The Battle of Tewkesbury

Project Group: Mike Barnes, Michael Holmes, Laura Hunt, Shauna Ralph, Becky Turner

Our group project aims to identify whether the Gastons field in Tewkesbury played a major part in the Battle of Tewkesbury in 1471. The Battle of Tewkesbury was a vital battle in the Wars of the Roses, being one of the most significant battles from the time because it subsequently ended the war. Our goal is to determine whether the Gastons field was used in this battle, or if the battle took place elsewhere in Tewkesbury.

On 26 February 2018, we visited Tewkesbury as a group to visit the Gastons and surrounding fields from the Battle Trail. As well as this, we spent some time in the Heritage Centre to gain inspiration and learn how the town presents the history of the battle. We also visited Tewkesbury Abbey, which is believed to be a major area for where the soldiers fled to during the battle.

Whilst we were visiting the field, it soon became clear that, as a group, we are enthusiastic about archaeological findings. As a result, David Howell is planning to arrange a group dig for us to try to find any clues from the battle in order to help us determine whether or not this field was a site of battle. We believe this will be extremely useful for our project as finding material evidence of items from the battle would help us solidify our answer to the project as to whether the field was a major part in the battle.

As well as the trip, we meet regularly to discuss our findings. We discuss what we have found out during the week running up to our meetings and where we currently stand with our research. As well as discussing what we have discovered so far, we also discuss what we hope to have achieved by the time we meet up again the following week. Thus, this gives us a good overview of the progress of the group work and means we are not overloading ourselves. We also discuss what we want as the outcomes of this project and every week we discuss what we would like to see on the panels we are preparing for the project exhibition.