The Battle of Edgehill: The History and Legacy of the Opening Battle of the English Civil War

The outcome of the English Civil War was no doubt unthinkable to many across Europe before it actually happened, and the Battle of Edgehill represented the first sign that things might not go according to the typical plan. The tiny hamlet of Edgehill sits atop an escarpment in the parish of Ratley and Upton in Warwickshire, England, an unremarkable location in and of itself, like many others in Warwickshire. It attracts a few tourists, some of whom are on the lookout for ghosts. Some claim to hear cries of pain and terror, the clash of swords, cannon fire, and the lament of lost souls. The first report of such phenomena was made shortly before Christmas 1642 when a number of Edgehill inhabitants claimed to have seen two ghostly armies fighting in the sky. So strong and widespread did these claims become that King Charles I sent a commission to investigate. The commissioners supposedly witnessed the apparitions and were able to identify some of the combatants as participants in the Battle of Edgehill, which occurred three months earlier on October 23, 1642. This included Sir Edmund Verney, who lost a hand in the battle and was observed missing an appendage. The apparitions supposedly ended when villagers buried the corpses of soldiers who still lay on the battlefield, but people still claim to hear signs of the celestial battle 370 years later.

The enormous upheaval in English society in 1642 may very well have engendered such tales. For the simple villagers, it seemed as if heaven and earth had been rent asunder. After all, the whole concept of divinely ordained kings was that God had created the system and placed a king over England, making the monarch, Charles I of the House of Stuart, God’s viceregent. But that year, the unthinkable happened when the king and Parliament broke with each other, raising their standards of war. The divinely appointed order was broken, and the result was bloodshed, terror, and chaos.