Not Quite the Siege of Newcastle 1644 - (1) Beginnings and Set Up

It will be a little while until the actual game takes place, but I've made a start on setting up an appropriate battlefield. Because of the short artillery ranges, the ground scale and the small size of 17th Century towns, I have decided to play the game across the table, which has a number of advantages.

My starting point is a contemporary map of Newcastle, dating from 1610 or so. Here it is.

By the time Lord Leven arrived at the gates in February 1644, a number of changes had taken place. The suburbs outside the northern section of the wall had been demolished (they burned for days, apparently), the walls had been put into a good state of repair (they had even been plastered, to make escalade more difficult - my walls have not been plastered...), but were still old-fashioned medieval walls with no frontal protection against artillery, and a sconce had been erected at Shieldfield, north east of the town, to cover the Sandgate area against possible approach along the valley of the Pandon Burn.

Having stared at the map for a while, consulted my various sources and scratched my chin, I have decided to represent the northern side of the town on the table. This represents only part of the assault (which did not take place until October, for reasons which I shall attempt to explain at some point in the next few posts), but it is the easiest section to play as a game, and it does include the location of the primary artillery barrage.

This first post is primarily to show off my very approximate version of Newcastle, and the captions to the pictures will give a little more information. In later posts I'll say more about why the real siege of Newcastle does not lend itself to a game without a lot of fudging - which will involve one of Foy's infamous potted histories - and discuss some new aspects of my rules. One further advantage of setting the field up early, of course, is that I can do some experimenting with particular rule mechanisms to see how they look. The game itself will probably be in a couple of weeks (availability of commanders permitting), and it will be a collaborative, rather than a competitive, effort!

In 1644 Newcastle was a prosperous town of some 11,000 inhabitants. The section
of the town shown is seen from the north, and is rather simplified. The River Tyne is
about 2 hexes beyond the far edge - somewhere behind the chairs. Following the
visible section of the wall round from the left, you can see the Pandon Gate, the
Corner Tower, the Carliol Tower, Pilgrim Street Gate, the Ficket Tower, the Bartram
Monboucher Tower, Newgate, the Heber Tower and the Westgate. Off the table, on the left
the wall loops around to the Sandgate, which is on the riverfront, and on the right it
meets the river near to the Closegate. The bits of white paper are to help me memorise
the names of the key locations. 

General view from the north east.

View from The Leazes, where General Baillie set up his batteries. The hexes are
about 200 paces across the flats, so you can estimate that the range is about 800
to 1000 paces from the hills. I believe the football stadium would feature prominently
somewhere in the middle of such a view of the modern city. 

General view from the north west.

Looking from the Castle, towards Newgate Street.

View towards the Newgate, inside the walls - get your ticket for the guided walk...

Pilgrim St Gate from the top of Pilgrim St.

The new fort added by Lord Glemham at Shieldfield - it looks a little more grand
than it really was - it occupies 2 hexes, and was manned by about 300 musketeers.

Somewhere via this link you will find an entertaining little dramatisation of some of the key issues of the real siege - click on the movie and you will meet some of the principal characters - notably Sir John Marley (the town mayor) and the Earl of Leven (the commander of the Scottish army outside).  They are heavily disguised, apparently, but you get the idea. I'll introduce them again in a later part of this short series of posts.

Auldhame Castle - Boots and Old Stones

Auldhame Castle as it is today, on the edge of a cliff - view from the North West

There is no escape - relentlessly, true to yesterday's post, I dug the boots and the camera out, the thermal underwear and the weatherproof trousers, and I walked the 600 yards through the woodland from my house to Auldhame Castle. Before you ask why I have never visited the place before, I can only say that I seem to have been busy.

Auldhame Castle was a fortified house built, probably on or near the site of an earlier building (which may have been some form of religious retreat - see later), in about 1530, by Adam Otterburn of Reidhall, who was sometime Lord Provost of Edinburgh (from 1538 until his term of office was ended by the Rough Wooing), Lord Advocate to James V of Scotland and later secretary to James' second wife, Mary of Guise. Adam was murdered in Edinburgh in 1558.

Since he also had a residence at Reidhall (or Redhall), in Edinburgh, Auldhame may have been the family farm or a country seat, but it was a substantial structure. It was an L-shaped building - the North wing faced onto the cliffs over the Forth, on the East Lothian coast, and much of that is still standing and recognisable; the South-East wing has mostly disappeared - about all that remains is the entrance door.

Trouble with neighbours? - Tantallon, the seat of the "Red" Douglas family, is
just across a field and a little bay from Auldhame. Since Otterburn advised
James V on a treason charge against the Douglas household in 1528, it seems
odd that he chose to build next door to them. The field in the foreground is
called Old Adam, and it is here that the burial ground was discovered in
2005 - I had read that "Adam" was a corruption of Auldhame, but I prefer to
believe it is named after old Adam Otterburn

Entrance to the vanished South wing

This photo is borrowed from elsewhere - note the cloverleaf motif

Vaulted cellar area below the remaining building

In these parts, the ivy always wins in the end

Good heavens - could that be a ghostly hand waving - can you see it too...?

The flat area on which the house was built is bounded by a bank (and
the footings of an old wall, somewhere under the trees), built on top of a sandstone face

The ground is hard to figure out, because of the subsequent growth of the forest, the
progressive collapse of the cliffs in front of the house, building of more recent
walls and field structures and a fair amount of anti-tank defences left
over from WW2 - the beach here was a source of constant worry as an invasion site
(from Norway?)

This  is not a sandstone cliff - it is WW2 concrete!

No-one really knows when the building ceased to be used. One theory is that Cromwell's boys slighted it as part of a general reduction of defensible buildings in the area after the Battle of Dunbar, another is that it was already derelict by then, though it was not very old. Auldhame appears (as Oldham) on John Speed's map of Scotland in 1610 - there was almost certainly a village (probably of timber huts) in addition to the Castle. This has been swept away - nowadays the hamlet of Auldhame comprises a line of terraced farm cottages on the A198, and the large 19th Century Auldhame House, which has no connection with (and is half a mile from) the old Castle.

Just as a reminder, this is what it is supposed to have looked like around 1600
 - viewed from the same angle as my first photo - the cliffs were further away then!

During the time I have lived nearby, there was a major archeological dig (2005) in a corner of one of the fields of Auldhame Farm, next to the wood containing the castle. A Christian burial site and some form of religious building were examined, and after some debate it was decided that they probably dated from the 8th or 9th Century, possibly contemporary with our local saint, St Baldred, who is thought to have lived at Auldhame. St Baldred is a complex subject - if you can be bothered, I recommend you check him out on Wikipedia. Apart from surfing across to the Bass Rock on a rock, he also managed to be buried in three separate places - a tricky fellow.

ECW - Work on Sieges, and the Distraction of Local Ruins

Within the next few weeks I intend to get out my ECW siege bits and pieces, and have a more formal attempt at a siege. One of my invited guests will be David the Cruncher, my chiropractor, who appeared in this blog a little while ago when he came here to be introduced to wargaming. In honour of his South Shields origins, on that occasion we played a game based on the Battle of Boldon Hill, which in reality had never quite been a proper battle at all, but the fact that David’s uncle lives in one of the villages on the battlefield was an overwhelming case in favour of the scenario.

My intended action this time will be "Something a Little Bit Like the Siege of Newcastle" (1644) – you will hear more of this shortly. Because of the impending presence of guest generals (and my experience of guest generals is that the beggars sometimes wish to have some idea what is going on), I am working on tidying up the rules, and writing them out in a form which might be understood by someone apart from me – in particular, all the scribbled pencil tables and post-it notes need some attention.

Anyway – I hope to set out more details of all this over the coming few weeks, including (maybe) a revised draft of the siege rules. In the meantime, I have become a little diverted by some of our local castles here in East Lothian.

It is, in any case, a topic which I find interesting, and there are a great many sites around here which have history related to the ECW. The most recent distraction came during my studies of the activities of the Covenanter Armies – I was reading about the East Lothian regiment which marched into Northumberland with Lord Leven (subsequently appearing at, for example, Marston Moor and the sieges of York and Newcastle), and it seems that the colonel and patron of this unit was Sir Patrick Hepburn, who lived at Waughton Castle.

Now I know Waughton – it is about 4 miles from where I am sitting – and I know there is a pile of old stones and the remains of a medieval doocot (dovecot, to English readers) on the farm at Old Waughton, but I know nothing about the history of the place – it really doesn’t look very interesting.

Wrong. A quick look at Andrew Spratt’s splendid website devoted to reconstructions of Scottish castles reveals that Waughton Castle was a fine thing – in fact here it is.

Waughton

So, if it was still the home of an important local family in the mid 17^th Century, how has it vanished so completely? – so much so, in fact, that a reclusive old nerd like me (who has plenty of free time, a camera and walking boots, and lives, as I say, 4 miles away) did not even know it was there.

Mr Spratt likens the disappearance of these old fortified houses to children’s sandcastles on the beach being swept away by the tide. Yes, it is true that there were a number of dramatic incidents such as Cromwell and Monck destroying the places, but even in the cases where the places just fell into disuse there was a sort of gradual tidal wave as the locals requisitioned the stone to build houses, barns, field boundaries. I must have seen the stones of Waughton Castle many times, but they are built into farm steadings and stane dykes. They must have migrated in countless small carts and barrows over the centuries. There may be some on our garden rockery…

So I have resolved that I will take a bit more trouble to spend some time looking at Andrew’s website, and visit what is left of these local places. Apart from the well-known National Trust sites at Tantallon (Douglas family) and Dirleton (Ruthvens), within a very few miles of here I know of Waughton (Hepburn), Hailes (more Hepburns), Innerwick, Yester and many others, I also now see that the ruin in the woods on the farm here at Auldhame, which is less than a mile away and which I had previously believed to be an ancient abbey, is now thought to have been a house destroyed by Monck after the Battle of Dunbar. Hmmm – Andrew, you have my full attention. There is also a tale that the Laird of Lochhouses (2 miles from here, now a working farm) was wounded at the Battle of Dunbar, followed home by English dragoons and shot on the doorstep of his “tower” – this patently is not the extant Victorian farmhouse, so I think there must be another ruin somewhere nearby.

Hailes

Yester

Auldhame - 15 minutes squelch from here

The church at Whitekirk (also about 2 miles away) is reputed to have been used to stable some of the Roundheads’ horses after Dunbar, but there are innumerable such stories, and there is a whiff of resentful outrage in this one – as an example of the sort of heretic rascals these chaps were.

Whitekirk Parish Church

Anyway – if the weather starts to improve, I would welcome the excuse to go squelching round the local countryside in search of ancient stones. I shall have to stock up on pork pies to add excitement to the packed lunches.

Please note that I use Mr Spratt's illustrations without any permission to do so - if you are interested in this, I would recommend that you visit his website via the link in this post - well worth the time.

Sieges: A Small Matter of Supplies (and Mining, Just a Bit)

I’m pleased to say that my elderly mother is now safely moved to a care home, which is the best outcome all round – it has been a very difficult and distressing time. Also, we have now sold her house, which was quicker and far easier than it might have been, so, with a bit of luck, my life should be returning to something a bit nearer a state of normality in the next few weeks.

Without  wishing to jump the gun, I thought it would be good to plan a celebratory wargame – a proper, social wargame – for the first time in ages. And it also seemed like an opportunity to try out the siege game again, after my brief but unsustained spell of progress in April. When I come to think about it, though, there is a bit of a problem. It’s all very well running a solo siege, correcting (frequently inventing) rules as I go along, and glossing over the incomplete bits (such as supply – and then there’s mining…), but playing this as an actual game with real people requires a rather more polished show. Thus I am proposing to get the rules typed up in a sensible form (sort of), and fill in the more obvious holes in the game. If some motivational soul ever points out to me that a problem is really an opportunity, my instinct is normally to give them the opportunity of removing my cup of coffee from their shirt front, but it does seem a good idea to embrace this excuse for getting the rules written up. Yes – all right – before I forget them again – quite so. Thank you.

Let’s deal with mining very quickly, and I’ll return to it in some future post. In about 2010, Clive S came up here to help out with some siege testing, and it was pretty good fun, but one thing that was clearly wrong was the effectiveness of mining. Mining was so devastatingly successful in the test game that it made us wonder why anybody ever bothered with all that tedious bombardment stuff. As I frequently do, I shelved the problem, pending some great leap of inspiration or some further research. My shelves are overloaded with things like that. 

Trouble was that my mining rules were so brilliantly clever that I had completely missed the point, and failed to check the dimensions of the problem. Clive and I had our mining parties tunnelling at speeds which would have left the machines which dug the Channel Tunnel miles behind. I will not give details of just how fast our miners could dig – it’s too embarrassing – but if such speeds had been possible then it is clear that mining would definitely have been the standard approach – in fact the whole history of fortification  (and everything else) would have been vastly different. Just put it down as a misunderstanding.

I did a fair amount of reading of late – the most useful source was a nice little booklet published by the Shire people, Siege Mines and Underground Warfare, by Kenneth Wiggins. He actually discusses digging and tunnelling techniques, but the main thing I took from all this scholarship is that miners who had no bad luck and knew what they were doing would do well to average 3 paces a day for the progress of a tunnel.

Ah – right. 3 paces a day is about 20 paces a week, which is one tenth of the way across one of my terrain hexes. This is a very small nibble indeed in one of our battlefields, and requires a whole new look at the matter. Hmmm. This also explains why mining was something of a secondary activity – though useful on its day, of course. I’ll think about this.

Just before I leave the subject of mining – does anyone know where they keep those Channel Tunnel digging machines when they are not using them? Just wondered. It doesn’t seem like the sort of thing you would throw on the back of a low-loader and off to the next job – interesting…

So – supplies.

SUPPLIES!

I am looking for some dead-easy approach to supplies which does not lead to either insanity or a crippling bookkeeping industry, yet prevents the matter being forgotten completely. My rule of thumb (it may be one of Foy’s Laws, but I can’t remember which one) is that the cleverer and more realistic you make your add-on rules (command, morale, supply, whatever), the more fiddly they become and the more likely they are to be dropped during an otherwise exciting game. In other words, if you really wish to exclude all consideration of command and activation from your wargame (for example), spend a few weeks developing the cleverest rule system the world has ever seen to cover this, and the players will just abandon it on the day. [This may have some parallels in the world of Brexit legislation, but let us not go there.]

I started off with provender – I’ll leave ammunition for the moment. Starting place, obviously, is Bruce Quarrie. Interesting, but far too much information, man. Can’t see the wood for the flipping trees. From the classic Siege of Dendermonde I picked up the useful idea of 2 lbs of bread plus 1 lb of meat per man per day. Ron Miles had a lot of detail in there about how many portions of meat you get from slaughtering a cow (1000) or a sheep (80) or even a cat (1.5), so I decided the simplest way to do this is add the whole lot together as food rations – not to worry what the recipe of the day was. The important bit is that a soldier needs 3 lbs of food a day. A magazine will contain a weight of food, and I’ll formulate some rules on how much this needs to be. As a quick aside, this is an aspect of warfare I have always studiously avoided – so I was interested to see what amounts are involved here.

My unit of strength for my ECW forces is the base – 6 figs per base for foot (200 men), 3 per base for horse (100). It occurred to me that it might be a nice additional convenience to add fodder into the food stores as well, and assume that 100 horsemen consume the same amount as 200 foot – let us stop short of whether the men can eat hay or the horses like their beef well cooked – I’m looking for the simplest-ever supply system.

This is a detailed depiction of 4 lbs of food - that's all you need to know

Thus a base of foot will require 200 x 7 x 3 lbs per week, which is, near enough, 2 tonnes, if you add in the drink. That is a lot – thus a regiment of 3 bases of foot will eat their way through 6 tonnes a week, and (by dint of my bovine assumption of equivalence) a unit of 4 bases of horse will require 8 tonnes. On the basis of no science at all, I’ll assume that an artillery unit needs 4 tonnes a week – they have few personnel but a great many draught animals.

The poor old citizenry do not get to eat as heartily as the soldiers. I’ll assume that 1 tonne will feed 500 civilians for a week. OK – that gives me a basis to get started. I’ll add a rule about rations – military and civilian personnel may get full, ¾, ½, ¼ or no rations – which will affect the health and vigour and general happiness of all parties. Oh yes – about the civilians…

In the absence of factual historical data, the population of a township or conurbation can be generated by the formula nD6 x k, where n has the following values:

Major City – 15

Provincial City – 10

Market Town – 6

Village or fortress – 3

My first assumption is that k should be 250 (I may change my mind later) – thus a market town turning up 6 4 4 3 3 1 with its 6 dice has a population of 21 x 250 = 5250.

Standard split is 50% females; for both sexes, one quarter are children and infants, one quarter old or infirm, thus one half able-bodied. Overall split then is

Females – children 12.5%, able bodied 25%, old/infirm 12.5% and the same for Males, so our market town of 5250 might yield 25% able-bodied men = 1315 approx.

Now I need to check how much you can get in a wagon, how much on a mule. I bet Bruce Quarrie has something on this…

Next I need to develop this a bit, and work out some dice algorithms for the relationship between diet and vigour, vigour and susceptibility to outbreaks of fever; I also need to work out some rules for how the effective strength of a garrison is affected by the need to police the population, and how the attitude and loyalty of the population is affected by things like food supply, sustained bombardment. Lots to think about – that’s OK, I have some more free time and a bit more spare brainpower than I had a week or two ago, so I’ll enjoy the challenge!

ECW Rules - documentation update for new version 2.65

Having received a comment from Paul about the rules, and a couple of email enquiries, I've updated the documentation on Google Docs. If you follow the link at top right for "My Own CCN-based ECW Rules", you'll get to the placeholder post which should now link to the new version. The changes are to the Rules Booklet and the QRS, and they bring it up to Ver.2.65, dated yesterday.

The changes reflect some previously-undocumented tweaks which I have been using, plus some typo-fixes, plus a few changes which are a result of my discussions with Peter Brekelmans about his 30YW variant.

Specific mods in the game include some amendments to Battling Back in Melee Combat, corrections to the Terrain Effects, and Light Artillery (by which I mean frame-guns and similar tactical, mobile pieces) now appears on the field only as attachments to units of Foot - light guns cannot be deployed as standalone units. Also, losses of artillery units no longer count for Victory Banners.

As ever, I think I've tested the links - if they don't work, or you are still getting the old versions, please let me know - many thanks.

I hope that some semi-formal documentation should also appear soon for the ECW siege game which I tested a few months ago - I'm a bit busy elsewhere at present, but it's in the pipeline!

My Own CCN-based rules for the English Civil War

The latest test version of these rules is maintained on Google Docs - if you wish to download them for personal use, these links will get you to the Rules Booklet, a Quick Reference Chart, a Stand of Pikes tracker, the Command Cards the "Chaunce" Cards and details of the "Ramekin" system for activation.

The last page of each of the card sets is to be printed on the reverse side of the sheets, to provide card backs.

The full Commands & Colors: Napoleonics rules, which are available to download from the GMT Games website, are also useful background reading, and give good worked examples and diagrams.

These rules are still being developed, so I am pleased to receive feedback on any play experience you have with them. Please do not distribute any of this material without contacting me, and I would expect to be credited with authorship if the stuff is shared. If you don't like the game, please don't slag me off in some arcane corner of the Social Media - helpful suggestions will be welcome! Courtesy never cost anything...

[This post is simply a place-marker, to tidy up some of the chaos in my layouts!]

Current version is 3.01, updated April 2020 - QRS sheet and a note on the alternative "Ramekin" activation system are new for Ver 3.01

Pottery Buildings - probably getting a bit silly now

I mentioned recently that I was not going to buy any more Tey Pottery buildings on eBay, since I have enough for my ECW wargames/sieges (in fact I am going to get rid of a couple of the less useful items) and, to be honest, I'm running out of storage space for the beggars.

I did, however, admit to a strong fancy to get my hands on a specimen each of Anne of Cleves' House (Lewes) and the Mermaid Inn, both of which looked splendid but regularly sold for far more than I was prepared to pay. Sure enough, I was lucky enough to land a nice, cheap example of Anne's house, but I held little prospect of getting the other one, which is much coveted (by proper collectors, in fact) and seldom seen.

Well, last week I was very surprised to see that some fine fellow was selling two Mermaid Inns on eBay simultaneously, at very reasonable starting bid prices. With little hope of success, I placed a modest bid on one and - by Jove - I won it. Even more surprising, the other did not sell at all.

The Mermaid Inn - three views

So here we have the Mermaid Inn, which I understand is in Rye, East Sussex (anyone ever drink there?). I have washed the spider poo off it, but have yet to "improve" it to the house standard, which means detailing the chimney tops, obliterating the pub sign over the door, repainting the ivy on the back (maybe that's the front, mind you...) and applying matt varnish, to get rid of that fearsome shine. This, of course, is why I have to avoid contact with the aforementioned proper collectors...

The real Mermaid Inn dates back to 1420 or thereabouts, though I understand the beer taps have been cleaned regularly since then. A fine addition to anyone's 17th Century town, I would say.

Storage - hmmm. I reckon I'm going to have to get rid of some of my Lilliput Lane houses to make room for these. That is definitely the end of the Tey collection - definitely. I have consciously resisted the urge to make a bid for the (even larger) Alfreston Manor, which is currently on eBay.

So there you have it.

Peter Brekelmans' Thirty Years War Variant for Commands & Colors - Latest V 2.2

Back in June I made reference to a Thirty Years War variant of Commands & Colors which I had been discussing with the chap who was developing it. During the course of what, for me, for family reasons, has been a rather fragmented Summer, Peter Brekelmans and I exchanged a great deal of correspondence, which I have enjoyed greatly, and from which I learned a good deal. Peter, like me, felt that it should be possible to develop a decent 17^th Century variant from the existing GMT Commands & Colors games – his starting place was my own attempt at an ECW game, but he wished to extend the scope to cover the Thirty Years War more completely and – unlike me – he wished to commit a proper effort to developing some scenarios.

Peter uses the concepts of Command and "Chaunce" cards, as did I, but his card sets are rather different from mine. He also was keen to amend the game so that melee combat was simultaneous, rather than the C&C system of attack-and-then-battle-back. We spent some time working with this, and developed systems which would make simultaneous melee blows possible, but we had concerns that the fundamental balance of advantage in the game might be distorted (in favour of the defenders, I believe), so Peter has retained the 2-stage C&C-style melee combat, and offers simultaneous melee as a game option.

My own ECW variant has been in use for some years now, though I confess the current documentation is a little out of date; Peter’s game has been well thought through, but we have lacked the opportunity to do any proper playtesting. Since Peter is running out of enthusiasm to develop this further, in the absence of a potential audience, we’ve agreed that I should make the game available on this blog. I can claim the best of both worlds here – if there is any reflected glory going, then I was a contributor, but if you wish to take issue with any of it, don’t come to me – it wasn’t my game anyway!

I think the game, as presented, is a very nice package – certainly it is thought provoking and a useful education to people like me who know little of the TYW. I shall persist with my own ECW game, though I shall certainly incorporate a couple of new tweaks which came from our discussions, and I hope to get a chance to do some proper testing of Peter’s rules when opportunity presents itself.

*** Update - as from 9th April 2017, the rules and the scenarios have been revised to V 2.2. The presentation of the Command and Chaunce Cards has also been greatly simplified. ***

 You can download the sheets from Google Docs – you will find

Rules Booklet

Army Reference Sheets

Calculation Sheet

Terrain Effects

Chaunce Cards

Command Section Cards

Command Tactics Cards

Scenarios

I shall keep this post linked from some panel near the top of my blog display, so that you can find it easily, and we’ll also set up a specific email address so that you may contact Peter about his rules.

I hope you will join me in complimenting Peter on his efforts, his knowledge of the period and his splendid rule-writing style.

Peter wishes to emphasise that the scenarios, in particular, are really drafts - in some cases almost discussion frameworks - and, in particular, have not been properly game tested. They provide a valuable reference as suggestions for games, but they come with no guarantee that they are quite ready for use as a rewarding social event!

Peter may be contacted at ga1632<CURL>rogers.com (replace <CURL> with the usual email AT symbol) if you wish to give him some feedback on his game or your experiences with it, or any general discussion points on the Thirty Years War.