THE BATTLEFIELDS OF ENGLAND.*

THE great majority of the battles fought on our soil have been those of Englishmen against Englishmen, a fact due partly, but only partly, to our insular position, and more to the weakness of the Continental States and their ignorance of diplomatic modes of forming coalitions. The winds and waves did not fight for England when the Vikings devastated her coasts or when the Normans landed in Sussex, and it should be a matter of serious consideration to our statesmen how long, with the present and possible advances in mechanical science, we may be able to keep a foe beyond the Channel or even the broad Atlantic, especially with a disaffected popula- • Bathes and Battlafields in England. By C. B. B. Bnrrett. London: A. D. Ines and Cu,

tion on our western flank. It deserves notice also that few, if any, invasions have been attempted, or even meditated. save when the hostile Power calculated on the sympathy and even the aid of a portion of our population. Karl the Great, in the plenitude of his power, did not dream of invasion, even prior to the union of the misnamed Heptarcby, until he was invited by the Archbishop of Canterbury, and was easily deterred by the stern defiance of the Mercian Offa ; and Napoleon I. admitted that even at the head of one hundred and fifty thousand men on the banks of the Thames he would still hope for the adhesion of the London proletariat, though we have little doubt that his expectation at least was quite erroneous. Had the Norwegian Harold won the fight of Stamford Bridge he would have been joined by the greater part of the people from the Forth to the Trent, and William was cheerfully received in London and supported by a portion at least of the clergy. Shakespeare has told us that-

" Nought shall make us rue If England to herself do but prove true ; " but has England always been true to herself, and may not what has once happened happen again?

Of all the combats whose fortunes Mr. Barrett has so ably and suggestively narrated, two only, Stamford Bridge and Hastings, can, we think, be rightly termed invasive, and from them we may learn that when armies possessing the same offensive and defensive arms, and trained by the same disci- pline, come to an engagement, the victory will depend almost totally on the personal strength and devotion of the individual combatants, assuming always that the commanders are men of equal ability,and have occupied equally favourable positions ; hence the Saxons gained a dearly-bought victory at Stamford Bridge. But when an army, however brave and well disci- plined, finds itself confronted by foes quite different in arms, discipline, and tactics, the result will very probably be disas- trous even in a position apparently impregnable, and hence the Norman archers easily broke the ranks of the un- armoured English, and gave them to be ridden down by the mail - clad knights. This has been the case in more recent times with English veterans at Killie- crankie and Prestonpans, and in our own day at Majuba Hill, a disgrace not yet expiated. We may also judge how dangerous to our country a coalition, even indirect, of two powerful Continental nations may be, for though there does not appear to have been any formal alliance between Norway and Normandy, yet the attacks having taken place at the same time, produced all the effects of a treaty ratified by all the jargon of diplomatic ceremonialism, and the victory in Yorkshire was one of the main causes of the collapse at Hastings. The English Fleet also was distracted by the double duty of guarding the Channel and the Humber, in both of which it failed, and hence it would seem that if an English squadron of thirty sail of the line can be relied on to resist successfully a hostile fleet of forty sail, we should, in the event of a coalition, require a second fleet of the same strength, beside a third nearly as numerous to protect our world-wide Colonies and commerce.

None of the engagements with Scottish armies can, we think, be called invasive save in a purely technical sense, for no Scottish Monarch could in his sober senses have dreamed of the conquest of England, or even of annexing the sir Northern counties. Northallerton and Neville's Cross were most probably prompted by the hope of recovering Cumber- land and Westmoreland, to which a claim was alleged, and apparently with much justice. Otterburn and Homildon were the outcome of mere raids in quest of plunder; Newburn was but a demonstration of union and firmness in defence of liberty of conscience, and the English soldiery were not inclined to hazard their lives in what they termed " The Bishops' War " ; and Flodden was the harebrained adventure of a Royal knight-errant born two centuries too late. These battles, too, may well be looked on as semi-civil, the com- batants on both sides being for the most part of the same Anglo-Dano-Norman race, for the Celtic tribes appear but twice—at Northallerton and Flodden—and were hardly sub- ject to either law or Crown until Culloden. In the former

combat we find the clans of Galloway more suo charging ferociously and soon breaking into a disorderly flight ; but at

Flodden the west-country Highlanders did themselves more credit, though eventually routed by the men of Wales and Cheshire, who thus verified the homely couplet :a-. " It ne'er yet was seen, their captain being Stanley, That Lancashire, Cheshire, or Wales ran away."

It should be remembered that the Galwegians belonged to the Cymric, not to the Gaelic, branch of the Celtic race, having occupied a portion of the British kingdom of Reged or Strath-Clyde; they were therefore not so closely akin to the more northern clans as is generally supposed. The fossil conservatism by which military commanders are dominated, and which is also deeply ingrained in the Scottish character, appears prominently in their tactical system, for by forming their troops in a solid phalanx of spearmen on a declivity they exposed them as effectually- " As ever stood mark before an English archer," and this vicious principle they adhered to for over two centuries, untaught by the experience of Bannockburn that light-armed archers can be easily annihilated by a flank- charge of cavalry. The battles of Lewes, Evesham, Borough- bridge, and Shrewsbury have been generally termed "The Barons' Wars ; " but it should be remembered that for some time prior to the earliest of them a fusion between the two races had been at work, and the "Saxon swine," as we have been styled by the patriot bards of a neighbouring land, had united in defence of the common forest with the Norman " leopard," to use the polite language of " our old ally." Lewes was the result of popular discontent at the King's partiality for foreigners and his tame submission to the domination of the Vatican; Evesham was the natural outcome of a factious jealousy between the chiefs of the Liberal party, and we have seen something very like it recently ; Borough- bridge the collapse of a vain and incompetent Prince of the blood Royal; but Shrewsbury deserves notice as being the first attempt to establish, though without the aid of the dagger or dynamite, what charlatans call autonomy and men of sense disruption. Had the rebels succeeded, the North of England would within a single generation have been seized by Scotland, the South swallowed by France, while Wales and the Western shires would have been devastated by inter- minable private wars.

As Mr. Traill has pointed out in the introduction with the judgment and ability which characterises all his writings, the dynastic strife between York and Lancaster was confined to the narrow strip of land extending from London to the Scottish border, the Northern shires being Lancastrian while the Metropolis and its vicinity were Yorkist ; while in that later and more important struggle, which we object to terming "The Great Rebellion," the conflict being one of opinions and not of the title to the Crown or of classes or races, every part of the country was embroiled save the six Eastern counties, which owed their tranquillity to their steadfast union. His- torians of the earlier dynastic strife have generally omitted to notice that its duration and inveteracy were in a great degree owing to doubts entertained as to the legitimacy of the claimants of the Crown—Edward of York and his namesake who fell at Tewkesbury—but as the contest raged within a limited area, the destruction of life and property could not have been very great, and commerce made rapid advances. Still, we can easily understand how the nation grew weary of purpose- less war, and readily acquiesced in the masterful role of the Tudors.

Field artillery appear at Barnet and subsequently at Flodden, but do not seem to have led to any important result, and hand-guns were probably first used by the German mercenaries who guarded the Scottish border in the reign of Henry VIII. Considering the clumsiness and want of pre- cision of these weapons, we cannot be surprised that the military red-tapista of the period looked coldly on them ; but they gradually made their way, and the Cornish musketeers did good service to the Royalist cause during the Parlia- mentarian war, The long-bow went out of use about the accession of the Stuart dynasty, and the cross-bow was never in vogue save for sporting purposes, though an Irish patriotic poet has informed us that the Saxon—cold-hearted, cruel, and brutal of course—gathered

"His awful cross-bowmen, whose long iron hail

Finds through cotha and skiath the base heart of the Gaal."

Considering the prominent position which the English archers held in warfare for five centuries, we may well wonder that neither the French nor Scots attempted to imitate them; but in the former case the nobles are said to have feared lest the trained vassals might turn their shafts on their lords, and in the latter it may be said that the national character of the Scotch is opposed to learning anything from those they brand as "foreigners." It will also appear how necessary it is that our combatants, whether Volunteers, Militia, or Regulars, should be furnished with the best weapons attainable and trained to the highest point of efficiency, so that we may not have to take lessons in shooting from the Transvaal, or from Germany in tactics and strategy.

We know not if Mr. Barrett is a member of the military profession, or has ever seen actual service, but he certainly possesses the eye and the acumen of a trained soldier; his descriptions of positions and encampments are clear and accurate, and he exhibits, when needed, the sound judgment of a skilled antiquarian. His impartiality, too, merits both praise and imitation. While vindicating the military character of Prince Rupert, which almost all previous historians have depreciated, he exposes the timidity and vacillation of the Parliamentarian chiefs, the more unaccountable as some of them, such as Essex and the two Wailers, had served under the great Gustavus Adolphus, who was not likely to tolerate hesitation. He does as ample justice to the stubborn valour of Newcastle's " White Coats " as to the discipline and firmness of the London Trainbands and Haslerig's " Black Lobsters," and his well-merited eulogy of the Somerset peasants who died in their ranks at Sedgmoor will furnish a rebuke to the sarcasms of the Irish novelist, Griffin. It may here be noticed that the Orange scarf worn by the officers of the Parliament proves that the political significance of that colour is not derivable from 'William III., but from his ancestor, William the Silent martyr for liberty of conscience.

It is not pleasant, and is even unamiable, to seek for errors in a work of such careful accuracy ; but we think our author is mistaken in making an army, advancing from Northumber- land towards London, march on Watling Street, it being generally held that this so-called Roman road ran diagonally from London to Chester, and would therefore be altogether out of the way. The augmentation to the armorial bearings of the Waller family is not connected with Agincourt, but with Poitiers, where King John of France was unhorsed by the lance of David Waller, of Groombridge in Kent.

We would direct the reader's special attention to the just and sensible account given of a mediaeval line of battle, so different from that which poets and painters seem to have combined to impose on us, as also his remarks on the long marches so frequently accomplished in the feudal period and by Cromwell's Ironsides. Selections from this book might well be studied and commented on at Sandhurst, and even in the seminaries which profess to prepare for that Institution.