The Wars of the Roses - Alison Weir [173]
By evening, the already swollen waters of the Cock Beck had risen higher, thanks to the snow, yet for many of the defeated this was their only escape route, and before long almost the entire Lancastrian army was in full flight down the steep banks of the ravine, slipping on the snow and ice and plunging into the freezing waters of the flooding stream, which was soon filled with thousands of panic-stricken men, desperately struggling to escape from the fury and arrows of the pursuing Yorkist troops, who were systematically butchering every man they caught.
Most of the fleeing Lancastrians were making for a makeshift bridge of boards at Cocksford, but what they had not anticipated was the strong current in the stream. Many drowned, while others were shot by the enemy, whose arrows were falling thickly amid the snowflakes. The Yorkists were also racing for the bridge, and there was heavy fighting as they tried to prevent the Lancastrians from crossing it to freedom. The bridge had not been built to support a battling mass of men, and as it gave way with a sickening crack hundreds of Yorkists and Lancastrians plunged together into the icy, deep water below, where most of them drowned or suffocated in the press. As they gasped their last, struggling wildly in the water, horses’ hooves trampled them, as more pursuers used their bodies as a bridge to the farther shore. Before long the Cock Beck was running red with blood all the way to the far-off River Wharfe.
As other Lancastrian fugitives came up to find the bridge gone, they were slaughtered by Wenlock’s men or chased into and beyond Tadcaster. Yorkist soldiers pursued the fleeing Lancastrians for some time after the battle, and even smashed the bridge over the River Ouse at Tadcaster, where yet more vanquished soldiers drowned.
The battle lasted in total ten hours, from eleven in the morning until roughly nine at night, although the rout went on for longer, some fugitives being pursued nearly as far as York. When it was over, men dropped down with exhaustion and slept among the dead and wounded. The Yorkists had scored a decisive and overwhelming victory, but at a bitter price.
Towton was probably the bloodiest battle ever to take place on English soil. Casualties were high because large numbers of men had fought intensively in a somewhat confined space. When dawn rose on 30 March, the meadow and North Acres were thick with corpses. King Edward surmised that about 20,000 had been killed; his heralds, after surveying the carnage, estimated 28,000, a figure given by several contemporary chroniclers. However, this only applied to bodies lying on the field, and did not include those who perished during the rout, so the real figure was probably nearer 40,000. Of these, according to John Paston, 8000 were Yorkists, although on 8 April the Venetian ambassador reported Yorkist losses of only 800. Whatever the actual figures, all the contemporary accounts agree that the death toll was unusually high; in fact, the casualty lists for Towton were proportionately higher than those for the Battle of the Somme.
The people of Yorkshire remembered Towton as ‘a great battle’, according to the Arrivall, an official Yorkist account of events, but the memory was bitter because in that battle were slain ‘many of their fathers, their sons, their brethren and kinsmen, and many other of their neighbours’. The slaughter of Towton broke the power of the great families of the north, and the Lancastrians lost some of