the plain. Tradition says that Tysoe was occupied, and that the soldiers took the bread from the village ovens ere they marched down street to the fight. But of the doings at Compton in the Hole, barely a mile distant, during the occupation we know nothing.

It is hard also to understand that there should have been anything in the nature of a surprise[B] in the Royalist advance, for within a district so sympathetic to their cause, one would have supposed the Puritan leaders to have been immediately informed of every movement of their enemies. Indeed, in another quaint pamphlet, “A Letter sent from a Worthy Divine,”[PG] the writer says that the alarm came at about eight o’clock in the morning, that the enemy were advancing, and that “it pleased God to make myself the first instrument of giving a certain discovery of it, by the help of a perspective glass, from the top a hill.”

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