Towton

March 29th 1461. Remember.
Paul

Hi Paul

I will never forget standing at the battlesite with George and my
inlaws on the anniversary a couple of years back. It was fine
weather when we left Durham but by the time we got to the monument,
it was snowing heavily, just as it had been all those years ago.

Those poor souls - of whatever colour of rose...

Lorraine

lpickering231/03/2003 6:37 pmlpickering2@...

> Hi Paul
>
> I will never forget standing at the battlesite with George and my
> inlaws on the anniversary a couple of years back. It was fine
> weather when we left Durham but by the time we got to the monument,
> it was snowing heavily, just as it had been all those years ago.
>
> Those poor souls - of whatever colour of rose...
>
> Lorraine

Dear Lorraine
A very emotive place, and not changed much.
I thought I was the only one to notice and mark the event. Glad to see I
wasn't.
Paul

Towton battle was fought this day in 1461.
Many good men lost their lives. Take a moment to remember them today.
Paul

Easter being late this year, I just realised that my rushing about
yesterday made me forget that it was the anniversary of Towton, the
Yorkist victory that finally established the House of York and Edward
IV on the throne. Still it appears I wasn't the only one. How could
we all let it pass unmarked? The bloodiest battle ever to take place
on English soil.
Worth a remembrance for those who died in the blizzard the blew
across the field that day in 1461.
Paul


"a winner is a dreamer who just won't quit"

Read more about Towton here:

http://www.yorkshirehistory.com/towton/towton1.htm

Strange how the English seem to know so little of their own history;
beyond Henry VIII and his 6 wives, and the Spanish Armada, any
mention of medieval history usually just draws blank looks.

--- In , Paul Trevor Bale
<paultrevor@...> wrote:
>
> Easter being late this year, I just realised that my rushing about
> yesterday made me forget that it was the anniversary of Towton,
the
> Yorkist victory that finally established the House of York and
Edward
> IV on the throne. Still it appears I wasn't the only one. How
could
> we all let it pass unmarked? The bloodiest battle ever to take
place
> on English soil.
> Worth a remembrance for those who died in the blizzard the blew
> across the field that day in 1461.
> Paul
>
>
> "a winner is a dreamer who just won't quit"
>
>
>
>
>
>

I am ashamed of myself for missing the anniversary of Towton,
especially as I used to live down the road from the battlefield
itself. This is because I didn't realise what today's date was,
rather than because I forgot the date itself. I hope that people can
forgive me as I have a young baby and so my brain is scatty and have
little frame of reference!

I agree that we English in general know very little of our own
history. I would say that schools have a lot to answer for in this
area, although I am told by teachers that it is improving. I left
school not knowing how many wives Henry VIII had, let alone when he
reigned, or what the Wars of the Roses were. The only medieval
history I learned was about the Peasants Revolt. There was a lot of
emphasis on the First and Second World Wars, the Industrial
Revolution and Gladstone and Disraeli, all important subjects but not
at the expense of all other history and especially how our own Queen
came to be on the throne and why we still have a monarchy. One
historian I spoke to who ran A-Level (Advanced Level, after high
school) classes told me one of her students asked if Henry VIII ruled
in Victorian times!

Fortunately I myself saw the light about 5 years ago, long after high
school. Other people are not so fortunate.

Tussauds (the company who now runs Warwick Castle and theme parks in
England) commissioned a survey a few years back asking English people
questions about English History. Only a minority answered correctly
which century the Wars of the Roses are in. I'm sad to say that
Tussauds isn't helping in this matter, shifting the focus at Warwick
from history to stories of ghosts and tales of torture. All great for
getting the kids in, but not helping the sadly misinformed English. I
asked one of the guides there to support his claim that Warwick was
at the Castle the night before the battle of Barnet. At a marching
speed of 40 miles a day (I had read somewhere) it would take a lot
longer than one day to get from the Midlands to North London. He was
very quiet, and then mumbled that the waxwork exhibition (which is
fantastic by the way) was indeed not necessarily a true
representation of where his Warwick's retainers physically were at
the night before he met his fate. I don't want to do Tussauds down as
they saved Warwick Castle from an unknown fate (the inheritance tax
has caused many fantastic buildings that have been in the same family
for centuries to be sold or fall into disrepair) and they are making
some effort towards introducing people to the wonders of the past.

Anyway I'll get off my soapbox for now! Let's remember those who fell
at Towton, and the good work of the Towton Battlefield Society, Tim
Sutherland, Andrew Boardman, and the others who are conducting great
research into the archaeology and history of the battle.


--- In , "theblackprussian"
<theblackprussian@...> wrote:
>
> Read more about Towton here:
>
> http://www.yorkshirehistory.com/towton/towton1.htm
>
> Strange how the English seem to know so little of their own
history;
> beyond Henry VIII and his 6 wives, and the Spanish Armada, any
> mention of medieval history usually just draws blank looks.
>
> --- In , Paul Trevor Bale
> <paultrevor@> wrote:
> >
> > Easter being late this year, I just realised that my rushing
about
> > yesterday made me forget that it was the anniversary of Towton,
> the
> > Yorkist victory that finally established the House of York and
> Edward
> > IV on the throne. Still it appears I wasn't the only one. How
> could
> > we all let it pass unmarked? The bloodiest battle ever to take
> place
> > on English soil.
> > Worth a remembrance for those who died in the blizzard the blew
> > across the field that day in 1461.
> > Paul
> >
> >
> > "a winner is a dreamer who just won't quit"
> >
> >
> >
> >
> >
> >
>

From today's Sunday Times (UK).
Who will be first to spot mistakes? I bags 'Angevins!'
Paul


From The Sunday Times

August 24, 2008

Towton, the bloodbath that changed the course of our history
This Yorkshire field of ruffled corn is where the most gruesome
battle ever fought on English soil took place in 1461.Why, have so
few heard of Towton
AA Gill. Photographs by Tom Craig

Get onto the B1217 ý the Ferrybridge-to-Tadcaster road ý just after
the M1 joins the A1M, and youýve crossed that unmapped line where the
north stops being grim and begins to be bracing. Go through Saxton,
past the Crooked Billet pub, and on your left youýll see rising
farmland, green corn and copses ý an old landscape, untroubled by
poets or painters or the hyperbole of tourist boards, but handsome,
still and hushed. The road is straight; it knows where itýs going,
hurrying along, averting its gaze. Through the tonsured hedge you
might just notice a big old holly tree on the side of the road. It
seems out of place.
Get out of the car, adjust to the hissing silence and step behind the
tree. Hidden from the road youýll find a gothic stone cross of some
age. Nobody knows who put it here or where itýs from. For centuries
it lay in the ditch. A date recently inscribed on its base, March 28,
1461, is wrong. It should be the next day: the 29th, Sunday. The
movable feast ý Palm Sunday.
This oddly lurking crucifix is the only memorial on the site of the
largest, longest, bloodiest and most murderous battle ever fought in
Britain ý Towton. Bloodiest not just by a few hundred, but by
thousands. Its closest home-grown mortal rival is Marston Moor,
fought 200 years later with a quarter of the casualties.
By all contemporary accounts, allowing for medieval exaggeration, on
this one Sunday between 20,000 and 30,000 men died. Just so that you
grasp the magnitude, thatýs a more grievous massacre of British men
than on the first day of the Somme. Without machineguns or shells,
young blokes hacked, bludgeoned and trampled, suffocated and drowned.
An astonishing 1% of the English population died in this field. The
equivalent today would be 600,000.
Walk in the margin of the corn as it is ruffled by the blustering
wind. Above, the thick mauve, mordant clouds curdle and thud like
bruises, bowling patches of sunlight across the rise and fall of the
land. In the distance is a single stunted tree, flattened by the
south wind. It marks the corner of this sombre, elegiac place.
It would be impossible to walk here and not feel the dread underfoot
ý the echo of desperate events vibrating just behind the hearing.
This is a sad, sad, dumbly eloquent deathscape.
Back down the road at the Crooked Billet, in the car park youýll find
a caravan on bricks that is the headquarters of the Towton Society.
The pub is happy to have them here; the council has given them
temporary permission. Most weekends this is a visitorsý centre, if
thereýs someone to volunteer to open it.
Iým met by a band of enthusiasts: an amateur historian, an
archeologist, a metal-detector, a supermarket manager, a chemical
engineer, teachers, a printer, a computer technician, a schoolboy and
his dad. They are a particularly ordinary English gaggle ý the sort
of men and occasional woman youýll find in huts and garages or
rummaging in car boots and boxes on any weekend. Keen but defensive,
proud and embarrassed, inhabiting that mocked attic of Englandýs
hobbyists, aware that their interest tiptoes across the line between
leisure activity and loopy obsession, they are instantly attractive.
Enthusiasm is always likable. English enthusiasm, so shy and rare, is
particularly winning. The men are beginning to wiggle into leggings
and jerkins of boiled wool and linen, belting on purses and daggers,
stringing bows, filling quivers from the boots of Japanese 4x4s,
slipping back across the centuries with apologetic grins. Iým handed
a skull. It wears the mocking expression common to all skulls and has
long forgotten the fear and agony of its traumatic wound: a double-
handed hammer blow to the back of its helmeted head so fearful, it
split the base of the bone and disengaged it from the spine.
The chances are youýve never heard of Towton. The most fatal day in
all of English military history has been lost, left to be ploughed
under by the seasons of seed-time and harvest. It is as if there was
a conspiracy never to mention it. There are surprisingly few
contemporary accounts of the battle, and they are sparse, though all
agree on the overwhelming size and mortality.
The reason Towton hasnýt come down the ages to us may be in part that
it was in the middle of the Wars of the Roses, that complex
internecine bout of patrician bombast, a hissy fit that stuttered and
smouldered through the exhausted fag end of the Middle Ages like a
gang feud.
The Wars of the Roses have no heroes; there are no good guys and
precious little romance. Theyýre as complicated and brain-aching as
Russian novels and pigeon-breeding. To begin with, every protagonist
has at least three names ý family, county and title. Their wives and
mothers are just as bad, and almost everyone is called Henry or
Edward at some point in their lives, and itýs all about heredity and
family trees. There are feuds and alliances that have precious little
to do with the commonweal of peasants and citizens.
The Wars of the Roses arenýt taught as history in schools any more,
only as literature, as Shakespeareýs great canon of regicide and
revenge that can be seen as our nationýs Iliad. And though Harry
Hotspur, Warwick the Kingmaker, John of Gaunt and Bolingbroke pass
across the stage bawling stentorian English, still bloody Towton is
absent, silent as a mass grave. Briefly, just so you get a feel for
the threads that come together to weave the shroud of Towton, here
are the basics.The Wars of the Roses kick off in 1455, though theyýre
not called the Wars of the Roses (the Victorians made that up). It
begins with the eight sons of Edward III, possibly the best king we
ever had. One of themýs called Lionel ý I thought Iýd mention that,
because Iýd have liked us to have a King Lionel. Edward started the
Hundred Yearsý War, and his eldest son was the Black Prince.


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The problems, the pushing and shoving in the royal queue, arise from
here. Itýs a power struggle between Plantagenets, except they donýt
call themselves that. They think of themselves as Angevins, descended
from Jeffrey of Anjou, whose symbolic flyer is the yellow broom, the
Latin for which, Planta genista, gave us Plantagenet.
After a bit of argy-bargy, happy slapping, black dungeon-work and a
couple of on-your-toes to the Continent, we get Henry V ý cocky sod
and, more important, lucky sod ý who wins Agincourt but unluckily is
then killed by the shits while his son is still a nipper.
Henry VI is a sorry excuse for a monarch. Even by the standards of
the inbred, pathetically inept medieval court, Hal Six should never
have been put anywhere near a throne. It was said he would have been
better suited to sainthood. Obsessively religious and miserable, he
probably suffered from catatonic schizophrenia, inherited from his
grandfather, the French king. He was incapable of governing a
truculent and bitter nation. And he had that other curse of medieval
monarchs: a ruthless, scheming and vindictive wife, who produced a
very suspect heir, considering Henry had never shown anything other
than disgust and incomprehension at the idea of hiding the pink
sceptre. For long periods he would retreat into vegetative states.
England had a cabbage as a king. Thatýs the Lancastrians.
On the York side we have Edward, Earl of March, who is everything the
fairy tale demands: 6ft tall, handsome, dynamic, smart, sensual and
brutal. After his father was executed and his head displayed on
Micklegate Bar with a mocking paper crown, Edward had himself
tentatively proclaimed Edward IV, and the sickly Plantagenet Henry
went north to raise an army.
York and Lancaster imply that these wars were a northern spat between
round vowels. In fact, they werenýt geographically specific, though
they were, roughly, North vs South. Edward marched north with his
supporters. One of the reasons Towton had such a bloody cast of
thousands was that it was one of the few British battles that had two
legitimised kings fighting each other. Both Edward and Henry used the
decaying system of hierarchical obligation to raise their forces.
By the time Edward had got to Pontefract, Henry and the Lancastrians
had moved from York to this broad ridge of farmland. At the dawn of
Palm Sunday ý the day Christ entered Jerusalem ý Edwardýs army
arrived on the rising land above Towton to find the Lancastrian hosts
awaiting him. Across a valley, on a ridge, their flanks protected by
the River Cock and woodland, things didnýt look too good for Edwardýs
Yorkists. If you were a betting man, and he was, youýd put your house
on Henry taking the day, rested, fed, with more men. Half the Yorkist
army, captained by the Duke of Norfolk, still hadnýt arrived, was out
there to the south, trudging the muddy arteries of England. And it
was snowing ý great howling, razoring gusts of snow.
Medieval English battles, like the dirges that commemorate them, tend
to follow a set course. The aristocracy dismount; they fight on foot.
There are mounted prickers roaming around the rear of the army to
discourage the deserters. It is the English way to slug it out, toe
to toe, get stuck in, show iron faith. They stand with their men,
except for Henry, who is too frail and dotty ý heýs back in York
telling his rosary, chewing his nails, being nagged by the missus.
The armies face each other, an arrowýs length apart, perhaps 300
yards. The archers step forward, communion wafers still stuck to the
roofs of their mouths, muttering prayers to St Sebastian, patron
saint of archers. The order ýKnock, draw, loose!ý sends a hissing
curtain of iron-tipped splinters high into the white air.
English archers have attained a mythic status down the ages because
of the showy underdog victories at Crýcy and Agincourt. They were
nation-specific ý only the English and the Welsh took on the
discipline, the plebeian odium and the round loathing that came with
a bow. None of the continental countries deigned to partake,
preferring to be nobly kebabbed. They relied on specialist Genoese
crossbowmen ý the Polish plumbers of medieval battlefields. Not even
the bellicose Scots and Irish could be bothered with bows, but when
used in sufficient numbers and with discipline, the longbow was the
lethal arbiter of battlefields for 300 years.
It was slowly replaced by gunpowder . Any terrified peasant could
point and pull a trigger, but it took a lifetime of aching, deforming
practice to muscle up the 100lb of tug needed to draw a yew bow to
dispatch a cloth yard of willow-shafted, goose-feathered, bodkin-
tipped arrow 200 yards through plate, through chain, through leather
and linen and prayers, into a manýs gizzard. The longbow was the most
lethally efficient dealer of death on European battlefields until the
invention of rifling and the Gatling gun.
The archers stepped forward and together chucked up what they call
the ýarrow stormý. An English archer could fire 15 to 20 arrows in a
minute ý thatýs what made the opening moments of battle so horrific.
The eclipse of arrows would have crossed high in the frozen air, and
in that moment Edward and the House of York had their touch of luck.
The thick, stinging curtain of snow slashed the faces of the
Lancastrian line, making it difficult to aim or judge distance,
pushing their arrows short. And it carried the arrows of York further
and deeper into the Lancastrian line. God howled and cracked for
Edward that morning, searing the cheeks and freezing the eyes of
Lancaster.
The metal-detectors have found the long, broad trench of bodkin
points, showing where the first appalling fusillade was loosed.
Emptying their own quivers, they began firing back the arrows wasted
by their enemies. There may have been half a million arrows fired in
10 minutes that day ý the largest longbow shafting in history.

Organised ranks of men standing under an arrow storm can do one of
three things. They can take it, the steepling hysteria, the terror,
the incessant keening of the goose feathers, the thud and grunt, the
screaming and pleading, the smell of shit and vomit and split gut;
they can stand with their skin prickling in mortal expectation. Or
they can retreat ý get out of the rain, give ground, lose form and
purpose, and run. Or they can attack ý move forward, confront the
butcher, the bloody, unmanly, unarmoured, jeering peasant bowmen.
This is what Lancaster did.
Heads down, slipping and sliding down the frozen incline, they moved
across the short valley and crabbed up the other side. All the while
the arrows came, flatter and harder. A glum statistic of medieval
battles is that the host forced to move first usually loses. But
Lancaster had the advantage of numbers; they were on home ground.
As they approached, Edward shouted above the wind to his men that
there was to be no quarter given, no ransoming of fat earls and
mercantile knights. This battle had been a long time coming. There
was a black litany of insults and humiliation, of murder and summary
execution, a debt to be underwritten in blood and tears. As the army
crossed the valley, there will have been the harbinger noise, the
crack and boom of early firearms. Yorkýs Burgundian mercenaries
detonate their pieces. The oldest bullet in the world has been found
in this valley.
So the two armies, screaming obscenities or just howling like mad
dogs, slithered together and joined one of the most hellish
experiences of human ingenuity: a medieval battle in the snow.
At the front line there is little room for swashbuckling or dainty
footwork. This is a match of thud and stab. The weapons of choice are
daggers and maces. Men with iron sallets buckled to the backs of
their necks, so they canýt be yanked forward to offer a spine stab,
stare wide-eyed through slits, straining and flailing with short,
maddened blows and ache-tensed muscles into the faces of men inches
in front of them.
There was a lot of armour about in 1461.
Most men would have had some form of head protection and bits of
plate, but the most common protection was a stab vest made from
layers of linen sewn together that might deaden the blow, absorb a
spent point or a fisted poniard. But this wasnýt about killing the
opponent. It was about putting the man in front of you down ý on the
ground. Heýd be dead in seconds.
The most common injuries are to the head and neck, and death must
often have come by way of suffocation ý the air squeezed from your
body under the weight of men behind you, jammed in the mangle of
battle. The pressure and the impetus came from the army that wasnýt
yet fighting shoving and heaving.
Lancaster begins to get the best of it. The battle line expands into
a vale now called Bloody Meadow. Most medieval battles have an
allotted time. Perhaps because the armies at Towton were
uncharacteristically large, and perhaps because for so many of the
men this was not their first fight, Towton went on way beyond its
span into extra time, gasping and heaving, sick with gore, men
expiring of dehydration. On into the afternoon, Edward ever more
desperate as his army gave, inch by inch, across the plain. And then,
up the B1217, came the banner of the white boar ý Norfolk, with the
rump of the army. Edwardýs relief must have been seismic. They wade
into the Lancastrian flank. Itýs the turning point: the line shudders
and stalls. And then the movement is back. Lancastrians catch their
heels on the bodies of their own dead. The line falters, bends,
bunches and breaks. In moments, an army unravels into a rabble, and
the rabble runs. And itýs time for lunch.
Back at the Crooked Billet we sit in the snug. Some of the Towton
Society are dressed in the burgundy and blue of the House of York,
with its badge not of a rose but of a sun in splendour; some are
kitted in the no-less-risible leisurewear of Argos. We eat roast beef
as tough and tasty as an archerýs glove and Yorkshire puddings the
size of breastplates. It should seem odd, but it isnýt. The rest of
the pub barely gives them a second glance. And they talk with glee
about this place, this patch of earth, this battle, and the clotted,
internecine politics of the Roses. Itýs easy to mock re-enactors,
dressing up and empathising like clairvoyants. We are taught that
history comes in books, not fields, to be seen like a court case,
with facts and evidence, to be measured against precedent and doubt,
to be unemotional, reasonable and forensic. But thatýs not how it was.
There is another history here. A story handed down that has grown
fluent and smooth and rhetorical, that expands and shrinks with the
needs of the moment. It is a story of belonging, the events that
stitch us into this landscape and in turn sew this landscape into a
country. It is the tapestry of us. These are people who can still
raise lumps of emotion over the misrepresentation of Richard III,
which may well be mildly bonkers but is also endearing, and as valid
and important as anything done in a university library.
After lunch we troop back to walk the rout of Towton. The wind is up;
the clouds spit gusting drizzle. Behind us is Ferrybridge and the
massive Drax power station. In front, caught in a shaft of sunlight,
is York Minster, whose towers were still being built when Towton was
fought. We step through the corn that grasps at our legs, sighing and
whispering. The retreat was where the real killing happened, the
slaughter that put Towton in a league of its own, over and above the
Somme.
The Lancastrians ran. The army of York, the fresh men from Norfolk
and the prickers on their horses, harried them, whooping with relief
and the anger that comes after fear. This was the moment when they
made their bounty, the coins and rings and rosaries, the badges and
lockets and hidden purses that would pay for the farm, for the cow,
for the wife. They moved down into the valley of the River Cock and
thousands drowned, their linen jerkins soaking up the frozen water,
pulling the desperate men under.
We follow up the old London Road. Before the A1, this rutted,
overgrown track was the aorta of the nation. We get to the river, now
little more than a stream, dodging rocks and fallen logs. Here,
hidden in a swaying copse of ash trees, was the Bridge of Bodies,
built of Lancastrian dead to form a dam, the spume running with
crimson gore. This was the final horror of Towton. We stare onto the
dark water in silence.
ýYou know, this is the bit I canýt imagine,ý says the printer, ýwhat
it must have felt like to be hunted down, hundreds of miles from
home, to have been through that day, to be wounded, terrified,
desperate ý what was that like?ý And we fall into silence again.
And then, because weýve been talking of many things, he says heýs got
a son all set to join the army, keen as a greyhound for some
soldiering. Standing in this awful, overgrown secret morgue, he says
heýs proud but terribly worried ý it frightens him, the thought of
his boy. And there, in those words and in that silence, is the thing
that history does when you meet it halfway. It bends in on itself and
folds the run of years to touch the present, not with a cold hand but
with the warm breath of a moment ago.
It snowed all that Palm Sunday. The thick snow deadened the noise of
dying whimpers and cawing crows, the shocked and exhausted soldiers
too stupefied or disgusted to pursue the rout, the carters and
baggage-train servants, the prostitutes and local peasants scuttling
up the ridge to harvest the dead, fires being lit for porridge and to
mull wine, the breath of the living pluming in the crepuscular white
light like small, ardent prayers of gratitude.
Towton gave Edward the throne for a time. Henry fled to Scotland, his
wife to France. Ultimately he was imprisoned in the Tower, and
finally, 10 years after Towton, murdered, possibly by starvation, a
means that avoided the sin of regicide. The House of Lancaster died
with him. Edward snuffed it in 1483 ý of indulgence, obesity and a
cold. He left his young sons in the care of his brother Richard. Bad
choice. The house of York perished at Bosworth, making way for the
Tudors and the New Age.
Towton was the last great explosion of the dark and vicious Middle
Ages. It comes at the end of the bleakest of centuries: the war with
France, the civil war, the Black Death. It was the last time the old
Saxon-Norman system of obligation would be used with such
catastrophic effect.
The dead of Towton are buried all over here, in mounds and trenches,
in pits, in Saxon churchyards and the deserted hamlet of Lead. They
are both history and landscape. They make up the most perfectly
preserved great battlefield in the country. If Towton were a grand
house, it would be nannied by dozens of quangos and charities,
patronised by posh interior decorators, fey historians, titled
ladies, Anglophile Americans and the Prince of Wales. But it isnýt.
Itýs kept by the quiet, respectful community and by this small band,
this happy breed of marvellously eccentric enthusiasts, who, as we
walk through the corn, I see are the yeomen of England walking back
through our history, through Cobbett and Dickens, through Shakespeare
to Chaucer and down the years to Domesday. They honour this blessed
land, this earth of majesty, this seat of Mars.
With thanks to the Towton Society (www.towton.org.uk), and to A W
Boardman for his invaluable book The Battle of Towton



Richard liveth yet

--- In , Paul Trevor Bale <paul.bale@...> wrote:
>
> From today's Sunday Times (UK).
> Who will be first to spot mistakes? I bags 'Angevins!'
> Paul

Nofolk banner being a white boar!
Eileen


>
>
> From The Sunday Times
>
> August 24, 2008
>
> Towton, the bloodbath that changed the course of our history
> This Yorkshire field of ruffled corn is where the most gruesome
> battle ever fought on English soil took place in 1461.Why, have so
> few heard of Towton
> AA Gill. Photographs by Tom Craig
>
> Get onto the B1217 – the Ferrybridge-to-Tadcaster road – just after
> the M1 joins the A1M, and you've crossed that unmapped line where the
> north stops being grim and begins to be bracing. Go through Saxton,
> past the Crooked Billet pub, and on your left you'll see rising
> farmland, green corn and copses – an old landscape, untroubled by
> poets or painters or the hyperbole of tourist boards, but handsome,
> still and hushed. The road is straight; it knows where it's going,
> hurrying along, averting its gaze. Through the tonsured hedge you
> might just notice a big old holly tree on the side of the road. It
> seems out of place.
> Get out of the car, adjust to the hissing silence and step behind the
> tree. Hidden from the road you'll find a gothic stone cross of some
> age. Nobody knows who put it here or where it's from. For centuries
> it lay in the ditch. A date recently inscribed on its base, March 28,
> 1461, is wrong. It should be the next day: the 29th, Sunday. The
> movable feast – Palm Sunday.
> This oddly lurking crucifix is the only memorial on the site of the
> largest, longest, bloodiest and most murderous battle ever fought in
> Britain – Towton. Bloodiest not just by a few hundred, but by
> thousands. Its closest home-grown mortal rival is Marston Moor,
> fought 200 years later with a quarter of the casualties.
> By all contemporary accounts, allowing for medieval exaggeration, on
> this one Sunday between 20,000 and 30,000 men died. Just so that you
> grasp the magnitude, that's a more grievous massacre of British men
> than on the first day of the Somme. Without machineguns or shells,
> young blokes hacked, bludgeoned and trampled, suffocated and drowned.
> An astonishing 1% of the English population died in this field. The
> equivalent today would be 600,000.
> Walk in the margin of the corn as it is ruffled by the blustering
> wind. Above, the thick mauve, mordant clouds curdle and thud like
> bruises, bowling patches of sunlight across the rise and fall of the
> land. In the distance is a single stunted tree, flattened by the
> south wind. It marks the corner of this sombre, elegiac place.
> It would be impossible to walk here and not feel the dread underfoot
> – the echo of desperate events vibrating just behind the hearing.
> This is a sad, sad, dumbly eloquent deathscape.
> Back down the road at the Crooked Billet, in the car park you'll find
> a caravan on bricks that is the headquarters of the Towton Society.
> The pub is happy to have them here; the council has given them
> temporary permission. Most weekends this is a visitors' centre, if
> there's someone to volunteer to open it.
> I'm met by a band of enthusiasts: an amateur historian, an
> archeologist, a metal-detector, a supermarket manager, a chemical
> engineer, teachers, a printer, a computer technician, a schoolboy and
> his dad. They are a particularly ordinary English gaggle – the sort
> of men and occasional woman you'll find in huts and garages or
> rummaging in car boots and boxes on any weekend. Keen but defensive,
> proud and embarrassed, inhabiting that mocked attic of England's
> hobbyists, aware that their interest tiptoes across the line between
> leisure activity and loopy obsession, they are instantly attractive.
> Enthusiasm is always likable. English enthusiasm, so shy and rare, is
> particularly winning. The men are beginning to wiggle into leggings
> and jerkins of boiled wool and linen, belting on purses and daggers,
> stringing bows, filling quivers from the boots of Japanese 4x4s,
> slipping back across the centuries with apologetic grins. I'm handed
> a skull. It wears the mocking expression common to all skulls and has
> long forgotten the fear and agony of its traumatic wound: a double-
> handed hammer blow to the back of its helmeted head so fearful, it
> split the base of the bone and disengaged it from the spine.
> The chances are you've never heard of Towton. The most fatal day in
> all of English military history has been lost, left to be ploughed
> under by the seasons of seed-time and harvest. It is as if there was
> a conspiracy never to mention it. There are surprisingly few
> contemporary accounts of the battle, and they are sparse, though all
> agree on the overwhelming size and mortality.
> The reason Towton hasn't come down the ages to us may be in part that
> it was in the middle of the Wars of the Roses, that complex
> internecine bout of patrician bombast, a hissy fit that stuttered and
> smouldered through the exhausted fag end of the Middle Ages like a
> gang feud.
> The Wars of the Roses have no heroes; there are no good guys and
> precious little romance. They're as complicated and brain-aching as
> Russian novels and pigeon-breeding. To begin with, every protagonist
> has at least three names – family, county and title. Their wives and
> mothers are just as bad, and almost everyone is called Henry or
> Edward at some point in their lives, and it's all about heredity and
> family trees. There are feuds and alliances that have precious little
> to do with the commonweal of peasants and citizens.
> The Wars of the Roses aren't taught as history in schools any more,
> only as literature, as Shakespeare's great canon of regicide and
> revenge that can be seen as our nation's Iliad. And though Harry
> Hotspur, Warwick the Kingmaker, John of Gaunt and Bolingbroke pass
> across the stage bawling stentorian English, still bloody Towton is
> absent, silent as a mass grave. Briefly, just so you get a feel for
> the threads that come together to weave the shroud of Towton, here
> are the basics.The Wars of the Roses kick off in 1455, though they're
> not called the Wars of the Roses (the Victorians made that up). It
> begins with the eight sons of Edward III, possibly the best king we
> ever had. One of them's called Lionel – I thought I'd mention that,
> because I'd have liked us to have a King Lionel. Edward started the
> Hundred Years' War, and his eldest son was the Black Prince.
>
>
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> The problems, the pushing and shoving in the royal queue, arise from
> here. It's a power struggle between Plantagenets, except they don't
> call themselves that. They think of themselves as Angevins, descended
> from Jeffrey of Anjou, whose symbolic flyer is the yellow broom, the
> Latin for which, Planta genista, gave us Plantagenet.
> After a bit of argy-bargy, happy slapping, black dungeon-work and a
> couple of on-your-toes to the Continent, we get Henry V – cocky sod
> and, more important, lucky sod – who wins Agincourt but unluckily is
> then killed by the shits while his son is still a nipper.
> Henry VI is a sorry excuse for a monarch. Even by the standards of
> the inbred, pathetically inept medieval court, Hal Six should never
> have been put anywhere near a throne. It was said he would have been
> better suited to sainthood. Obsessively religious and miserable, he
> probably suffered from catatonic schizophrenia, inherited from his
> grandfather, the French king. He was incapable of governing a
> truculent and bitter nation. And he had that other curse of medieval
> monarchs: a ruthless, scheming and vindictive wife, who produced a
> very suspect heir, considering Henry had never shown anything other
> than disgust and incomprehension at the idea of hiding the pink
> sceptre. For long periods he would retreat into vegetative states.
> England had a cabbage as a king. That's the Lancastrians.
> On the York side we have Edward, Earl of March, who is everything the
> fairy tale demands: 6ft tall, handsome, dynamic, smart, sensual and
> brutal. After his father was executed and his head displayed on
> Micklegate Bar with a mocking paper crown, Edward had himself
> tentatively proclaimed Edward IV, and the sickly Plantagenet Henry
> went north to raise an army.
> York and Lancaster imply that these wars were a northern spat between
> round vowels. In fact, they weren't geographically specific, though
> they were, roughly, North vs South. Edward marched north with his
> supporters. One of the reasons Towton had such a bloody cast of
> thousands was that it was one of the few British battles that had two
> legitimised kings fighting each other. Both Edward and Henry used the
> decaying system of hierarchical obligation to raise their forces.
> By the time Edward had got to Pontefract, Henry and the Lancastrians
> had moved from York to this broad ridge of farmland. At the dawn of
> Palm Sunday – the day Christ entered Jerusalem – Edward's army
> arrived on the rising land above Towton to find the Lancastrian hosts
> awaiting him. Across a valley, on a ridge, their flanks protected by
> the River Cock and woodland, things didn't look too good for Edward's
> Yorkists. If you were a betting man, and he was, you'd put your house
> on Henry taking the day, rested, fed, with more men. Half the Yorkist
> army, captained by the Duke of Norfolk, still hadn't arrived, was out
> there to the south, trudging the muddy arteries of England. And it
> was snowing – great howling, razoring gusts of snow.
> Medieval English battles, like the dirges that commemorate them, tend
> to follow a set course. The aristocracy dismount; they fight on foot.
> There are mounted prickers roaming around the rear of the army to
> discourage the deserters. It is the English way to slug it out, toe
> to toe, get stuck in, show iron faith. They stand with their men,
> except for Henry, who is too frail and dotty – he's back in York
> telling his rosary, chewing his nails, being nagged by the missus.
> The armies face each other, an arrow's length apart, perhaps 300
> yards. The archers step forward, communion wafers still stuck to the
> roofs of their mouths, muttering prayers to St Sebastian, patron
> saint of archers. The order "Knock, draw, loose!" sends a hissing
> curtain of iron-tipped splinters high into the white air.
> English archers have attained a mythic status down the ages because
> of the showy underdog victories at Crécy and Agincourt. They were
> nation-specific – only the English and the Welsh took on the
> discipline, the plebeian odium and the round loathing that came with
> a bow. None of the continental countries deigned to partake,
> preferring to be nobly kebabbed. They relied on specialist Genoese
> crossbowmen – the Polish plumbers of medieval battlefields. Not even
> the bellicose Scots and Irish could be bothered with bows, but when
> used in sufficient numbers and with discipline, the longbow was the
> lethal arbiter of battlefields for 300 years.
> It was slowly replaced by gunpowder . Any terrified peasant could
> point and pull a trigger, but it took a lifetime of aching, deforming
> practice to muscle up the 100lb of tug needed to draw a yew bow to
> dispatch a cloth yard of willow-shafted, goose-feathered, bodkin-
> tipped arrow 200 yards through plate, through chain, through leather
> and linen and prayers, into a man's gizzard. The longbow was the most
> lethally efficient dealer of death on European battlefields until the
> invention of rifling and the Gatling gun.
> The archers stepped forward and together chucked up what they call
> the "arrow storm". An English archer could fire 15 to 20 arrows in a
> minute – that's what made the opening moments of battle so horrific.
> The eclipse of arrows would have crossed high in the frozen air, and
> in that moment Edward and the House of York had their touch of luck.
> The thick, stinging curtain of snow slashed the faces of the
> Lancastrian line, making it difficult to aim or judge distance,
> pushing their arrows short. And it carried the arrows of York further
> and deeper into the Lancastrian line. God howled and cracked for
> Edward that morning, searing the cheeks and freezing the eyes of
> Lancaster.
> The metal-detectors have found the long, broad trench of bodkin
> points, showing where the first appalling fusillade was loosed.
> Emptying their own quivers, they began firing back the arrows wasted
> by their enemies. There may have been half a million arrows fired in
> 10 minutes that day – the largest longbow shafting in history.
>
> Organised ranks of men standing under an arrow storm can do one of
> three things. They can take it, the steepling hysteria, the terror,
> the incessant keening of the goose feathers, the thud and grunt, the
> screaming and pleading, the smell of shit and vomit and split gut;
> they can stand with their skin prickling in mortal expectation. Or
> they can retreat – get out of the rain, give ground, lose form and
> purpose, and run. Or they can attack – move forward, confront the
> butcher, the bloody, unmanly, unarmoured, jeering peasant bowmen.
> This is what Lancaster did.
> Heads down, slipping and sliding down the frozen incline, they moved
> across the short valley and crabbed up the other side. All the while
> the arrows came, flatter and harder. A glum statistic of medieval
> battles is that the host forced to move first usually loses. But
> Lancaster had the advantage of numbers; they were on home ground.
> As they approached, Edward shouted above the wind to his men that
> there was to be no quarter given, no ransoming of fat earls and
> mercantile knights. This battle had been a long time coming. There
> was a black litany of insults and humiliation, of murder and summary
> execution, a debt to be underwritten in blood and tears. As the army
> crossed the valley, there will have been the harbinger noise, the
> crack and boom of early firearms. York's Burgundian mercenaries
> detonate their pieces. The oldest bullet in the world has been found
> in this valley.
> So the two armies, screaming obscenities or just howling like mad
> dogs, slithered together and joined one of the most hellish
> experiences of human ingenuity: a medieval battle in the snow.
> At the front line there is little room for swashbuckling or dainty
> footwork. This is a match of thud and stab. The weapons of choice are
> daggers and maces. Men with iron sallets buckled to the backs of
> their necks, so they can't be yanked forward to offer a spine stab,
> stare wide-eyed through slits, straining and flailing with short,
> maddened blows and ache-tensed muscles into the faces of men inches
> in front of them.
> There was a lot of armour about in 1461.
> Most men would have had some form of head protection and bits of
> plate, but the most common protection was a stab vest made from
> layers of linen sewn together that might deaden the blow, absorb a
> spent point or a fisted poniard. But this wasn't about killing the
> opponent. It was about putting the man in front of you down – on the
> ground. He'd be dead in seconds.
> The most common injuries are to the head and neck, and death must
> often have come by way of suffocation – the air squeezed from your
> body under the weight of men behind you, jammed in the mangle of
> battle. The pressure and the impetus came from the army that wasn't
> yet fighting shoving and heaving.
> Lancaster begins to get the best of it. The battle line expands into
> a vale now called Bloody Meadow. Most medieval battles have an
> allotted time. Perhaps because the armies at Towton were
> uncharacteristically large, and perhaps because for so many of the
> men this was not their first fight, Towton went on way beyond its
> span into extra time, gasping and heaving, sick with gore, men
> expiring of dehydration. On into the afternoon, Edward ever more
> desperate as his army gave, inch by inch, across the plain. And then,
> up the B1217, came the banner of the white boar – Norfolk, with the
> rump of the army. Edward's relief must have been seismic. They wade
> into the Lancastrian flank. It's the turning point: the line shudders
> and stalls. And then the movement is back. Lancastrians catch their
> heels on the bodies of their own dead. The line falters, bends,
> bunches and breaks. In moments, an army unravels into a rabble, and
> the rabble runs. And it's time for lunch.
> Back at the Crooked Billet we sit in the snug. Some of the Towton
> Society are dressed in the burgundy and blue of the House of York,
> with its badge not of a rose but of a sun in splendour; some are
> kitted in the no-less-risible leisurewear of Argos. We eat roast beef
> as tough and tasty as an archer's glove and Yorkshire puddings the
> size of breastplates. It should seem odd, but it isn't. The rest of
> the pub barely gives them a second glance. And they talk with glee
> about this place, this patch of earth, this battle, and the clotted,
> internecine politics of the Roses. It's easy to mock re-enactors,
> dressing up and empathising like clairvoyants. We are taught that
> history comes in books, not fields, to be seen like a court case,
> with facts and evidence, to be measured against precedent and doubt,
> to be unemotional, reasonable and forensic. But that's not how it was.
> There is another history here. A story handed down that has grown
> fluent and smooth and rhetorical, that expands and shrinks with the
> needs of the moment. It is a story of belonging, the events that
> stitch us into this landscape and in turn sew this landscape into a
> country. It is the tapestry of us. These are people who can still
> raise lumps of emotion over the misrepresentation of Richard III,
> which may well be mildly bonkers but is also endearing, and as valid
> and important as anything done in a university library.
> After lunch we troop back to walk the rout of Towton. The wind is up;
> the clouds spit gusting drizzle. Behind us is Ferrybridge and the
> massive Drax power station. In front, caught in a shaft of sunlight,
> is York Minster, whose towers were still being built when Towton was
> fought. We step through the corn that grasps at our legs, sighing and
> whispering. The retreat was where the real killing happened, the
> slaughter that put Towton in a league of its own, over and above the
> Somme.
> The Lancastrians ran. The army of York, the fresh men from Norfolk
> and the prickers on their horses, harried them, whooping with relief
> and the anger that comes after fear. This was the moment when they
> made their bounty, the coins and rings and rosaries, the badges and
> lockets and hidden purses that would pay for the farm, for the cow,
> for the wife. They moved down into the valley of the River Cock and
> thousands drowned, their linen jerkins soaking up the frozen water,
> pulling the desperate men under.
> We follow up the old London Road. Before the A1, this rutted,
> overgrown track was the aorta of the nation. We get to the river, now
> little more than a stream, dodging rocks and fallen logs. Here,
> hidden in a swaying copse of ash trees, was the Bridge of Bodies,
> built of Lancastrian dead to form a dam, the spume running with
> crimson gore. This was the final horror of Towton. We stare onto the
> dark water in silence.
> "You know, this is the bit I can't imagine," says the printer, "what
> it must have felt like to be hunted down, hundreds of miles from
> home, to have been through that day, to be wounded, terrified,
> desperate – what was that like?" And we fall into silence again.
> And then, because we've been talking of many things, he says he's got
> a son all set to join the army, keen as a greyhound for some
> soldiering. Standing in this awful, overgrown secret morgue, he says
> he's proud but terribly worried – it frightens him, the thought of
> his boy. And there, in those words and in that silence, is the thing
> that history does when you meet it halfway. It bends in on itself and
> folds the run of years to touch the present, not with a cold hand but
> with the warm breath of a moment ago.
> It snowed all that Palm Sunday. The thick snow deadened the noise of
> dying whimpers and cawing crows, the shocked and exhausted soldiers
> too stupefied or disgusted to pursue the rout, the carters and
> baggage-train servants, the prostitutes and local peasants scuttling
> up the ridge to harvest the dead, fires being lit for porridge and to
> mull wine, the breath of the living pluming in the crepuscular white
> light like small, ardent prayers of gratitude.
> Towton gave Edward the throne for a time. Henry fled to Scotland, his
> wife to France. Ultimately he was imprisoned in the Tower, and
> finally, 10 years after Towton, murdered, possibly by starvation, a
> means that avoided the sin of regicide. The House of Lancaster died
> with him. Edward snuffed it in 1483 – of indulgence, obesity and a
> cold. He left his young sons in the care of his brother Richard. Bad
> choice. The house of York perished at Bosworth, making way for the
> Tudors and the New Age.
> Towton was the last great explosion of the dark and vicious Middle
> Ages. It comes at the end of the bleakest of centuries: the war with
> France, the civil war, the Black Death. It was the last time the old
> Saxon-Norman system of obligation would be used with such
> catastrophic effect.
> The dead of Towton are buried all over here, in mounds and trenches,
> in pits, in Saxon churchyards and the deserted hamlet of Lead. They
> are both history and landscape. They make up the most perfectly
> preserved great battlefield in the country. If Towton were a grand
> house, it would be nannied by dozens of quangos and charities,
> patronised by posh interior decorators, fey historians, titled
> ladies, Anglophile Americans and the Prince of Wales. But it isn't.
> It's kept by the quiet, respectful community and by this small band,
> this happy breed of marvellously eccentric enthusiasts, who, as we
> walk through the corn, I see are the yeomen of England walking back
> through our history, through Cobbett and Dickens, through Shakespeare
> to Chaucer and down the years to Domesday. They honour this blessed
> land, this earth of majesty, this seat of Mars.
> With thanks to the Towton Society (www.towton.org.uk), and to A W
> Boardman for his invaluable book The Battle of Towton
>
>
>
> Richard liveth yet
>
>
>
>
>
>
>

--- In , Paul Trevor Bale
<paul.bale@...> wrote:
>
> From today's Sunday Times (UK).
> Who will be first to spot mistakes? I bags 'Angevins!'
> Paul



I'll take Jeffrey of Anjou.

I raised an eyebrow at Norfolk's badge being the White Boar, too.

And I'd take my blue pencil to the line about mordant mauve clouds
curdling. That's rather purple prose, literally.

But on the whole, I like this article very much. If I had written it,
I would hang it with pride on my ego wall. The writing is very
individualistic and effective. There is such a you-are-there quality
that I can feel the wind and hear it soughing through the corn leaves
-- the author didn't write this from his office chair. The pacing
excellent, short punchy sentences mixed with long descriptive ones
with plenty of vivid imagery. And it tells a story evidently seldom
told, in prose that sings.

I would bet that a few dozen people who never thought much about the
musty old Middle Ages will become interested after reading this.
Maybe read up on the Wars of the Roses. Maybe visit this battlefield.
Maybe turn up one day in the Richard III Society.

Katy

The Black Death in the 15th century.
Towton being fought by a "feudal levy".

--- In , "eileen"
<ebatesparrot@...> wrote:
>
> --- In , Paul Trevor Bale
<paul.bale@> wrote:
> >
> > From today's Sunday Times (UK).
> > Who will be first to spot mistakes? I bags 'Angevins!'
> > Paul
>
> Nofolk banner being a white boar!
> Eileen
>

--- In , "theblackprussian"
<theblackprussian@...> wrote:
>
> The Black Death in the 15th century.
> Towton being fought by a "feudal levy".


I'll give him (presuming that AA Gillis a man) that one. He said
that Towton, in 1461, came at the end of a century of calamities that
included the Black Death. Fourteen sixty-one isn't the end of the
15th century, so I take that referring to the previous hundred years,
which did include several outbreaks of the Black Death in England.

Quoting the ever-popular Wikipedia: "By the end of 1350 the Black
Death had subsided, but it never really died out in England over the
next few hundred years: there were further outbreaks in 1361–62, 1369,
1379–83, 1389–93, and throughout the first half of the 15th century."

The proofreader should have caught "knock" for the act of fitting an
arrow to the string of a bow -- it's "nock" in that sense -- but there
may not have been a human proofreader involved, and a computer spell
check lexicon would like "knock" just fine, since it is a real word.
(Just to prove that point, the spell-checker in my own computer
underlined "nock" as being a probable misspelling.)

Katy

--- In , Paul Trevor Bale <paul.bale@...> wrote:
>
> From today's Sunday Times (UK).

Is that right they had 'mounted prickers' to stop deserters - sounds a good idea, how
many would there have been? They would have had to be here there and everywhere.
Another thing who kept an eye on them, to dissuade them from deserting?

Eileen




>
> AA Gill. Photographs by Tom Craig
>
> Get onto the B1217 – the Ferrybridge-to-Tadcaster road – just after
> the M1 joins the A1M, and you've crossed that unmapped line where the
> north stops being grim and begins to be bracing. Go through Saxton,
> past the Crooked Billet pub, and on your left you'll see rising
> farmland, green corn and copses – an old landscape, untroubled by
> poets or painters or the hyperbole of tourist boards, but handsome,
> still and hushed. The road is straight; it knows where it's going,
> hurrying along, averting its gaze. Through the tonsured hedge you
> might just notice a big old holly tree on the side of the road. It
> seems out of place.
> Get out of the car, adjust to the hissing silence and step behind the
> tree. Hidden from the road you'll find a gothic stone cross of some
> age. Nobody knows who put it here or where it's from. For centuries
> it lay in the ditch. A date recently inscribed on its base, March 28,
> 1461, is wrong. It should be the next day: the 29th, Sunday. The
> movable feast – Palm Sunday.
> This oddly lurking crucifix is the only memorial on the site of the
> largest, longest, bloodiest and most murderous battle ever fought in
> Britain – Towton. Bloodiest not just by a few hundred, but by
> thousands. Its closest home-grown mortal rival is Marston Moor,
> fought 200 years later with a quarter of the casualties.
> By all contemporary accounts, allowing for medieval exaggeration, on
> this one Sunday between 20,000 and 30,000 men died. Just so that you
> grasp the magnitude, that's a more grievous massacre of British men
> than on the first day of the Somme. Without machineguns or shells,
> young blokes hacked, bludgeoned and trampled, suffocated and drowned.
> An astonishing 1% of the English population died in this field. The
> equivalent today would be 600,000.
> Walk in the margin of the corn as it is ruffled by the blustering
> wind. Above, the thick mauve, mordant clouds curdle and thud like
> bruises, bowling patches of sunlight across the rise and fall of the
> land. In the distance is a single stunted tree, flattened by the
> south wind. It marks the corner of this sombre, elegiac place.
> It would be impossible to walk here and not feel the dread underfoot
> – the echo of desperate events vibrating just behind the hearing.
> This is a sad, sad, dumbly eloquent deathscape.
> Back down the road at the Crooked Billet, in the car park you'll find
> a caravan on bricks that is the headquarters of the Towton Society.
> The pub is happy to have them here; the council has given them
> temporary permission. Most weekends this is a visitors' centre, if
> there's someone to volunteer to open it.
> I'm met by a band of enthusiasts: an amateur historian, an
> archeologist, a metal-detector, a supermarket manager, a chemical
> engineer, teachers, a printer, a computer technician, a schoolboy and
> his dad. They are a particularly ordinary English gaggle – the sort
> of men and occasional woman you'll find in huts and garages or
> rummaging in car boots and boxes on any weekend. Keen but defensive,
> proud and embarrassed, inhabiting that mocked attic of England's
> hobbyists, aware that their interest tiptoes across the line between
> leisure activity and loopy obsession, they are instantly attractive.
> Enthusiasm is always likable. English enthusiasm, so shy and rare, is
> particularly winning. The men are beginning to wiggle into leggings
> and jerkins of boiled wool and linen, belting on purses and daggers,
> stringing bows, filling quivers from the boots of Japanese 4x4s,
> slipping back across the centuries with apologetic grins. I'm handed
> a skull. It wears the mocking expression common to all skulls and has
> long forgotten the fear and agony of its traumatic wound: a double-
> handed hammer blow to the back of its helmeted head so fearful, it
> split the base of the bone and disengaged it from the spine.
> The chances are you've never heard of Towton. The most fatal day in
> all of English military history has been lost, left to be ploughed
> under by the seasons of seed-time and harvest. It is as if there was
> a conspiracy never to mention it. There are surprisingly few
> contemporary accounts of the battle, and they are sparse, though all
> agree on the overwhelming size and mortality.
> The reason Towton hasn't come down the ages to us may be in part that
> it was in the middle of the Wars of the Roses, that complex
> internecine bout of patrician bombast, a hissy fit that stuttered and
> smouldered through the exhausted fag end of the Middle Ages like a
> gang feud.
> The Wars of the Roses have no heroes; there are no good guys and
> precious little romance. They're as complicated and brain-aching as
> Russian novels and pigeon-breeding. To begin with, every protagonist
> has at least three names – family, county and title. Their wives and
> mothers are just as bad, and almost everyone is called Henry or
> Edward at some point in their lives, and it's all about heredity and
> family trees. There are feuds and alliances that have precious little
> to do with the commonweal of peasants and citizens.
> The Wars of the Roses aren't taught as history in schools any more,
> only as literature, as Shakespeare's great canon of regicide and
> revenge that can be seen as our nation's Iliad. And though Harry
> Hotspur, Warwick the Kingmaker, John of Gaunt and Bolingbroke pass
> across the stage bawling stentorian English, still bloody Towton is
> absent, silent as a mass grave. Briefly, just so you get a feel for
> the threads that come together to weave the shroud of Towton, here
> are the basics.The Wars of the Roses kick off in 1455, though they're
> not called the Wars of the Roses (the Victorians made that up). It
> begins with the eight sons of Edward III, possibly the best king we
> ever had. One of them's called Lionel – I thought I'd mention that,
> because I'd have liked us to have a King Lionel. Edward started the
> Hundred Years' War, and his eldest son was the Black Prince.
>
>
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> The problems, the pushing and shoving in the royal queue, arise from
> here. It's a power struggle between Plantagenets, except they don't
> call themselves that. They think of themselves as Angevins, descended
> from Jeffrey of Anjou, whose symbolic flyer is the yellow broom, the
> Latin for which, Planta genista, gave us Plantagenet.
> After a bit of argy-bargy, happy slapping, black dungeon-work and a
> couple of on-your-toes to the Continent, we get Henry V – cocky sod
> and, more important, lucky sod – who wins Agincourt but unluckily is
> then killed by the shits while his son is still a nipper.
> Henry VI is a sorry excuse for a monarch. Even by the standards of
> the inbred, pathetically inept medieval court, Hal Six should never
> have been put anywhere near a throne. It was said he would have been
> better suited to sainthood. Obsessively religious and miserable, he
> probably suffered from catatonic schizophrenia, inherited from his
> grandfather, the French king. He was incapable of governing a
> truculent and bitter nation. And he had that other curse of medieval
> monarchs: a ruthless, scheming and vindictive wife, who produced a
> very suspect heir, considering Henry had never shown anything other
> than disgust and incomprehension at the idea of hiding the pink
> sceptre. For long periods he would retreat into vegetative states.
> England had a cabbage as a king. That's the Lancastrians.
> On the York side we have Edward, Earl of March, who is everything the
> fairy tale demands: 6ft tall, handsome, dynamic, smart, sensual and
> brutal. After his father was executed and his head displayed on
> Micklegate Bar with a mocking paper crown, Edward had himself
> tentatively proclaimed Edward IV, and the sickly Plantagenet Henry
> went north to raise an army.
> York and Lancaster imply that these wars were a northern spat between
> round vowels. In fact, they weren't geographically specific, though
> they were, roughly, North vs South. Edward marched north with his
> supporters. One of the reasons Towton had such a bloody cast of
> thousands was that it was one of the few British battles that had two
> legitimised kings fighting each other. Both Edward and Henry used the
> decaying system of hierarchical obligation to raise their forces.
> By the time Edward had got to Pontefract, Henry and the Lancastrians
> had moved from York to this broad ridge of farmland. At the dawn of
> Palm Sunday – the day Christ entered Jerusalem – Edward's army
> arrived on the rising land above Towton to find the Lancastrian hosts
> awaiting him. Across a valley, on a ridge, their flanks protected by
> the River Cock and woodland, things didn't look too good for Edward's
> Yorkists. If you were a betting man, and he was, you'd put your house
> on Henry taking the day, rested, fed, with more men. Half the Yorkist
> army, captained by the Duke of Norfolk, still hadn't arrived, was out
> there to the south, trudging the muddy arteries of England. And it
> was snowing – great howling, razoring gusts of snow.
> Medieval English battles, like the dirges that commemorate them, tend
> to follow a set course. The aristocracy dismount; they fight on foot.
> There are mounted prickers roaming around the rear of the army to
> discourage the deserters. It is the English way to slug it out, toe
> to toe, get stuck in, show iron faith. They stand with their men,
> except for Henry, who is too frail and dotty – he's back in York
> telling his rosary, chewing his nails, being nagged by the missus.
> The armies face each other, an arrow's length apart, perhaps 300
> yards. The archers step forward, communion wafers still stuck to the
> roofs of their mouths, muttering prayers to St Sebastian, patron
> saint of archers. The order "Knock, draw, loose!" sends a hissing
> curtain of iron-tipped splinters high into the white air.
> English archers have attained a mythic status down the ages because
> of the showy underdog victories at Crécy and Agincourt. They were
> nation-specific – only the English and the Welsh took on the
> discipline, the plebeian odium and the round loathing that came with
> a bow. None of the continental countries deigned to partake,
> preferring to be nobly kebabbed. They relied on specialist Genoese
> crossbowmen – the Polish plumbers of medieval battlefields. Not even
> the bellicose Scots and Irish could be bothered with bows, but when
> used in sufficient numbers and with discipline, the longbow was the
> lethal arbiter of battlefields for 300 years.
> It was slowly replaced by gunpowder . Any terrified peasant could
> point and pull a trigger, but it took a lifetime of aching, deforming
> practice to muscle up the 100lb of tug needed to draw a yew bow to
> dispatch a cloth yard of willow-shafted, goose-feathered, bodkin-
> tipped arrow 200 yards through plate, through chain, through leather
> and linen and prayers, into a man's gizzard. The longbow was the most
> lethally efficient dealer of death on European battlefields until the
> invention of rifling and the Gatling gun.
> The archers stepped forward and together chucked up what they call
> the "arrow storm". An English archer could fire 15 to 20 arrows in a
> minute – that's what made the opening moments of battle so horrific.
> The eclipse of arrows would have crossed high in the frozen air, and
> in that moment Edward and the House of York had their touch of luck.
> The thick, stinging curtain of snow slashed the faces of the
> Lancastrian line, making it difficult to aim or judge distance,
> pushing their arrows short. And it carried the arrows of York further
> and deeper into the Lancastrian line. God howled and cracked for
> Edward that morning, searing the cheeks and freezing the eyes of
> Lancaster.
> The metal-detectors have found the long, broad trench of bodkin
> points, showing where the first appalling fusillade was loosed.
> Emptying their own quivers, they began firing back the arrows wasted
> by their enemies. There may have been half a million arrows fired in
> 10 minutes that day – the largest longbow shafting in history.
>
> Organised ranks of men standing under an arrow storm can do one of
> three things. They can take it, the steepling hysteria, the terror,
> the incessant keening of the goose feathers, the thud and grunt, the
> screaming and pleading, the smell of shit and vomit and split gut;
> they can stand with their skin prickling in mortal expectation. Or
> they can retreat – get out of the rain, give ground, lose form and
> purpose, and run. Or they can attack – move forward, confront the
> butcher, the bloody, unmanly, unarmoured, jeering peasant bowmen.
> This is what Lancaster did.
> Heads down, slipping and sliding down the frozen incline, they moved
> across the short valley and crabbed up the other side. All the while
> the arrows came, flatter and harder. A glum statistic of medieval
> battles is that the host forced to move first usually loses. But
> Lancaster had the advantage of numbers; they were on home ground.
> As they approached, Edward shouted above the wind to his men that
> there was to be no quarter given, no ransoming of fat earls and
> mercantile knights. This battle had been a long time coming. There
> was a black litany of insults and humiliation, of murder and summary
> execution, a debt to be underwritten in blood and tears. As the army
> crossed the valley, there will have been the harbinger noise, the
> crack and boom of early firearms. York's Burgundian mercenaries
> detonate their pieces. The oldest bullet in the world has been found
> in this valley.
> So the two armies, screaming obscenities or just howling like mad
> dogs, slithered together and joined one of the most hellish
> experiences of human ingenuity: a medieval battle in the snow.
> At the front line there is little room for swashbuckling or dainty
> footwork. This is a match of thud and stab. The weapons of choice are
> daggers and maces. Men with iron sallets buckled to the backs of
> their necks, so they can't be yanked forward to offer a spine stab,
> stare wide-eyed through slits, straining and flailing with short,
> maddened blows and ache-tensed muscles into the faces of men inches
> in front of them.
> There was a lot of armour about in 1461.
> Most men would have had some form of head protection and bits of
> plate, but the most common protection was a stab vest made from
> layers of linen sewn together that might deaden the blow, absorb a
> spent point or a fisted poniard. But this wasn't about killing the
> opponent. It was about putting the man in front of you down – on the
> ground. He'd be dead in seconds.
> The most common injuries are to the head and neck, and death must
> often have come by way of suffocation – the air squeezed from your
> body under the weight of men behind you, jammed in the mangle of
> battle. The pressure and the impetus came from the army that wasn't
> yet fighting shoving and heaving.
> Lancaster begins to get the best of it. The battle line expands into
> a vale now called Bloody Meadow. Most medieval battles have an
> allotted time. Perhaps because the armies at Towton were
> uncharacteristically large, and perhaps because for so many of the
> men this was not their first fight, Towton went on way beyond its
> span into extra time, gasping and heaving, sick with gore, men
> expiring of dehydration. On into the afternoon, Edward ever more
> desperate as his army gave, inch by inch, across the plain. And then,
> up the B1217, came the banner of the white boar – Norfolk, with the
> rump of the army. Edward's relief must have been seismic. They wade
> into the Lancastrian flank. It's the turning point: the line shudders
> and stalls. And then the movement is back. Lancastrians catch their
> heels on the bodies of their own dead. The line falters, bends,
> bunches and breaks. In moments, an army unravels into a rabble, and
> the rabble runs. And it's time for lunch.
> Back at the Crooked Billet we sit in the snug. Some of the Towton
> Society are dressed in the burgundy and blue of the House of York,
> with its badge not of a rose but of a sun in splendour; some are
> kitted in the no-less-risible leisurewear of Argos. We eat roast beef
> as tough and tasty as an archer's glove and Yorkshire puddings the
> size of breastplates. It should seem odd, but it isn't. The rest of
> the pub barely gives them a second glance. And they talk with glee
> about this place, this patch of earth, this battle, and the clotted,
> internecine politics of the Roses. It's easy to mock re-enactors,
> dressing up and empathising like clairvoyants. We are taught that
> history comes in books, not fields, to be seen like a court case,
> with facts and evidence, to be measured against precedent and doubt,
> to be unemotional, reasonable and forensic. But that's not how it was.
> There is another history here. A story handed down that has grown
> fluent and smooth and rhetorical, that expands and shrinks with the
> needs of the moment. It is a story of belonging, the events that
> stitch us into this landscape and in turn sew this landscape into a
> country. It is the tapestry of us. These are people who can still
> raise lumps of emotion over the misrepresentation of Richard III,
> which may well be mildly bonkers but is also endearing, and as valid
> and important as anything done in a university library.
> After lunch we troop back to walk the rout of Towton. The wind is up;
> the clouds spit gusting drizzle. Behind us is Ferrybridge and the
> massive Drax power station. In front, caught in a shaft of sunlight,
> is York Minster, whose towers were still being built when Towton was
> fought. We step through the corn that grasps at our legs, sighing and
> whispering. The retreat was where the real killing happened, the
> slaughter that put Towton in a league of its own, over and above the
> Somme.
> The Lancastrians ran. The army of York, the fresh men from Norfolk
> and the prickers on their horses, harried them, whooping with relief
> and the anger that comes after fear. This was the moment when they
> made their bounty, the coins and rings and rosaries, the badges and
> lockets and hidden purses that would pay for the farm, for the cow,
> for the wife. They moved down into the valley of the River Cock and
> thousands drowned, their linen jerkins soaking up the frozen water,
> pulling the desperate men under.
> We follow up the old London Road. Before the A1, this rutted,
> overgrown track was the aorta of the nation. We get to the river, now
> little more than a stream, dodging rocks and fallen logs. Here,
> hidden in a swaying copse of ash trees, was the Bridge of Bodies,
> built of Lancastrian dead to form a dam, the spume running with
> crimson gore. This was the final horror of Towton. We stare onto the
> dark water in silence.
> "You know, this is the bit I can't imagine," says the printer, "what
> it must have felt like to be hunted down, hundreds of miles from
> home, to have been through that day, to be wounded, terrified,
> desperate – what was that like?" And we fall into silence again.
> And then, because we've been talking of many things, he says he's got
> a son all set to join the army, keen as a greyhound for some
> soldiering. Standing in this awful, overgrown secret morgue, he says
> he's proud but terribly worried – it frightens him, the thought of
> his boy. And there, in those words and in that silence, is the thing
> that history does when you meet it halfway. It bends in on itself and
> folds the run of years to touch the present, not with a cold hand but
> with the warm breath of a moment ago.
> It snowed all that Palm Sunday. The thick snow deadened the noise of
> dying whimpers and cawing crows, the shocked and exhausted soldiers
> too stupefied or disgusted to pursue the rout, the carters and
> baggage-train servants, the prostitutes and local peasants scuttling
> up the ridge to harvest the dead, fires being lit for porridge and to
> mull wine, the breath of the living pluming in the crepuscular white
> light like small, ardent prayers of gratitude.
> Towton gave Edward the throne for a time. Henry fled to Scotland, his
> wife to France. Ultimately he was imprisoned in the Tower, and
> finally, 10 years after Towton, murdered, possibly by starvation, a
> means that avoided the sin of regicide. The House of Lancaster died
> with him. Edward snuffed it in 1483 – of indulgence, obesity and a
> cold. He left his young sons in the care of his brother Richard. Bad
> choice. The house of York perished at Bosworth, making way for the
> Tudors and the New Age.
> Towton was the last great explosion of the dark and vicious Middle
> Ages. It comes at the end of the bleakest of centuries: the war with
> France, the civil war, the Black Death. It was the last time the old
> Saxon-Norman system of obligation would be used with such
> catastrophic effect.
> The dead of Towton are buried all over here, in mounds and trenches,
> in pits, in Saxon churchyards and the deserted hamlet of Lead. They
> are both history and landscape. They make up the most perfectly
> preserved great battlefield in the country. If Towton were a grand
> house, it would be nannied by dozens of quangos and charities,
> patronised by posh interior decorators, fey historians, titled
> ladies, Anglophile Americans and the Prince of Wales. But it isn't.
> It's kept by the quiet, respectful community and by this small band,
> this happy breed of marvellously eccentric enthusiasts, who, as we
> walk through the corn, I see are the yeomen of England walking back
> through our history, through Cobbett and Dickens, through Shakespeare
> to Chaucer and down the years to Domesday. They honour this blessed
> land, this earth of majesty, this seat of Mars.
> With thanks to the Towton Society (www.towton.org.uk), and to A W
> Boardman for his invaluable book The Battle of Towton
>
>
>
> Richard liveth yet
>
>
>
>
>
>
>

I find myself agreeing with you Katy, very well written except for
the odd mistake and bit of purple prose.
Parts I find fault with are :-

The reason Towton hasn't come down the ages to us may be in part that
it was in the middle of the Wars of the Roses, that complex
internecine bout of patrician bombast, a hissy fit that stuttered and
smouldered through the exhausted fag end of the Middle Ages like a
gang feud.
The Wars of the Roses have no heroes; there are no good guys and
precious little romance. (Needs to read up more!)

It begins with the eight sons of Edward III, possibly the best king
we ever had. (This he follows by saying how he started the Hundred
Years War. And this makes him great???)

It's a power struggle between Plantagenets, except they don't call
themselves that. They think of themselves as Angevins, descended from
Jeffrey of Anjou

Knock, draw, loose!

And then, up the B1217, came the banner of the white boar  Norfolk

in the burgundy and blue of the House of York (though I suppose
murrey could be called burgundy)

Henry fled to Scotland, his wife to France. Ultimately he was
imprisoned in the Tower, and finally, 10 years after Towton,
murdered, possibly by starvation, a means that avoided the sin of
regicide. The House of Lancaster died with him. Edward snuffed it in
1483  of indulgence, obesity and a cold. He left his young sons in
the care of his brother Richard. Bad choice. The house of York
perished at Bosworth, making way for the Tudors and the New Age.

Towton was the last great explosion of the dark and vicious Middle Ages.


Then of course there's the back handed compliment that might actually
get people interested in Richard.....
These are people who can still raise lumps of emotion over the
misrepresentation of Richard III, which may well be mildly bonkers
but is also endearing, and as valid and important as anything done in
a university library.

But on the whole pretty good.
Paul

p.s. in view of the recent discussion starvation is one form of death
nobody's mentioned regarding Henry VI, have they?



On 24 Aug 2008, at 18:00, oregonkaty wrote:

> --- In , "theblackprussian"
> <theblackprussian@...> wrote:
>>
>> The Black Death in the 15th century.
>> Towton being fought by a "feudal levy".
>
>
> I'll give him (presuming that AA Gillis a man) that one. He said
> that Towton, in 1461, came at the end of a century of calamities that
> included the Black Death. Fourteen sixty-one isn't the end of the
> 15th century, so I take that referring to the previous hundred years,
> which did include several outbreaks of the Black Death in England.
>
> Quoting the ever-popular Wikipedia: "By the end of 1350 the Black
> Death had subsided, but it never really died out in England over the
> next few hundred years: there were further outbreaks in 136162, 1369,
> 137983, 138993, and throughout the first half of the 15th century."
>
> The proofreader should have caught "knock" for the act of fitting an
> arrow to the string of a bow -- it's "nock" in that sense -- but there
> may not have been a human proofreader involved, and a computer spell
> check lexicon would like "knock" just fine, since it is a real word.
> (Just to prove that point, the spell-checker in my own computer
> underlined "nock" as being a probable misspelling.)
>
> Katy
>
>
> ------------------------------------
>
> Yahoo! Groups Links
>
>
>

Richard liveth yet

--- In , Paul Trevor Bale
<paul.bale@...> wrote:
>
> I find myself agreeing with you Katy,


Thank you, Paul.


> Parts I find fault with are :-
>
> The reason Towton hasn't come down the ages to us may be in part that
> it was in the middle of the Wars of the Roses, that complex
> internecine bout of patrician bombast, a hissy fit that stuttered and
> smouldered through the exhausted fag end of the Middle Ages like a
> gang feud.
> The Wars of the Roses have no heroes; there are no good guys and
> precious little romance. (Needs to read up more!)

True. I think every person whose name comes down to us in history of
that era is worthy of a novel unto his or herself. And probably many
whose names are not familiar.
>
> It begins with the eight sons of Edward III,

To be editorially picky, he may have had eight sons, or more, but only
six survived to adulthood and were players in the events.


> And then, up the B1217, came the banner of the white boar – Norfolk
> in the burgundy and blue of the House of York (though I suppose
> murrey could be called burgundy)


I would allow Gills the burgundy for murrey, and I like the image of a
Medieval army proceeding up the motorway (though it would have been
nice if he had called it by its then-name also) but he can't give
Norfolk the boar.

(What was the correct badge at that time? Norfolk was John Mowbray
but I don't know his badge unless it was the crossed ostrich feathers.)


> Henry fled to Scotland, his wife to France. Ultimately he was
> imprisoned in the Tower, and finally, 10 years after Towton,
> murdered, possibly by starvation, a means that avoided the sin of
> regicide.


Regicide is regicide however it is accomplished -- Gills should have
said to avoid the appearance of, or to disguise, regicide. He may
have done so -- editors can sometimes tweak a writer's prose into
errors, and the writer doesn't know till he sees it in print and
sprays a mouthful of breakfast coffee over what has been done to his
manuscript.


> Towton was the last great explosion of the dark and vicious Middle Ages.


A little purple, again. Maybe lavender. The Middle Ages were not
dark and while sometimes violent, I wouldn't call the era vicious.



> p.s. in view of the recent discussion starvation is one form of death
> nobody's mentioned regarding Henry VI, have they?


Not that I have ever seen. It would have been the easiest route, too,
wouldn't it, if the York contingent had wanted to be rid of Henry.
From what has been said about his self-chosen diet, it was not far
from starvation, or at least severe malnutrition to begin with.

On the one hand, there is the clear implication that the new regime
wanted to get rid of the former's king quickly and once and for all.
And that it was to prevent his being the focus of a counter-coup
(again) but would he have been one? He was not much of a figurehead,
and was known to be incapable of governing, and as of a day or two, he
had no heir. There was no reason to be in a hurry to have him dead.

I don't find it at all hard to believe that Henry actually did die of
natural causes, however suspiciously convenient his demise was.

Katy

Katy,

Adrian Gill is, indeed, male. He left his Edinburgh birthplace at the age of one.

Stephen

----- Original Message -----
From: oregonkaty
To:
Sent: Sunday, August 24, 2008 10:11 PM
Subject: Re: Towton


--- In , Paul Trevor Bale
<paul.bale@...> wrote:
>
> I find myself agreeing with you Katy,

Thank you, Paul.

> Parts I find fault with are :-
>
> The reason Towton hasn't come down the ages to us may be in part that
> it was in the middle of the Wars of the Roses, that complex
> internecine bout of patrician bombast, a hissy fit that stuttered and
> smouldered through the exhausted fag end of the Middle Ages like a
> gang feud.
> The Wars of the Roses have no heroes; there are no good guys and
> precious little romance. (Needs to read up more!)

True. I think every person whose name comes down to us in history of
that era is worthy of a novel unto his or herself. And probably many
whose names are not familiar.
>
> It begins with the eight sons of Edward III,

To be editorially picky, he may have had eight sons, or more, but only
six survived to adulthood and were players in the events.

> And then, up the B1217, came the banner of the white boar - Norfolk
> in the burgundy and blue of the House of York (though I suppose
> murrey could be called burgundy)

I would allow Gills the burgundy for murrey, and I like the image of a
Medieval army proceeding up the motorway (though it would have been
nice if he had called it by its then-name also) but he can't give
Norfolk the boar.

(What was the correct badge at that time? Norfolk was John Mowbray
but I don't know his badge unless it was the crossed ostrich feathers.)

> Henry fled to Scotland, his wife to France. Ultimately he was
> imprisoned in the Tower, and finally, 10 years after Towton,
> murdered, possibly by starvation, a means that avoided the sin of
> regicide.

Regicide is regicide however it is accomplished -- Gills should have
said to avoid the appearance of, or to disguise, regicide. He may
have done so -- editors can sometimes tweak a writer's prose into
errors, and the writer doesn't know till he sees it in print and
sprays a mouthful of breakfast coffee over what has been done to his
manuscript.

> Towton was the last great explosion of the dark and vicious Middle Ages.

A little purple, again. Maybe lavender. The Middle Ages were not
dark and while sometimes violent, I wouldn't call the era vicious.

> p.s. in view of the recent discussion starvation is one form of death
> nobody's mentioned regarding Henry VI, have they?

Not that I have ever seen. It would have been the easiest route, too,
wouldn't it, if the York contingent had wanted to be rid of Henry.
From what has been said about his self-chosen diet, it was not far
from starvation, or at least severe malnutrition to begin with.

On the one hand, there is the clear implication that the new regime
wanted to get rid of the former's king quickly and once and for all.
And that it was to prevent his being the focus of a counter-coup
(again) but would he have been one? He was not much of a figurehead,
and was known to be incapable of governing, and as of a day or two, he
had no heir. There was no reason to be in a hurry to have him dead.

I don't find it at all hard to believe that Henry actually did die of
natural causes, however suspiciously convenient his demise was.

Katy

--- In , "Stephen Lark"
<stephenmlark@...> wrote:
>
> Katy,
>
> Adrian Gill is, indeed, male. He left his Edinburgh birthplace at
the age of one.


Thank you. I thought he wrote like a man. (I am ducking already in
anticipation of accusations of sexism.)

Katy

On 24 Aug 2008, at 22:11, oregonkaty wrote:

>
> I would allow Gills the burgundy for murrey, and I like the image of a
> Medieval army proceeding up the motorway (though it would have been
> nice if he had called it by its then-name also) but he can't give
> Norfolk the boar.
>
> (What was the correct badge at that time? Norfolk was John Mowbray
> but I don't know his badge unless it was the crossed ostrich
> feathers.)




A mulberry tree fruited proper and ostrich feathers argent. Crest a
lion statant, tail extended, crowned.

Howard would later quarter his arms, three lions passant, with
Mowbray's when he became the duke.

Hope this makes sense
Paul


Richard liveth yet

The 3 lions passant (with a white label) were the arms of Thomas of
Brotherton, Earl of Norfolk.

This image is nearly correct:

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Image:Duke_of_Norfolk_Arms.svg

The first quarter is Howard (with the Flodden augmentation), the
second is Brotherton, third Warenne (Mowbray was co-heir of the Earls
of Surrey), the fourth is Mowbray (but the lion should of course be
white).

The Mowbray Dukes usually bore Brotherton and Mowbray quarterly.


--- In , Paul Trevor Bale
<paul.bale@...> wrote:
>
>
> On 24 Aug 2008, at 22:11, oregonkaty wrote:
>
> >
> > I would allow Gills the burgundy for murrey, and I like the image
of a
> > Medieval army proceeding up the motorway (though it would have
been
> > nice if he had called it by its then-name also) but he can't give
> > Norfolk the boar.
> >
> > (What was the correct badge at that time? Norfolk was John
Mowbray
> > but I don't know his badge unless it was the crossed ostrich
> > feathers.)
>
>
>
>
> A mulberry tree fruited proper and ostrich feathers argent. Crest
a
> lion statant, tail extended, crowned.
>
> Howard would later quarter his arms, three lions passant, with
> Mowbray's when he became the duke.
>
> Hope this makes sense
> Paul
>
>
> Richard liveth yet
>

Correction!

Those were the modern arms, and the fourth quarter is in fact that of
FitzAlan of Arundel.

Jocky of Norfolk probably bore:

http://www.vandaprints.com/image.php?id=68485&idx=2&fromsearch=true

without the augmentation.

--- In , "theblackprussian"
<theblackprussian@...> wrote:
>
> The 3 lions passant (with a white label) were the arms of Thomas of
> Brotherton, Earl of Norfolk.
>
> This image is nearly correct:
>
> http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Image:Duke_of_Norfolk_Arms.svg
>
> The first quarter is Howard (with the Flodden augmentation), the
> second is Brotherton, third Warenne (Mowbray was co-heir of the Earls
> of Surrey), the fourth is Mowbray (but the lion should of course be
> white).
>
> The Mowbray Dukes usually bore Brotherton and Mowbray quarterly.
>

--- In , "theblackprussian"
<theblackprussian@...> wrote:
>
> Correction!
>
> Those were the modern arms, and the fourth quarter is in fact that of
> FitzAlan of Arundel.
>
> Jocky of Norfolk probably bore:
>


The Duke of Norfolk at the Battle of Towton was John Mowbray, father
of the John Mowbray whose daughter Anne married Edward IV's son Richard.

John Howard (Jockey of Norfolk in the Bosworth field jibe) succeeded
the last John Mowbray.

Katy

Not according to McGill.
Paul

On 25 Aug 2008, at 13:07, theblackprussian wrote:

> The 3 lions passant (with a white label) were the arms of Thomas of
> Brotherton, Earl of Norfolk.
>
> This image is nearly correct:
>
> http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Image:Duke_of_Norfolk_Arms.svg
>
> The first quarter is Howard (with the Flodden augmentation), the
> second is Brotherton, third Warenne (Mowbray was co-heir of the Earls
> of Surrey), the fourth is Mowbray (but the lion should of course be
> white).
>
> The Mowbray Dukes usually bore Brotherton and Mowbray quarterly.
>
>
> --- In , Paul Trevor Bale
> <paul.bale@...> wrote:
>>
>>
>> On 24 Aug 2008, at 22:11, oregonkaty wrote:
>>
>>>
>>> I would allow Gills the burgundy for murrey, and I like the image
> of a
>>> Medieval army proceeding up the motorway (though it would have
> been
>>> nice if he had called it by its then-name also) but he can't give
>>> Norfolk the boar.
>>>
>>> (What was the correct badge at that time? Norfolk was John
> Mowbray
>>> but I don't know his badge unless it was the crossed ostrich
>>> feathers.)
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> A mulberry tree fruited proper and ostrich feathers argent. Crest
> a
>> lion statant, tail extended, crowned.
>>
>> Howard would later quarter his arms, three lions passant, with
>> Mowbray's when he became the duke.
>>
>> Hope this makes sense
>> Paul
>>
>>
>> Richard liveth yet
>>
>
>
>
> ------------------------------------
>
> Yahoo! Groups Links
>
>
>

Richard liveth yet

Correct Katy. John Howard, later Duke of Norfolk, fought at Towton as
Lord Howard. His arms were Gules a bend between 6 fitchee argent,
which translates as a white stripe from top left corner to bottom
right over a red background with three crosses in the the top section
and three in the bottom. These are what he quartered with Mowbray's
when he became duke in 1483.
Paul


On 25 Aug 2008, at 15:10, oregonkaty wrote:

> --- In , "theblackprussian"
> <theblackprussian@...> wrote:
>>
>> Correction!
>>
>> Those were the modern arms, and the fourth quarter is in fact that of
>> FitzAlan of Arundel.
>>
>> Jocky of Norfolk probably bore:
>>
>
>
> The Duke of Norfolk at the Battle of Towton was John Mowbray, father
> of the John Mowbray whose daughter Anne married Edward IV's son
> Richard.
>
> John Howard (Jockey of Norfolk in the Bosworth field jibe) succeeded
> the last John Mowbray.
>
> Katy
>
>
> ------------------------------------
>
> Yahoo! Groups Links
>
>
>

Richard liveth yet

Sorry mate, but it's actually almost 50 years later than Towton and a
different family holding the title.
Paul

On 25 Aug 2008, at 13:07, theblackprussian wrote:

> This image is nearly correct:
>
> http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Image:Duke_of_Norfolk_Arms.svg
>

Richard liveth yet

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A._A._Gill

Thou should not live by wikipedia alone.......:-)
Paul





On 25 Aug 2008, at 17:53, Stephen Lark wrote:

> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A._A._Gill
>
>
>
>
> ------------------------------------
>
> Yahoo! Groups Links
>
>
>

Richard liveth yet

and I was talking about P.D.McGill!



On 25 Aug 2008, at 17:53, Stephen Lark wrote:

> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A._A._Gill
>
>
>
>
> ------------------------------------
>
> Yahoo! Groups Links
>
>
>

Richard liveth yet

I'm aware of that, I was speculating on the arms Howard used as Duke
from 1483. It seems it was his son Thomas Earl of Surrey who bore the
Warenne and Mowbray quarters:

http://lshmwaco.org/miniature_photos/WOR2/photos/photo11.html

The Duke may have simply quartered Howard with Brotherton and ignored
the Mowbray link.

--- In , Paul Trevor Bale
<paul.bale@...> wrote:
>
> Sorry mate, but it's actually almost 50 years later than Towton and
a
> different family holding the title.
> Paul
>
> On 25 Aug 2008, at 13:07, theblackprussian wrote:
>
> > This image is nearly correct:
> >
> > http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Image:Duke_of_Norfolk_Arms.svg
> >
>
> Richard liveth yet
>

Earlier posts gave me the impression that it was Gill who wrote the
article - and the style.

--- In , Paul Trevor Bale
<paul.bale@...> wrote:
>
> and I was talking about P.D.McGill!
>
>
>
> On 25 Aug 2008, at 17:53, Stephen Lark wrote:
>
> > http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A._A._Gill
> >
> >
> >
> >
> > ------------------------------------
> >
> > Yahoo! Groups Links
> >
> >
> >
>
> Richard liveth yet
>

I'm lost here now as I thought Eileen had asked what the correct arms
were for the Mowbray Duke at Towton!
Paul

On 25 Aug 2008, at 20:47, theblackprussian wrote:

> I'm aware of that, I was speculating on the arms Howard used as Duke
> from 1483. It seems it was his son Thomas Earl of Surrey who bore the
> Warenne and Mowbray quarters:
>
> http://lshmwaco.org/miniature_photos/WOR2/photos/photo11.html
>
> The Duke may have simply quartered Howard with Brotherton and ignored
> the Mowbray link.
>
> --- In , Paul Trevor Bale
> <paul.bale@...> wrote:
>>
>> Sorry mate, but it's actually almost 50 years later than Towton and
> a
>> different family holding the title.
>> Paul
>>
>> On 25 Aug 2008, at 13:07, theblackprussian wrote:
>>
>>> This image is nearly correct:
>>>
>>> http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Image:Duke_of_Norfolk_Arms.svg
>>>
>>
>> Richard liveth yet
>>
>
>
>
> ------------------------------------
>
> Yahoo! Groups Links
>
>
>

Richard liveth yet

--- In , Paul Trevor Bale <paul.bale@...> wrote:
>
> I'm lost here now as I thought Eileen had asked what the correct arms
> were for the Mowbray Duke at Towton!
> Paul;

No, what I meant was that was another error, Norfolk's banner being a white boar :O)

Paul - P D McGill? who he??

Woz going on??
Eileen
>
> On 25 Aug 2008, at 20:47, theblackprussian wrote:
>
> > I'm aware of that, I was speculating on the arms Howard used as Duke
> > from 1483. It seems it was his son Thomas Earl of Surrey who bore the
> > Warenne and Mowbray quarters:
> >
> > http://lshmwaco.org/miniature_photos/WOR2/photos/photo11.html
> >
> > The Duke may have simply quartered Howard with Brotherton and ignored
> > the Mowbray link.
> >
> > --- In , Paul Trevor Bale
> > <paul.bale@> wrote:
> >>
> >> Sorry mate, but it's actually almost 50 years later than Towton and
> > a
> >> different family holding the title.
> >> Paul
> >>
> >> On 25 Aug 2008, at 13:07, theblackprussian wrote:
> >>
> >>> This image is nearly correct:
> >>>
> >>> http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Image:Duke_of_Norfolk_Arms.svg
> >>>
> >>
> >> Richard liveth yet
> >>
> >
> >
> >
> > ------------------------------------
> >
> > Yahoo! Groups Links
> >
> >
> >
>
> Richard liveth yet
>

My understanding is that Mowbray's badge was the white lion.

According to McGill & Jones, _Standards, Badges & Livery Colours of
the Wars of the Roses_, p.20, the badges were:

Primary: A lion rampant argent

Secondary: A mulberry tree fruited proper; ostrich feathers argent

"The Rose of Rouen," written after Towton, mentions the badge
specifically:

"The way into the North Country the Rose [Edward IV] full fast he
sought, with him went the ragged staff [Warwick] that many a man he
brought. So did the White Lion [Norfolk] full worthy he wrought..."

>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
(What was the correct badge at that time? Norfolk was John Mowbray
but I don't know his badge unless it was the crossed ostrich feathers.)

--- In , "yorkistjoe"
<joe.schweninger@...> wrote:
>
> My understanding is that Mowbray's badge was the white lion.
>
> According to McGill & Jones, _Standards, Badges & Livery Colours of
> the Wars of the Roses_, p.20, the badges were:
>
> Primary: A lion rampant argent
>
> Secondary: A mulberry tree fruited proper; ostrich feathers argent
>
> "The Rose of Rouen," written after Towton, mentions the badge
> specifically:
>
> "The way into the North Country the Rose [Edward IV] full fast he
> sought, with him went the ragged staff [Warwick] that many a man he
> brought. So did the White Lion [Norfolk] full worthy he wrought..."


Thank you -- I was the one who asked. I was going to check in my copy
of Shakespeare's Heraldry (compiled to assist in putting on his plays)
but I'm reorganizing my house and like most things it's "around here
somewhere."

Katy

Paul wrote:
> >
> > From today's Sunday Times (UK).
> > Who will be first to spot mistakes? I bags 'Angevins!'

Katy responded:
> I'll take Jeffrey of Anjou.
>
> I raised an eyebrow at Norfolk's badge being the White Boar, too.
<snip>
> But on the whole, I like this article very much. If I had written
it, I would hang it with pride on my ego wall. The writing is very
individualistic and effective. There is such a you-are-there quality
that I can feel the wind and hear it soughing through the corn leaves
-- the author didn't write this from his office chair. The pacing
excellent, short punchy sentences mixed with long descriptive ones
with plenty of vivid imagery. And it tells a story evidently seldom
told, in prose that sings.
>
> I would bet that a few dozen people who never thought much about the
musty old Middle Ages will become interested after reading this.
Maybe read up on the Wars of the Roses. Maybe visit this battlefield.
Maybe turn up one day in the Richard III Society.

Carol responds:

I agree with Katy about the quality of the writing--and from a
restaurant reviewer and movie critic. (By the way, no *American*
Sunday supplement that I know of would have allowed the casual use of
"sh*t" not once but twice in the article. I guess we're all prudes
compared to the British!)

Someone noted "knock" as an error that should have been caught by the
proofreader. Make that copyeditor: the proofreader is normally
supposed to make sure that the "proof" (the article set in type)
matches the edited "copy" (the article as submitted by the reporter,
reviewer, critic, or other contributor). It's even possible that the
copyeditor, not being familiar with archery, introduced that error.
(The proofreader *could* catch it, but he'd need the copyeditor's okay
to make further corrections--at least, that's the way it was when I
worked for a newspaper back in the 1970s.)

Another error that should have been caught and corrected (Gill must
have been half-asleep when he typed it, or maybe he misheard his
sources, is "flyer" for "flower": " It's a power struggle between
Plantagenets, except they don't call themselves that. They think of
themselves as Angevins, descended from Jeffrey of Anjou, whose
symbolic flyer is the yellow broom, the Latin for which, Planta
genista, gave us Plantagenet."

Well, maybe "Jeffrey" had "flyers" in his garden, who knows? Or
brooms, for that matter. :-)

BTW, I thought that the Plantagenets had long since stopped thinking
of themselves as Angevins by the time of Towton, and it's odd that
Gill refers to Henry VI as a Plantagenet king without seeming to
realize that Edward IV was also a Plantagenet.

I liked the wistful little reference to people who care about
Richard's reputation, rather spoiled by the reference to Edward's
leaving his sons in Richard's care as a bad mistake. (I'd say that the
mistke was leaving Edward in Anthony Woodville's care, far from
Westminster, but that has nothing to do with the article.)

Anyway, I hope that Gill is inspired to do a little research into the
period he's writing about here and isn't under the delusion that
Shakespeare and Dickens and Chaucer (long dead by the time that Towton
was fought) were historians (how did Cobbett, an eighteenth- and
nineteenth-century political writer, get with that group?). He can
bring history to life. He just needs to check his facts. He'd like
Kendall, I think.

Regarding the white boar, maybe one of Gill's sources referred to the
white boar at Tewkesbury or Barnet and he misunderstood, confusing the
Duke of Norfolk's banner with the Duke of Gloucester's ten years
later. Just a thought.

Carol, who was confused for a moment by the reference to McGill and is
glad that someone else straightened that out!

Just realised I missed posting a reminder of the anniversary of
Towton which was fought yesterday the 29th March in 1461.
The bloodiest battle ever fought in England, we should all remember
the dead, on both sides.
Paul



Richard liveth yet

And it snowed here in Michigan yesterday...must have been as a memorial.



L.M.L.,

Janet

http://features.csmonitor.com/books/2009/03/28/figures-in-silk/
<http://geo.yahoo.com/serv?s=97359714/grpId=5527791/grpspId=1705297333/msgId
=10616/stime=1238412950/nc1=1/nc2=2/nc3=3>




__________ Information from ESET Smart Security, version of virus signature
database 3974 (20090330) __________

The message was checked by ESET Smart Security.

http://www.eset.com

A new series on BBC4 in the UK entitled A History Of The World (no
idea why!) begins with a film on the Battle of Towton. Showing
Wednesday October 20th at 20.30.
Worth a look I hope.
Paul

Thanks!
Maybe we'll get lucky and BBC America will carry it then.
Sheffe

--- On Tue, 10/12/10, Paul Trevor Bale <paul.bale@...> wrote:

From: Paul Trevor Bale <paul.bale@...>
Subject: Towton
To: "RichardIIISociety forum" <>
Date: Tuesday, October 12, 2010, 12:07 PM







 









A new series on BBC4 in the UK entitled A History Of The World (no

idea why!) begins with a film on the Battle of Towton. Showing

Wednesday October 20th at 20.30.

Worth a look I hope.

Paul

Well known Englishman Karl Ude-Martinez [sic] fronted a film on Towton last night. Weapons of Destruction series on Yesterday channel.
What a pole-axe did to you, the longbow and such.
Interesting. Unlike the recent Dan Snow series on castles where he kept pushing the experts aside to have a go at things [badly] himself!
Paul

Richard Liveth Yet!

He does sound exceptionally English. The question is, is he from the Surrey Ude-Martinezes or the Hampshire Ude-Martinezes...?!

I just hope he did it in a snowstorm. Otherwise it's cheating!!!

--- In , Paul Trevor Bale <paul.bale@...> wrote:
>
> Well known Englishman Karl Ude-Martinez [sic] fronted a film on Towton last night. Weapons of Destruction series on Yesterday channel.
> What a pole-axe did to you, the longbow and such.
> Interesting. Unlike the recent Dan Snow series on castles where he kept pushing the experts aside to have a go at things [badly] himself!
> Paul
>
> Richard Liveth Yet!
>
>
>
>
>
>
>

Nope...he's from Cheam ackshully...Eileen

--- In , "blancsanglier1452" <blancsanglier1452@...> wrote:
>
> He does sound exceptionally English. The question is, is he from the Surrey Ude-Martinezes or the Hampshire Ude-Martinezes...?!
>
> I just hope he did it in a snowstorm. Otherwise it's cheating!!!
>
> --- In , Paul Trevor Bale <paul.bale@> wrote:
> >
> > Well known Englishman Karl Ude-Martinez [sic] fronted a film on Towton last night. Weapons of Destruction series on Yesterday channel.
> > What a pole-axe did to you, the longbow and such.
> > Interesting. Unlike the recent Dan Snow series on castles where he kept pushing the experts aside to have a go at things [badly] himself!
> > Paul
> >
> > Richard Liveth Yet!
> >
> >
> >
> >
> >
> >
> >
>