PRIMARY SOURCES

There are a substantial number of contemporary accounts of the battle, but the majority are from the royalist perspective. Edgehill is one of relatively few battles of the war for which we have a contemporary plan, though in this case only the royalist deployment is depicted. It was one of a set of plans of battles in which Prince Rupert had a senior command, produced for him some years after the conflict by Bernard de Gomme. A copy of the de Gomme plan and transcripts of most of the contemporary accounts of the battle are given in Young (1976). Extracts are to be found online in the English Heritage report.

SECONDARY WORKS

By far the most significant work remains that by Young (1976), who provides transcripts of almost all the significant contemporary accounts, detailed information on the composition of the two armies, together with the most detailed discussion of the battle itself. For a shorter and far better illustrated discussion in an accessible and very readable format see Roberts and Tincey (2001), who also provide an excellent brief overview of the armies and their arms and equipment. This is a good complement to Young, 1976, but has enough detail to stand alone. The latter however has one major flaw, the absence of sensible maps showing the deployments and action against a modern or historic map base.

The various significant studies of the battle by Young, Burne, and others show somewhat different deployments, both in the formations and in the location within the landscape. By far the most useful discussion of the battle formations is in Roberts & Tincey who review various alternative deployment methods used by different European commanders, though the detail of the deployment that they present is open to dispute. Indeed this is true of all current interpretations because they fail to adequately address the issue of the historic landscape as the context of the battle. This is a problem that the ongoing Edgehill Survey is intended to address through a detailed investigation of the historic terrain and of the archaeology of the battle.

The main sources used in preparing the account on these web pages were the English Heritage battlefield report, Roberts & Tincey, Young, and Burne.