The Battle of Towton Part One
Updated: Oct 20
The Battle of Towton – Part One: The Road to Yorkshire’s Bloodiest Battle
There are places in Yorkshire where you can stand today and it takes a bit of imagination to picture what happened there hundreds of years ago.
Towton is one of them.
Look across the fields between Saxton and Towton and, for the most part, you are looking at ordinary Yorkshire countryside. Fields, hedges, tracks and a few roads.
But on Palm Sunday, 29 March 1461, this quiet stretch of Yorkshire became the scene of one of the largest and bloodiest battles ever fought on English soil.
Before we get into it, one thing is worth saying. As with many events from the Wars of the Roses, the surviving accounts don't agree on every detail. What follows is the most widely accepted version of events, drawing on the surviving records, archaeology and modern battlefield research.
And this story really begins before anyone reached Towton.
From Wakefield to Towton
If you've been following our Wars of the Roses series, you'll know that things had already gone badly wrong for the House of York.
Richard, Duke of York, had been killed at the Battle of Wakefield on 30 December 1460. ( Bummer )
His 17-year-old son Edmund, Earl of Rutland, was also killed during the aftermath of the battle.
But Richard had another son.
Edward, Earl of March. ( Bull of a Man )
And Edward was a very different proposition.
While his father was dead in Yorkshire, Edward defeated a Lancastrian force at Mortimer's Cross in February 1461. He then marched to London and was proclaimed King Edward IV on 4 March.There was just one slight problem. England already had a king.
Henry VI was still alive and the Lancastrians certainly weren't about to accept Edward simply because somebody in London had put a crown on his head.
There were now effectively two kings competing for England.
Sooner or later, somebody was going to have to settle it.
And they were heading for Yorkshire.
The Fight at Ferrybridge
Edward marched north with his army.
Standing between him and the main Lancastrian force was the River Aire at Ferrybridge.
We've covered the fighting at Ferrybridge separately, but it forms an important part of the Towton story.
A Lancastrian force led by John Clifford, 9th Baron Clifford, ( Bounder and Cad ) attempted to hold the crossing. The Yorkists eventually got men across the Aire elsewhere, outflanking Clifford and forcing him to retreat towards the main Lancastrian army.
Clifford didn't make it.
He was killed around Dinting Dale, just south of Towton.
The man traditionally blamed for killing Edward's younger brother Edmund at Wakefield was dead. But Edward had little time to celebrate. Just ahead of him was the main Lancastrian army. And it was enormous.
Two Armies Face Each Other
The exact number of men who fought at Towton will probably never be known.
Older accounts give staggering figures, sometimes running towards 200,000 men. Those numbers are generally considered far too high.
Even so, this was clearly an exceptionally large medieval battle involving an extraordinary number of England's nobility. Historic England notes modern estimates of around 80,000 men on the battlefield, with the Lancastrians probably possessing the larger force.
The Lancastrians occupied the higher ground south-west of Towton.
Edward's Yorkists approached uphill from the direction of Saxton.
Between them lay Towton Dale. And then the weather joined in.
Snow on Palm Sunday
It was bitterly cold.
Snow was being blown across the battlefield by a strong wind — and crucially, that wind was blowing towards the Lancastrian army.
The Yorkist vanguard was commanded by the experienced William Neville, Lord Fauconberg.
Fauconberg realised that the weather could be used as a weapon.
The battle began with archers.
According to the traditional account, Fauconberg ordered his Yorkist archers forward. With the wind behind them, they released their arrows towards the Lancastrian lines.
The Lancastrians replied. But they had a problem. They were shooting directly into the wind and snow. Their arrows fell short.
The Yorkists could simply step back beyond their effective range while the Lancastrians continued firing arrows that landed harmlessly in front of them.
Then Fauconberg supposedly played another clever trick.
Once the Lancastrian arrow storm had largely finished, his men moved forward again. They could recover some of the Lancastrian arrows lying in the ground and send them straight back.
Whether every detail happened exactly as later chroniclers described it, the basic picture is clear: the wind and snow favoured the Yorkists, and the opening archery exchange went badly for Lancaster. There was only one way to stop it.The Lancastrians had to advance.
The Armies Close
Thousands of men began moving forward.
Archers gave way to men-at-arms armed with swords, bills, poleaxes and other weapons designed to do some fairly unpleasant things to whoever happened to be standing opposite.
Edward IV was there with his men. He was only 18 years old.
Just three months earlier his father had been killed at Wakefield. His younger brother Edmund was dead. Now Edward had marched back into Yorkshire wearing a crown and was preparing to fight the army supporting Henry VI.
If he lost, his reign as King of England might have lasted less than a month.
There wasn't much room for error.
The two armies closed across the snowy ground.
What had begun with arrows was about to become something much worse.
And unlike many medieval battles, this one wasn't quickly decided.
The fighting would continue for hours. Thousands would die.
And before the day was finished, the fields around Towton and the banks of Cock Beck would acquire a reputation that survives more than five and a half centuries later.
The arrows had done their work.
Now the real Battle of Towton was about to begin.
Continued in Part Two – The Battle of Towton: Yorkshire's Bloodiest Day.
The Battle of Towt
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