Tewkesbury Talking Points

 After a week or two on other projects we were back to Richard's on-going series of Wars of the Roses battles. This time we had the climactic conclusion to the 1471 campaigns, with the destruction of the Lancastrians at Tewkesbury, hard on the heels of Warwick's defeat at Barnet.

There's a lot of contemporary or near contemporary description of Tewkesbury, but that doesn't make it easy to nail down. In terms of secondary accounts I like Richard Brooks (when have I ever not?), who places the battle lines slightly further north than most. Haigh is okay, the Osprey is nicely illustrated, and Bicheno's "Blood Royal" has an interesting take. I don't have the "Battleground" book, written by the Tewkesbury Battlefield Society bloke, so that's an omission on my part.

It's a shade difficult to tie in all the details, and having the battlefield mostly under a housing estate isn't helpful.

For this game Phil, Will, and I were the Yorkists, and Jon, Ian and Steve the Lancastrians.

Richard gave us the option to come on in march column (we're at the bottom), which we did. In the distance Steve, as Somerset, likewise came on that way, with the intention of turning our flank. We made the mistake of not deploying our artillery immediately, and moved it up. This was pointless, as range on this table made no difference. We should have started firing from the get-go.

My plan, as Edward IV, was to pull the battle over to the right to get a 2:1 with Will (Hastings) on Jon (Devon) whilst Phil (Gloucester) held the left. We'd then roll them up from that side whilst Steve was isolated.

The Lancastrian artillery had a good first couple of turns whilst we were moving and unlimbering, and got four hits on Gloucester. Across the Coln Brook Phil was moving the"200 spears" mounted troop about to confuse Steve.

Will and I deployed either side of the road, as Ian (Wenlock) tucked in behind Jon in the orchard. There was a bit of confusion about the effect of the orchard area (I may not have been paying full attention in the briefing). Jon played a really cunning game in here, shooting and dodging back, making use of the 4" range limit in the terrain piece (that's a trick I played in the Ebresa SCW game, so serves me right!) so we were unable to get our superior archery to bear whilst taking damage. Across the river, Phil is threatening Steve with his pathetically small group of cavalry, which loom much larger in Steve's imagination than they do on the table.

Phil went in with the cavalry as Steve was in march column and inflicted quite a bit of damage. Our artillery was now firing, but its only target was the Lancastrian guns, although it was very effective against them.

Steve changed formation and saw the cavalry off, but they were performing their function of holding him out of the way whilst we dealt with the rest of the army. Gloucester had now deployed into his battle formation, but Ian's troops were hidden in a dip and he couldn't shoot at them.

We were also still having problems getting to grips with Jon.

Ian then emerged and lined up to fight Phil. We turned our artillery to shoot at Steve. We did quite a bit of damage.

It took us a couple of turns but we finally started to push Jon's men back. Steve decided against his sojourn on the other bank and retraced his steps.  It was proving hard to get to grips with Ian.

The pictures run out at this point. I ordered Will to about face and swing round the back of my battle to support Phil in the centre whilst I broke Jon's battle. Having done that I was hoping to about face and catch Ian in the rear, but that took me longer than it took Steve to get across the river, deploy and attack Phil (benefits of being in march column). This dual attack on him broke his battle before I could get in. When we ended Will and I were lining up to take the pair of them on, and we were marginally stronger (I'd taken no damage at all) so I reckon we'd edged the game, but the Lancastrians did better than historically.

Did this tell us anything about Tewkesbury? I'd say that's tough to answer, as so much depends upon the decisions made and interpretation of the terrain. The rules cope with all we did very well, and they do really feel like a WotR battle. From my point of view I would have benefitted from re-reading the rules beforehand and getting in my head the sequencing of the interpenetration rules. The other slight issue is that the exact distances units are apart is important so the foreshortening caused by the camera can be a bit misleading, but Richard was very patient in answering our questions about exactly where we were and what we could do.

Another enjoyable e-vening game.