We need to talk about Towton

I have put off writing this blog post for a while for a variety of reasons. I've had Andrew Boardman's book on the battle of Towton on the a shelf to read for a few years (!) alongside his book on the Medieval Soldier in the Wars of the Roses. Andrew is a bit of a legend. He founded the Towton Battlefield Society, appeared on several TV programmes about the Towton graves and his book on Towton, first published in 1996, is highly regarded and has been through at least three editions. My copy is the 2009 edition. There's been another one in 2022 with a slightly different name, which I haven't seen

Boardman's central thesis is that Towton was a uniquely bloody and large battle. That understanding drives his analysis and description of the battle. His account only makes sense if the battle is the largest fought in the medieval period, so his thesis is circular. It's the largest battle so it must have been like this and being like this means it must have been the largest battle. Between the first publication in 1996 and the 2009 version the argument that it wasn't the largest ever started to grow in strength. This edition has been re-written to put the case as to why it was the largest battle. In the interim he also concedes that Watling Street and Marston Moor might have been larger, but this is the largest medieval battle.

Boardman is widely read on the subject, and is very well acquainted with all of the sources too. The volume of research he has done is truly awesome. As someone who only really came to the period in the last 10 years or so, and only really started to dig into the sources and bibliography of the period in the last five or six, I have a lot of ground to make up.

Upfront I have to say a couple of things. Firstly I don't believe that the evidence that Towton was the largest battle in the medieval period is conclusive. Even if it is the largest, it isn't 50,000+ people involved the largest. Neither is it 28,000 people died the largest too. Secondly I, personally, think the book is poorly written and makes poor use of the available evidence. I do not think that in a lot of cases Boardman actually understands what the evidence is telling him, and in addition he is one of those who loves to fall back on the "they must have been thinking this..." style of writer. No. You cannot know. To say that the men lined up to fight were all cold, hungry, tired and scared is a stretch too far. They may have been cold (in a period where being cold was not uncommon), some of them might have been hungry (we have one line that suggests that some of the Yorkists might have been short of food), some of them might not have slept well (we don't know) and as to whether they were scared...well, it is just as easy to conclude that a good proportion of them might have been "well up for it", to coin a phrase.

There are at least three parts of Boardman's thesis about what happens at Towton that are open to serious challenge. These are:

• The size of the armies
• The use & effectiveness of archery
• The number of casualties

I'll have a look at these three subjects individually below so hopefully you'll get an idea of why I don't agree with the worthies whose reviews are quoted on the back cover.

Size of the Armies

Boardman's evidence for his belief that the armies are the largest is summarised on page 101 of the 2009 edition of his book. His calculation works like this:

Leading peers: 2,000 - 3,000 men each

Other lords: 300 -500 each

City/Town Militias: York contributed 1,000 (implication that others must have produced a lot too) .

Therefore the Lancastrian army is big because:

Five Peers of the realm = 10,000 - 15,000 

Eight Lords = 2,400 - 4,000

"Impressive array of knights" = 1,000 at least as Boardman says the army "may have amounted to 20,000 according to the averages"

Add to that the 1,000 men of York plus other towns and the mercenaries makes up another 5,000, giving us 25,000 Lancastrians. There's no similar calculation for the Yorkists who are said to be 20,000 at the start of the battle, joined later by 5,000 under Norfolk.

The Lancastrian calculation is open to challenge at a fundamental level. The size of the contingents for Peers and Lords is based upon the 1475 muster and "bills of payment for cloth to make livery jackets", This is tenuous. The former was a fully funded army of the whole realm lead by an undisputed king, planned and raised over several months at peak campaigning season. It is really different to armies called out at short notice with minimal planning at a time of civil war when it is questionable which side is going to come out on top. The evidence for the purchase of cloth for livery jackets and the time period they were intended for is a bit thin, and Boardman provides no references for the reader to check (in my area of expertise, the Edgcote campaign, Edward IV orders 1,000 livery jackets. Not 2,000. And he's king). My personal guess would be that you could halve the lower numbers above to get to the core of the troops raised through feudalism, bastard or otherwise. That gets a number closer to 6 -7,000.

The last number of 5,000 has no science behind it at all. The 1,000 men from York is quoted as being from a Commission of Array. It is not. It is from a document dated from 1486, addressed to Henry VII, in which York, a city that backed Richard III during his short reign, is pleading for a reduction in the taxes it pays (the "fee farm"). In this it is desperately trying to show its Lancastrian credentials, claiming it sent a thousand men to Towton. The quote from the York City Book is that at ‘the lamentable batell of Tolton [Towton], called Palmeston feld, where ther were of your said citie at ther owne costes about a Ml men defensible araied, of the which many was salyne and put in exile’. (Ref: "The York House Books 1461-1490, ed. Lorraine C. Attreed (2 vols., Stroud, 1991), i. 390-1.) NOTE: The men equipped themselves at their own expense, and so won't appear in any city financial records that Henry VII's men could have checked. It is not numbers from a Commission of Array. It is not a contemporary record.

In practice the number would have more likely have been 150 -200 men. This is based upon the assessment of York made during the reign of Henry VII. He rated York at 152 men, compared to Coventry at 76 men - i.e. twice as much. Coventry turns out 40 - 80 men when called to do so, and we know these numbers are correct as we have the names of the individuals in the Coventry Leet Book. Doubling that gives you 80 - 160, plus a little more for it being local gives you about 200. But it is still a guess, just one that is more plausible than basing the turn out on a document 25 years after the event.

All of which means that it is more likely that the Lancastrians were between 10,000 - 12,000 strong. This looks right, given where they chose to deploy, and avoids the need to anyone to be queuing up to get on the battlefield. A larger army would in any event have deployed further forward closer to the edge of the plateau where its flanks would have been secure, and the Yorkists would have had to fight up on to the battlefield.

The Use and Effectiveness of Archery

We know that the Anglo-Welsh longbow was a fearsome weapon in the hands of trained archers when used en masse. Archers were in demand across Europe, and offers of their service formed part of treaties with foreign powers, notably in promises to the Duke of Brittany.

Boardman's account of Towton looks in detail at how the Yorkist archers were deployed, how they were used and how effective the longbow was in practice. His evidence for the latter draws heavily on the Hardy/Strickland book "The Great Warbow".

First up I should say that there is currently some debate about the veracity of the Fauconberg archery story, in which he dupes the Lancastrians into shooting off all their arrows before returning them with interest. I won't go into that now, but will work on the basis that it is part of the narrative.

Boardman sizes Fauconberg's ward as being about 10,000 men as he is of the view that the vaward was normally the strongest ward in a medieval army as it would be the first to encounter the enemy. There are no sources given for that statement, but again I'll accept it as part of the narrative. Fauconberg is therefore commanding half of the starting army, and his ward is said to contain 10,000 men (p47) all of whom are archers (p169). As Boardman has a ratio of archers to melee troops of 1:1, that means ALL of the Yorkist archers are with Fauconberg.as part of a separate battle. His battle maps then show Warwick and Edward's wards split left and right, queued up behind the archers.

These 10,000 archers then pour endless volleys of arrows into the Lancastrians. Given the numbers of arrows per archer - 24 - and the story of of shooting back the Lancastrian arrows, this means between 250,000 and 500,000 arrows were shot by the Yorkists, leading Boardman to say "I am inclined to believe that even after a few volleys of arrows at least 10,000 men were 'incapacitated' during this phase of the battle" (p170). That means nearly half of the Lancastrian army by his calculations was out of action before the hand to hand fighting started. Consequently the Lancastrians had to attack or face extermination, which they did. This resulted in their now outnumbered army pushing the Yorkists back to the edge of the plateau and nearly achieving victory before Norfolk's arrival turns the tide.

The reason that so many people are injured or killed is that the longbow is an awesome killing machine, based on the evidence cited in Hardy/Strickland. Unfortunately I now have to call out Boardman for his selective use of evidence from their book. He talks about arrows going through wrought iron and also through stone. That's all well and good. Except that in the case of wrought iron Strickland and Hardy themselves state that armour is not made from wrought iron (it isn't made from stone either), but from steel, and that it usually isn't worn on its own, but with padding on the outside and inside. The effectiveness of longbows against plate armour was tested in this episode of Tod's Workshop in 2019, which also featured Toby Capwell of the Wallace collection, who knows more about armour than is healthy for any one person. Longbow arrows do not go through plate armour. They don't go through helmets made of plate either. Strickland and Hardy start to make this point in their book, but when they wrote it the experiments hadn't been done, but they clearly say that steel armour is more effective the wrought iron they were testing on. Okay, so my video is from 10 years after Boardman revised his book, but Strickland and Hardy already knew the truth of what arrows could go through and what they couldn't and they clearly state in their book that the tests they've done don't approximate late medieval armour. What has been done here is manipulation of source material to further a point of view that is essential to support a thesis that has already been decided upon. What is needed for Boardman's interpretation of the battle is for the size of the Lancastrian army to be reduced so that the smaller Yorkist army can beat them, and also for a large number of casualties to be caused. That then means that Towton can be both the largest battle fought and also the bloodiest.

If we reduce the armies to their more likely sizes of around the 10-12,000 size, and also assume an even distribution of archers between wards that are split in a ratio of 30:40:30, then Fauconberg has about 1,500 archers. This means that the numbers of arrows shot is closer to 75,000 arrows. That's still enough to provoke the Lancastrians to attack, but it doesn't create a heap of 10,000 bodies. Of course, it might not have been just Fauconberg's archers. If the three wards were deployed side by side, which was both normal and possible with the reduced army sizes, then Fauconberg could have been given command of all of the army's archers, who stepped forwards to shoot altogether. That's a total of 5-6,000 archers, shooting 120,000 - 240,000 arrows, half the number above. 

The Number of Casualties

You can see from the preceding section that Boardman's maths is leading him towards BIG numbers. His approach, conclusions and the defence of his thesis for the bloodiest battle is contained on pages 174 - 177. His starting point is the 28,000 claimed to have been counted by the heralds and repeated in various contemporary letters. Boardman seems to regard the several sources as corroboration rather than repetition. The likelihood is that it is actually the opposite. I haven't seen the original source documents, but it is possible that the number written is 28M, which in medieval times can mean either 28,000 or 2,800, something that turned up when looking at the numbers for Edgcote. For that number to be correct at 28,000 then the armies must be massive (as claimed), and the percentage killed similarly very, very high. 

Estimating numbers of people, living or dead is hard. In respect of Towton the reports of clogging up of the Cock Beck with a bridge of bodies, and the dead being strewn along a large amount of the countryside on the road to York are cited as evidence for the big numbers. I didn't want to be as crass as putting up a picture of actual dead people, but here's an Extinction Rebellion "Die In" in the main hall at the Natural History Museum:

The floor is covered with people. To be precise, it's covered with 100 people. You can find similar pictures of other demos for yourself and count the numbers if you want. They all look like a lot more than you might think. You could probably clog up Cock Beck with no more than a couple of dozen bodies.

Killing lots of people in the preindustrial age is hard too. Boardman describes the longbow as the medieval equivalent of the machine gun. It isn't. It might be the equivalent of a breech loading rifle, but it is not the equivalent of a machine gun firing 600+ rounds per minute on a flat trajectory using a bullet that'll go through steel. He talks about casualty rates on the Somme, quoting 21,000 were killed in the first hour. Official numbers were 19,240 out of an attacking force of 120,000. That's a one in six kill rate against men standing up in the open against machine guns. Or look at the one sided casualty rates in the Sudan in the late 19th century, with masses of Mahdists facing massed breech loading rifles. Best estimates give 20% casualty rates inflicted on them.

Hacking people to death with swords and poleaxes is physical hard work. Executioners in China during the Taiping Rebellion had to be given rest periods to enabler them to cope with the volumes. They could not kill even static people hour after hour without taking a break and getting their weapons resharpened. The massive death rates from battles involving the likes of the Timurids involve much, much, bigger armies and usually the execution of prisoners.

 

The calculations of likely arrow casualties are summarised on p175, where he argues that 10,000 men shooting 24 arrows a piece mean that even if half of the arrows miss then half, 120,000 do not. This sort of calculation is based upon very little science. Brigadier Hughes, in his book "Firepower" cited evidence of musket trials conducted in the 19th century that give hit percentages at 250 yards against massed target of about 15%. It's higher at closer ranges, up to 60% at 75 yards or so. Hughes' calculations of actual battlefield performance are lower, for a variety of reasons. So taking the numbers here - which are still not a fair comparison but have some sort of evidence to back them, a 15% hit rate gives 18,000 hitting a target not 120,000, but given that men might be armoured the number injured falls even below that. And if it is archers shooting at archers in a fairly open formation, not standing shoulder to shoulder (say a metre apart in six ranks also a metre apart) then a lot of arrows dropping from an arced shot are going to fall into open space. This would be different at ranges of up to 50 metres, with aimed shooting giving a much higher hit rate although possibly less effective if the front rank is men at arms in full plate.

So in summary, in respect of the numbers of dead, I find Boardman's thesis certainly "not proven" at best, if not completely spurious.

I will stop there. Hopefully I've shown that a lot of the core thesis is founded on pretty much nothing solid. I do wonder whether anyone has engaged any form of critical faculty when reading the book, or whether they just want the "biggest and bloodiest" myth to be true. I find it very, very, hard to concur. The sooner we take that on board the sooner that we'll start to understand the battle as it was fought.