The Unknown Warrior (19 page)

Ingelmark's study illustrates some facets of the battle through the palaeopathology of its victims: ‘80 per cent of the blows struck vertically from above belong to the group “not more than one cut”, it indicates that these blows were difficult to strike. The cuts belonging to the group “two or more cuts” have probably been struck at warriors who had fallen, were retreating or were attacked from behind; whereas the injuries in the group “not more than one cut” were received in hand-to-hand fight' (
ibid.
: 184). It seems likely that those not killed in combat were dispatched with little mercy. The army of the inhabitants of Visby, the old, the young, the lame and disabled, were slain before their town's gates in the July heat.

FIVE

The Flash of Powder: War in the Tudor and Stuart Period

Our enemies, consisting of about 800 horse and 300 foot, with ordnance, led by the Earl of Northampton … intended to set upon us before we could gather our companies together, but being ready all night, early in the morning we went to meet them with a few troops of horse and six field pieces, and being on fire to be at them we marched through the corn and got the hill of them, whereupon they played upon us with their ordnances but they came short. Our gunner took their own bullet, sent it to them again, and killed a horse and a man. After we gave them eight shot more, whereupon all their foot companies fled and offered their arms in the towns adjacent for 12 pence a piece.

(Neremiah Wharton, August 1642, in Ede-Borrett, 1983: 10)

The period from the sixteenth century to the mid-seventeenth century encompasses a dramatic change in the lot of the soldier – it sees the last days of the use of archery by the infantry and the emergence of the large-scale use of gunpowder. Although cannon were present in the years spanned by the previous chapter, and it was not until 1595 that Queen Elizabeth I's Privy Council ordered the general replacement of the bow with a firearm – the ‘arquebus' (Strickland and Hardy, 2005: 390) – the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries saw an enormous growth in the use of firearms in European war. Ships were provided with firepower, such as the vessels that served Henry VIII, including the
Mary Rose
, and those that fought the Spanish Armada in 1588.

By the time of the English Civil War, 1642–51, musketeers using firearms known as matchlocks formed one of the two branches of the infantry, the other being armed with pikes and still protected by elements of armour. Although pikemen would continue to use such protection, the use of gunpowder meant that armour would become almost redundant in this period and that sieges were frequently brought to quicker conclusions. Until the emergence of the bayonet, musketeers would still benefit from the protection of pikemen against cavalry attacks, when their own swords or the stocks of the musket would have been insufficient.

Infantry in this period was used to man ships and provide the soldiery on board during naval engagements, they were present as forces on set-piece battles on land, and also played a vital role in sieges, manning both defensive and offensive works, which they and engineers constructed. Their role was varied, and it often left its trace in the archaeological record. Although impressive, we shall not be examining the great castles or ships of the period. This chapter will look at the evidence left of the footsoldier's life and often their death. It also sees the emergence of a well-trained standing army, the revolutionary (in more than one sense) New Model Army, from the earlier tradition of the trained band.

WEAPONRY

The Tudor warship
Mary Rose
, which sank on 19 July 1545, is an exceptional resource of information pertaining to the later years of archery. In addition to sailors, there were many men on board who were effectively infantrymen – soldiers with the county militia. Longbows were found across the site of the wreck of the
Mary Rose
, scattered as the great warship slid to her final resting place in the Solent. Some were complete, some broken, and a number were recovered from storage chests on the weather deck. One chest contained forty-eight bows, the other thirty-six. The yew bows in these chests were 1.82–2.13m in length (Strickland and Hardy, 2005: 6–7). On the upper deck of the warship another chest was found. This held 1,248 arrow shafts. Fifty-two sheaves tied in bundles of twenty-four, with up to 6,000 arrows eventually being found (
ibid.
: 7–9). Eighteen leather spacers, pierced to take either twenty-four or thirty-six arrows, and armguards (bracers), mostly of leather and nearly all stamped with various marks, were retrieved (Stirland, 2000: 122). Twenty-four of the latter have survived along with one example made from horn, which had survived thanks to the preservative action of tar from one of the ship's ropes (Strickland and Hardy, 2005: 10).

Dr Matthew Strickland discusses another aspect of infantry war in our period – the possibility of the use of poisoned arrows, something that the French alleged as a result of the high level of combat fatalities among men sustaining arrow wounds: ‘recent evidence from the
Mary Rose
arrows shows that there was some substance in the French complaint … a copper-based compound was used to protect the fletchings and to help firm the glue used to fix them on the arrow shaft. It is possible that the copper sulphate may (albeit unintentionally) have served to exacerbate a wound inflicted by the arrow head itself ' (Strickland and Hardy, 2005: 286).

Although the early sixteenth century continued to see the presence of the longbow and of pole-arms that would have been familiar to the soldiers who fought and died at Towton, Agincourt and Crécy (see
Chapter 4
), the firearm was increasing in importance. Tony Pollard and Neil Oliver's important work on the 1513 battlefield of Flodden bears this out. At this battle, the Scots suffered a grievous defeat at the hands of the English, a defeat that included the death of their king, supposedly ‘struck down … by an English bowman's arrow, fired into his mouth as he battled to within a spear's length of the Earl of Surrey' (Pollard and Oliver, 2002: 121). This defeat still has resonance today leading, as it did, to the bagpipe lament ‘The Flowers of the Forest'. The archaeological work not only retrieved a lead cannonball, probably fired at the Scots by English artillery pieces, but also discovered a lead ball that would probably have been fired at the English using an ‘arquebus' or ‘hackbut' (
ibid.
: 159).

In 1588 the Spanish put together a huge force with the intention of landing in and defeating England – the famous ‘Armada'. The ships were not just a large naval force, they also carried a strong infantry element. The defeat of the Armada was absolute and saw the sinking of many of the major Spanish vessels around the coast of the British Isles, vessels that are now yielding some of their secrets to maritime archaeologists. One such ship was the mighty
La Trinidad Valencera
, which, at 1,100 tons, was the fourth largest of the Armada. She had received damage in engagements off the Flemish banks and eventually ran aground and broke up on a reef off the north Donegal coast after her crew had escaped (Martin, 2001: 73).

Spanish footsoldiers would still have been armed with the pike – a long wooden pole, which was tipped with a metal blade and had strips of metal along the top to prevent the head of the weapon being lopped off by a sword. Pikemen acted in units, rather like the Ancient Greek phalanx, with pikes extending to the front and using force of weight to drive through units – the ‘pike-push'. Pikemen were also vital to protect musketeers, who could seek shelter within the square. The excavation of this Spanish vessel included retrieval of several pike staves – a bundle of the lower ends was recovered, the greatest length being some 3m. Two metal pike heads were also found and the excavators calculated that the original pike would have been composed of a 5.5m ash stave, some 3.5cm thick, tapering to a 2.4cm diameter end. The head was a small pointed iron ‘shoe' and, with the side strips, the whole weapon weighed around 5kg (
ibid.
: 82).

The contents of this vessel are most useful in illustrating the increasing importance of firepower to the infantry. Seven wooden matchlock gunstocks were retrieved, all of which were plain and undecorated and thus probably the basic infantry weapon. There appeared to be no standardisation of weapon type – clearly there was no regular weapon issue. Thousands of lead bullets were also discovered, in two main sizes: 13mm/14g for arquebuses and 19mm/40g for muskets (
ibid.
: 82). Such weapons worked by pouring black powder down the barrel of the gun, followed by the lead shot and any wadding, which was rammed down. More powder was added to a primer pan, which led to the main charge. The priming powder was ignited by the touch of a burning cord, which set off the main charge, expelling the round from the gun. As barrels were not rifled, weapons were not accurate to any great distance. There was the added danger of leaving the ramrod in the barrel when the weapon was fired, as this would also be projected from the weapon, something of which modern re-enactors are acutely aware.

La Trinidad Valencera
yielded several of the main powder flasks and examples of smaller powder flasks, presumably used to charge the pan (
ibid.
: 82–3). Another wreck site from the Armada – that of the
Girona –
was investigated by maritime archaeologists. This vessel was a galleass of the Naples Squadron, which sank off Lacada Point, County Antrim, on 26 October 1588 (Flanagan, 1987: 8). A wooden arquebus stock and ramrod were retrieved from the vessel. The stock still retained the round of shot that had been put into the barrel (
ibid.
: 6).

Since lead, as well as stone, was the raw material for musket balls, infantrymen did not have to look far to replenish their supplies. Excavation work within the Friary buildings at Jedburgh Abbey revealed traces of lead waste, which was interpreted as being the waste product from window repairs or cut fragments from the casting edges (Dixon
et al.
, 2000: 50–1). But, as several traces were found in quite late deposits both inside and outside the building, and displayed heat damage, Ian Barnes, who examined the magnetic susceptibility and viscocity of the site (
ibid.
: 80), believes there might be another explanation. He suggests that the traces of lead are the result of the stripping of window lead and its reforming into musket balls by the soldiers who sacked the Friary (Barnes, pers. comm.). This might be corroborated by the discovery of a lead shot within the finds assemblage, a piece of ordnance that would have been fired by an artillery piece of the fifteenth to seventeenth century. Historic documents indicate that the Friary was burned first by Lord Eure, and then the Earl of Hertford, 1544–5 (
ibid.
: 87).

Lead musket balls have been found all over English Civil War sites, including those which were uncovered in the ditch surrounding Basing House, Hampshire, ranging from 9mm to 18mm in diameter (Allen and Anderson, 1999: 85). Earlier excavation work on this site had recovered parts of the muskets themselves, with two of the priming pans that held the powder that would ignite to fire the full charge, two musket locks, and the iron nozzle of a powder flask with its lid ‘actuated by a see-saw lever' all recovered (Moorhouse, 1971: 52–3). Ammunition that had been fired has also been excavated from this siege site: a ‘fired lead shot was found above or embedded in the gatehouse cobbles' (Allen and Anderson, 1999: 81). The same is true for the lead musket balls from Sandal Castle in Yorkshire. Some 15 per cent of the eighty pieces of lead shot found appeared to have been flattened from impacts (Credland, 1983: 261). In terms of matchlock pieces, three trigger locks were found at Sandal, as were priming pans and pan-covers alongside several lead covers from powder holders; 105 lead balls were found during excavations at another Yorkshire castle, Pontefract (Eaves, 2002: 345).

Part of a matchlock was recovered from Nottingham Castle (Harrington, 1992: 23). When under siege, there would have been difficulties in obtaining new projectiles for the muskets and thus it should not have been a surprise to find moulds for manufacturing new lead balls – rather like the discoveries of impromptu moulds at the Roman siege site at Velsen (see
Chapter 2
). At Scarborough in Yorkshire, excavators found sprues from two-piece lead shot moulds (
ibid.
: 56), a hearth at Dudley had a bowl cut into it in which lead was found – probably evidence for a similar practice (
ibid.
: 55), and another example was discovered at Beeston Castle in Cheshire (Ellis, 1993: 122). A further mould for two bullets was perhaps found at Pontefract Castle in Yorkshire though the excavators remained somewhat uncertain of its use (Roberts, 2002). All of these would have used lead stripped from roofs and windows, as at Jedburgh, and the excavators of Pontefract believed that the kitchen might have served as a small-scale munitions factory with evidence of recycled copper alloy and lead (
ibid.
: 431).

At its best, careful study can show the distribution of artefacts and thus the concentrations of activity. Foard (2001) has produced a distribution plot for the presence of shot on the small Northamptonshire site of Grafton Regis, besieged by a force of 5,000 over three days in 1643 – a force to which the 200-strong garrison succumbed.