Maps of Wargamer’s Minds

‘Geography’, the old graffiti joke goes, ‘is everywhere.’ From my position on the edge of academia, in the “modern” neo-liberal university, the Department of Geography is the one which is aiming for hegemony. There seems rather little that Geography does not cover. From my school days, geography was a fairly innocuous subject to do with maps, climate and why tea plantations were not found in Scotland. Today it is a bewildering array of intertwined subjects relating to everything from philosophy to madness (some people would argue that these are fairly close together anyway), including some fairly mysterious forms such as health, social and cultural geography.

A few days ago I was trying out a new toy which our institutional librarians are very proud of. It is one of those integrator sorts of things which searches more or less everything. It was launched with a massive fanfare a year or two ago, and has just been made to work reasonably properly (although for my money it still has annoying ‘features’). In an idle moment I typed ‘war game’ into it, and had a look at what was returned.

Inevitably, there was a load of stuff on how games of various sorts are used by the military-industrial complex to prepare itself for the next round of proving how vital it is to the survival of humankind. There was also a fair bit of stuff on non-military wargames in the business community, proving to themselves how vital their activities are to the neo-liberal capitalist project they are already committed to (and commit the rest of us to; don’t get me started). In desperation I added to word ‘hobby’ to my search. This brought the numbers down to the easily manageable less than sixty, but also turned up an interesting paper:

Yarwood, R., 'Miniaturisation and the Representation of Military Geographies in Recreational Wargaming', Social & Cultural Geography 16, no. 6 (2015), 654-674.

I thought this was worth a look, and so, in time honoured fashion I downloaded and printed it (I find reading on a screen rather trying after a while, particularly for academic stuff). I hope that the journal in which the paper was published explains the link between the first paragraph and the rest, by the way.

There is, apparently, some interesting work on miniaturisation which has been done. Miniaturising a scene gives the observer a degree of power after it. Yarwood cites, among others, the Siborne model of Waterloo, an enormous panorama of the battle. It looks and feels convincing. We have power over the battle, an all seeing gaze, which the participants did not. However, Wellington insisted that the Prussians were not represented. The discourse was that Waterloo was a British victory. The model represents but distorts reality.

In a similar way, Yarwood argues, models of ships and planes celebrate technology and industrialisation. The model is shaped by political and economic factors which shape both it (as, say, a mass produced Airfix model) and the original. Reality is presented by the model in a semi-detached (at least) way.

On the other hand, model making, such as building kits or painting toy soldiers, is a craft. The power of a model is only realised through someone doing something with it, be that looking at it, painting it or playing with it. The artisan imbues the model with their own self. A quick browse of assorted modelling and wargaming blogs will verify this to the reader (aside from this one, of course. If I imbue my models with anything, it is the characteristic that I am not very good at painting them).  

Playing with a miniature animates it and creates a new world. The imagination is reinforced by the three-dimensionality of the model. In play, space is transformed. A wargame is a miniature, separated world which is still linked to the wargamer and their ‘real’ world, but is different to it. Playing with miniatures can bring new understandings and experiences. The question arises as to what these new meanings might be rooted in, and how they reflect the wargamer’s own perceptions of the world, both as physical geography and as mental geography, political, economic and technological realities.

I have not enough room to do justice to the paper in a single post, so I shall have to continue with this summary and discussion next time. However, the next point Yarwood makes is a kind of interesting one, so I shall finish with that. Yarwood observes that there is a fairly long tradition of using games in military training. There are thus two sorts of linked wargame – one driven by the military and one by recreation.

Simulation of war has been undertaken at least since the inception of Kriegspeil in the nineteenth century. These sorts of thing also get scaled up, so the military uses life sized built up areas and real actors to generate ‘realistic’ war games as training exercises. Sometimes the distinction between a training exercise for the military and a game for recreation has become blurred. Some authors refer to a ‘military – industrial – media – entertainment’ network, where film, game, war reporting and training exercise blur. Insofar as this might actually take place, civilians are ‘recruited’ to the military; indeed, occasionally this might happen in real life, even though war is not a video game (except, perhaps, in the hands of drone controllers).

Miniature wargames have largely been ignored by the military. They have developed, largely, from playing with toy soldiers and do not have the same sorts of hang-ups as the military might do over accuracy, authenticity and, of course, contemporary relevance. Yarwood does note later on that some of the foundational figures in miniature wargaming were soldiers on active service and that, perhaps, wargaming was a form of catharsis for them. Thus, for this academic interest, that of examining a miniature world and its imaginative interactions and performances, unlimited by the boundaries imposed by makers of game software or the exigencies of the military-industrial-media-entertainment network, miniature wargames are, perhaps, a purer form of imaginative world and thus worthy of study in and of themselves.

Still, there is more to come, hopefully next week, unless the MIME network have got me.

What to Consider

In wargaming, as in life, there are limits to the factors we can actually consider. We might suppose (and some people argue) that there is no such thing as free will. Everything, they suggest, would be accountable for if we knew enough about the causes. Thus, by this reasoning, I am a wargamer for a certain set of reasons. If these were known in sufficient detail, then it would be obvious why I am a wargamer.

The problem with this is, of course, that the causes can never be known sufficiently. By analogy, the mechanistic universe also fails, not because of quantum mechanics (although that, of course, does not help) but because too much has to be known about the initial conditions to be able to predict the future. Given that we cannot know the location and momentum of every particle in the universe, we cannot predict the future.

You might well, and quite correctly, object that we can and do make predictions, and some of them are quite accurate. This is not done, however, by a mechanistic approach, but by modelling. And the trick in modelling is to model those bits which are important, approximate those bits which have a visible effect, and ignore the rest. Models are, of course, quite scientific. The creation of models, however, is more of an art form.

Switching back to wargaming, of course none of this should be a surprise to the regular reader of this blog. A rule set, I have suggested before, is a set of interacting models which pick out the bits of the real world battles that seem important. How accurately they do this (whatever the term ‘accurate’ might actually mean here) depends on how well we have done the job of picking out the important bits, and how well our models cohere both with each other, and also with our ideas of how battles are supposed to go.

I read on someone’s blog recently (sadly, I cannot recall which one) some comments about how playing a wargame and playing a wargame campaign differ. In a wargame, a stand-alone action, that is, we can commit the Guard Cavalry because they might swing the final conclusion. In a campaign game we might keep them in reserve to cover a retreat. Our perspective differs according to the context.

Thus a set of wargame rules really should, if it is to hold a mirror to reality, be asking the sorts of questions of a wargamer in a stand-alone action that reality would ask. But, usually, they do not. I imagine that this is because the wargame rule set is more focussed on the battle, rather than its context. Blasting away at the enemy with a grand battery is a lot more fun than ordering them to limber up and move out because the left flank has just collapsed.

The question then is what is important to a campaign game, and how are those things modelled. Here, of course, we can delve into the details of logistics, reinforcements, replacements, training and so on. There is a huge field out there of possible factors. The problem is, of course, that it all starts to get far too complex and collapse under the weight of administration and, at least relative, lack of interesting stuff going on.

So we need to try to pick things that are both relevant and interesting. Many a fascinating wargame has been fought around supply trains and relief of forts, I know. But I suspect that these have mostly come about through scenario choice rather than a campaign game, certainly one which tracks the supplies a fort has in stock. We might decree a situation, manufacture it, but relatively rarely, I suspect, does it arise organically.

I have, over the years, tried a number of different approaches. I have tried out the full Tony Bath Hyboria approach, and concluded that he must have enjoyed bureaucracy very much. I have tried linked games, where the next wargame depends on the previous one, and these have worked, at least insofar as I have managed to guess the broad parameters of the outcomes.

I have mentioned before other things I have tried. I once indulged in a campaign game set in the Japanese Samurai era invasion of Korea, where two Samurai armies fought their way inland, beating off Korean and then other armies until they ran out of men and were overwhelmed. I have had a ECW campaign where the two sides pursued each other up and down a valley, neither, because of losses, quite able to deal a knockout blow.

All of these campaigns modelled some aspects. Some included logistics – if your supply line was cut you had to stop. Some modelled attrition – how do you get reinforcements and recruits? Some modelled movement. Most of them had the previous battle affecting the next one, at least in numbers of troops deployed.

Currently, I have abandoned most of these models. The games are linked, true. But, thus far at least, the Spanish invaders have not suffered from attrition in their march inland. In my ancients campaign, (which has also stalled, by the way) army sizes tend to get diced for when a battle is indicated. I have also abandoned map moves. It is not that my armies zip around in some imaginary space, or turn up where they want to, but that my reading suggests that, in general, defending armies adopted defensive positions, and attacking armies tended to attack them, more or less in situ.

The key, then, is deciding what to include into a set of models for a campaign or a battle. We tend, as modern Western people infused with a worship of numbers and things we can control, to aim for the things we can enumerate – numbers of men, rounds of ammunition, and quantities of rations and so on. These are, of course important, but actually our ancestors rarely seem to have considered them too much. The Ancient Greeks, for example, simply made sure they stopped for the night near a market. Should I really need to model that?

Failed Monarchs

Let no-one convince you that history, even academic history, is boring. It might seem like a rather staid and dry sort of subject, with crumbling professors poring over even more crumbling manuscripts, but, sometimes, a light is shone on a previous ‘thoroughly understood’ subject and it is turned upside down.

Thus, for example, the historiography of the English Civil War was well understood in the middle of the twentieth century as the rise of the landed gentry linked with the up and coming merchant and legal classes in London and important cities, who fed into the members of the Long Parliament. These controlled the means of production and, as any good Marxist materialist historian will tell you, the class that controls production eventually wins political power.

It took someone to go and take a look at the data to dent this idea. The new generation of historians traced the careers of merchants and MPs in the 1630’s, 1640’s and 1650’s. They did not find, for example, that the court sponsored monopolists of the 1630’s automatically supported the King, nor that the London merchant class supported Parliament. Things were, inevitably, a lot more complicated than that. The nice neat, clean, materialist narrative was holed below the water line, and finally exploded when it was noted that, in fact, religion mattered to the people involved.

As with the seventeenth century, so with the sixteenth and, I suppose, probably with most other centuries as well. The case in point here is Jenny Wormald’s book, Mary, Queen of Scots: A Study in Failure (Edinburgh, John Donald, 2017). This is a re-issue of a book first published in 1988, almost as a reaction to the outpouring of work relating to Mary Stuart that occurred around the three hundredth anniversary of her execution.

The book is not a life of Mary. Wormald notes that such a work had been performed, highly competently, by Antonia Fraser. Wormald has a narrower focus than the whole of Mary’s life, although she does fill in a lot of the bits of her life to give context to the points of interest. Those points are that as a monarch, Mary Stuart was a useless failure.

I suppose that, to wargamers, this is a rather less than interesting point. After all, Mary was hardly a military commander. Her involvement in the Scottish Civil Wars of the late sixteenth century was fairly marginal, and I have a sneaking suspicion that the wargaming of such stand offs and action as did take place is infrequent, to say the least. Nevertheless, I think there is a point or two worth making.

The first point is about Mary herself. Wormald argues that she failed as a monarch of Scotland because she was never interesting in being Queen of Scotland. She had, after all, been married off very young to the King of France’s son, Charles, and brought up at the French court, out of the reach of Scotland’s English enemies. Charles acceded to the throne and Mary became queen consort. In terms of early modern achievement, this counted as a success. Scotland, of course, was ruled through a regency.

It did not last. Charles died and Mary was forced to return to her native land. The normal historical narrative then goes that her reign was subverted by Protestant lords and her own romantic entanglements. Factional fighting in Scotland fatally undermined Mary’s reign, and she was forced to flee to England to what she thought would be safety. Bored in confinement, she got involved in Catholic plots and, probably promoted by the English Secret Service, betrayed her cousin Elizabeth who eventually had no choice but to execute her.

Wormald has little truck with this narrative. The problem was, she argues (and I am convinced, even if no everyone will agree) that Mary wanted to be Queen of France, or England, but not of Scotland. Her marriages were part of attempts to find a Scottish ‘strong man’ who could run the country for her. But make decisions as a royal ruler was expected to, she would not. She just was not interested.

Thus, the Scottish nobility eventually deposed her. This was not for the reason of religion, particularly. The Reformation already had a deep hold in Scotland by then. It was because she was useless as a monarch. The only decent thing that Mary did, on this analysis, is produce a male heir. The comparison is, of course, with Elizabeth. Also female (no, really?) she managed to hold onto power and executive decision making for decades, defying the demands of nobility, foreign powers, Parliament and people to marry, of make decisions she did not want to. But Elizabeth, too, wanted to be Queen of England. The difference was that she was Queen of England, and was determined to remain so. Mary did get involved in plots against Elizabeth and so, ultimately, she had to be removed. Elizabeth’s prevarication was, in fact, policy to avoid blame for killing a fellow ruling monarch.

The second point is about reputations. I have done a bit here to lay into a few reputations of people who probably do not deserve it. Alexander III of Macedon, for example, is commonly called ‘the Great’ but the reality seems to be more that he was an egocentric, unstable, war obsessed murderer. Yes, he conquered most of the known world but, given the nature of the known world at the time, anyone who inherited a decent army from his father probably could have done the same.

As with Alexander, so it is with Mary Stuart. She has an aura of a tragic, romantic, heroine. Who cannot be melted by the story of her ride into the wilds of the Borders to nurse her true love wounded in a skirmish? There are trails to follow her perambulations around the country, and exhibitions and books about the lost Queen of Scotland, and her callous cousin.

Alternatively we can ask: what on earth was the Queen doing dashing across the countryside and catching what nearly turned out to be her death of cold? Why was she not doing some ruling? Elizabeth perambulated widely across the south, anyway, of her kingdom. But she actually did ruling along the way. She did not remove herself from the seat of power; she took it with her.

Wormald’s case, then, is that Mary failed as a renaissance ruler because she did not want to rule Scotland. Romantic as the other narrative might be, and much more appealing to a sentimental age, Mary failed because she did not want to engage in the real political decisions that were needed in Scotland at the time. Romance only takes a ruler so far, at least during their lifetimes.

The Rivals

I actually have a small pile of books sitting on my shelf (all right, one of my shelves) awaiting review on this blog. I have little idea how this has come about. I must have been blogging about something else in the meantime. Wargaming, possibly. Anyway, as I think the books are quite interesting, I shall attempt to work my way through them, while, in the background, terrain construction continues.

Anyway, some of you may remember a while ago I wondered about finding a book about the English Civil Wars written from a Scottish point of view. The inherent paradox in that sentence suggests reasons why historians have, from time to time, attempted to re-name the English Civil Wars to the British Civil wars or The Wars of the Three Kingdoms (and one Principality, of course). Nomenclature aside,  there is not all that much, at least accessible to the average reader without an eye-watering book budget, on the causes, course and consequences of the Wars (call them what you will) in parts of the British Isles other than England.

An honourable exception to this is the current book: The Rivals: Montrose and Argyll and the Struggle for Scotland by Murdo Fraser (Edinburgh: Birlinn, 2015). The author is a Conservative Party Member of the Scottish Parliament, and apparently has been since 2001, which at some points during that period must have been a rather lonely existence. Be that as it may, it is a good book.

As the title suggests, the book focusses on the contest between James Graham, Marquis of Montrose, and Archibald Campbell, Marquis of Argyll. They were of similar background and separated by five years in age (Argyll being the older). Their early careers were, in fact, rather similar. They were both Scottish nobles attempting to make their way in the world with the paradox that the seat of Scottish political power was in London with the King and his court.

Both men were supporters of the Scottish kirk and its Presbyterian ways, and both signed the National Covenant, the protest against the imposition of a new Prayer Book on the Scottish Church by Charles I and his government. Argyll was more the political steerer, Montrose the man of action. Montrose dealt with Scottish supporters of the King in the north of Scotland, Argyll pulled the strings in Edinburgh, and the Bishops Wars turned into a military, financial and political fiasco for Charles I.   

The alliance of Argyll and Montrose did not last. The problem was, inevitably, the King. Charles I, whatever his faults, had the ability to inspire loyalty in some of his subjects. This seems to have been in the case of Montrose, simply because he was king. Alongside many others of Charles’ subjects, he simply could not conceive of the king not being kingly, that is, of not having the rights and privileges of being king. This, of course, was, at least partly what the wars were fought over: what exactly did these consist of?

Montrose then, drifted towards the Royalist party while Argyll became the political head of the Scottish ‘rebel’ side. Contacts and apparent shared interests with the English Parliament (such as was left in London) lead, eventually, to the Solemn League and Covenant, the invasion of England by the Scottish army and the defeat of Prince Rupert at Marston Moor in 1644, and the loss of York. Montrose, at about the same time, after a number of abortive attempts, started to win a series of victories over Scottish forces in Scotland itself.

Fraser notes a few things about the campaigns of 1644-5 in Scotland. Firstly, Montrose might have been a good, inspirational commander but his ability to undertake scouting was poor. Three times he was surprised by Government forces. Once he won (Kilsyth – he was lucky), once he drew Fyvie Castle, and once he lost (Philliphaugh). Montrose’s problem, of course, was that he had to keep winning; the war was one of reputation, at least in part.

The second thing Fraser observes is Argyll’s activities during the war. He was accused of cowardice, not least for being half-way down the loch on his boat as his forces went down to defeat at Inverlochy. Fraser thinks that this was probably sensible. Argyll was not a military man particularly, and his forces were led by an experienced solider. Further, he was not terribly well anyway, and, finally, his existence alive as a political operator in Scotland was, probably, much more important than a heroic death against clan rivals.

The machinations of the various sides after the end of the First Civil War are complex enough in England. In Scotland they are even more tortuous. There were various factions, within the Kirk, within government, within defeated Royalist themselves, and that is without taking into consideration the involvement of English and Irish affairs. The point of importance is that the Scottish army was a respectable force which no-one could afford to ignore. An invasion of England from Scotland was a serious matter. The Scots, in general, had experienced officers and that made their forces quite formidable.

In the end Montrose and Argyll are linked by the fact that both were betrayed by Charles II. Montrose launched a rather pointless campaign in 1650 which he knew was hopeless, and which was used by Charles to apply pressure to the Scots. When it inevitably failed and Montrose was captured, execution was inevitable. After the Scots were smashed by the New Model Army, Argyll sort of retired and attempted to rebuild his estates which had been ravaged by the war. After the Restoration he went to London to kiss hands, and was arrested for treason. He faced a lengthy trial in Edinburgh, packed with his enemies. Argyll’s defence was sunk by letters showing that he had informed on Scottish Royalists for the Cromwellian regime. He, too, was executed.

Fraser notes that it is impossible to understand seventeenth century politics without understanding the religion of the people involved. He also notes that the tensions between centralisers and the periphery continue to this day, particularly with reference to Scotland. Montrose, he suggests, saw the King and central government as a bastion against anarchy. Argyll saw central government as potential tyranny. It is always possible that both were right, to some degree.

When To Retire Gracefully

Oh dear. It is very difficult, I suspect, when writing a blog not, at some point, to offend someone. Not only that, but blogging, as with all social media, leaves a permanent record on the internet of all your blatherings. Thus, as some politicians, journalists and other people in the public eye have discovered, a few words dashed off without your usual care and attention can come back to haunt you.

I seem to have inadvertently upset M. Foy, of the Prometheus in Aspic blog. He feels that a post from last November, entitled Vive la Difference was a criticism aimed at him and/or his blog. While he (or rather, a post on the aforementioned blog) was mentioned, and quite prominently, admittedly, in the post, I was doing the ‘philosopher writing a book review’ sort of thing. I am sure you have seen the sort of thing – you read a review of a book and find that the words have little to do with the book in question. Philosophers, in my experience, do this rather a lot. They prefer to talk about their own view, rather than the views of the author. Thus, my post was sparked by the original, and not meant as a criticism.

Be that as it may, hurt feelings are hurt feelings, and I apologise for any impression of criticism which was present in the post. I shall not try to defend it. I do note that it was not the first time I have moaned about people (not M. Foy) laughing at the size of 6 mm figures and claiming impossibility to paint. I doubt it will be the last. I also note from the date of the post that I was probably donning emotional armour in preparation for my annual foray to a wargame show. Such things leave me rather depressed about my hobby, I admit. Finally, I hope the point of the post was that we, as wargamers, should be open to learning from each other. If that was not as clear as it could have been, then mea culpa. Still, an explanation is not a defence, and the apology stands.

I hope we can lay the matter to rest here. A hobby is a hobby; even considering waving handbags at each other at dawn is taking the whole thing too seriously. I hereby lay my handbag down.

*

I have started to wonder as to when wargame toys, of various types, might be laid to rest. In my second wave wargaming, I have been going for about twenty years or so, on and off, and have accumulated a fair quantity of stuff. Thus, as many of you may have noted, my "new" 'Wars of the Counter Reformation’ armies are old ones revived. Well, re-based, anyway. On the whole, I do not have a problem with them. I would concede that I could probably do a slightly better paint job on them now than I did all those years ago, but not sufficiently better as to warrant repainting them.

You might have noticed, from the photographs of ‘Whitby Fight’ a few weeks ago, that I have a range of buildings. Many of them are very old, Hovels, card ones. I recall the pain of cutting them out and sticking them,. Often, the pain was real, as you had to ensure that your knife was very sharp to cut them, and small pieces, fingers and sharp hobby knives are only asking for one outcome, really, and that involved blood (among other things, of course, but I do try to keep the blog family friendly).

Now, other buildings I possess are more recent (I think the Hovels buildings were copyrighted in 1980-something), and things have progressed. There are some very nice resin buildings around, and, over the years, I have acquired some of them as well. Even I can, often, make a reasonable paint job of them. They mix in reasonably well with the card stuff, and so I am not particularly bothered by any differences. In fact, the only thing that did surprise me was the light splash (I’m sure there must be a technical term for reflection in flash photography) which the card buildings gave, particularly the tower masquerading as Sneaton Castle. The inner part of that, where the battlements are, was white and proved a bit problematic to get a picture of.

Before digressing further, the point of what I am trying to ask is: when do we pension things off in wargaming? I am sure there are some gamers who are still happily using the figures they bought and painted four decades ago. Similarly, I have little doubt that many are busily buying and painting the very latest models which, it has to be said, have a lot more detail on them than even those of a few years ago.

As a further aside, I have sworn off buying the latest Baccus ECW range. Having seen them in real life, they are way too detailed for me to do them justice. At this rate I shall have to head for 2 mm, just to keep my painting efforts sane.

But the pensionable age of figures, terrain items and rule is a question I have not resolved. As I mentioned, I still recall making the Hovels buildings, and am reluctant, even at this distance in time, to relinquish them and their use. I am not claiming they are particularly good, or beautiful, or anything. But I made them and do not want to let them go (after all, they have mouldered in a cupboard for the last decade or so while I have sojourned in the ancients world). As with the buildings, so with the soldiers. I painted them. I do not need any (well, many) more. I continue to use them.

Rules, I think, seem to be a different issue. I have many rules of a certain age on my shelf. The wargame rule world seems to move on more quickly than casting technology. Rule sets also seem to multiply. I used to have a fairly comprehensive collection of ‘early modern’ rule sets. I doubt if I could afford such today. But I am not sure when I decide to pension a rule set off.

Further, over the last twenty years, historiography has certainly moved forward. My recent reading has suggested that a lot of things I thought I knew about warfare in the sixteenth century is probably wrong. My recourse, as some of you have probably worked out, is to write my own. But things will change again, and they too will be pensioned off.

So, is wargaming a hobby of constant renewal? A quest for the ‘perfect’ set of rules? A desire for beautiful figures of gorgeous terrain? How does it work for you?

The Return of the Abbeys Campaign

As many of you (if there are many, of course) might have noticed, my wargaming is nothing if not intermittent. This is usually because real life keeps breaking out, and that is also true, in spades, of the period from my last wargame (that is, the one where the Armada landed at Whitby) and now. However, the delays have not been entirely due to the exigencies of life, but also due to a decision I made when I started this round of linked battles.

The decision I made was that I would, so far as is possible, create suitable troops and terrain for each action. For the Armada landing scenario, I needed a bunch of rowing boats, my Armada ships to be rebased and, in some cases, repaired and a bunch of Spanish sword and buckler troops to be purchased, painted and based. That done, I found that the emotional investment had been quite high, and I was worried that the resultant battle would not live up to my imaginings, and the quantity of the work invested in it, particularly as the rule set was ‘experimental’. I needed some encouragement from the Estimable Mrs P to actually put the figures on the table.

In spite of all the anxieties, I enjoyed the game, even though, by many yardsticks, not much happened. The Spanish got ashore and the English ran away. Or rather, they made a tactical retreat. The English strategy for resisting Armada landing was never to fight them on the beaches, particularly. There are, in England, way too many beaches anyway.

My addled brain has, therefore, been working on the next action in the campaign, which, as I mentioned, is a Guisborough, where there was a priory. This was a large and wealthy place and was a centre for the rising against Henry VIII known as the Pilgrimage of Grace. As I read somewhere recently, the only mistake the leaders of the Pilgrimage made was to trust Henry VIII’s word as a king.

Fortunately (or, perhaps not, as we shall see) I have access to old maps. Guisborough in the 1840’s was a bit of a ribbon town, with the ruins of the Priory at one end, the parish church next to it, then the market place and houses. There is also a stream running from fishponds in the Priory Park (two thereof, presumably one for the Prior and one for the monks and lay brothers), to the south of the town and then round to join the river that runs to the north. Thus Guisborough is a bit of a pocket. The main road (before the by-pass) ran down from the hills, over the stream by a bridge at the western end of the park, into and through the town (turning left, or west) and then to another bridge over the stream, a bit above the confluence with the river.

A review of available terrain items suggested that another bridge was required. I did consider carrying on regardless and turning the first bridge into a ford, but that seemed to undermine my original decision to try to do things properly. Those of you who have seen the Yorkshire Tea advert will understand why this might be important.

So a bridge was purchased (from Leven Miniatures) and it now requires painting and basing. I already had a bridge, and that too needed basing; that is almost complete. I also suspect I need some stream and river bends to make the terrain work, and also a piece to turn a river into a stream, given the spans of the bridges are rather different. Of course, alongside the bridge a few extra suitable buildings were acquired, and they too will need painting and basing before action can be declared. I also need to consider Guisborough Priory. The tower of the church was knocked down in 1550, apparently, and fell through the roof of the nave, demolishing it. All that is left is the east end. I feel that I would like to represent it on the table, but cannot quite work out how at the moment.

This, plus the aforementioned real life, a job (which occasionally seems so surreal as not to warrant mention in the same breath as ‘real life’) and a research project have conspired to prevent any actual wargames being played. This has given time for my imagination to run riot, of course….

*

‘Someone to see you, my Lord.’

‘Who is it?’

‘He says his name is Bert Trousdale, my Lord.’

‘What?’

‘He says he is a militia captain from the next town.’

Don Pedro grunted. ‘Show him in.’

*

‘So, it is agreed then. On Monday next, you and your men will seize Hisborough Bridge and hold it, and we will come a relieve you and defeat any trained bands that remain.’

There was a rapid exchange of barbaric sounds between the Priest translator and Trousdale, with much nodding. Trousdale smiled, stood up and stuck out his hand. ‘Shake’ he growled.

Don Pedro allowed his hand to be pumped up and down. Trousdale bowed slightly, nodded, turned and left the tent. Don Pedro massaged his fingers.

‘Bring soap and hot water.’ The servant left the tent as well.

‘Can we trust him?’

The priest shrugged. ‘They are men of their word around here,’ he said, ‘so probably.’

*

Don Pedro looked at the scout. ‘Are you sure?’ he demanded.

‘Quite sure, my Lord. There are two bridges. One before the town and one after. The English army is in the town. The militia are at the bridge on the other side.’

‘Nombre de Dios,’ he mumbled. ‘Call a council of war.’

*

Of course, things are never as simple as they seem. There are two bridges. Trousdale is holding the one which is least convenient to the Spanish, but which is also least likely to get him hung as a traitor. So Don Pedro has to work out what to do about it. As a further complication it is possible that the militia (as opposed to the Yorkshire trained band army in the town) will not turn out to be as loyal to the Spanish Catholic cause as their captain believes; for that matter, it is not certain that Trousdale is either a militia captain or about to support the Spanish. It will all turn on some dice rolls when anyone asks.

Last time, someone (JWH?) asked for some orders of battle. For what they are worth, these are they:

Troops                  Spanish         English Home

Demi-Lancer         2                  1

Light Horse           1                  1

Pike                       4                  3

Bill                                             *

Shot                       4                  3

Bow                                           *

Skirmisher             1                 

Gendarme              1                 

Militia                                      4*

* Alternatives; The English home army may have 4 militia bases or up to 2 bill and 2 bow bases, the rest being militia.

For the Whitby scenario, the English had 4 militia bases. The Spanish converted their gendarmes, demi-lancers and pikes to sword and buckler men, on the basis that eighteen foot pikes and horses did not go well in rowing dinghies.  The Spanish light horse – mounted arquebusiers – were converted to foot skirmishers. The Spanish came ashore in two, six base, waves, separated by the time it took the boats to row back to ships and load the second wave. This was controlled by a die roll for each boat, but did not cause significant delays. Similarly, the boats rolled an average die to see if they drifted left (on a roll of two) or right (five). This did happen a bit but did not cause significant disruption. Nor, in fact, did cannon fire from the harbour, but that was because the English had a bad dice day. The Spanish troops also had to roll to disembark onto the beaches, but as they had a good dice day, it did not cause any delays. I think the scenario is rather better balanced than my play out of it…

For Guisborough I think the scenario might work quite nicely as a three player game, especially if the English think Trousdale is loyal, and the Spanish think he will be holding the near bridge for them. There being just the one of me, however, such decisions will all be done by dice.

Crocodile Infested Streams

If you look in some older wargame books, you will find some calculations as to how far a person can walk, across country in, say, fifteen minutes. This is then used as a basis for calculating how far a unit of troops can move in a similar amount of time. The answer is, of course, far further than a unit of troops would actually move in the given time. Thus is is massively reduced, along with some hand-waving sort of argument that, due to the requirement to keep in line, the troops actually had to move rather more slowly than individuals would.

Here, as my regular reader will know, we try not to do hand waving sorts of arguments, or, if we do (and we all hand wave from time to time) we do try to acknowledge that we are wafting our limbs around and look at the reasons for that. The point here, in terms of movement is, of course, that shifting five hundred men across the countryside in anything like a coherent manner is a whole lot more difficult than we might imagine. This applies even if the men involved are trained to do it.

I am starting to suspect that the dispersed nature of modern troops and warfare has a bigger impact on wargaming older periods than I imagined. It is a truism I have heard that, under pressure, people often tend to bunch up. Modern warfare make bunching up a disaster – a bigger target for weapons of all sorts is created. Thus a lot of training goes into making the soldiers move in a dispersed manner. It is safer. On the whole, of course, these considerations do not apply to anything much before the invention of modern high explosive artillery. Troops were in rather tight formations to aid command and control before the mid-nineteenth century (say; let’s not be picky).

Moving a battalion of infantry from the English Civil War across country is not an easy matter. Terrain is rarely entirely flat. Frequent halts have to be called in order to dress the lines. On the other hand, the accuracy of ranged weapons was low (for reasons I will come back to in another post, hopefully) so the slowness of the advance, and, for that matter, the density of troops, did not matter all that much.

Then there are other problems. A unit of pikemen, for example, needs coherence to be effective. Dispersed pike, for all the arguments I have occasionally seen to the contrary, are useless. On its own a pike is merely an eighteen foot lump of wood, slightly unmanageable. In my view, people who think that you could ‘fence’ with a pike have never tried hefting wood around. The power of pike is in the unity and order of the mass, not the individual. Hence, I suspect, the comment that you see in the sixteenth century and beyond, that to kill a pikeman is to murder an innocent man.

Terrain is rarely simple. Even our garden has folds in it, enough to cause a pike block to pause and redress its lines. Hedges are impassable, woods a disaster, although the same people who argue in favour of pike fencing also seem to think that pikes are perfectly capable of being used in a wood. And that brings me, roughly speaking, to an explanation of the title of this post.

In some of the Polemos rules, bases trying to cross streams have to roll. I forget what the criterion is, but they can, in fact, fail to cross the obstacle. This has caused some amusement, and comments along the lines of the title here – are there crocodiles in that stream?

At the end of the lane up which I live there is a stream or, in the local language, a beck. It has been tinkered with by humans over, I imagine, the centuries. Just last year, a whole load of work was carried out to reinforce the banks to stop them collapsing, manage the flow to stop it undercutting the banks and remove some trees, to stop leaves clogging it up in the autumn.  This is, then, a heavily managed landscape feature. Nevertheless, I would submit that five hundred people attempting to cross the stream would firstly, be thrown into some disorder themselves and, secondly, do a fair bit of damage to the banks.

On the face of it, a single person could cross it stream, although the banks are fairly steep, with the only problem being wet feet. A unit say eight deep is a different proposition, I suggest. By the time the fourth of fifth is clambering across, the banks would be collapsing into the water, the mud would be stirred up and, as troops with heavy equipment are more clumsy than your average hiker, a few, at least, would simply fall in (much to the amusement of their comrades, I imagine).

 This trouble is for a feature that is man managed, canalised. How much more difficulty would an unmanaged stream offer. The canalisation of the flow means that the banks are solid (more or less) and the flow is even. There are no bankside boggy bits or hidden pools. The undergrowth is cut down. And so on. It is quite possible to suppose that an ancient tribal unit, for example, could hesitate at such a crossing, or at least find that it takes a while. You might dispute the (I think) one in six chance of that happening, as in the Polemos rules, but it is really a bit hard to suppose that it is unlikely, that a unit will pass a stream with only a slight delay, as in most rules (at least, the ones I can remember).

Finally, of course, we should remember that the Scottish pike charge at Flodden was disrupted by a hidden ditch. The cohesion was lost, the units opened to the English bills. The slaughter was frightful, to the extent that most later sixteenth century Scottish armies refused to cross the border at all. Even small terrain features can have a big effect. The case of crocodile streams most recently commented on was a refight of the battle of the Sambre. The stream disrupted the Gallic attack. Perhaps a refight without the stream would be instructive (as would Flodden without the ditch). Caesar and the English could find life a lot tougher than they did with the terrain features present.