Towton 1461: The anatomy of a battle

1: A living battlefield

One of the many layers of bodies discovered in the mass grave at Towton, North Yorkshire (Bradford University)

The battle of Towton is Britain’s bloodiest battle, according to Google. It has also been called the longest and biggest battle fought on British soil. Like many other medieval close-quarter combats, there is no comparison or question about its brutality and premeditated savagery. It developed into a hand-to-hand no-quarter butcher’s yard of mutilation that defies modern thinking. It may have been pursued to ‘cleanse’ a dynasty of illegitimate rule, and it was, most likely, fought in a driving snowstorm between two overtly factional armies who had sought revenge on each other since the beginning of the Wars of the Roses.

Every victory comes at a price they say, and Towton is comparable in effect (if not in actual casualties) to numerous other one-day battles around the world that changed history. Towton’s death toll of 28,000 has been compared to British fatalities on the first day of The Somme in 1916. It has also been said that one per cent of the population fought at Towton in 1461 and that a large proportion of the English nobility was wiped out as a result. However, as with all other battles, certain facts to support or oppose such claims contain biased opinion, and even official documents of the time are liberally soaked in political propaganda.

So, how do we find the truth about what actually happened in a battle like Towton?

There are many more bloodiest days to choose from if you are interested in figures and statistics, some of which cannot be verified due to similar problems of time and tide. But this post is not about how many deaths medieval heralds recorded on a cold March day in North Yorkshire. Nor is it about comparing the size of armies or the duration of the fighting at Towton. It is instead, an introduction to how the past continues to reach out to us through what we can see, the effects of warfare on individuals, a microscopic dissection of the facts, and the raising of much deeper questions about our acceptance of mass violence as a continuation of politics when all else fails. In short, my aim is to explore the anatomy of a battle, through Towton, and discover what lies at its heart.

To those who have read my 1994 and 2009 editions of The Battle of Towton I hope that another revised version of the book (due out next year) will tell the full story. To those who are new to the subject, I’m confident that you will find something that urges you to visit the battlefield and wonder at the kind of men who fought and died there more than half a millennium ago. As always when dealing with events of authenticity, this reappraisal of the battle will be highly controversial, and the image of those who fought and died at Towton is far from romantic.

Why revise a book about Towton again? Because unlike any other historical site, a battlefield, in my opinion, is a living thing - a continually changing natural witness to the events that took place there. And in the case of Towton, this condition becomes more immediate if we consider that the battle site has been relatively untouched since the Wars of the Roses (1455-1487). New evidence continues to emerge and challenges what we think occurred there. Medieval topographical features such as deserted villages, moated manor houses and period buildings, including chapels and churches, link past with the present. Ridge and furrow field systems, the existence of ancient woodland and the discovery of medieval hedgerows remind us that the battlefield is a heritage site, and should be preserved and protected at all costs. But above all this, one overriding survival of the battle speaks volumes of the men who fought and died there. The battlefield is still an unmarked tomb, and despite the resistance of those that find the death toll at Towton over-egged by historians and chroniclers, it is this link between worlds that makes it a place of veneration for many. 

Chroniclers’ estimates of the death toll vary wildly from the sensible to the ridiculous. But it is certain that once thousands of men were buried on the battlefield and since 1994 new graves have been discovered by archaeologists (most notably Tim Sutherland) to highlight a much darker side of the Wars of the Roses than previously imagined. A terrible secret that Towton has cleverly concealed is gradually rising to the surface, and thankfully it is not the forgotten battle it once was. The mass killings and the slaughter perpetrated at Towton is no myth or quaint legend anymore. Instead, it is a reminder to us of our mortality and what we can do as a species when compelled to fight.

Twenty-six years have passed since I first put pen to paper, but theories change with time - as do historians. Since 1461 the site has attracted the interest of the royal, the pious and the romantic. In the Victorian era, the battlefield became the haunt of antiquarians. It inspired poets to write eulogies about the slaughter, and over the years Towton has had its fair share of historians who all perpetuated the legends told by local farmers and villagers; stories that might still hold some truth today. Through the ages, graves were discovered in the fields and bones were exhumed and re-buried in hallowed ground. The more famous areas associated with the battle became the subject of ballads and acquired bloody topographic names. Walls of dead were found in cellars and under the floorboards of local homes. Rivers became colourful receptacles of the great slaughter in certain histories and chronicles. And even a specific type of rose miraculously took root in a meadow to commemorate the ‘white’ and the ‘red’.

These are the legends of Towton Moor - or are they merely persistent memories of even stranger tales lost in time?

The original ‘Towton Cross’ from a photograph taken in 1912

Ever since the battle of Towton, many myths have been perpetuated about what occurred there, including where the actual fighting took place. A thin shroud of invention hid the real story of the battle for many centuries, and this is where my interest in a multi-disciplined approach began in earnest. Following the work done by Brooke, Markham, Burne, to name but three ‘battlefield detectives’, I was lucky enough to write the first major work on the subject. But even I was not prepared for what was unearthed at Towton in July 1996 by the team from Bradford University.

War graves containing human bones became headline news, and like those discovered by the Tudors and Victorians in their day, the human cost of warfare was expounded to the full by the media. The stark reality of dead soldiers who actually witnessed the battle of Towton still astonishes me. People who were interested in the find demanded an interpretation, but even specialists in their field and modern research methods could not decode the whole truth about the graves and what they contained. A brutal death with an edged or blunt weapon leaves tell-tale marks on bone, and forensic tests can make a critical judgement how an individual died. With the help of anthropological science, approximate age at death can be revealed. A soldiers’ general state of health and proportions can be measured. But who are we to say under what circumstances a particular soldier died, and who are we to judge the course of the battle from such a clinical postmortem? 

Other factors have caused me to revise my initial work concern the strategic and tactical aspects of medieval warfare. The mechanics and devastating power of the medieval bow and arrow have been drastically modified and proven since 1994 to the extent that my own theories about how the battle was fought have changed. In a test shot of a replica Mary Rose warbow in 1996, the archer Simon Stanley loosed a series of arrows from beside the hawthorn tree above North Acres and achieved a distance of over 300 yards. When retrieved, one replica arrow had split a block of magnesium limestone and penetrated the ground beneath such was its power when it struck the ground. In 2005 The Great Warbow, by Strickland and Hardy, exploded the extraordinary claims by some ‘experts’ that the longbow of the late Middle Ages was largely ineffective, and at long range caused only disorder and confusion in enemy ranks. Conclusive ballistics tests since then have proved otherwise, and the implications of this regarding the weapon’s killing power and consequently the duration of such actions, such as Towton, cannot be ignored.

Similarly, a reappraisal of the contemporary evidence reveals that the social impact of Towton was fresh in some people’s minds long after the event. Whole shires refused to participate in further bloodshed or give support to the victors. Memorials, chapels and official documents venerated the dead at Towton, much like in any age. Concerning the tactical, strategic and political thinking at the time, the campaign was a model of propaganda. Chronicles and letters confirm my original claim that in the second half of the fifteenth-century Englishmen waged a new type of warfare that was more purposeful and devious than ever before. More importantly, winning was not dependant on arbitrary tactics and (in the eyes of medieval man) God’s judgement. Commanders sought a tactical edge over their opponents. And at Towton, it is apparent that the outcome was dictated by a sequence of events that, in the end, caused the high casualty rate to increase far from the battlefield. In pro-Yorkist letters and contemporary chronicles, one can detect the universal sigh of relief that Edward IV had triumphed. In short, Towton was a ‘near run thing’ despite a host of chroniclers who inflated the death toll out of all proportion. Fear of foreign invasion, internal rebellion and quarrelsome nobles with private forces were dangers that could not be ignored. And the casualties at Towton helped cement both crown and sceptre to Edward’s warlike image when his newly acquired throne was far from secure.

Archaeological relics of the battle are predominantly difficult to authenticate, but still, they surface in Towton and Saxton fields to fascinate and spark heated debate. Some artefacts are things of incredible beauty and craftsmanship. They speak to us across time and space about the kind of soldiers that passed that way only once. Hoards of arrowheads found on the battlefield (by Simon Richardson) summon up the ghosts of the Towton archers plying their deadly craft. Sword and dagger pommel heads re-animate weapons that were designed to kill and maim. But were all these relics actually shot or used in 1461? We seek confirmation, and our elusive search for the truth uncovers more questions than answers with each new find. We may speculate what else has to be discovered on the battlefield, what might have been dropped by soldiers or hacked from their bodies in the heat of combat, but this is not the end of Towton’s story by any stretch of the imagination.  

Admittedly many questions still arise surrounding this unique battle. We can visit the ‘living’ battlefield of Towton and wonder at the unimaginable slaughter committed there. We can walk the battlefield in all weathers - even snowstorms - to explore the topography. We can visit local churchyards and see memorials to the battle dating back to the fifteenth-century. We can read about the carnage in contemporary chronicles and letters, but have we got anything in common with the men who fought at Towton? Can we glean anything from their brutality and senseless slaughter? Indeed, is the battle of Towton at all significant in the twenty-first century?

In the foreword and preface to the 1994 edition of The Battle of Towton the late Robert Hardy and I held the opinion that our indescribable fascination with the battle was a combination of several factors: a lifelong interest in the site, an affinity with the medieval period, a passion for military history and a personal search for the reason why we go to war. Battlefield conservation was also a major issue at the time. But other than these passions, nothing tangible about the battle touched the present or changed our perception of the Towton story. The grave found in 1996 changed all that. It brought us face to face with those that fought in 1461 and why and how they died raised questions long since buried with their bones. 

It is perhaps worth reiterating my feelings in the first edition of my book that any place where great historical decisions are made must not be forgotten and that battlefields are among the most important of these. My personal search for the truth about Towton goes on, but as you read this post and others in the series, it is perhaps worth remembering that civilisation has not moved on very far over time. Are we more civilised than the men who fought at Towton? What would we have done if faced with a similar life or death situation? Did the recently excavated grave in Towton village simply hold casualties of the battle, or were they in fact victims of much darker deeds committed after the event? I hope this new perspective on the battle provides some of the answers and prompts further research into this unique conflict where, ‘son killed father, and father killed son’.