Identifying the enemy.

[ochoin]

The ECW must have been a nightmare. Arms & formations were basically the same. Your enemy could be wearing the same colour coat as you, he might speak the same language as you & unit flags weren't necessarily very different from the other sides. AFAIK there aren't many "friendly fire" stories but it must have been not uncommon.

I am led to believe the accepted wisdom of partisan-coloured sashes (scarves, evidently) is incorrect.

Certainly, you could call out a slogan such as, "God and the Covenant" etc. to show your alignment. Otherwise, field signs must have been very important.

With my ECW armies, I have tended to have the scarves of Covenanter officers in mid-blue & those of my E. Royalists in red, wrong though this might be. I have also tried to incorporate unit field signs were possible eg Sir Henry Bard's RoF sport white feathers and scarves which distinguishes them from other, red-coated units. All this is for me, the wargamer rather than me, the amateur historian.

I am tempted to include some mechanism in the rules we use (Victory Without Quarter) to allow some confusion & friendly fire.

donald

[tim.w]

You just had to worry about your red sash fading to orange!

[ochoin]

The red sash/orange sash (scarf) is actually a myth.

donald

[BaronVonWreckedoften]

I am led to believe the accepted wisdom of partisan-coloured sashes (scarves, evidently) is incorrect.

Hmmm, it's a bit like "clan tartans were a purely Victorian invention"; as such, they were, but almost every clan either owned or had access to, a weaving mill that produced a number of set (no pun intended) patterns that were used by the owning clan or its allies to whom it rented "loom time", so there were one or more setts that were "distinctive" to a specific clan.

Sashes - more properly scarves - tended to be adopted by officers, since they were less likely to wear actual uniform clothing, in the less common (I won't say rare) instances when it was issued, as they liked to strut their stuff in their Sunday finest, not to mention being clad head-to-toe - or groin at least - in armour, buff coats and the like. Partly influenced by service on the Continent, "factions" would adopt a particular colour: eg the Eastern Association used tawny (orange) as it was an "Essex" colour; Fairfax and the Northern Association had blue; Waller, based on a portrait, appears to have favoured yellow. Blue was common amongst Covenanter forces even prior to the Bishops Wars and the Royalists are recorded by non-combatant observers as wearing "rose red" scarves and ribbons - although I think the "light blue" meme is based on van Dyck's portrait of Charles I who is actually wearing the sash of the Order of The Garter, rather than a field sign.

If you don't already frequent it, there is an excellent (and very well researched) website called "Keep Your Powder Dry" and he has an excellent chapter on "scarves"!

[ochoin]

He frequents TMP a lot:
https://www.keepyourpowderdry.co.uk/2021/11/sashes.html

As far as I know, he is a diligent researcher.

donald

[Patrice]

Arms & formations were basically the same. Your enemy could be wearing the same colour coat as you, he might speak the same language as you & unit flags weren't necessarily very different from the other sides.

It happens in civil wars. They are so untidy...

AFAIK there aren't many "friendly fire" stories

I don't know. But OTOH, firing with matchlock muskets is not so fast than with mid or late 19th C. or 20th C. weapons, and you know it will take time to reload; so, firing in a haste is not a good idea(?)

[BaronVonWreckedoften]

Unless someone panics and gives the wrong order.....

(Wasn't there an ECW battle where a second rank of musketeers shot the front rank in the back whilst "rotating"?)

[DavidNBA]

I haven't yet found any actual mention of friendly fire incidents in various accounts I have but surely they must have happened; certainly various officers of all sides were captured by mistaking enemy units for their own. On a sort of related topic it seems that any sensible safety-minded person would have avoided Civil War armies; the list of avoidable accidents is long, such as people igniting each others powder bandoliers with their slow matches, accidentally shooting each other and civilians, open powder barrels being used by the artillery being ignited by dropping linstocks in them, and, of course, that rather Monty Pythonesque one of prisoners after Lansdown sitting on a wagon full of powder barrels smoking pipes... The resulting explosion obliterated the prisoners, killed several Royalists and badly injured the Royalist commander Lord Hopton, as well as destroying a large part of the remaining powder the Royalist army had. (There's some good material on the topic of hazards and on many aspects of the wars in that splendid volume, Charles Carlton's "Going to the Wars: The Experience of the British Civil Wars 1638-1651".)

[BaronVonWreckedoften]

I always liked the one about musketeers refilling their powder horns by dipping a hand into the powder barrel and scooping some out, whilst forgetting that they were using the hand that had the match cord entwined around the fingers.....

[Patrice]

forgetting that they were using the hand that had the match cord entwined around the fingers.....

Nearly happened to me a couple of times in medieval re-enactments.