Towton was our worst ever battle, so why have we forgotten this bloodbath in the snow?



Today, March 29th, should be a significant and melancholy date in the English calendar, known and marked by all schoolchildren. For on Palm Sunday, March 29th 1461, as church bells rang out across the land, two vast armies met on a bleak, snow-swept Yorkshire plateau near the village of Towton to fight what was to be our country's biggest, bloodiest and longest battle.



When it comes to superlatives, Towton has them all. Even England's other epochal, history-changing clashes, Hastings in 1066 and the Somme in 1916, for example, cannot challenge Towton for the butcher's bill of the slain. Hastings was a battle that changed the ethnic, political, and linguistic culture of the land forever, and lasted across an autumn day until dark. Yet neither the numbers that fought there (7/8,000 on each side) nor the casualties inflicted, approach anywhere near the later medieval battle. The first day on the Somme, July 1st 1916, when almost 20,000 died, is generally seen as Britain's greatest military disaster, cutting the flower of the nation down like summer corn. Yet Towton trumped even that bloody day in carnage and sheer savagery. As the Civil War battle of Antietam, America's bloodiest single day, is to the US, so Towton is to England. Why, then, is it not better remembered?



Anniversary: A television re-enactment of the battle of Towton - the bloodiest in Britain's history - which took place on 29th March 1461

Though dedicated History teachers struggle to impart some knowledge of our past to their students, this vital subject has become so dumbed down and marginalised in the curriculum, that even a supposedly Conservative-led Government has not stopped the rot.



Though Education Secretary Michael Gove and Schools Minister Nick Gibb have declared their intention of restoring some rudiments of 'our island story' to its rightful place in the classroom, they are fighting an uphill battle to get it past the teaching Unions who have reduced History to a sub-branch of Marxist sociology. This has produced such ignorance that it is scarcely surprising that surveys regularly report that many young people believe that Hitler won the battle of Hastings, or that Henry VIII squeezed his bulk into a Spitfire cockpit to fight the Battle of Britain.



OK, I exaggerate. But not by much. And it is striking that this willful turning of our backs on the past is not shared by our European neighbours or our American cousins. In France they are currently building a theme park near Paris on the site of one of Napoleon's more obscure battles, as he fought a rearguard action against the Allies closing in on him in the twilight of his brilliant military career. In the US, Gettysburg, the climactic battleground of the Civil War is a hallowed national shrine, as are all the other Civil War battlefields. In Britain we allowed Naseby, our equivalent of Gettysburg, and the decisive battlefield of our Civil War, to be desecrated by driving a dual carriageway road right across it.

Forgotten: Bloody Meadow and Cock Beck, where much slaughter took place in the rout at the Battle of Towton

Perhaps there is an element of shame in the way that the English remember - or rather, don't remember - Towton. Hastings, after all, was fought, depending on whose side you were on, either to repel a foreign invader or to conquer a kingdom. The Somme was a battle fought on a foreign field against a foreign foe - and with your pals from your own street, factory, or football club at your side.



Towton, however, was the most brutal battle fought in the midst of a vicious civil conflict: the Wars of the Roses. Give or take a few Scots and European mercenaries, there were only Englishmen present. The thought that this unprecedented and unsurpassed slaughter was visited by the English on their own people is therefore not one to be recalled with patriotic pride alongside Crecy, Agincourt, Trafalgar and Waterloo. Towton was consigned to the memory hole of oblivion from which it is only now being rescued by a few dedicated enthusiasts, such as the Towton Battlefield Society who this weekend, on April 1st, as every year, commemorate the battle with a re-enactment walk on this still unspoiled ground, so stained with English blood.



The actor Robert Hardy, a patron of the Battlefields Trust and an authority on the longbow - the weapon that proved its worth once again at Towton, as it had on so many Medieval battlefields - eloquently explained why such sites should be sacred to us when he wrote of battlefields: 'They are places where great skill, great courage, great loyalty, great perfidy, great cowardice, great stupidity have been shown. Where men have gone to their deaths because of passionate beliefs, uncontrollable rage or in the control of a code or a discipline so powerful that it has seemed better to perish than to escape them. A battlefield is also a tomb, holding the bodies of those who died there, in Towton's case a very great number; a perpetual shrine and memorial which should engage our thoughts and our reverence'.

Tomb: Skeletons of men killed at Towton discovered in 1996 in a mass grave close to a battlefield site

Violent: This shattered skull shows the brutality of the fighting Unknown: The total number of men killed at Towton is still disputed, but could be between 20,000 and 30,000

Surprisingly for such a titanic struggle, Towton is less well-documented than other battles of the Wars of the Roses. Even such basic data as the numbers engaged and killed, wounded, or subsequently massacred and executed remain a matter of hot dispute among military historians, although the emerging evidence of battlefield archaeology makes clear that the battle surpassed all similar struggles on English soil.



On one fact, however, all authorities agree: for a medieval battle Towton was awesomely huge. The lowest estimate for the number of fighting men there is 50,000 - the highest, upwards of 80,000. And there is broad consensus, too, that at least 20,000 died, probably around 28,000 - an estimated 1% of the total population of England at the time. That is a staggering statistic by any standard. So what brought these men to that desolate field, and why did they fight and die there?



The conflict that we call today the Wars of the Roses - (that name was never used by contemporaries although the white rose was a Yorkist badge) - was a dynastic struggle for the throne between two branches of the Plantagenet family, the Houses of Lancaster and York. The adherents of two rival kings fought at Towton, and one of those monarchs - the newly crowned Yorkist Edward IV - although only nineteen years old, led his army in the battle and his commanding, charismatic presence - at six foot four he was our tallest ever king - was probably crucial to his victory. The rival king - the Lancastrian Henry VI - sat out the clash in the nearby city of York, together with his formidable French Queen, Margaret of Anjou. It was this inability of the feeble-minded Henry to lead an army in battle - an essential qualification for a successful medieval king - that was a major cause of the wars and the final downfall of his House.

Weak: Henry VI stayed away from the fighting in York Leader: 19-year-old Edward IV was a figurehead on the battlefield

Henry had come to the throne as a nine-month old baby when his warrior father, Henry V, the victor of Agincourt, died unexpectedly in France in 1422. To the traditional troubles of a realm under a child king - over-mighty subjects and factionalism - were added, as Henry grew, his own personal character weaknesses. His tough-minded father and paternal grandfather Henry IV had firmly established the Lancastrian line on the throne after usurping it from Richard II, but the pious and pacific Henry VI was not a chip off their old blocks. Rather, he inherited the mental instability of his probably schizophrenic maternal grandfather, King Charles VI of France, and sometimes lapsed into actual insanity. The result was widespread anarchy and misrule; the loss of the Hundred Years' War, and with it all England's French territories apart from the port of Calais; and the division of the ruling nobility into two factions - a court party (the Lancastrians) led by Queen Margaret of Anjou and the Beaufort family; and an opposition (the Yorkists) clustered around the kingdom's wealthiest and most powerful magnates, Richard, Duke of York, and his allies the Neville family. After York's death in another Yorkshire battle - Wakefield - his cause fell into the capable hands of his son, Edward, who rallied London and the south to his cause and chased the Lancastrians into their northern stronghold.

At Towton, the Lancastrian host, a massive array of perhaps 42,000 men, had the advantage that no less than a third of the total Engish Peerage, 28 lords, were present in their ranks. This continuing loyalty of most lords to the ruling House, despite King Henry's manifest incapacity, is a testimony to the semi-religious power of an anointed medieval king, however incapable, to command the unquestioning fidelity of his subjects.



The Lancastrians drew up facing south on open fields before the small village of Towton, two miles south of the town of Tadcaster. They were organised in the customary three divisions or ‘battles’. The right-wing battle was led by Henry Percy, Earl of Northumberland, whose family rivalled the Nevilles as the north's leading noble dynasty. It was guarded on its right by a steep-sided valley, Towton Vale, through which ran a stream, the Cock Beck, a natural obstacle which aided the Lancastrians at first but would eventually prove a death-trap. The left-wing Lancastrian battle was commanded by the Earl of Devon and Lord Ralph Dacre, a Cumbrian magnate; while the overall commander of the army, Henry Beaufort, Duke of Somerset, headed up the main battle in the centre with Henry Holland, Duke of Exeter.



Advantage: The Yorkists made great use of longbows to fell their Lancastrian opponents

Facing the Lancastrians north of Saxton village were the Yorkists, another vast army of around 36,000, only slightly smaller than their enemies. The medieval weather was colder than our present balmy March and through a long and freezing night, both sides lay huddled and exposed to their common enemy, the elements, attempting to keep warm. Hungry, thirsty, and shivering with cold, they vainly sought shelter from intermittent snow showers sweeping the open ground. The snow that draped the battlefield made the cannons brought from the Tower of London redundant and dampened the taut bowstrings of the archers placed in the front ranks of the rival armies. Both sides knew that the coming day would decide the fate of the kingdom, and prepared themselves for a grim and desperate fight to the death.

It is too often assumed that most soldiers in the Middle Ages were conscripted serfs, forced to fight according to the whims of the lords to whose following or 'affinity' they belonged, and to whom they owed the duty of military service as part of their Feudal obligations, along with their rent and labour.



While this is true of many men, there was a core of professional warriors who moved from campaign to campaign, and from country to country, as their martial employment demanded. Analysis of skeletons found in Towton grave pits has shown that many of these men were trained archers, with over-development of their bowstring-pulling arms. In addition to this professional ability, many such soldiers genuinely supported their side, as with a modern football team, from sectarian factional loyalty, and the rival roars of 'King Henry!' or 'King Edward!' would have split the early morning air at Towton before arrows flew and battle commenced.

As the grey dawn finally broke, the bells of the village churches in Towton and Saxton rang out over the snow-shrouded fields, calling the faithful to prayer. Palm Sunday was one of the Holiest dates in the Christian calendar in a pre-secular age, but although they knelt briefly in prayer on the iron-hard snowy earth, the two sides in this increasingly bitter civil war were also filled with thoughts of their mutual destruction. As the sun cast spears of light across leaden skies, the dark masses of the two armies advanced to combat. Snow was now falling heavily, and the wind was blowing from the south, flinging thick flurries into the faces of the Lancastrians, and temporarily blinding them. A Yorkist commander, the wily little Lord Fauconberg, took advantage of this by ordering his archers to advance within range of the Lancastrians, fire their first volley of arrows, and then smartly reteat.



Maddened by the stinging arrows that came streaking out of the snow, the Lancastrian bowmen replied, blindly shooting into the storm. Fauconberg’s men having vacated the ground and retired, the arrows fell short. The Yorkists returned, filled their quivers with some of the spent enemy arrows, and stuck the remainder into the ground, tips upward, to impede the enemy's advance. They then fired again and again as the main body of the Lancastrian army attacked. The two bodies of fighting men, closing with each other hacked, stabbed and tore at their enemies with bills, spears, swords, halberds and war hammers, only pausing to shift aside the bodies of the slain accumulating in piles.



Lord Fauconbridge ordered his archers to shoot volleys of arrows and then retire before the Lancastrians could respond

To and fro the struggle swayed. At times the superior numbers of the Lancastrians forced their enemies back, and it seemed that only the courage and charisma of Edward himself, a giant clad in gilt armour with a jewelled coronet on his helmet, maintained morale, daring his men to flee.

All through the short winter day and into the night the battle continued. At one point the Lancastrian Lord Dacre, desperate for a drink, took off his helmet. A young Yorkist, hiding in a hawthorn bush with a crossbow, recognising Dacre as the man who had killed his own father, promptly shot him through the throat (he was buried along with his horse in nearby Saxton churchyard). King Edward, knowing the stubborn Lancastrian loyalties of his fellow nobles, had given the command to ‘Kill the Lords, but spare the commons’ but there was little quarter given to anyone in this primal struggle. Finally, as darkness fell, the battle’s balance was tipped by the belated arrival of the Yorkist affinity of John Mowbray, Duke of Norfolk, who had been delayed at Pontefract by illness, marching up the road from the south to bolster the Yorkist right wing. After ten hours of desperate fighting this was the moment when the Lancastrian morale cracked.



Feeling the pressure of these fresh new troops, but still fighting desperately, step by step the Lancastrians left began to give way. Sensing the way things were going, men began to flee the field, at first in ones or twos, then in whole battalions. A retreat became a rout as the main body of the Lancastrian host finally broke and stumbled, down the slippery, deadly slope on their right into the steep valley of the Cock Beck. Swollen by snow, the little stream was in spate and had become a raging torrent. The sheer banks of the Beck, treacherous at the best of times, became impassible barriers, slithery with blood and ice, down which men, heavily awkward in their armour, slid helplessly to their doom to be drowned or trampled under the foaming white water. The beck filled with the torn and pierced bodies of fleeing Lancastrians piling in obscene dams as the Yorkists above them hacked and stabbed the survivors.



The waters of the beck were said to have run red for three miles with the blood of the slain as stragglers scrambled over bridges of bodies to reach the far side. Even then they were not safe. They were harried by the triumphant Yorkists on horseback, cutting them down as they fled. Chroniclers wrote of an enormous bloody stain, some six miles long and three miles wide, covered in corpses and littered with discarded armour and weapons, spreading across the snow from the battlefield, .



Bloodshed: Fleeing Lancastrian troops were slaughtered or drowned as they tried to escape

The slaughter had been prodigious. Prominent fatal casualties on the Lancastrian side included the Earl of Northumberland, Lord Egremont, and the famous mercenary Sir Andrew Trollope and his son. The Earls of Devon and Wiltshire were caught and beheaded in the days following the battle, - their heads replacing those of King Edward’s father, brother, and uncle above Micklegate Bar in York. Forty-two knights captured on the field were executed on a vengeful Edward’s orders. A grave pit found at Towton Hall in the 1990s may contain the skeletons of these men, as the number of bodies found matches the death toll, their hacked bones and cracked skulls showing forensic evidence of the extreme violence that marked their deaths. But the 'commons' had suffered too. Around 10,000 men had died on either side on the bleak upland plain before the issue had been decided, and in the bloody rout that followed perhaps another eight-thousand perished, making a Lancastrian casualty roll of more than 20,000 dead - or about half of all those who had begun the battle on their side.



The bloodbath at Towton was decisive. The Lancastrians had been shattered militarily, and politically, as Edward IV’s biographer, Charles Ross noted: ‘For most Englishmen, including a majority amongst the barons and gentry, it now became prudent and realistic to acknowledge the authority of the new king’. Edward was able to establish his House of York on the throne with the support of most of the country. His rule, however, was far from secure and undisputed. Queen Margaret and her son Prince Edward, taking poor King Henry with them, managed to flee from York en route for Scotland on the night of the battle just as Edward and his victorious army were entering the city from the south.



The deposed Royal Family and their entourage - including the Dukes of Somerset and Exeter, who had also managed to escape from the battlefield - took refuge in Scotland, where they licked their wounds and plotted their next move.The victorious Edward IV spent two months in the north, establishing his regime in the heartland of his enemies, before returning to London for his coronation. On June 26th he formally re-entered the capital, riding through the streets of the City amidst cheering crowds until he reached the Tower, where the Royal apartments had been refurbished for their new occupant. The next night passed in the traditional pre-coronation vigil, with Edward creating 32 new knights of the Bath, emphasizing that although the throne was under new occupation, continuity, rather than radical change, would be the hallmark of the Yorkist regime. On 28th June, Edward processed amidst more popular acclaim from the Tower to Westminster Abbey for his coronation. The first phase of the Wars of the Roses had been brought to a decisive end by the vigour, confidence and sheer military skill of this shining new sun/son of York.