It sounds like something from The Gashlycrumb Tinies, doesn’t it, right before “N is for Neo who Thought he was God”. But Sir Marmaduke Constable was a real person who survived the battles of Bosworth and Flodden, only to die when he swallowed a frog in a glass of water.

That is one of the best things in the Bosworth Battlefield Heritage Centre. There’s not much that remains of the Battle of Bosworth. In fact there is so little left that they put the monument and the museum in the wrong place. It was only after much detective work and thousands of miles of metal detectoring that the real battlefield was discovered a couple of miles away, closer to the Dog and Hedgehog than the Richard III sundial.

I’ve described the Battle of Bosworth before in this blog, so I won’t go over all the strategy and treachery again. Let’s just say that Richard III came by the throne under suspicious circumstances, and Henry VII had an even worse claim. The museum tries to explain.

Check out the Woodvilles and Greys, bottom left: “Lancastrians turned Yorkist then confused”. A lot of the Wars of the Roses was like that.

There are lots of reproductions and interactive stuff in the museum.

There’s even a fake skull, so they are trying to be a real museum.

You can try on a chainmail vest (bloody heavy, much heavier than the plate armor) or look at the result of experiments with armor-piercing arrows.

The conclusion, by the way, is that even if the arrows didn’t make it through the armor, the blunt force trauma would probably kill you anyway. Longbows were vicious. But there weren’t just longbows at Bosworth. There were guns as well, and the metal detectors turned up many lead cannonballs from the battle.

Early cannon balls would bounce and roll along on dry ground. I wonder if the decision to fight the battle around a patch of marsh was as much intended to reduce the effectiveness of cannons as much as it was to impede cavalry? Richard probably had more of both of those than Henry did.

The star of the exhibit is this little badge about an inch long.

It’s a boar, the symbol of Richard III, and was probably worn by one of his entourage. Was the location where it was found the place where Richard was hacked down?

We arrived at the non-battlefield by the Battlefield Line Railway, which sadly today was running vintage diesel rather than steam trains.

They also had a vintage British Rail attitude to punctuality, so all in all it was a very 1960s railway experience. I didn’t dare check the station cafe in case there was a dried and curling three day old ham sandwich on display there.