The Black Country and Birmingham produced the metal that fought wars. Sword blades came from the small forges that lined every brook in north Worcestershire. Pike heads were hammered out in dozens of workshops. Shot came from Stourbridge; cannon from Dudley. King Charles I had failed to secure the arsenals at Portsmouth and Hull, so he needed those small Midlands forges as much as he needed his armies, and he could not have them. Robert Porter, one of the best sword-cutlers of the age, lived in Worcestershire but sold his blades in Birmingham, and he had refused to supply swords to "that man of blood" at any price. Birmingham was a Parliamentary town, openly so. Rupert's mission was threefold: punish Birmingham, garrison Lichfield, and clear the country between them. He arrived ready to teach a lesson.

Local historians later borrowed a phrase from John Bund -- the townsmen were "the sturdy sons of freedom" -- and the description fit. The ministers and leading men of Birmingham had counselled surrender; the soldiers under Captain Richard Greaves and the lichfield horse who had ridden in to help thought the odds were impossible. But the "middle and inferior sort" of people, especially those who could hold a musket, insisted on a fight. Around three in the afternoon Rupert ordered the assault. His troopers advanced on the earth bank and were thrown back by musket fire so heavy they could not stand. A second attempt failed the same way. The men of Birmingham, mostly untrained, twice repulsed the best cavalry in the Royalist army. "That less than 300 men should keep some 1,800 at bay, even for a short time, was an act that deserved to be recorded," Bund later wrote.

Captain Greaves had charged the Royalists to give his foot time to retreat toward Lichfield. He took five wounds in the charge and pulled his men away once their work was done, leaving the townspeople to face Rupert alone. The Earl of Denbigh -- William Feilding, the elder of the two -- was killed in the fighting near Smethwick that closed the battle. By Royalist accounts, civilians had shot at the troops from their houses as the soldiers passed through the streets. To suppress the fire, Rupert's men set those houses alight. The pillaging continued through the rest of the day. The next morning, before the army moved on toward Lichfield, more houses were burned. Eighty residents and more died. The town centre was largely destroyed. By the laws of war as practised on the Continent -- where Rupert had been raised and trained -- this was permissible: if shots came from a house, the house could be burned. By the standards of English domestic warfare, it was shocking. King Charles himself rebuked Rupert afterwards for what his men had done.

A Parliamentary clergyman -- accounts differ on his name -- was caught up in the pillage and killed by Rupert's troopers. The detail crystallised the Parliamentary case against the Royalists for the rest of the war. Pamphlets poured out of London with titles like "Prince Rupert's Burning Love to England Discovered in Birmingham's Flames." One of the witnesses who contributed to the most famous of these pamphlets was signed "R. P." -- almost certainly Robert Porter, the sword-cutler whose mill had been burnt for refusing to supply the king. Porter, it was said, knew not only how to make a sword but how to use one, and had joined Captain Greaves' charge near Smethwick in which the Earl of Denbigh was killed. The Royalists answered with their own pamphlet on 14 April 1643 defending Rupert. The exchange continued in print for years. The Parliamentarians never stopped speaking of "the Birmingham Butcheries."

Urban development has eaten the battlefield whole. The earth-bank defences are now a roadway. The Old Ship Inn on Camp Hill -- Rupert's headquarters on the afternoon of the battle, where local tradition placed the prince through the worst hours of pillage -- survived into the nineteenth century but is gone, preserved only in photographs taken before its demolition. There is no monument that catches the eye, no preserved field, no acre of green you can stand on and call the site of the battle. What survives is the memory in old pamphlets and the historian's footnote that this was one of the first English towns deliberately sacked in the Civil War. The townspeople who had voted with their muskets to resist the king paid in their houses and lives. The political coup that resulted -- the propaganda value of the burning -- helped tilt opinion against the Royalists in ways that no military victory could have done.