Edge Hill Phantom Armies: the King’s Commission of 1643

Reviewed by Josh N · Updated August 25, 2026 · How we verify

Few English ghost stories carry an official seal, but the Edge Hill phantom armies do. In 1643, after printed accounts of ghostly sightings began circulating, Charles I sent a royal commission to this escarpment in southern Warwickshire, and its members reported seeing two spectral armies fighting in the sky above the battlefield. That single episode has kept the ridge on every list of haunted British places ever since.

Edge Hill itself is an escarpment, while Edgehill is a hamlet, both in the civil parish of Ratley and Upton in the Stratford-on-Avon District. At Ratley the escarpment rises to 219 m above sea level and 112 m above nearby Radway, and it sits within 300 metres of the Warwickshire border with Oxfordshire.

Why the Armies Met Below the Escarpment

The battle of Edge Hill was fought on Sunday 23 October 1642, the first major battle of the English Civil War, between the Royalist forces of Charles I and the Parliamentarian army under the Earl of Essex. The King’s army began the day on the plateau above the scarp, with Parliament’s front line roughly 2,200 yards away.

The topography dictated everything. From the edge, the ground drops steeply, levels out, then rises again towards Battleton Holt, with the Oaks and Graveground Copice a little beyond. Parliament’s army was drawn up across the latter two. The King’s forces had to come down from the escarpment if they wanted a fight at all, because the slope was far too steep for Essex to contemplate attacking the Royalists while they held the edge. Visitors expecting a wooded ridge should note that at the time of the battle there were far fewer trees.

The outcome settled nothing. The battle was inconclusive, with both sides claiming victory, and it took several more years and many more battles before the Parliamentarians won the war. Edge Hill also gave its name to that first battle, in which the ridge was a prominent feature.

Thomas Jackson’s Pamphlet and What the Commission Claimed

The haunting entered the record within months of the fighting. Reports of ghostly sightings were published by a printer named Thomas Jackson, and in 1643 the King responded by sending a royal commission to the site. Those commissioners claimed to have seen two phantom armies fighting in the sky above them.

It is worth being precise about what that does and does not establish. The commission is a documented response to a printed claim, not proof of anything supernatural. Seventeenth-century pamphleteering was a political trade, and a spectral re-enactment of a battle the King’s men had failed to win outright carried obvious propaganda value for whoever chose to interpret it. What survives is the claim itself, made by named men on royal authority, which is more than most apparitions can offer.

Sanderson Miller’s Castle Inn at Edgehill

The hamlet has one public house, and it is an eccentric one. The Castle Inn is built of local Hornton Stone and dates from the 1740s, to designs by Sanderson Miller (1716 to 1780). It is controlled by the Hook Norton Brewery. Anyone walking the ridge will find it the obvious fixed point in an otherwise thinly built landscape.

Ironstone Workings Around the Ridge

The ground here has been worked as well as fought over. The area around Edge Hill has been quarried extensively for Jurassic ironstone since the 11th century. Iron ore was later quarried and carried on the Edge Hill Light Railway to the Stratford-upon-Avon and Midland Junction Railway near Burton Dassett, an industrial layer that shaped the fields visitors now cross.

What People Say They See Above the Battlefield

The reported phenomena at Edge Hill are unusually consistent for a site of this age, and unusually singular: not footsteps or cold spots, but whole armies. The 1643 accounts describe two phantom forces engaged in the sky above the field, essentially a replay of the fighting staged overhead. These are reported experiences rather than verified events, and the surviving evidence is testimony gathered on the King’s instruction rather than anything independently corroborated.

Walking Edge Hill and the Battle Ground

The escarpment and the hamlet are open country crossed by public routes, and the narrow wood on the scarp in the south-east overlooks the lower slope and the plain on which the battle was fought, which makes it the best place to read the ground. The battle lines ran from roughly grid reference SP346485 to SP367498 on the Parliamentarian side, and from SP349472 to SP376491 for the King’s forces between the end of the spur at Knowle End and Brixfield Farm. Bring boots and a map: the interest here is landscape rather than exhibits, and the drop below the edge is steep enough to explain, better than any account can, why the Royalists had to come down.

Address: Edgehill, Ratley and Upton, Stratford-on-Avon District, Warwickshire

See Edge Hill for Yourself

Sources

• Echoes of war still surround Edgehill
• OS map
• The Castle at Edgehill
• The Castle Inn
• Ghostly Battle of Edgehill
• Wikipedia: Edge Hill, Warwickshire

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