The Battle of Towton – Part Two
The Battle of Towton – Part Two: Yorkshire’s Bloodiest Day
In Part One, we left two enormous armies closing on each other through wind and driving snow on the fields between Saxton and Towton.
The arrows had been fired.
The Lancastrians had advanced.
Now came the part of the Battle of Towton that earned it such a fearsome reputation.
As we said in Part One, accounts written about Towton do not agree on every detail. Here we're following the most widely accepted course of events rather than stopping every few paragraphs to argue over different versions.
And whichever version you follow, one thing isn't really in doubt.
What happened next was brutal.
Fighting in the Snow
Once the two armies met, the battle became a mass of close-quarter fighting.
Men armed with swords, bills, poleaxes and other weapons fought at extremely close range. This wasn't two neat lines taking turns to attack each other. Thousands of men were packed together, pushing and fighting across muddy, snow-covered ground.
Edward IV was right amongst it.
He was just 18 years old, newly proclaimed king and fighting for a crown he'd held for less than a month.
Losing wasn't really an option.
Behind the Lancastrian army stood the cause of Henry VI. Behind the Yorkists stood Edward's claim to replace him.
There could be no comfortable draw.
Towton was going to produce a winner.
Hours of Fighting
The battle appears to have continued for hours.
Later accounts describe fighting lasting for much of the day, and while we shouldn't pretend anyone was standing there with a stopwatch, Towton was clearly an unusually long and hard-fought medieval battle.
Neither side could break the other.
The Lancastrians probably had the numerical advantage, while Edward seems to have thrown himself into the fighting alongside his men.
Then something happened that helped change the battle.
More Yorkists arrived.
Norfolk Arrives
Edward had been waiting for troops commanded by John Mowbray, Duke of Norfolk.
They had been delayed, but during the battle at least part of Norfolk's force finally reached the battlefield.
For the exhausted Yorkists, they were fresh men.
For the Lancastrians, who had already been fighting for hours, they were the last thing they needed to see.
The additional Yorkist troops attacked the Lancastrian position and the balance began to shift.
Eventually the Lancastrian line broke.
And this is where Towton became a massacre.
The Lancastrians Run
Once an organised medieval army began to flee, things could go badly wrong very quickly.
Men who had spent hours fighting shoulder-to-shoulder were suddenly trying to escape across the same ground at the same time.
The Lancastrians fled northwards.
Behind them came the Yorkists.
Ahead of them lay Cock Beck.
Today it doesn't look like much of an obstacle. You could stand beside it and wonder how a small Yorkshire beck could possibly become an important part of one of England's bloodiest battles.
But imagine thousands of frightened and exhausted men trying to cross it while an enemy army is chasing them.
Men were killed during the retreat and others became trapped around the crossing points.
The area traditionally associated with some of the worst killing became known as Bloody Meadow.
Stories later developed of bodies piling so high that men crossed Cock Beck over the dead.
Whether it literally happened like that is impossible to know.
The important part doesn't need embellishing.
The Lancastrian retreat had become a slaughter.
Did 28,000 Men Really Die?
This is probably the number most often associated with Towton.
28,000 dead.
It is an extraordinary figure.
It is also one we shouldn't simply repeat as established fact.
Medieval accounts give enormous numbers for both the armies and the dead, and modern historians generally treat them cautiously. We simply don't know exactly how many men fought at Towton or how many died.
But that doesn't mean the reputation of the battle was invented.
Something happened near Towton in 1996 that brought the reality of the battle rather closer.
The Dead of Towton
Work near Towton Hall uncovered a mass grave.
Inside were the remains of men who had suffered horrific injuries.
Archaeological investigation eventually identified the remains of at least 38 individuals in the grave, many displaying severe trauma caused around the time of death. Further discoveries associated with the battlefield have been made since.
Suddenly these weren't numbers written in a medieval chronicle.
They were actual people.
Men who had walked onto these Yorkshire fields on Palm Sunday in 1461 and never walked away again.
For us, that's one of the things that makes Towton particularly fascinating.
You can argue about whether 20,000, 28,000 or some completely different number died.
You can't argue with the bones.
Edward Wins His Crown
By the end of the day, the Lancastrian army had been comprehensively defeated.
Henry VI, Queen Margaret and their son Edward were not fighting on the battlefield. After the defeat they fled north, eventually seeking safety in Scotland.
Edward IV had won.
The 18-year-old who had marched into Yorkshire claiming to be King of England had defeated the main army supporting the man who already held the title.
His throne was now considerably more secure.
But the Wars of the Roses weren't finished.
Not even close.
Henry VI was still alive. Margaret of Anjou certainly hadn't given up. There would be more armies, more battles and eventually another extraordinary reversal of fortune.
But on 29 March 1461, the House of York had won its greatest victory.
Four Yorkshire Stories
And this brings the first part of our Wars of the Roses journey through Yorkshire together.
At Sandal Castle, Richard, Duke of York, marched out to fight and was killed at the Battle of Wakefield.
At Wakefield Bridge, his 17-year-old son Edmund was traditionally said to have been caught and killed by Lord Clifford.
At Ferrybridge, Clifford's own luck ran out as Edward IV's army marched north.
And at Towton, Edward finished what his father had started.
Four places.
Four connected stories.
And they're all here in Yorkshire.
That's perhaps the strangest thing about visiting Towton today.
There isn't a castle towering over the battlefield. There aren't grand ruins showing you where thousands of men fought.
There are fields.
A beck.
A few tracks.
Yorkshire countryside.
And if you didn't know what had happened there on a snowy Palm Sunday more than 560 years ago, you could quite easily drive straight past.
But once you know the story, Towton never looks quite the same again.
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