Talk:First Battle of Newbury

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Good articleFirst Battle of Newbury has been listed as one of the Warfare good articles under the good article criteria. If you can improve it further, please do so. If it no longer meets these criteria, you can reassess it.
Article milestones
DateProcessResult
June 20, 2011Good article nomineeListed
Did You Know
A fact from this article appeared on Wikipedia's Main Page in the "Did you know?" column on June 5, 2011.
The text of the entry was: Did you know ... that the First Battle of Newbury has been described as "both the longest battle of the English Civil War and the one that historians have found the greatest difficulty in describing"?
On this day...Facts from this article were featured on Wikipedia's Main Page in the "On this day..." column on September 20, 2020, and September 20, 2022.

Result not decisive[edit]

I have to quibble with the result being listed as "Decisive Parliamentarian Victory". The battle itself was pretty much a draw, although the Royalists failed in their objective and Essex won the aftermath. I would have thought that a better description would be "Tactically Inconclusive. Strategic Parliamentarian Victory." As the talk is pretty quiet, I'll leave it for a while before I change it, to allow for counter-arguments here. Tigerboy1966 (talk) 23:24, 21 June 2011 (UTC)[reply]

That works, but I wouldn't go for "tactically inconclusive". Essex's tactical objective was to get the royalists out of the way. Charles's tactical objective was not to get out of the way, strategic objectives obviously being "then we can get back to safety" and "then we can destroy the last Parliamentarian army in Britain" respectively. By grinding Charles down, Essex also won the statistical victory of preventing effective chase - by being ground down, Charles failed to keep essex in check. Ironholds (talk) 01:33, 22 June 2011 (UTC)[reply]
We could simply be a bit more free with the terms so as to reduce confusion; 'Royalist failure to destroy Parliamentarian army, Parliamentary army succesfully retreats to London'. Maybe this or a variation of this? Omegastar (talk) 19:49, 29 February 2012 (UTC)[reply]
Works for me! Ironholds (talk) 23:27, 29 February 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Image[edit]

The view shown with this article is of the battlefield of the 2nd Battle of Newbury taken from Donnington Castle - and is not relevent to this article. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Newburychap (talkcontribs) 14:29, 27 February 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Result in infobox[edit]

I've removed "Decisive" and the bullet points from the infobox result parameter in the infobox. Anything other than a simple "X victory" or a "See aftermath" link to the section in the article where the result is discussed if there is no consensus in the sources on the victor is deprecated by WP:MILMOS#INFOBOX and Template:Infobox military conflict. I would also point out that, per MOS:LEAD, "The lead serves as...a summary of its most important contents" and "Apart from basic facts, significant information should not appear in the lead if it is not covered in the remainder of the article" yet there is no discussion of the decisiveness or otherwise of the battle in the main body of the article. Factotem (talk) 08:52, 12 April 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Sections on Bristol, Gloucester etc[edit]

The level of detail provided for these elements seems unnecessarily detailed - it nearly doubles the length of the article and could be covered in two paragraphs. Robinvp11 (talk) 16:57, 19 January 2021 (UTC)[reply]