We are delighted to see that Wemian is being published again, and were invited to contribute an article to the first of the fresh volumes. Here is the article:
The Battle of Wem: The Dog That Didn’t Bark
Is there any point to which you would wish to draw my attention?
To the curious incident of the dog in the night time.
The dog did nothing in the night time.
That was the curious incident, remarked Sherlock Holmes.
-Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. Silver Blaze (1892)
Shrewsbury’s important battle of 1403 is memorialised with the closing scenes of a Shakespeare play and commercially-rewarding brown signs. Wem’s English Civil War battle of September 1643 has neither. This is a serious injustice which Wem needs to immediately remedy as far as a sign is concerned. For now, the 1643 battle event is only dimly remembered by this couplet:
The women of Wem and a few musketeers|Beat Lord Capel and all his cavaliers.
But what is actually being communicated in this rhyme? What might it mean if we can access some other learning perspectives? Is something sitting behind this that we can use to unlock a more complex identity and the opportunities that may sit with that?
********
Let us start with what we easily know from the sources. In September 1643, Wem declared for Parliament early in a fiercely Royalist country, one in which, in 1642 Charles I had made his temporary capital a few miles away in Shrewsbury months before. We also know the forces were grossly unequally matched. According to Pickering, serving with the Royalists, this was the extent of the royalist deployment:
3 cannon, 2 drakes, one great mortarpiece that carried a 30ln. bullet, had 120 odd wagons and carriages laden with bread, biskett, bare and other provisions and theire armye being formydable as consistynge of neer 5,000.
To that, the Parliamentarian force is meagre, and the situation chaotic: some of the guns on the ramparts are wooden dummies, local women have been dressed in red coats and exhibited on the church roof to confuse the enemy, the walls are not finished, the gates are off their hinges. In terms of actual enlisted soldiers, we are told there are only 40.
Forty soldiers and a chaotic (even slapstick) military setting against a well-armed force of nearly 5,000 – leaving aside how terrifying this must have been for the townsfolk, we ought to be able to easily guess how this shakes out… with a Royalist triumph?
That is not what happens!
What actually happens is this: the Royalist attackers formed up on one side, approaching Wem only from Soulton Road, and the commander, Lord Capel, light-heartedly smoked his pipe by where the cricket club now is.
Then they left for Shrewsbury, taking the quicker route via Palms Hill. The engagement took less than an afternoon and Wem was not taken. Hurrah for Wem’s garrison and the doughty Parliamentarians! A triumph under remarkable odd! Or is it that simple?
People like to analogize a seemingly obvious, but unnoticed point to Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes story of the dog that didn’t bark, quoted above. The apparently unseriousness of the Battle of Wem, and the improbably victors, should be taken more seriously. It is a non-barking dog.
Emerging scholarship at Soulton, points to an exciting explanation, which foregrounds Wem in our national story at a time emergency with a mysterious and important national work. Sir Rowland Hill, (Old Sir Rowland) publisher of the 1560 Geneva Bible and hero of As You Like It had put his library in Soulton. This library was a prize for both sides in an epistemological conflict about what the constitution was, and what God would sanction in politics: remember that the bible Hill publishes is the authority to execute Charles I.
If you shave away the more baroque explanations of what on earth as going on in Wem in October 1643, as Occam’s razor teaches to, we are left with the simplest explanation of those autumn days being this: Capel is in north Shropshire for something that is not Wem. This is for the excellent reason that the object of the engagement is Soulton and not Wem! Capel has put in a cordon west of the site of the Industrial Estate to protect an operation the mission of which is to scoops up Old Sir Rowland’s books and take them to the Royalist HQ and the scholars there, for they are vital and needed in the conflict more than guns and food.
Support for this can be found in three observations: (1) it is strongly recalled in culture that Old Sir Rowland had at least one copy of Magna Carter (he is holding one and pointing at his house at Soulton in his Hawkstone stature); (2) the contents of the remarkable Cotton Library which founds the British Library was the amassed by as family from nearby Alkigton, who were Old Sir Rowland’s Agents and their principle had more reasons to ammas these materials then they did; and (3) Soulton Hall was ransacked in the civil war and the family hid in the caves at Hawkstone for years during the commonwealth – why?
We can go further. We can actually see the Royalists are not especially interested in Wem as a military target in dates close to this: within a few months Prince Rupert passes a few miles west of Wem (still in Parliamentary hands), and says of it: ‘It was a crow’s nest that would not afford each of his men a piece of bread’. These shady comments about Wem (which the author certainly does not associate with) get a just reward when Shrewsbury falls to an attack coming from Wem and the Royalists lose the county.
Accept the above and Wem may claim to have been protecting the well springs of English liberty in 1643. Which is a very important thing to have been doing. Accept that and the absence of a brown sign is conspicuous and stunts the town’ opportunities.
********
As soon as a brown sign is up:
BATTLE OF WEM 1643
work should begin on getting sculpture of the remarkable and brave Women of Wem.
The county has funding for public art, and we have talented artists in Shropshire who are commissioned to support the national identity as they did in HM The King’s coronation last year. They should be supported to support out town’s identity work.Wem has courageous and mysterious identity to claim. And in that connection, what are those secret tunnels really about..?
With thanks for scholarly support from James D. Wenn.
