Battle of Towton

Towton was fought on Palm Sunday in a driving snowstorm, and is remembered as the bloodiest single day of battle ever fought on English soil. The wind blew the snow into the Lancastrians' faces, and the Yorkist archers used it to outrange them, loosing volleys and then stepping back so the enemy's arrows fell short, and picking up and reshooting those very shafts. Provoked into advancing, the Lancastrians closed for hours of grinding hand-to-hand fighting in the snow. Late in the day fresh Yorkist reinforcements broke the line and turned the battle into a massacre, with many cut down or drowned crossing the swollen stream the field still calls Bloody Meadow. The victory secured the throne for the eighteen-year-old Edward IV.

A mass grave uncovered near the field in 1996, and the skeletons known as the Towton 25, transformed how historians picture a late-medieval battle. Healed earlier wounds show many of the dead were veteran soldiers, while their fatal injuries, repeated blows and blade cuts to the face and the back of the skull, reveal close-quarters ferocity and the killing of men who were fleeing or trying to surrender. It became a landmark case in battlefield archaeology, evidence for a brutality the chronicles gesture at but do not describe. The bones, in the end, are a better witness than the numbers.