We need to talk about Towton too.

I don't seem to be able to leave this alone. I thought I'd done after my analysis of aspects of Boardman's book on Towton,  however I have on the Society's bookshelf Mike Ingram's copy of "Fatal Colours" by George Goodwin. The subtitle is "Towton 1461: England's Most Brutal Battle", so I had high hopes for this, despite it being published in 2011, before the real debate on numbers started (although it was written after Tim Sutherland published "Killing Time", so there was some hope). The reviews were mostly very good, and it has had praise from the likes of David Starkey (who wrote the introduction) and Tracy Borman, plus Desmond Seward and Anthony Goodman. 

The premise of the book is to explain why Towton was the most brutal battle in the Wars of the Roses - if not ever - this neatly sidesteps whether or not it was the biggest battle, although it is evident that the author clearly thinks it is. It therefore starts from the idea that the battle was the most brutal and then looks for the evidence to prove that. Which is sort of an "ooo-err" moment for me as it's a type of circular argument. However, a lot of big names reckon it's great, so what does it matter what I think?

Firstly I think that whatever this is, it isn't really a book about the battle of Towton. There are 194 pages devoted to the thesis from "Prologue" to "In Memoriam", so this excludes Starkey's introduction and the various "Dramatis Personae" and family tree pages, index and so on. Of these 194 pages only 32 are devoted to the battle itself. That's circa 16%. By way of context this is a book that also devotes 6 pages to what people ate and drank. Whilst it may have a chapter called "Prologue", most of the book is actually prologue. After a couple of false starts, stopping off at a brief description of Palm Sunday 1461, then St Albans in 1455, it then picks up its story proper in 1422 with the birth of Henry VI. It  follows his reign in varying degrees of depth in chronological order to show how both sides ended up really hating each other so much there was no way Towton could be anything other than a nasty fight to the finish. In a way it's a history of the Wars of the Roses, part 1, with part 2 never having been written.

There isn't any original research into the battle itself. The author's efforts have gone mainly into the prequel. The narrative of the battle is drawn mainly from Andrew Boardman's book that I mentioned above. He also makes use of the Osprey on the battle (which I have and should re-read), but as that's drawn mostly from Boardman too that probably makes little difference. This is scarcely surprising. Goodwin was at the time of writing a member of the Towton Battlefields Society, of which Boardman was the founder and chair. There's been little done with the evidence from those books anyway other than accept it uncritically. Especially in the area of the sizes of the armies. Goodwin confidently states that in respect of the total combatants "...figures such as 50,000 seem probable, and even the 75,000 quoted by one military historian...is not impossible" (that's referring to A H Burne, supported by Charles Ross - not a military historian - writing in the 1950s). 

He goes on to say: "These figures make sense of the terrain. Across a potential battlefield of up to half a mile, it would take these numbers to spread across the the ground in significant depth of ranks to prevent the threat of either gaps being punched through the line or of being outflanked".

Okay. Let's break this down with some arithmetic. Taking 50,000 for both armies and dividing by two gives us 25,000 (these are Boardman's numbers as well). Allowing 1 yard per man on an 880 yard frontage that gives a unit depth of 28 ranks. In his diagrams Goodwin shows three or four divisions deep, but there's no logic for this and no source evidence for which nobles gave up precedence in order to stand at the back. Is 28 ranks deep viable? At this time Swiss pike blocks had introduced the idea of forming up 16 ranks deep, an idea used by Alexander's phalangites 2000 years earlier (near enough) and occasioned because they both used an 18 foot long pike. In practice units armed with shorter pole melee weapons, like hoplites using spears, form up a maximum of 8-10 ranks deep. Romans, armed with swords tended to be six ranks deep, leaving the likely depth for those using billhooks and poleaxes being 6 - 8 ranks deep.

So, no. The choice of terrain does not tell us they had big armies. It does not make sense in terms of the terrain. Quite the opposite.  Assuming archers set up in three ranks ahead of the main army, and melee troops seven (to make the sums easy) that's 10 ranks on an 880 frontage or actually closer to 9,000 men. Having 25,000 men on that frontage just means that the guys at the back never get into combat, and end up being routed into. The use of reserves in Wars of the Roses battles is very, very, rare. Troops form up to ensure they have no flanks exposed. If we accept that the Lancastrians had deployable reserves behind their front divisions then when the armies start to turn - as suggested on pages 179 - 180 - then the reserves would have been moved to defend the open flank that was attacked by Norfolk. Which they weren't. 

Having the big numbers fighting then means you can have a high casualty count, making the battle brutal. Goodwin quotes 28,000 dead, taking the figure from Charles Ross, quoting the letter by George Neville after the battle*. Ross, writing in the 1970s, was an academic not a  military historian at a time when writing and researching about military aspects of history wasn't what you did. Ross is great on many things, but his critical analysis of the sources in respect of battles was cursory if it happened at all.

The brutality is further evidenced by the work done on the skeletons unearthed in the 1990s. These show that people running away in a period of edged weapons got quite badly cut up. I don't see how this is uniquely dreadful. We've now seen what happened to Richard III at Bosworth and we've always had the bodies from the battle of Visby as evidence, so we know that being killed in a medieval battle was anything but clinical and even in the modern day the best time to kill your opponent is when they're running away. We have no grave pits from other English 15th century battles for a comparison (for whatever reason) so we can't say what happened was uniquely brutal.

As I said the 160 pages of prologue in the book are designed to tell us why both sides hated one another. Goodwin goes back to 1422 because he majors on the thesis that Henry VI wasn't just a bad king but actually no king at all. This is one interpretation. Others are available, like in David Grummitt's biography, published in 2015. Anyway, Henry's failures mean we end up with the various betrayals and fallings out until everyone is executing everyone else's fathers and children at St Albans and Wakefield and so on, so they all hate one another. I can't argue with that, it's just that I don't think you need 160 pages to explain it. In a book about a single battle, that's a chapter or two at most. It really does look like padding to hit a word count total when you don't have much to say about the battle itself or the campaign.

The second reason they all hated one another was that the armies represented a face off between the North (Lancastrian) and the South (Yorkist). Two armies that spoke a different language/dialect, one of which had rampaged through southern England on the way to 2nd St Albans. People with strange customs and practices, who ate different types of bread.

To deal with the rampage first. Armies do cause issues, but it is now widely accepted that the Yorkists ramped up propaganda about how beastly Margaret's army was to rally support against her army. The factual evidence isn't great for an unusual swathe of destruction prior to 2nd St Albans.

As to the North v South divide, I haven't done a lot of research, but I have got a copy of "The Gentry and Peerage of Towton vol 1" by Graham Darbyshire, as does George Goodwin. So I counted up the names listed in the "Men of War" section, that lists Lancastrians caught by Acts of Attainder. There are 79 names. Of these names 50 - yes FIFTY - are from southern or at least non-northern counties or locations. If this is a good representation then over 60% of the Lancastrian army were southerners.

There's obviously no Attainders for the Yorkists, so it's not clear where Darbyshire gets the names for that part of "Men of War", but he gets 63 names, of which 13 are definitely Northern and four or five could be either. So, not as big a mix as the Lancastrians, but both sets of names don't include the big names from the Nevilles, Percies and Beauforts.

In the section on Local Gentry 23 families are identified, of which 13 are said to have fought for the Lancastrians at the battle, so slightly more of the locals sided with Henry VI, but by no means overwhelmingly so such that Northern accents were absent from the Yorkist ranks.

I think I'd conclude that the North v South divide is at best unproven and at worst for Goodwin's thesis, untrue.

I'm not really in a position to do anymore than pick at the edges of this, but it seems to me that there's a problem here which stems from Boardman's book. If you're part of the Towton Battlefield Society it is hard not to accept his arguments and analysis. There's a similarity with Northamptonshire Battlefields Society here. We've published books on Northampton and Edgcote. It's what we think happened and we'd be unhappy if anyone was writing a book about either battle disagreeing with our research and by implication suggesting they had our endorsement by saying they were a member. If Boardman is your starting point then you're going nowhere unless you're going to disagree completely with him (which I pretty much do). 

In conclusion there is a lot of research in this book. It's a decent enough survey of the period of Henry VI's reign up to Towton  - although I should add again that other interpretations are available - but it isn't really breaking new ground in the "You killed my father" analysis, and as I've indicated above the North v South thesis is tenuous to say the least. I'd also say be wary of any battle descriptions as well. For example the account of Mortimer's Cross is complete fantasy. My guess it is drawn from Philip Warner's "British Battlefields", a book you can access through the archive.org borrowing facility. I'd recommend this as a way of looking at it because it really isn't worth owning. The account of Edgcote is laugh out loud funny, and only touches reality where he spells the battle's name "Edgcote" and not "Edgecote". Accounts of other battles I know and understand are made up of supposition and probably a desire to hit word count. 

Otherwise Goodwin there's good research on medieval diet and other aspects of medieval life, and descriptions of weapons and armour. The author is a longbow fanboy fetishist, so treat his descriptions of its effectiveness with caution.

On the whole it's another book that fails to deliver on its promises in respect of this battle. If you want to understand Towton then this book won't get you very far forwards.

*There is an issue with how numbers were written at the time, as I discovered when working on Towton. In Roman numerals this could have been written XXVIIIm, which isa normally read as 28,000 but could also be read as 2,800. I can't find a facsimile of the original to decide which it might be.