Towton 555

Today is the 555th anniversary of the battle of Towton, fought on March 29th 1461, which that year was Palm Sunday and hence the contemporary name of the battle was Palm Sunday Field. It is normally considered the largest and bloodiest battle fought on English soil.

As someone raised in the area and fascinated by the later middle ages Towton has long been an interest of mine, and when I still lived in the area I organised visits to the site and a series of Requiem Masses ( Anglican Rite ) in the church at Saxton, where many of the victims are buried.

My previous post on the battle can be viewed at  Palm Sunday Field 1461, Towton links, The Battle of Towton - 550th anniversary, Towton - remembering the dead, Victims of the Battle of Towton and Palm Sunday Field.

Victims of the Battle of Towton

Today is the anniversary of the Battle of Towton in 1461, fought in a snow storm on Palm Sunday and reputedly the bloodiest battle fought in English history. I have posted about it previously in Palm Sunday Field 1461,  Towton links, The Battle of Towton - 550th anniversary and Towton - remembering the dead. I have a longstanding interest in the battle which was fought in my home area.

In recent years there have been several books about the battle, but so far I have not managed to read them. However one I would draw attention to is based on the detailed archaeological examination of skeletons of soldiers who died in the fighting and which were discovered in a mass burial at Towton in 1996.

Image:Amazon

Blood Red Roses is published by Oxbow Books, who are based very close to where I live in Oxford. the book is now in a second edition and is established as an exemplary case study of such battlefield archaeology.

In the years before I came to Oxford I used to organise a Requiem for the fallen of Towton in Saxton church, where many are buried in the churchyard, and in whose parish the battle sites lie. I always try to remember them in my prayers on this day and invite others of you as readers of this blog to do as well.

The Battle of Towton - 550th anniversary

Today is the 550th anniversary of the Battle of Towton, fought on Palm Sunday 1461, and probably the bloodiest battle ever fought on English soil.

Last year I posted about the battle, and you can read, or re-read, those posts at Palm Sunday Field 1461 and Towton links.

The following piece is adapted from the RichardIII Society website:

The Opening Barrage at Towton by Graham Turner
Reproduced by kind permission of the artist
www.studio88.co.uk

Following their success at the second battle of St Albans the Lancastrian army moved south towards London but the city was chary of opening its gates to Queen Margaret’s army despite the fact she was re-united with the king. Margaret decided not to press the matter and withdrew with her army to the north. Meanwhile Edward, the new Duke of York and the Earl of Warwick, following their respective victory at Mortimer's Cross and defeat at St Albans, were reunited at either Chipping Norton or Burford and marched on the capital. The young duke felt sufficiently secure in his position to take the crown and on 4 March 1461 he was declared king as Edward IV. He knew that to make good his claim he had to defeat the Lancastrians once and for all. On the 5th the Duke of Norfolk left London to raise an army in his base of East Anglia and on 7 March Warwick left for the midlands to the same end. Edward remained in London for another week and then marched north.

By 27 March Warwick, leading the vanguard of the new royal army, reached Ferrybridge, the crossing for the river Aire and just eight miles south of the Lancastrians who were encamped and preparing for the battle. The bridge was badly damaged but repairs were made and Warwick crossed and made camp. Early on morning of the 28th Lord Clifford led a surprise attack on the Yorkists, who were driven back across the river and Warwick’s lieutenant, Lord FitzWalter, was killed and the earl was wounded in the leg by an arrow. Meanwhile King Edward advanced from Pontefract to find the bridge once again seriously damaged. Lord Fauconberg was sent westwards along the river to Castleford, three miles away, where he successfully crossed the Aire. He immediately marched north, caught up with Clifford, killed him and scattered his force. By the evening of the 28th the Yorkist host had crossed the river Aire and moved northward to meet the Lancastrian army.

The 29th March 1461, Palm Sunday, was a bitterly cold windy day with snow on the ground. The Lancastrian army, under the command of the 24-year-old Duke of Somerset, may have been 30,000 strong, and was drawn up on heathland north of a ridge between the villages of Towton and Saxton. His two main ‘battles’, one under his own command and the other under the command of the Earl of Northumberland, were side by side with archers to the front and a small rearguard behind them. King Edward, south of the ridge, ranged his archers, under the command of Lord Fauconberg, across the width of his two ‘battles’, one commanded by himself and the other by Warwick. As with Somerset, he had a small rear guard but the young king’s major worry was the non-arrival of the Duke of Norfolk and the East Anglians. To the left of the northward-facing Yorkist army was the river Cock which meandered westwards and surrounded Castle Hill Wood on three sides. North and south of the wood, the heathland fell sharply to the river and to the right of the Yorkist army was a plateau. The battlefield was anything but spacious. There has been speculation that the Lancastrians hid a force within the woods to ambush the Yorkists but this has not been substantiated.

The battle began mid-morning and the first Yorkist volleys of arrows were aided by the wind to find their mark within the Lancastrian ranks. The Yorkist archers immediately moved back and the Lancastrian response fell on empty ground. Fauconberg’s archers were then ordered forward to retrieve the spent missiles. The first advance probably came from the Lancastrians with Somerset’s ‘battle’ moving towards King Edward at a greater speed than Northumberland upon Warwick’s ‘battle’. The clash between the armies was intense within the restricted arena of battle, the fighting was hand to hand and the whole battle became a melée. The turning point was probably the arrival of the Duke of Norfolk and his men who flung themselves onto the left flank of the Lancastrians. Gradually the Lancastrian line gave way until late in the day it eventually broke and the troops fled towards the river, their pathway becoming known as Bloody Meadow. The river Cock was in full flood, and hundreds were drowned. So ended one the longest and bloodiest battles fought on English soil. As many as 28,000 may have been killed, the Yorkists possibly losing 8,000. Amongst the Lancastrians the Earl of Northumberland, Lord Dacre, Lord Welles and Sir Andrew Trollope were killed and the Earls of Devon and Wiltshire were captured and executed shortly afterwards although the Duke of Somerset and the Duke of Exeter escaped. The dethroned King Henry and his Queen and son, who had stayed in York during the battle, fled with them to Scotland. The victorious young King Edward was now free to return to London and his coronation.

The Rout
Artwork from 'Campaign 120: 'Towton 1461: England's bloodiest battle' by Graham Turner
© Osprey Publishing Ltd.
www.ospreypublishing.com

The livery is that of the Earl of Northumberland and the Percy family

I would add the thought that Towton wasa decisive battle, which made the Yorkist seizure of power effective, even thought the 1460s were punctuated by attempts to restablish the Lancastrians, as did happen in 1471. Not until after the battle of Tewkesbury that year was King Edward IV secure. Whether the change of King and royal house solved anything is difficult to tell. What it did do was make a complex situation more so, and the fighting and deaths of 1460-61, and of the following decade made for greater division, and created new individuals and groups with much to lose or gain. Moreover by changing the dynastic line and succession, removing not a few potential heirs along the way the continuing issue of the sixteenth century monarchy was to come to the fore - just who was, or was not, the heir apparent or presumptive?

As with my post last year I will end by asking the prayers of my readers for all those slain at Towton or in its aftermath, and for all the combatants.

Towton links

I realize some of the links I put in my earlier post about Towton do not work (my fault no doubt), so here is another attempt, with some more sites added:

A selection of pieces about the battle listed by the Towton Battlefield Society can be found here.

An article which raises questions about the location can be found here.

For the archaeological evidence look here.

For recent books on the battle there are several listed on Amazon; they appear in most cases to be essentially military histories, rather than more wide ranging studies of the battle in context.

For a review of one by Christopher Gavett, and published by Osprey, look here.

For the work of Graham Turner, a modern artist who specializes in reconstructing the conflicts of the period look at this.

Palm Sunday Field 1461

Today is the 549th anniversary,(allowing, that is, and being pedantic - you would expect nothing less I know - for the calendar change of 1752) of the battle of Towton, fought on a snowy Palm Sunday, and known to contemporaries as Palm Sunday Field. The Yorkist victory secured the crown for Edward IV and the battle is often considered to have been both the largest and bloodiest fought on English soil. It marked the end of a vicious series of battles which had begun at Wakefield three months earlier - one of the few periods of intense conflict in the so-called Wars of the Roses.

Towton lies a few miles north of my home town of Pontefract and it was one of those local links to the late middle ages which shaped my historic interests.

To learn something about the battle look here and for a review from The Ricardian of September 1995 of Andrew Boardman The Battle of Towton (Stroud 1994) click here. For something about the archaeology of the burials discovered in 1996 adjacent to the site of the battlefield chapel erected at Towton look here and here.
The website of the Towton battlefield society is here

The battlefield has survived relatively unscathed, and can be walked and studied. There are locations there which are eerie and atmospheric even on a summer day. To look across the centre of the battlefield or to follow the line of the Lancastrian flight and the Yorkist pursuit along the old road towards Tadcaster and York makes anyone aware of what happened that day and to sense, chillingly, the horror and brutality of civil war.

In 1986, the 525th anniversary year, as Secretary of the Local History Society in Pontefract I organised a commemorative event on the Easter Monday - as close as we could get to the actual date. My inspiration was knowing that in 1971 to mark the the quincentenary of the battle of Tewkesbury there had been the celebration of a requiem in the Abbey church there and that there had been the revival of the Sarum liturgy for the burial of the unknown sailor from the Mary Rose in the Anglican cathedral in Portsmouth a year or two previously. We therefore had an Anglican Requiem - I was not then up to organising a Use of York one - in Saxton Church, which lies just off the battlefield, and in whose churchyard lie the remains of many of those who died at the battle. These include not only Lord Dacre under his table tomb, but many anonymous bodies, re-interred there a generation after the battle. Many of us then walked the battlefield, following an excellent trail outlined in a leaflet produced shortly beforehand. The fates were kind to us in so far as we actually had flurries of snow at one point.

For the next few years I organised an Anglican-rite requiem in the church - it seemed the least, yet also the best one could do for all the participants. I remain very grateful to those Anglican clergy who enabled this to take place, notably Brian Harris, then Vicar of Aberford cum Saxton. I rather think this liturgical celebration may have ceased when I left the area and moved to Oxford. There continues to be, I assume, the tradition of walking the battlefield on Palm Sunday, and a short service in the chapel at Lead on the western edge of the battlefield.

Today, if I was in the area, I would organise something similar, but now it would be an Extraordinary Form Mass, or indeed see if it could be the occasion for a reconstruction of a York Use Requiem.

Please remember in your prayers all who died at Towton and all the combatants.

Lady Mary Clive R.I.P

Yesterday's Daily Telegraph carried the obituary of Lady Mary Clive, who has died at the age of 102. I never met Lady Mary but wish I had. Over forty years ago, when she was researching her biography of Edward IV, she contacted my mother, then Secretary of the Local History Society in Pontefract with some enquiries about the battle of Towton. Over a period of time we endeavoured to answer these and As a schoolboy I recall drawing a map of the battlefield and its relationship to Pontefract and other neighbouring sites and sending that off to Lady Mary. We felt somewhat flattered when mother's work was acknowledged in the text of This Son of York when an autographed copy arrived by post some time later. It was only later that we discovered that Lady Mary was a member of the redoubtable Packenham family, and sister to the late Earl of Longford. From her obituary she appears to have been a redoubtable and resourceful lady, and her letters were always kind and appreciative. May she rest in peace.