Hello everyone and welcome to the History of England episode 385, The Battle for London.

This time we heard that things had finally come to blows against all the odds. Charles's clever and

articulate appeals to rally to the cause of King Church and Social Order had begun to work.

His powerful magnates had brought together an army. On 23 October 1652, Charles and the

Earl of Essex had come to blows in the first major encounter of the English Civil War at Edge Hill,

normally accounted a score draw, and therefore worth three points in the Civil War pools,

but Charles had held the battlefield at the end of the day. The Carolean cop was at the top

of the Dung heap of war. Most importantly, the road to London lay open. We are going to see

in this episode what Charles makes of this golden opportunity. Before we proceed though, I have

something to say now I realise that many of you had had your fill of names and feel a little

overwhelmed by them and I am sorry for that. A bit. Almost inevitably, I am now going to infuriate

you yet further because there's going to be lots and lots of geography and place names,

and for those of you not born and bred in the place where Blake had hoped to build Jerusalem

among the dark, satanic mills, this could be a challenge. So, I will spend some time trying to

locate you in hopefully a more helpful way than saying, Kinton, you know, between Warric and

Bambury just off the Foss way. Not sure how I'm going to do that, but you can mark me at the end

of each episode. However, in the interests of being a good and helpful citizen of the pothos fear,

I have also placed a couple of maps on the internet at thehistrevingland.co.uk. There's a

smorgasbord of maps actually through the ages. If you go to thehistrevingland.co.uk,

forward slash blog, forward slash type, forward slash maps. Like you're ever going to remember that,

I'll put a link in the podcast post. Also, there is a stonking interactive map and

timeline at a site called historymaps.com. I mean, wildly good. You can get in and out and even

...