ECW - Recruitment continues...

Five new regiments of foot arrived back from Lee's House of Painting Miracles - once again, I am humbled by the quality. Thank you, Lee.

Three units of Lowland Covenanters, to help the Parliamentarian cause. These are the regiments of the Earl of Loudon (Glasgow), Colonel James Rae (Edinburgh) and Viscount Maitland (Midlothian), looking suitably belligerent. Shades of Sauchiehall Street on a Saturday night. They will, of course, change their identity as appropriate to fit the scenario.

For the Royalists, there are two new units from the North of England, fighting with the Marquis of Newcastle's whitecoats; here are the regiments of Sir Wm Lambton and Colonel John Lamplugh. Like the Covenanters, these figures are mostly Tumbling Dice, with a few Kennington/SHQ chaps drafted in for a bit of variety. I really like these TD figures, but I have to say I'm getting very fed up with cleaning up and gluing heads, though the results appear worth the effort.

Lastly, here's a fine Puritan preacher, calling down appropriate vengeance (as one does). This is from the old Warrior range - not the present one - and is quite a rarity. I haven't quite decided how to use him yet, but here he is, practising, just in case.

ECW - in which I almost discuss audiobooks

I like to listen to stuff when I’m driving – music (a lot), radio (a good bit, though I have to switch off current affairs phone-ins because they bring on road rage) and increasingly I have a liking for audio books, which is a fairly new area for me.

My new car will play mp3 files, from CDs or flash drive cards of any size you like. This is such a boon and such a novelty that I’m still experimenting with the possibilities. A few months ago I started downloading promising looking audiobook titles from LibriVox and elsewhere – sadly, I have found this to be mostly very disappointing.

The idea that you can get a free download of someone reading a worthwhile book is exciting – the reality is that the actual reading is done by someone who considers that he has a good speaking voice, often without very much apparent justification. It’s easy to find fault – if I’m getting this much entertainment for nothing, you would think, I should just shut up and make the best of it.

Doesn’t work for me. As a native of Liverpool, who has lived most of his life in Scotland, I am probably not well placed to criticize anyone else’s accent, but I am very familiar with the problems of making myself understood by a (potentially hostile) stranger. A number of these books are read by someone whose accent I find distracting, and it is surprisingly common to find mispronounced words; there was one chap whose speech is punctuated by a strange clicking sound, which I believe may be his dentures, and it is very common indeed for the reader to demonstrate that he has little or no understanding of what he is saying – which actually makes it hard to follow. The funniest audiobook I have is a brave effort by a husband and wife team who have done a huge job reading one of the better-known 19^th Century works on military strategy; quite a lot of this book makes reference to French and German place names and people. The couple, between them, do not have the beginnings of a clue on pronunciation, but compensate enthusiastically by reading a phonetic English version in a strangulated, “foreign” voice – shades of Moriarty from the Goon Show – there is a short but distinct pause as they take a run-up at each fresh challenge.

Reading aloud a text – especially someone else’s text – so that it is easy to listen to and understand is a tricky business, and certainly something that I would not attempt – at least not where anyone could hear me. For a start, a script which is written specifically to be read out should be written with that in mind – sentences should be reasonably short and clearly structured, and great swathes of attached clauses, parentheses and afterthoughts should be avoided. “Fine writing” of the type promoted at your local night school Creative Writing classes – never use one adjective if you can use two – is tricky to read aloud. Spoken presentation of a formal, written piece of prose requires a very great (and rare) skill – that is why Laurence Olivier and John Gielgud and a few others did such a lot of it. They were good.

Before I went to visit Chester I downloaded an excellent podcast about the Siege of Chester, presented by Melvyn Bragg in his BBC radio series on “Voices of the Powerless” (you can buy it here if you are interested).

I put it on a CD, for my in-car homework prior to the Chester trip, and took the opportunity to fill up the rest of the disc with the mp3 version of an audio CD about the ECW I bought about a year ago. I hadn’t listened to this before – never got around to it – but it’s surprising what you can get through on a solo car journey.

Hmmm. I’m not going to spend a lot of time analysing it, but I did buy the thing so I guess I’m entitled to a view. It is, again, an enthusiastic, rather amateurish production – well recorded, with some nice sound effects and some pleasing period music from Packington’s Pound and others, but heavy going. The producer was also the writer and the narrator. He pulled out all the stops on the serious writing effort, but left himself with an almost impossible reading job as a result. The format is a series of earnest dialogues – mostly with Oliver Cromwell – written in a carefully hand-polished style and delivered in a clear Luton accent – I found that words like “troof” and even “nuffink” did little for my listening experience. Cromwell is asked a load of serious questions, and replies appropriately. It is not a lot of fun, though the sleeve notes and credits suggest that a fair amount of fun was had by those recording it. Sir Laurence would have made a better job of it.

You what, luv?

In a roundabout way, this leads me back to what might have been a central theme for this post, if I had thought of it earlier – what did spoken English sound like during the Civil War? If we had met Lord Goring and his mates, could we chat with them? What about William Brereton? Or Lettuce Gamul? Would the Voices of the aforementioned Powerless have meant anything to us? I haven’t been reading ECW material for long, and when I first started I had major problems with the spelling and wording of 17^th Century texts. Somehow, I seem to have gone some way toward getting the hang of this, since I now find the contemporary quotes and correspondence very entertaining, and also intriguing. I realize that people expressed themselves in a different manner in those days, and the rules of grammar were not what we might expect today. In the absence of standardised spelling, what we see must be each writer’s attempt to record what he heard people say – names of places and people show a surprising variety of spellings, and there must be a lot of clues in there about how people spoke – what did English sound like in those days, officially and locally?

All I know about the voices of the day is that Richard Harris stares at the horizon and shouts throughout the movie Cromwell – there must be more to it than that. I did manage to dig up a lengthy, learned text on the subject of the changes in English dialects since Tudor times, but that isn’t a lot of fun either. Unless everyone promises to behave nicely, I may record myself reading it aloud – preferably when I’m drunk – and release it on LibriVox. It will be a surefire cure for insomnia.

ECW – Gallopers, or Whatever

Tweakle, tweakle, melee rule;

Still not ryte, thou bless’d owld fule 

Artwork by Paul Hitchin

Dalliance with my variation on Commands & Colors rules for the English Civil War is going well. The games bash along nicely, but my preferred “suck it and see” approach to changing the rules has sometimes produced some unexpected results.

One area of study has been the rules for Melee Combat involving horse. For those who are interested in this stuff, and anyone else who has a few minutes to spare, let me explain a little.

Commands & Colors is a boardgame. I’m quite comfortable with this fact, though occasionally stones fall on my house because I have painted hexes on my tabletop. The advantages of using C&C with miniatures, for me, are that it works, its mechanisms are simple almost to the point of being crude, there are no debates about what happens in certain situations and the game trots along nicely – invariably reaching a conclusion which all parties can understand. All of which adds up to the thing being – well, a lot of fun.

My ECW game is actually based on the Napoleonics version of C&C. My changes to the basic rule set reflect my understanding of how cavalry (sorry, horse) operated in this period. As much for my own benefit as anyone else’s, I shall set down a simplified version of this – if the simplicity is verging on the infantile, that’s OK – that is the sort of person I am.

In the Thirty Years War, according to my sources, there were two main types of horse – cuirassiers and general-purpose cavalry usually referred to as arquebusiers. The accepted way of using them was based on the methods and training of the Spanish and Dutch schools. As follows: 

1. Horse have pistols. These pistols are heavy, inaccurate, unreliable, almost impossible to load on a moving horse and serve mostly as a cross between a badge of a gentleman’s rank and a cudgel. 
2. When ordered to advance to the attack, the horse trot steadily up to the opposition, get their pistols ready (usually in a surprising, tipped-over-sideways posture which apparently increases the chance of the priming igniting properly), get as close as possible (preferably right in their faces) and attempt to fire (did it go off? – oh bugger – I’ve got another one here – hang on…). 
3. If the enemy flinches, or otherwise appear to be discouraged by all this carry-on, the discharged pistols are discarded, or possibly thrown at the foe, swords are drawn and the whole thing becomes a lot more energetic, one side or other being chased from the field, cut down, captured etc.

You can see this would be an unpleasant event to be caught up in, but it presents a strange, lumpy blend of chivalrous protocol and loyal commitment to the fashionable technology. At least in theory, at its peak this pistol ritual was developed into some complicated formation manoeuvres – specifically the Caracole (derived from the Spanish word for a snail, which I believe was associated with the shape of the turning movement rather than the speed with which it was delivered) – which in hindsight seem better suited to the parade ground than the battlefield.

"…pistol? - what pistol…?…"

A number of rule sets I have read make a particular feature of this pistol skirmishing, and even of the caracole, but it doesn’t look like anything I would wish to use in a game, unless it was a 1:1 skirmish – fortunately, the caracole seems to have been abandoned by the 1640s. Managing the loading and firing of individual pistol volleys within a brigade-level wargame seems to me the sort of thing my late friend and guru, Allan Gallacher, would have termed “Fannying About” – molecular-level activity of little consequence.

According to the story, King Gustavus Adolfus of Sweden (or some influential party in his gang) decided, probably correctly, that the pistol was not yet ready to be used in such a manner, and that it made more sense to forget about it and just jump straight to the sword bit and – since you then didn’t have to worry about aiming a pistol, you could thus get a bit of a move on as a result. One can almost visualize the shocked expressions of struggling pistol men being charged in this barbaric manner…

Righto – having thus reached the limits of my own attention span, I have adopted the convenient and widely used convention that my ECW cavalry will break down into 3 types – “Gallopers”, who are Swedish-style charging horse who just rush in with swords, rather than fiddling around with pistols, “Trotters”, who are the more cautious pistol chaps, and Cuirassiers, who are heavily armoured, slow-moving Trotters. I have also decided to rise above the irritation caused by these modern wargaming names for the classes, which generate a lot of heat and some contempt among purists. If you are offended by the names then you are absolutely correct – please be assured that when I say Gallopers, what I really mean is “that type of horse which are not, and never were, actually called Gallopers, but which I incorrectly and sloppily refer to as Gallopers entirely for my own convenience”. And similarly for the Trotters - I hope that makes everything all right.

Anyway – where was I? – oh yes – Gallopers. Within my C&C-based ECW rules, Cuirassiers, being heavy,  have a 2-hex move, Gallopers (which includes a lot of early-period Royalists) have a 3-hex move and Trotters also have a 3-hex move, though any Trotters moving into contact with the enemy are limited to 2 hexes, to allow for all this faffing about with pistols, and keeping everything calm in the approach. Gallopers  get an extra Combat Die in a melee, to allow for the extra elan and momentum and shock effect and suchlike – which seems reasonable – but they only get it in a newly formed melee in which they are the attackers. In other words, they do not get this in a melee which is continuing from an earlier turn, nor in any bonus melee resulting from the C&C “Cavalry Breakthrough” rule, whereby a cavalry unit which wins a melee may occupy the hex vacated by the enemy, and optionally move a further hex, and may fight an extra melee immediately (i.e. in the same turn). Neither do I allow Gallopers to claim this extra bonus die if they are “battling back”, in C&C speak, having been themselves attacked.

My intention, as you will gather, was to restrict this bonus to sections of the combat in which the Gallopers had the initiative and had a definite extra shock impact.

I am still testing to see how this all works out – the recent debacle of the Battle of Netherfield demonstrated an extreme consequence of the horse getting a run of luck (mumble, mumble), which is clearly something that has to be checked over.

An unexpected side-effect has shown up in a couple of subsequent replays of the same test game; since an extra Combat Die is a significant bonus, it is a smart move for the Parliamentarian (Trotter) horse to attack first, so that the Gallopers are restricted to “battling back” and do not get the bonus die. The result is that the Trotter horse have definitely become very aggressive – unrealistically so. In an attempt to reflect a real tactical situation in the game, I have generated distinctly unrealistic behaviour on the part of the Trotters.

I can solve this at a stroke by allowing the Gallopers the bonus die even when they are battling back, in which case there is no particular advantage for the non-Gallopers in making pre-emptive attacks (other than the obvious one that they get first blow, and only the survivors will fight back). The downside of this instant fix is that the Gallopers become even more formidable than they were already. Hmmm.

We’ll try it out, anyway. I really do like fiddling around with rules, but only on the understanding that one day they settle down into something which is demonstrably sensible.

ECW – The Battle of Netherfield (1644)

Good grief - Col Trevor's boys, who won the battle almost on their own

This was a bit of a spur of the moment – Nick and I set up the battlefield to have a quick playtest of the amended C&C_ECW rules (faster movement for foot units, if remote from the enemy) and to try a more open field than usual, better for cavalry.

Nick was the Royalist commander, and made his customary gung-ho start, with units of his “galloper” horse charging off on both flanks, with no attempt at either support or co-ordination. I smiled to myself and prepared to fight off these foolhardy diversions, thinking ahead to my inevitable push to victory in the centre.

It never happened. Nick’s right flank cavalry pinned my left flank in the corner of the table, and his left flank attack, notably Col Marcus Trevor’s Horse, with some support from Tyldesley’s regiment, somehow routed two of my veteran foot units in rapid succession, and then set about my militia foot, whom I had kept carefully out of harm’s way, but who now simply melted away. And so it continued - the rules for rolling cavalry melees worked to stunning effect. Normally they result in the cavalry overreaching themselves, but this time they just annihilated my right and centre. Admittedly there was an element of luck in the dice rolls, but I have not been so thoroughly trounced in a wargame for many a year – I lost 8-0 on Victory Counters in about 80 minutes total playing time. I have no idea what my Parliamentarian losses were – must have been thousands, and I lost a general – but I do know that the Royalists lost a grand total of 2 cavalry bases – which is approx. 200 killed and wounded. It was, in short, a whitewash, but such a glorious one that it was a privilege to be on the receiving end.

As usual, Nick did the photography.

Oh yes - the changes to the infantry movement rules seemed to work nicely, though the course of the battle was such that I almost forgot to notice such details.

Royalist light artillery - all the artillery was worse than useless

Artistic view of Lord Molyneux's horses' backsides

Downtown Netherfield, before the trouble started

General view - Royalists advancing from the right - in the centre of the picture
 you see Trevor's horse, on a very serious mission

…and, a bit later on, looking back the other way

The Parliamentarian left flank horse, pinned in a corner

Lord Byron's Foot recapture the village of Netherfield

Trevor's Horse, after a brief repulse, continue the rampage

This typifies the whole day - I presented my worthy opponent with a Hazzard a
Chaunce card, which should normally result in his troops all being struck
down with colic or worse, but on this occasion it merely resulted in Tyldesley's
Horse (as it turned out) becoming even more dangerous than before. On
the grounds that I can never be so unlucky again, I take all this in good spirit
(mumble, mumble…)

Just to make sure that the size of the victory did not go unnoticed, our
photographer wishes to emphasise that this is how many Victory Counters he got...

…and this is how many I got

Late Edit: Overnight I received a friendly email from Daniel, a regular correspondent, who points out in a jocular way that such a catastrophic defeat – especially at the hands of an 11-year-old opponent – suggests gross ineptitude in at least one of two areas: my generalship and my rule-writing. How, he asks, can I regard such a disaster as any kind of privilege? Where is my fighting spirit, my self-esteem?

I've been thinking about this.

I am happy to accept that he is probably correct, and go along with the humour of the situation, but I have played wargames for many years now – I’ve seen most things there are to see, within the scope of the periods and the types of games in which I have been involved. Though I have known underdeveloped rules to produce some silly results, only once before, in all those years, have I seen the chance element in a properly tested game take complete control of a cavalry attack and produce such an event. People can live their entire lives and never see a straight flush, an avalanche, a perfect storm, an alignment of the little planets of probability in such a way that normal logic and rational expectation are suspended.

We can – we probably will – play the same game again today, and it won’t play out the same way. It couldn’t possibly. Yesterday’s result was certainly a freak, but then all results of a game involving chance are freaks in their own way – this was notable only for its extreme degree. If the cavalry sweep the table in the replay then the rules are definitely crazy, but they won’t. The perfect storm of dice and cards comes along rarely enough to be memorable, and to be strangely thrilling, when it does, for the sad little, faintly autistic people like me who devote some of their precious time to watching for such things.

History is full of unexplained, almost miraculous events which decided battles. Maybe this story is a gentle argument in favour of keeping the chance element in rules fairly high. I can make excuses as much as I like, but historians will never know for sure what brought about the disintegration of my army at Netherfield(!), in the same way that they still argue about what exactly turned the real battles of Montgomery and Adwalton Moor, among numerous others, in the same war.

The Chester Trip

Evidence - there's not a lot of contemporary stuff left, but here the repair to the main
breach in the wall is clearly visible

On Sunday, I went down to Chester for a few days looking at the ECW sites. I went with an old friend, whose name – as it happens – is Chester. Merely a happy coincidence, but I shall take care to make it clear to which Chester I am referring, as necessary.

Our preparation for the trip was mostly in reading John Barratt’s fine The Great Siege of Chester, and booking ourselves on to a couple of guided tours.

Monday we walked around the walls – there is a very good set of visitor information boards for the ECW period, featuring excellent artists’ impressions of how the various locations looked in the 17^th Century. As far as we can tell, these painted views are not available in any publication or online – I am still checking, but they probably should be.

In the afternoon we went for a guided walk around the battlefield at Rowton Moor (about 4 miles outside Chester’s walls) with Ed Abrams, who offers a fine blend of enthusiasm and expertise – his Civil War Tours enterprise is heartily recommended.

In the evening, we had arranged to have dinner at The Brewery Tap, in Bridge Street, which was the home of Francis Gamul during the siege, and is where Charles I spent the nights before and after Rowton Moor. I was very pleased with this little bit of historical tie-in (and the food was great). I guess our meal was rather more cheerful than Charles Stuart’s must have been the night after the battle. In passing, I was also delighted to learn that Gamul’s daughter was christened Lettuce, a name which appears to have drifted out of fashion lately.

Original, with new bits - the Water Tower, near the old port

A tax called murage was collected to pay for maintenance of the walls. The
officials in charge of this were called Murringers - here's a list of some of them 

Captain Morgan's cannon - OK, it's a monument - certainly, an iron gun
carriage would take a bit of shifting

Gone but not forgotten

Chester (the person) at the Phoenix Tower. Legend has it that King
Charles watched the battle of Rowton Moor from the top. He
must have had remarkable eyesight - you can't see Rowton from here.

Looking down Foregate Street from the Eastgate - much of this part of the city
was destroyed in the siege, and most of what you can see in this picture is Victorian

Eastgate Clock

Near the South-East corner of the old city - this area saw some of the most fierce bombardment

The rear portion of this pub was the house of Francis Gamul, who was Charles' host
at the time of Rowton Moor

The scene of the first stages of Rowton Moor - there are three modern villages
built on the old battlefield

Ed Abrams, the expert guide (left), discusses the role of dragoons at Rowton with Chester

There are very few contemporary buildings still visible at Rowton - this one, by
local tradition, may have been a dressing station for the Royalist wounded.
The farmer has refused permission to survey the field.

This is almost the only official recognition of the fact that an important
battle was fought here. The monument is close to what is thought to be a mass
burial in an old lime pit.

Tuesday morning we joined Ed’s colleague Viv (who was in costume) for a tour of the Civil War sites within the city, so we were back on the walls again. Informative and very entertaining – again, recommended.

Behind many of the shops in The Rows, in the old city of Chester, are these vaulted
medieval cellars, which were used as storehouses and also as bomb shelters during the bombardment

The Bear and Billet - this pub was originally the house of the keeper of the old
bridge over the Dee, and the copious windows were originally access to a warehouse,
to store goods coming over from Wales

Different time, different approach. As roads improved and commercial transport
became larger, gates changed from  being a means of keeping enemies out to a way
of letting friends in. The Wolf Gate on the right is one of the original gates, the
much larger New Gate next to it is clearly intended to give a prestigious welcome to
the city.

On the Wednesday, we set out on the trail of King Charles. We had intended to move on to the battlefield at Montgomery, south of Welshpool, but the weather warnings for the following day were a bit alarming, and we decided, since Montgomery is not far from the same latitude as Birmingham, that we should not stray so far south. In the event, we went to have a quick look at Denbigh Castle, which is where Charles stayed after his visit to Chester. We stayed overnight at Maeshafn, near Mold, and the next day we had a rather stressful drive home through howling gales and very serious rain. No real problems for us, but we saw a number of large trucks which had blown over, or blown off the road.

This is fine - what has become a standard approach - but I have some misgivings.
Jolly signboards give bilingual information so that Miss Williams' class from the
primary school can identify with life in a medieval castle, and it's great that kids
have such a resource available, but you won't find very much about the actual
history of the place. I checked in Denbigh town library, and there wasn't much there,
either. Is there a tacit assumption that primary schools are the only people who visit such sites?