Bats, baronets and Battle is more than just about cricket. This is a history full of colourful characters eccentric baronets with a fondness for gambling, forthright women who wished to take their role and the game beyond an excuse to wear a pretty dress, and brothers from local villages who played the sport at the highest levels home and abroad. If Sussex was the cradle for the earliest of cricket, the villages around Battle were there at the games birth. From Georgian times and the murky world of 18th century politics, Tim Dudgeon traces Battle crickets role from its role in 18th century Georgian gambling though the fear of 19th century rural unrest and the dawn of the professional game to the tragic impact of two world wars and into the modern era. The story he uncovers is an intriguing one that has local people and communities at its heart, but throws light on their links with events and forces that have shaped our world today.

Reprint of the original, first published in 1868.

On September 1, 1814, under the command of Lt. Gen. Sir George Prevost, nearly 15,000 veteran British troops, fresh from victory over Napoleon, crossed the Canadian-American border—the largest foreign army ever to invade the United States. Opposing the British invasion were Gen. Alexander Macomb and his army of fewer than 5,000 men and the improvised fleet and brilliant strategy of thirty-year-old Lt. Thomas Macdonough. They were on the losing side of a devastating war. By the time the British and Americans clashed on the waters and surrounding shores of Lake Champlain on September 11, 1814, Macomb and Macdonough’s government, pursued by British troops, had fled from a burning Washington. Yet despite the odds, the Americans managed to thwart the world’s strongest naval power in one of the most decisive battles in American history. The source of the documentary film of the same name, The Final Invasion is based on primary research and original discoveries—including previously unknown private diaries and orders, missing since the war. Fair-minded, astute, and passionately engaged with his subject, Col. David G. Fitz-Enz brings to life the immediacy and immensity of the British threat, the bloody reality of naval warfare, and the far-reaching consequences of the American victory against tremendous odds.