Battle of Newbury Part 2

The first part of this series of articles can be found here

In this feature I am going to share my thoughts on the forces mustered at the Battle of Newbury

The Forces

According to the research I have conducted both sides were evenly matched with 14,000 men aside. 

However the Parliamentarians had more foot and the Royalists more horse. The table below illustrates the estimates provided from a variety of sources.

	Foot	Horse	Total
Parliament	8000	6000	14000
Royalist	6000	8000	14000
Total	14000	14000	28000

Using the Orders of Battle listed on the BCW website and supplemented by the Osprey book of the battle of Newbury I have etablished that the following number of regiments were fielded by each side.

Our game will feature every single one of these regiments/units

	Foot Regiments	Horse Regiments	Total
Parliament	21	16	37
Royalist	23	18	41
Total	44	34	78

Despite having fewer infantry the royalists had more foot regiments so be default there regiments will need to be smaller. This is illustrated in the table below.

	Average Regiment Size Regiments	Horse Regiments
Parliament	381 men	375 men
Royalist	260 men	444 men
All Force Average	318 men	411 men

I then had to estimate the size of each regiment present and my best resource was the the muster rolls from the BCW website.

Source: https://wiki.bcw-project.org/parliamentarian/foot-regiments/start

For example:

Skippon’s Regiment of Foot (Parliament) in 1643 had a muster of 527 men in August 1643 (1 month before the battle) . As this is significantly greater than the average foot regiment size of 381 it has been designated as a LARGE unit.

Where possible every regiment has been checked for strength and the rating of Small, Standard of Large has been given. In the event that no records exist for strength I have used the average for the respective army.

This has created the following ratings for forces:

Please note these have been tweaked to get the final counts correct but still maintain the correct number of regiments.

A full order of battle for each side is listed below.

The following units are designated in the game

Foot Regiment (this includes Pike & Shot)

                Standard Shot & Pike

                Commanded Shot

Large units will be denoted by a mix of Pike and Shot as 32 man units (eg 16 pike & 16 shot), Medium as 24 man units and small 16 figure units

Cavalry Units

                Royalist Cavalry (Galloper rules)

                Parliamentarian Cavalry (Caracole Rules)

                Parliament have one unit of Currassiers

                Dragoons

Large Cavalry Units will be illustrated as 8 figures, standard as 6, small as 4

Artillery

                Light Guns

                Medium Gun

Royalist Forces

Parliamentary Forces

The next step was to create cards for each of these regiments with the relevant information on every unit. For consistency purposes if the card has an Orange boarder it is a Parliamentarian unit and Blue denotes Royalist

All the cards have been created using powerpoint and then laminated for play.

example of Royalist Infantry

example of Parliament Cavalry

In my next article I'll cover the commanders and unit deployments

part 3 can be found here