Teaching GCSE History: Changing Warfare (Edexcel)

This SHP option, offered by Edexcel only, builds on the success of the A2 paper for which colleges such as Frome Community College have created some excellent resources.  For materials on the Crimean, Boer and First World War go to their site.

Edexcel have produced their own scheme of work which might serve as a helpful reference point for planning and developing your own lessons.  As I observe more live lessons I will naturally post the best practice I have seen as soon as possible.  Mark Battye the energetic subject officer for Edexcel history now runs a forum on which he has posted several invaluable documents for schools to use as the plan for the new course which started in September 2009.  Here is the link to sample activities from the Teacher’s guide.

Victory at last in the battle to identify Bosworth Field (The Times 29.10.09)

The discovery of lead musket shot and cannonballs helps to identify the site after 500 years of uncertainty.

According to Glenn Foard who has spent four years and over £1million of local and national grants looking for the definitive proof, he has now found it!  The evidence comes in the form of 22 lead cannon and musket balls.  Being larger than any previously recovered hoard of artillery shot from all the other 15th and 16th battlefields in Europe put together is only one claim to fame. The hoard also predates by ten years the earliest hard evidence for cannon being used as mobile battlefield weapons. 

Because the finds are lead, not rusty iron, we can work out what pressure they were fired under and what they hit when they landed.  Not only were the Bosworth discovery items numerous and well-preserved, they were also heavy, some being 7.2kg

So what is the real importance?

According to Steve Walton, a specialist in military artillery at Pennsylvania State University, “the standard military history says that artillery becomes mobile when the French invade Italy in 1494-5.”  As Bosworth took place in August 1485, Foard is suggesting that we need to reconsider the chronology we teach to students. 

What evidence has been used to support the latest discovery?

• Reconstructions of the landscape from written accounts
• Local place names
• Soil analysis (in the search for the 15th century marsh that played a crucial role on the day)
• Intensive archaeological survey of sites using metal detectors

All without the help of Tony Robinson and geophys!

Does it really matter?

According to Michael Jones’ book Bosworth 1485: Psychology of a Battle, the year 1485 represents the ending of a millennium of medieval history and the opening of a new chapter in England’s development. Possibly!

Of course, public interest centres on Shakespeare’s Richard III and the murder of the princes in the Tower.  Revisiting history’s good and bad guys is part of what we do in school, but far less crudely than the media does.  This discovery gives us all an opportunity to discuss with students the provisionality of history and the need to be on the look-out for those who seek to spin the past