By Ben Oldham (bo286@cantab.ac.uk)
Picture a medieval battlefield. A mudbath littered with writhing corpses is usually what springs to mind – but what if that ground was frozen? A hail of arrows was a common sight against English armies – but what of a blizzard of ice? What exactly did a winter campaign look like?
The long, harsh winter of 1460-61 saw momentum swing recklessly between the forces of Richard, duke of York and the Lancastrian armies (nominally) under King Henry VI. Richard had been brutally killed at Wakefield just after Christmas, after which York’s son, the earl of March, took on the Yorkist claim to the throne, and met the Lancastrian forces at Towton on Palm Sunday, 1461.
Though closer to Easter than Christmas, conditions that day were arctic. Gale-force winds blew walls of ice into the Lancastrian ranks. A man could consider himself lucky to have seen the arrow which killed him. After hours of hand-to-hand combat, a purported 36,676 Englishmen lay dead on the field.[1] Even by conservative estimates, Towton was the bloodiest battle ever fought on English soil.[2]
It is also, however, one of the best preserved battlefields in Britain. Whereas under normal circumstances, battlefields were scoured by the local townspeople, it is speculated that at Towton the frozen ground prevented much of this post mortem plunder. Not only did the icy conditions contribute to the battle’s outcome, it also ensured its archaeological preservation, though less so in the public psyche.[3] Perhaps next time we return home, soaked, from a snowball fight, we might think of our fifteenth-century counterparts and count ourselves lucky that it could have been much, much worse.
[1] E. Hall, Hall’s Chronicle (c. 1547, 1809 edn.); D. Jones, The Hollow Crown (2014).
[2] A. W. Boardman, The Battle of Towton (1996).
[3] See http://towtonbattle.free.fr for the ongoing project.
Illustration: John Quartley, Battle of Towton. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:The_Battle_of_Towton_by_John_Quartley.jpg
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