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If NO artifacts have ever been found at Battle, wouldn’t that be a strong indicator that the battle was elsewhere? And I know this is not an original idea, but it seems like the average Englishman can pretty much scrape the ground with a hoe and find something of historical importance.

I thought most of the real wealth of England still is owned by the descendants of Norman invaders. I’d be pissed off, too!

Maybe the whole Norman Conquest thing is a myth fabricated by Elizabeth and the Bushes to cover for the orbiting shape shifting reptilian overlords?

But then you’d have expected them to plant some artifacts at the purported site.

Everything started going down hill when the Normans showed up and started trashing the neighborhood.

Sweas, your remark about the chain mail clad women reminded me of this:

http://www.theonion.com/blogpost/many-civil-war-reenactments-sadly-are-still-not-ha-10865

Did the ancient Britons even have chain mail in Boadicea’s time? The Romans were still doing leather and metal armor in the early Empire, and I’m pretty sure the Britons couldn’t have ordered chain mail from Sears. (For one thing, as someone I knew in the Society for Creative Anachronism told me, Sears is always out of chain mail.)

Ah, but when it was in stock, Sears put a lifetime(sic) warranty on their Craftsyeoman chain mail, just like the warranty on their their Craftsman tools. Bring in a bloody chain mail doublet with a hole in the chest, and they’d give the widow a new one – no questions asked!

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Sigh. I forgot about html markup, silly me!
That was “resists the urge to quote Kipling–too obvious”

If watching 20 years of Time Team makes you an expert, then I’m an expert.

There are very few artifacts after an ancient battle because every thing is gathered for reuse or just stolen. There were few artifacts from the Battle of Bosworth which they no longer believe happened in Bosworth but close by. They determined this by reexamining the terrain and then looking for certain types of artifacts of which there were very very few. They determined where different types of weapons wd have been placed and then looking for ammo from that weapon, i.e., cannonball, arrowheads, shot, etc., in those areas which they found.

And tho they found very few artifacts, the professional archaeologists and historians determined it was enough to change their view as to the location of the Battle of Bosworth.

ps: they did an episode on the Battle of Hastings but I missed it.

The exact location of the Battle of Hastings is one of those nut-rich specialties that sell niche books. They’re getting might good with things like ground penetrating radar these days, though, so I’m sure some lucky nut will find the real thing eventually.

Boadicea was not so much a one-off as a special case, being a regnant queen of an appropriate age.

There was a loosely similar case in the Norman age: Sichelgaita, second wife of Robert Guiscard, the Norman leader in southern Italy. She accompanied him in battle on several occasions, wearing armor. At the battle of Dyrrhachium in 1081, she is credited with rallying the Norman center when it was driven back by a charge of the Varangian Guards (who were, according to some accounts, mostly Saxon exiles).

Unless ground penetrating radar picks up a mass grave, what wd they find from the Battle of Hastings? Again, almost all artifacts were retrieved for re use. The Battle of Hastings being 400 years older, gave people that much more time to scavenge. You’re in the antiquity biz — shouldnt you know the answers to all these questions, my little Anglo-Saxon flower?

Ric Fan @October 18, 2016, 12:34 am:
I thought most of the real wealth of England still is owned by the descendants of Norman invaders. I’d be pissed off, too!

By now, nearly all English people have some Norman ancestry.

That would include the Grosvenors, who in the 1700s bought a lot of what became central London, and are among the richest families in England, and the comparatively nouveau-riche de Havillands, whose patriarch started a successful aircraft company.

I’m no expert on the BofH, but I know they’ve relocated the site of Agincourt based on contemporary descriptions of the battle matching up with observed features in today’s landscape (ditches, ridges, that sort of thing). Some of which had been superficially obscured. That’s the sort of thing drones and other new techniques are getting good at.

That’s what they did with Bosworth Field II — found a field about 1000 kilometers away that matched the landscape descriptions and then found the supporting artifacts. It was a pretty interesting episode of Time Team. I gave it Two Trowels up!

That’s what they did with Bosworth Field II — found a field about 1000 kilometers away that matched the landscape descriptions and then found the supporting artifacts.

OK, I’m just an American who does not think in Metric, but 1000 Kilometers is well over 600 miles by my figuring. You can’t travel in a straight line in England for that distance, and still be in England.

I’m assuming a typo, but in that case where is the newly discovered battle site?

Chubby Saxons encased in suets of armor.