How did the landscape shape Civil War battle Naseby 1645?

Mandy, can we begin by getting a picture of the landscape of the English Midlands at the time of the civil wars in the 17th century? While the topography of the area isn't changed, the landscape would be unrecognisable today.

Please can you describe it?

Yeah, I mean it's true to say that the bones of the landscape, the hills and the valleys, they're still there to be observed and experienced just as they were back then.

But if we were transported to Northamptonshire in 1645, we'd find the landscape to be totally unrecognisable to our modern eyes.

Naseby, like many of the surrounding parishes, was divided into three vast open fields and in the case of Naseby, quite a large parish, each of these fields was about a thousand acres.

The agriculture was largely dedicated to the growing of arable crops and that's to feed both the village population and any livestock that they were keeping.

Each of these enormous open fields had its own substructure.

It was divided into furlongs, and a furlong is about 10 acres, more the size of what we'd think a modern field to be.

And each of those furlongs was further subdivided into a number of individual strips.

So any individual in the parish, farming in the parish, his land holdings were made up of these strips and they were intermingled in each of the furlongs in one field and again in furlongs in the other open fields.

When a field was cultivated, it was ploughed by a team of oxen or horses and it was more often horses by the time of the Civil War.

And they were pulling this single direction, simple, single mouldboard plough.

So the team would start at the outside of a strip and work inwards in a clockwise direction, if you can picture that.

And so the earth would be piled continuously to the right by the mouldboard.

And the result of this was the characteristic ridge and furrow pattern that we see fossilised nowadays in some pasture landscapes, and that includes parts of Naseby.

this ridge strip has got a sinuous curve, which is a sort of reversed S shape.

And it's that shape because as you near the edge of your strip, you had to start turning the plough team to give you room to go along the headland and kind of turn around and come back the other way.

So these ridges, they served multiple purposes.

Obviously, they delimited the strips.

You could see, you know, this is Adam's strip, this is John's strip.

But they also provided what drainage the fields had because the ridges were always positioned to run downhill.

So the furrows would act like drains.

One of the most striking features of this landscape to modernise would be the absence of hedges and trees.

It's nothing like the patchwork appearance that we're used to, particularly in sort of middle and rural scenery nowadays.

And it was also all open access.

Mandy, can we begin by getting a picture of the landscape of the English Midlands at the time of the civil wars in the 17th century? While the topography of the area isn't changed, the landscape would be unrecognisable today.

Please can you describe it?

Yeah, I mean it's true to say that the bones of the landscape, the hills and the valleys, they're still there to be observed and experienced just as they were back then.

But if we were transported to Northamptonshire in 1645, we'd find the landscape to be totally unrecognisable to our modern eyes.

Naseby, like many of the surrounding parishes, was divided into three vast open fields and in the case of Naseby, quite a large parish, each of these fields was about a thousand acres.

The agriculture was largely dedicated to the growing of arable crops and that's to feed both the village population and any livestock that they were keeping.

Each of these enormous open fields had its own substructure.

It was divided into furlongs, and a furlong is about 10 acres, more the size of what we'd think a modern field to be.

And each of those furlongs was further subdivided into a number of individual strips.

So any individual in the parish, farming in the parish, his land holdings were made up of these strips and they were intermingled in each of the furlongs in one field and again in furlongs in the other open fields.

When a field was cultivated, it was ploughed by a team of oxen or horses and it was more often horses by the time of the Civil War.

And they were pulling this single direction, simple, single mouldboard plough.

So the team would start at the outside of a strip and work inwards in a clockwise direction, if you can picture that.

And so the earth would be piled continuously to the right by the mouldboard.

And the result of this was the characteristic ridge and furrow pattern that we see fossilised nowadays in some pasture landscapes, and that includes parts of Naseby.

this ridge strip has got a sinuous curve, which is a sort of reversed S shape.

And it's that shape because as you near the edge of your strip, you had to start turning the plough team to give you room to go along the headland and kind of turn around and come back the other way.

So these ridges, they served multiple purposes.

Obviously, they delimited the strips.

You could see, you know, this is Adam's strip, this is John's strip.

But they also provided what drainage the fields had because the ridges were always positioned to run downhill.

So the furrows would act like drains.

One of the most striking features of this landscape to modernise would be the absence of hedges and trees.

It's nothing like the patchwork appearance that we're used to, particularly in sort of middle and rural scenery nowadays.

And it was also all open access.