Bloody Meadows

Investigating Landscape of Battle

Battles, as events, are a major focus of military history in all periods, and battlefield sites are increasingly being taken up as part of the nation's cultural heritage. "Bloody Meadows" goes behind the particular discoveries revealed by site excavation and any information that the landscape may reveal about the sequence of events in battle. By investigating the places themselves it shows that we can develop an insight into the minds of those who fought in the past and into some of our own assumptions and expectations about war. The book reveals differences in landscape type between battlefields from the tenth to nineteenth century in Britain, Belgium, France, Spain and Portugal. It shows a clear shift in landscape preference, especially from a medieval preference for high ground near towns to a later one for low ground away from towns; in the nineteenth century this changed to a preference for spaces containing a number of distinct types of features: settlements, high and low ground and watercourses. Ultimately, the authors ask what it means for these sites to have been remembered as significant places for national heritage and what we can learn from them about the nature of war.