‘We are told by our historians, of “a great marsh, that Henry was obliged to pass, though now drained by cultivation.” This is another mistake; there neither is, nor ever was one, or any obstruction, but the rivulet mentioned before, which a man might easily jump over.’²⁹

In this Hutton is clearly correct, or at least in so far as Sutton Cheney open field was concerned. Though one may question many aspects of the interpretation presented by Hutton and Nichols, they did see Ambion Hill before parliamentary enclosure changed it forever. This is one of the few things of which later authors should have taken note from the 1813 book. It would have helped them to avoid the wildest excesses of fancy in creating marshes that, as we will prove, never did exist on or around Ambion.

It is difficult to establish on what evidence many of Hutton’s or Nichols’ conclusions were based, but where occasionally stated it is seen to be spurious. This is most obvious with their interpretation of the location of the camps of the protagonists. Thus, they have Richard in the area for several days before the battle and provide identification of the camps using archaeological evidence of various types, all of which is likely to have a very different origin.³⁰ As we have seen, they also identify the site where Richard died, which they pinpoint as a very small patch of boggy ground in a narrow meadow to the south-east of Ambion Wood.³¹ While some key evidence is discarded, like the substantial marsh recorded in the primary sources and discussed by earlier historians, other evidence is accepted if it can in some way be woven into their story. Thus, having fixed the location of the main action and Richard’s death, they then have Richard’s troops fleeing south westward towards Stoke, so they can relate this to the apparent discovery of battle finds in that township and the location there of Crown Hill.³²