By June 1644 the First English Civil War had been running for 22 months -- since King Charles I had raised his banner in Nottingham and declared the Earl of Essex and Parliament traitors. The country was a patchwork of garrisons and contested counties. Dudley Castle, on its limestone ridge between Birmingham and Wolverhampton, was a Royalist garrison commanding the roads through the Black Country. In early June Denbigh moved on it with 1,000 infantry and 750 cavalry. The castle was strong; the siege would take time. Charles I knew that if Dudley fell, Parliament would have a foothold deep in the iron-producing heartland. He sent Henry Wilmot, the first Viscount Wilmot, north from Worcester with 2,500 cavalry to lift the siege.

Denbigh learned of Wilmot's approach and detached a small force to delay him. After an inconclusive skirmish Wilmot pulled back and made camp for the night. Denbigh used the breathing space to abandon the siege under cover of darkness. The infantry could march; the cavalry could ride; the artillery was another matter. Civil War siege guns were enormous, slow things, and extracting them from emplaced positions in the dark, with men working by lantern-light, took hours. Denbigh would not leave them. Other commanders would have spiked the touch-holes and walked away. He insisted on saving every barrel. When the sun came up on 12 June, the last gun was finally on its carriage -- and Wilmot was close.

Denbigh was still within a mile of Dudley Castle when he turned his force around and arrayed it on Tipton Green to face the oncoming Royalists. Wilmot, reinforced by musketeers from the castle garrison, advanced. Royalist musketeers occupied Tipton Green House, a substantial building that anchored the right of their line. Around 300 cavalry and a body of musketeers charged the Parliamentary positions. The first charge was repulsed. The second routed Denbigh's cavalry, which broke and ran. But Denbigh had held enough infantry in reserve to counter-attack. A detachment under Colonel Simon Rugeley pushed the Royalist musketeers out of Tipton Green House and stabilised the line. The Royalists, having lost their building, broke off the engagement. Both armies, exhausted and bruised, were reluctant to renew the fight.

Wilmot withdrew toward Worcester to rejoin the king. Denbigh continued his slow march to Walsall, his cannons still rolling. Both commanders wrote dispatches claiming the day. The Royalists had the better case: they had relieved the castle and lifted the siege, which was the strategic objective. The Parliamentarians could point out that they had not been routed -- they had held their formation, recovered Tipton Green House, and forced the Royalists to disengage. Tactically the battle was indecisive. Strategically the king's men had achieved their mission. Casualty figures from the engagement are not reliably recorded, which is typical for small Civil War actions where the bigger national narrative absorbed the local detail. Tipton Green was a footnote, even at the time -- one of dozens of skirmishes fought in 1644 as both sides probed and harassed each other through a long campaigning summer.

The Black Country grew over the battlefield as it grew over almost every Civil War site in the Midlands. Coal pits, iron forges, then terraced housing, then twentieth-century industrial estates. A plaque on Malthouse Stables -- a building that sits on part of the ground where the fight took place -- marks the engagement quietly, for anyone who knows to look. Tipton today is residential, retail, light-industrial; the green has been built over many times. Walking the streets, you would not guess that Royalist musketeers once fired from a house that occupied roughly this corner, or that 750 Parliamentary cavalry once formed up on what is now somebody's allotment. Denbigh's stubbornness about his guns -- the human detail that survives best from the day -- is the kind of small thing that connects an empty patch of West Midlands ground to a man's voice, four centuries gone.