XIII
The battle of Towton, March 29, 1461, was the bloodiest ever fought on English ground, the slain on both sides in that desperate fight and in the skirmishes at Ferrybridge and Dintingdale amounting to more than 30,000 men. The events that had preceded it were alternately cheering and depressing to the hopes of the Yorkists, who had been defeated with great slaughter at Wakefield on the last day but one of the previous December, had gained the important victory of Mortimer’s Cross on the 2nd of February, and had been defeated again at the second battle of St. Albans on the 17th of the same month; and although on March 4th the young Duke of York had entered London and assumed the crown as Edward the Fourth, the Lancastrians still held the Midlands and, lying at York, interposed a bold front against an advance. It was a singular position. The Lancastrians had their headquarters at the city from which their opponents took their title, and two kings of England, equally matched in power, animated their respective adherents with the utmost loyalty.
After their victory at St. Albans the Lancastrians, exhausted, had retired to York, the south being as dangerous to a Lancastrian army as the north, loyal to the Red Rose, was to the Yorkists. The Yorkists, on their part, eager to enter London, did not pursue their rivals. Both sides required breathing time, for events had marched too rapidly in the past two months for the pace to be maintained. Still, the Yorkists were in force, three weeks later, at Pontefract, and threatening to cross the Aire at Ferrybridge, a strategic point on their contemplated line of advance to the city of York. It was here, early in the morning of the 28th, that the bloody prelude to the battle opened, in a sudden Lancastrian attack on the Yorkist outpost. Lord Fitzwalter, the Yorkist commander, lay asleep in bed at the time. Seizing a pole-axe at his sudden awakening, he was slain almost instantly, but his force, succeeding in driving the enemy across the river, took up a position at Brotherton, the Lancastrians falling back in disorder to Dintingdale, near Barkston Ash, where, later in the day, the Lancastrian, Lord Clifford, was slain by an arrow.
The advance-guard of the Lancastrian army now fell back upon the main body, which took up a well-chosen position between the villages of Saxton and Towton, lying across a rising road which led out of the former place, and having on its right the steeply falling meadows leading down into the deep depression of Towton Dale, where the Cock Beck still wanders in far-flung loops in the flat lands below. On their left the ground stretched away for some distance and then fell gently towards the flats of Church Fenton.
At their rear the road descended steeply again into Towton, while Tadcaster lay three miles and York eleven miles beyond. It was a position of great strength and one that could only possibly be turned from the left. The fatal defect of it lay in the chance, in the case of defeat, of the beaten army being disorganised by a retreat down so steep a road, leading as it did to the crossing of a stream swollen with winter rains.
In visiting this spot, we must bear in mind that the broad road from Ferrybridge to Tadcaster and York was not then in existence. The way lay across the elevated land which, rising from Barkston Ash towards Saxton, reaches to a considerable height between that village and Towton. From this commanding spot the valleys of the Wharfe and Ouse lie plainly unfolded, and the towers of York itself may be seen on the skyline, on the verge of this wide expanse of meadows and woodlands.
The hedgerows on the way to the battle-field are remarkable for the profusion of briar roses that grow here in place of the more usual blackberry brambles and thorns, and Bloody Meadow, the spot where the thickest of the fight took place, was until quite recently thickly overgrown with the red and white roses with which Nature had from time immemorial planted this scene of strife. Latterly they have all been grubbed up by farmers, keener on the purity of their grasslands than on historic associations.
