The one thing upon which there was broad agreement between almost all authors and map makers since the sixteenth century, is that the battle took place somewhere in the area between the villages of Sutton Cheney, Shenton, Dadlington and Stoke Golding. Starkey’s conjecture of 1985 broke this consensus. The argument was reworked and elaborated by John Austin and Michael Jones, then published by Jones in 2002 (Figure 1.18). This provides a quite different location for the battlefield, which was suggested as lying somewhere to the east of Atherstone, more than 6 km from the traditional location.⁵² King Dick’s Hole, which is first recorded in the nineteenth century, was suggested as marking the approximate location of Richard’s camp on 21 August, but Jones could only offer a very vague idea of the area within which the battle was fought. This was said to lie within the townships of Fenny Drayton, Witherley and Atterton, where alluvial evidence does indeed suggest an area of impeded drainage that might have contained the marsh recorded by Vergil.

Three key pieces of evidence were presented in support of this site. First is the description of Richard having camped near to Merevale and the second is the naming of the event as the battle of Merevale. Both derive solely from the Crowland Chronicle Continuation and there is a straightforward explanation for this that does not require the wholesale transfer of the battle. The author of the Chronicle and his intended audience will have been more familiar with substantial monastic properties, especially one like Merevale which lay close to a major national route like Watling Street, than with an obscure small town.⁵³ Significantly, none of the secular accounts refers to the battle as having been fought near Atherstone but a number do state that the battle was fought near to Bosworth, a small town of no greater significance in the fifteenth or sixteenth century. The Crowland description is not of course exceptional in providing a locational reference some distance from the actual battlefield. Other sources give similarly vague information, such as ‘Redemore near Leicester’,⁵⁴ while the Castilian report refers to the action being near Coventry.⁵⁵ Even the comment from Rous, that the action was fought on the Warwickshire/Leicestershire border, could be reconciled with the traditional location for the Registered Battlefield boundary extends to within 3 km of the county boundary.⁵⁶

The third element in the Jones hypothesis is the payment of compensation made by Henry VII to Merevale Abbey and to nearby townships, because they sustained losses at the time of the battle.⁵⁷ Jones distinguishes between the payments to the Abbey of Merevale for crops damaged by ‘our people coming towards our late field’ and the losses of the townships of Mancetter, Witherley, Atterton and Fenny Drayton which specifies ‘at our late victorious field’. The former he attributes to the depredations of quartered troops but the latter he interprets as representing losses during the battle itself.⁵⁸ In contrast Goodman, Foss and others interpreted these payments as recompense for the losses in grain and corn suffered by the villages as Henry’s army foraged for food in the area on the night before the battle.⁵⁹ It is difficult to link these payments to the interpretation of the battle as suggested by Jones as they cover such a wide area, extending both sides of Watling Street and including land in Atherstone, which is on the other side of the river from their suggested battlefield. Most significantly, when the troop movements suggested by Jones are superimposed it is seen that several of the townships are actually wholly avoided, including Fenny Drayton which received one of the highest payments.

Jones accepted that Redemore had been accurately located by Foss. Thus, in order to sustain his argument, Jones claimed that this naming of the battle derived from where the dead were buried not where the action was fought. The bodies, he argued, had been carried back with the army on its march to Leicester and buried at the first suitable location where there was a chapel.⁶⁰ Jones claimed that ‘what was being commemorated was not where the battle was fought but the place where the dead were buried afterwards. And a burial site could be many miles distant from the actual battlefield.’⁶¹ No documented examples of such practice, which would involve an army carrying many hundreds of bodies for 5–6 km to a place of burial, have been reported from other battlefields. Jones accepts that normally the bodies of just a handful of the nobility would be transported from the field for special burial, yet he provides no explanation why Henry would have moved the Bosworth slain en masse to, of all places, the small chapelry of Dadlington, even if it was on the army’s line of march to Leicester.⁶² Indeed later he accepts that burials were normally made in close proximity to the action, arguing from local tradition that Bloody Bank, recorded in 1763 in Atherstone, was where other bodies had been buried.⁶³ A mound adjacent to the Fen Lane to the north east of Fenny Drayton is also identified as a possible burial mound of the slain, though this had already been demonstrated in the 1960s to be simply a windmill mound.⁶⁴

Jones’s argument is easily countered. This is because the battle is named the Field of Redemore in the report to the York City Council on 23 August, by someone probably present with Richard’s army at the battle.⁶⁵ The bodies will not have been buried until after this person, or his informant, left the field. The name Redemore is therefore the most immediate record of the battle and gives us a topographical clue as to the location of the battle that relates to the action itself, not the burial of the dead.

Another difficulty with the Jones hypothesis is its requirement that by the 1570s, after less than a century, local memory of the exact place of battle had been lost, allowing it to be transferred to a site of burial miles from the battlefield. This seems improbable, not least because Saxton’s map was produced under the patronage of the house of Tudor and the battlefield, where the dynasty was founded, is the only one he shows in his whole Atlas. Jones also claimed that when Henry VII visited Merevale in 1503 and gave money for stained glass there to celebrate his victory it was because of the abbey’s proximity to the battlefield. It is as likely to be in recognition that Henry was quartered there on 21 August 1485 and prayed there that evening or on the morning of the battle. A similar explanation can also be made for the claim of the Abbot of Merevale for the ‘rights’ of the lordship of Atherstone in ‘remembraunce of youre late victorious felde and journey’.⁶⁶ Other arguments are equally insecure, such as the later references to the battle having been fought amongst the towns known as ‘the Tuns’ – Atherstone, Fenny Drayton and Atterton. This tradition accords just as well with Saxton’s location between Shenton, Dadlington and Sutton Cheney.