A Virtual Tour of Towton Battlefield (Continued)

When Lancaster’s front line had been thrust back and back through 90 degrees, still fighting, still struggling to hold the line, they came directly below the command point of the greatest fighting monarch England has ever seen. Edward IV was a natural general. Brave as a lion, well over six feet in height, proportionately broad and always, instinctively, knowing when the key moment in any battle had arrived. Now, he saw the staggering, weary line of Lancaster before and below him and urged his men to one last great effort. His whole centre pushed down from their ridge and crashed into the faltering Lancastrians, driving them before their charge.

It was too much – the men of Lancaster - worn, bloody, battered, beaten - broke and ran. Weary men will always take the easy route if there is one and Somerset’s dissolving host turned and ran down the snowy, blood-slimed slopes of the steep ravine known ever after as Bloody Meadow. At the bottom, a tiny stream awaited them, Cock Beck, which had been filled to flooding by two weeks of rain-storms and snow-water running off the surrounding hills. The exhausted men, most still wearing their armour plunged forward, and fell, and drowned, until enough of them were dead to form bridges of human corpses across which their comrades could cross to the other side and away, anywhere, from the pursuing, killing steel of York.

Days later, Edward wrote to his mother Cecily, Duchess of York, to tell her of his victory and of the death toll it had exacted. 28,000 men, more than a third of those engaged had paid the final price and gone into the collective grave pits afterwards. Never more would Lancaster, or York, assemble armies of such size to dispute the right to England’s throne, nor would the land ever see such an Armageddon again.

And today, on each Palm Sunday, people from all parts of our country – and much further afield – gather together to pay tribute to the fallen who died 540 years ago on England’s Bloodiest Day – Towton.

Continue the Tour...