15th century Battle of Bosworth's 'victory spot' moves two miles
29 Oct 2009, 1639 Hrs

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London, October 29 In a new study, researchers have sited the exact spot where the English kingdom was won in 1485 in the famous Battle of Bosworth, determining the location to be two miles away from the spot that was originally believed to be the position where victory was achieved.

The Battle of Bosworth brought an end to the middle ages and ushered in the Tudor Era in England.

According to a report in the Times, Glenn Foard, a battlefield archaeologist, stood on Ambion Hill in Leicestershire, next to the award-winning Bosworth Battlefield Heritage Centre, pointed at the distant church spire of Stoke Golding and declared an end to 500 years of arguments over the location.

"It's over there, two miles away," he said, beyond and below the church, off to the right a bit and spread over 250 acres of what is now flat farmland, crisscrossed by hedgerows, pasture and autumnal trees.

Foard, who has led a four-year, 1.3 million pounds investigation into the whereabouts of the fighting, is convinced that he has unearthed the proof.

In an unexpected and thrilling development for the archaeologists, that proof is in the form of 22 lead cannon and musket balls that dramatically reshape thinking about late medieval combat.

According to Foard, his team has discovered more lead artillery shot at Bosworth than has so far been recovered from all the other 15th-century and 16th-century battlefields in Europe put together.

The Bosworth discoveries range in size from musket balls up to a 7.2kg cannonball. They are distributed in two clusters and may have been fired by both sides.

Experts from various disciplines reviewed the scant original documentary evidence for the battle, reconstructed the landscape of the area from contemporary accounts, tracked the development of local place names, analysed soils and peat deposits and finally conducted an intensive archaeological survey of the likely sites using metal detectors.

The credentials of the Ambion Hill site were examined and dismissed along with Peter Foss's suggestion that it was fought on low-lying ground between the villages of Shenton, Upton, Stoke Golding, and Dadlinton and Michael K. Jones's theory that the battle was eight miles away in Warwickshire.

By March 1 this year, Foard's team of volunteer metal detectors had only one likely field left to survey and were no closer to identifying a new location with certainty.

Fortunately, the team found an artillery lead roundshot in that field and they concluded the area as the spot where the Battle of Bosworth was won. (ANI)

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