Talk:Clifton Moor Skirmish

Untitled

I have replaces the terms " right " and " left " with the terms west and east to avoid confusion. Terms such as right and left of course are subjective, depending on which way you are facing.Wizlop 13:40, 3 July 2007 (UTC)

A map would eb useful for this, if anyone has one.Wizlop 13:40, 3 July 2007 (UTC)

Hanoverian or British

I see there has been some to-ing and fro-ing about what to call the winning side.

Normally, as a loyal Brit, I would say, "They were British, of course. The soldiers who defeated the Jacobites weren't from Hanover, they were British". But in this case, it's a bit different. The fighting was between two armies, each supporting a man they considered to be the rightful king of the United Kingdom. In this context, "British" is ambiguous. Ok, we all know that the Jacobites were defeated, and were pretty much a lost cause all along, so we can tell which side is meant. But Charles' supporters were also British, and were fighting for Britain, as they saw it, against a usurping king from Hanover. In the circumstances, I support the retention of the label "Hanoverian". Maproom (talk) 22:49, 21 January 2008 (UTC)

Government losses

I'm correcting the section on casualties; the claims of 100+ government troops killed were rebel propaganda, not fact. Stuart Reid, in his "1745: A Military History", cites a 1746 newspaper account by a witness, as well as the register of the nearby parish church where the government dead were buried, as indicating ten dragoon privates were killed in the skirmish and four officers wounded. The parish register entry cited by Reid also indicates that another dragoon died several weeks later, presumably of wounds received. Winterbadger (talk) 18:19, 13 August 2010 (UTC)

Stanhope skeleton

Most of the body of this article seems to have been copied wholesale from the Paisley Tartan Army webpage on the battle, which in turn has copied it wholesale (including archaic spelling!) from James Browne's 1838 book "The Scottish nation: or, The surnames, families, literature, honours, and biographical history of the people of Scotland", only adding the section headers that whoever copied it into Wikipedia included.

Whether it's kosher to do that kind of copying (the *original* source, at least, is in the public domain) and whether it's a good idea to simply copy a 170-year-old text and uncritically add it to an encyclopedia is questionable.

But what's terrifically funny (to me) is that the Wikipedia "author" has copied over a comment about a skeleton found wearing tartan at Stanhope that "is believed to have been a Jacobite casualty of the skirmish". While the comment has been sourced to another page, it's also part of the Paisley Tartan Army page. And it shows remarkably bad geography, because Stanhope is not near Clifton, Cumbria, but near Clifton, County Durham, which is over 100 miles from where the skirmish took place!Winterbadger (talk) 19:03, 13 August 2010 (UTC)

Edits 07/01/15 (dates, uses of "British")

This was supposed to be a quick note to explain my edits. It has grown a bit. I'll cut it if asked to.

This article gave 19th Dec in the text and 18th Dec on the diagram. I "Googled" Clifton Moor, and the overwhelming majority said the 18th. So I checked the contemporary newspapers, and it was 18th. I have aligned the two dates in the article in favour of the 18th (without reference).

The article did not say which calendar it used; I put in a pre-note on that.

I also noticed a couple of inappropriate uses of "British".

The first was "the British Hanoverian government". Well, in colloquial usage, then and now, that is accurate and, ipse facto, arguably correct enough. But it is not formally correct, and it is using an informality that has connotations that are socially and politically dangerous. Allow me to explain.

In olden times, "Britain" was the anglicised form of "Britannia", the Roman name for the whole island group that was itself derived (it is thought) from an ancient Celtic name. The biggest island, Britannia Magna, is of course Great Britain. Over time, "Great Britain" got abbreviated to "Britain", and, more recently, through careless or uninformed usage, is thought by many to be a synonym for "England", and thence "British" for "English". There is a grotesque absurdity in this. In Dryden's King Arthur, "British" means the indigenous population, in contradistinction to the English (Saxons) who were troublesome invading immigrants. Yet I, whose ancestors have ploughed these islands since before any Roman saw them, and long before any Englishman had been heard of, was told by a really delightful Englishwoman that, because I was born in Glasgow, I am not British! No wonder there are Irish, who are far more British in the ancient sense than most Whitehall pin-stripees, who wish to have their island officially excluded from the British Isles archipelago, because careless use of "British" implies that their country is still the property of the Anglo-Saxon invaders.

The point of all that is that it is not good encyclopedic practice to use "British" in its vague and ambiguous colloquial incarnation, in place of the official term, especially when discussing intra-British conflict.

The second instance was "Since the commander of the British forces, the Duke of Cumberland". This one is much more cut-and-dried ... it was a civil war, and both sides were British (whether or not the word "British" has ever had all the baggage discussed above). They were the government troops, are called that in every history I have read, and now they are called that here. (I think am fairly impartial; while my family had no reason to love the Stuarts, and fought against them on the then rebel side at Bothwell Brig, the regiment of the family name served the government in the '45). Wyresider (talk) 18:18, 7 January 2016 (UTC)

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