I read a book

For my significant birthday this year I asked for, and received, Nick Lipscombe's atlas of the English Civil War. This is a sumptuous tome, produced in cloth-spined hardback by Osprey, published to the highest production standards in terms of look and feel. It is printed on really high gsm paper, even more substantial than your normal Osprey. It really looks terrific on your bookshelf, or on your coffee table if you happen to leave it lying around, casually open to one of its superb map spreads.

It came out in September, and the reviews have been universally good, rating it as a must have book from the moment it hit the sales outlets. For me, I was also very impressed, but I thought I'd wait until I'd actually read it and looked at all of the maps (something most of the Amazon 5* reviewers CANNOT have done) before I put finger to keyboard and shared my thoughts. So here we are, early December, and I finished working my way through it about a week ago.

Firstly, I have to say up front that if you are interested in the period this is a must have book. There isn't an atlas of the civil war to touch it in coverage and clarity of maps. The chronology and orders of battle included are excellent too. Nothing I say here should put you off owning a copy.

The only carping about the book in most of the reviews is the absence of an index. I have to say that in a book of this size, price and importance that is an unforgiveable omission. It makes it really hard to use as a reference book. For someone like me, who has read about and studied the Civil War for most of my adult life without becoming immersed in it to the exclusion of everything else, this is frustrating to say the least and a piece of overt cost-cutting on an otherwise prestige project (the book is £50. I'd pay an extra fiver for an index). The book is mostly chronological, so if you have a vague idea of where the battle or event you're interested in occurred you can flip back and forth to find it. If you don't then best of luck. 

But what about the actual contents? Well, these comments are made by someone who has more than a passing interest and knows a lot about some things and not much about others, so bear that in mind.

Let's talk about the text, and the general coverage of the book. The text is well written and very readable, and suitably footnoted (the bibliography is impressive too, by the way). It isn't really ground breaking in anyway, as far as I can tell, but it does draw attention to areas where there is controversy. Most newbies to the period could do a lot worse than read it as a primer with knobs on. There is a bit of not widely available information in it - look at the Naseby description and map, for example, for an area I know where understanding has moved on in recent years. The main area where I think it does add to our understanding is that the quality of maps is excellent, and they are detailed and units on the battle maps are mostly to scale (except for the depth, which is normal). The maps of town fortifications and sieges are unparalleled. This is written by a man who understands sieges and fortifications and the importance of the ground.

The main criticism of the text is that it isn't quite a history book and it isn't quite an atlas text. If you pull any historical atlas off a shelf - and I've got probably a dozen covering various periods - the idea is that the text and maps marry up in a way that you can look at the maps whilst reading the text. i.e. The text and the relevant maps are on a two page spread. That is decidedly NOT the case here. Often you get a double spread of text or a double spread of maps. I can see why that is. The text is more extensive than normal, and there are a lot of maps, so it was always going to be hard in a book of these physical dimensions. It's also why the Times Atlases of WW2 and History of Man and so on have such a big page size. So, this is a book you read with your fingers stuck in several places so you can flip backwards and forwards between text and maps. Or you can just look at the pictures of course. A second issue with the overall design is a decision made about dates and labelling of campaign maps in particular. It would really help if the text boxes were numbered in consecutive order, instead of just being dated. Some of the maps are quite busy, and trying to follow things in sequence it isn't helpful if you don't know what date to look for next.

Now we come to the actual problems with the maps. One reviewer on Amazon noted an issue with one or two maps, where he thought a layer was missing. He may be right; I'm not an expert of the things he's talking about. I can tell you that there are errors on some of the maps I do know about, and if you don't know the period and rely on the maps as a source that's a real problem (I'm reminded of another book I own, on the Russian Civil War, which is terrific if you already know the period and is badly misleading if you don't. Fortunately this book is not in that category). My pet peeve with history books and maps is when not all the places in the text appear on the maps. It doesn't often happen in this book, but it does happen more than it should, and in a book with over 150 maps, how is that forgivable? 

I will confess to not knowing everything about every part of the war, so I went and double checked some items. The Edgehill map has issues: some of the Parliamentarian labelling in is the wrong place, and the text and the map contradict each other over the time of the King's council, unless I have misunderstood them. Text typos are rare, but one side receiving their "just deserves" doesn't look right to me.

The most serious error I am aware of (from local knowledge) is in respect of the status of Northampton, which for a number of years of the war is clearly marked as being a Royalist possession. It wasn't then and it never was. The error is corrected in later maps, but it sure looks like it changed hands if you just rely on the maps. In fact my home county is quite poorly served by the atlas. The author notes he can't record every minor skirmish and siege but there isn't a consistency about it all. Nothing seems to happen in Northamptonshire until the Naseby campaign, more or less, and this really misleading. The Royalists make repeated attempts to interfere with Parliament's control of the county, from both Oxford and Banbury. Rupert is a visitor more than once. A map should tell you this and tell you why. Just look where the county sits across north/south main thoroughfares. The small, but important for control of the county, siege at Grafton Regis which was conducted by Skippon, no less, is completely missing, as is the manoeuvring around Northampton (the gates are shut on several occasions and fire exchanged as Rupert tried to capture it by coup de main).  Admittedly the Northants Battlefields Society book which covers the campaigns only came out this year, but information on Grafton Regis is readily available on line.

Northamptonshire in the Second Civil War is also completely overlooked. Yes, there's a map of the region but the actions that led to the very small and brief Battle of Woodcroft House (where the future Regicide Thomas Wayte led the local forces) are completely missing. They are important. They tell a story of how efficiently the NMA loyalists shut down most of the rising, and how little support the Royalists actually had. Again this is a little known part of the war, but shouldn't be missing. Okay, you may say, but that's just Northamptonshire, but is it? I don't know. I've seen someone who looks to me to be from the north of England find a couple of problems up where he lives, which I would not have spotted as I don't know the area. That then leaves me worried that if two local experts think there's a problem with their bits, what about all the other regions?

In theory the book covers 1638-51, but in practice it covers the Protectorate up to its end. It includes a map of the Major General's regions. This is handy, but not really useful as such maps are common. Completely missing is the rising that precipitated the crisis and led to the Major Generals being set up. This is the rising botched by the original Sealed Knot, and normally known as "Penruddock's Rising". Details of what happened in the West Country, and the other locations where Royalist desperadoes were rounded up would have been more worthwhile than the Major Generals map. Add to that no map of the Western Design and the Battle of the Dunes (no mention of the latter, either) and it isn't as comprehensive as I'd like.

Okay, so that sounds like a lot of negatives and a lot of nit-picking. Well, perhaps so, but even with them the book is still a solid BUY recommendation, and I'm very pleased with it. I shall be using it for reference and planning future games, but I'll be cross checking the details too. However, it clearly is NOT a 5 out of 5 book if you've actually read it properly. It's a 4 out of 5 at best, which is still pretty good.

And it really, really, does need an index.