The Bloodshed of Towton Battle

The English landscape binds its secrets tightly, but within its soil can be found the imprint of events both great and small. There are few clues, but here in Yorkshire, 500 years ago, is said to have taken place Britain's bloodiest battle. On Palm Sunday 1461, up to 60,000 men gathered in the fields outside the village of Towton near York. By the day's end, history records, 28,000 lay dead or dying. The conflict in which they perished was a turning point in the Wars of the Roses. Its outcome determined the future of the kingdom. Five centuries of myth and legend lie between us and the truth of the Battle of Towton. Forensic science was about to cut through them. At Towton Hall in 1996, builders were digging foundations for an extension. Just beneath the surface, they found human remains. As the bones came to light, archaeologists called to the site realized what they'd found. A mass grave. And the way in which those inside it had died had been brutal. I think a lot of people have a very romantic view of medieval warfare and the injuries at Towton really bring these people to life and show what they must have undergone. And it shows a picture that wasn't romantic at all. It shows a picture of a very horrific death. In death, the Towton soldiers were about to yield remarkable information. For the international team of archaeologists of Bradford University, they would disclose the savage reality of hand-to-hand fighting, demolish the myth of chivalry, and conjure images of a dreadful slaughter. First, the men in the grave had to be exhumed. The pit was a tangled mass of bones, and the archaeologists had little time to work. But using infrared surveying equipment, they were able to record the exact position of each bone to within one millimetre. We survey 16 points on the body, one on the centre of the skull, one on each shoulder, one on each elbow, one on each wrist, three down the spine, three down each leg, which means the 16 points can be used to build up a reconstruction of the skeleton once we've actually excavated it. Tim Sutherland's survey produced a three-dimensional image of the grave and the separate skeletons layered within it. There were 37 bodies, packed tightly together where they'd been buried on that snow-driven March day 500 years before. One has to imagine that this was a very fierce battle, that as many people as possible had to be buried in as short a time as possible, and in very unfavorable conditions. And so all the soldiers were almost packed like sardines in a tin, they were closely packed in this grave. Little spaces were used by fitting people in where they could, and there was a very, very tight layering. As the skeletons were unearthed, the work began. Bone analysis revealed them to have been men and boys aged between 16 and 50. Carbon dating confirmed that they died around the time of the battle. They'd been stripped naked. The cause of death evident in their massive head wounds. At first we couldn't quite believe the extent of the injuries which some of these people had suffered. One of the individuals had... To 13 skull injuries and it seemed almost that unhuman or unnatural for anybody to be hacked to death in such a way. For the archaeologists, the questions were equally clear. Who were the men in the Towton grave pit? How exactly had they come to die there? When they died, England had been in turmoil for six years. The Wars of the Roses were a vicious struggle for the crown. The White and Red Roses representing the rival dynasties of York and Lancaster. It wasn't the simple fight we imagine between Yorkshire and Lancashire. The war split England between North and South. The Red Rose Lancastrians were mostly men of the North and included Scots. The White Rose Yorkists found their support mostly in Southern England and Wales. But as in any civil war, there were no clean battle lines. The country was torn into a ragged patchwork of conflicting loyalties. The reigning king, Henry VI, was a Lancastrian, a pious man but with a shaky grip on the throne. For the followers of his rival, young Edward, Earl of March, the son of York was rising. Edward had led the Yorkists for just 12 weeks following the slaying of his father, Richard, and his brother, Edmund, by Henry's men. Now at Towton, he wanted revenge and to have the crown for himself. Young, 18-year-old Edward has lost his father, he's lost his 17-year-old brother. Is he going to arrive at the Battle of Towton three months later, full of the milk of human kindness, with a forgiving nature? No. What he's out for is vengeance. He wants the murderers of his family. I think the scene is set for a particularly brutal and vicious conflict. In the turmoil of civil war, formal records disappear. Evidence for the ferocity of the fighting at Towton relies on chronicles and folk memory. We're told the Lancastrians had the advantage in numbers. They were on the field first and took advantage of high ground to make a strong, well-defended position. What's interesting about a battlefield such as Towton is that, contrary to most ideas about medieval generalship, it's actually very well chosen. The Lancastrian right flank is well protected by this steep drop here. So, in actual fact, the general had made every attempt to protect his... You've got the Yorkists advancing onto the plateau early morning and laying out from this position here along the fields directly over to Castle Hill Wood which is over on that flank there. The Lancastrians were spreading the fields along the edge of that boundary there so in effect it's a shallow valley. armies lined up either side. The Yorkists had fewer troops but one major advantage, the weather. They had the wind behind them and as dawn broke it was blowing a blizzard straight into the faces of the Lancastrians. Under the snow's cover, Yorkist archers are said to have advanced unseen and shot repeated flights of arrows into the ranks massed against them. The Lancastrians took heavy casualties and had no choice but to advance and engage the Yorkists hand to hand. The bitter fighting that followed reputedly lasted ten hours. The outcome decided only by the arrival of Yorkist reinforcements. As the Lancastrians fled, they were cut down. The blood of the 28,000 killed in the battle is said to have made the rivers run red for days. So much for the Towton story, but what facts could the grave pit offer the archaeologists? The skeletons were a mix of body types, some of them very robust. They ranged in height from as little as 5 foot 2 to just over They're six feet tall. They were fighting men, but the scientists couldn't even tell whose side they'd been on. I think we probably have individuals from almost every walk of medieval life. I can say that because of the general stature of the individuals. And that suggests they're being drawn from a whole host of lives. There are some individuals bearing previous injuries, aspects of a very strenuous lifestyle, and others no different from any other medieval population. Because the archaeologists had been able to recover whole skeletons, They could begin to work out the physique of individual bodies. Would this give a clue about the part the men had played in the battle? In this case it was very important that we had complete individuals because it gave us a fuller picture of what this person went through. Because we had the full skeleton in each case or almost each case, we could work out that some of them were very strongly developed and they might have had dietary deficiencies. But we had quite a lot of individuals with their left arm being further developed than the right arm and that might indicate that they were practicing archery. If the skeletons in the Touton grave include archers, it's significant. On any medieval battlefield, only 10% were knights in armour. The rest were foot soldiers, mostly conscripts. But in English armies, the archers were the backbone of this infantry. The longbow was their weapon of mass destruction. Practice with the bow was enforced by law in England and had produced a breed of men with formidable killing power. If there is one glory of English arms in the late Middle Ages, it is the bowmen. Edward I had used large numbers of archers in the late 13th century and of course by the time of Edward III in the mid-14th century, these archers are going abroad. There was plenty to be gained if you were campaigning in France. Great victories like Agincourt would make an archer a rich man. In the course of the Hundred Years'War with France, English archers became the most feared killing machine of the age. The archers at Towton were the sons and grandsons of the generation that fought at Agincourt, that have learnt their skills in just the same way. They'd have started at a young age. At a young age, I mean, one, it was the law, but I think it had been peer pressure. They'd see the fathers using the boat and want to have a go at it themselves. I mean, the power of the longboat, it was a great leveller. It didn't matter whether you were a king, duke, knight, whatever. You could still be shot and killed at long range by just a simple man of the land. But the glories of the Hundred Years'War were long gone. Henry VI's reign had seen the loss of almost all England's possessions abroad. In the snows at Towton, the English bowmen were facing not the French, but their own kind. They knew what they could expect. When they closed for battle, archer against archer, I think the archers of one side or the other, they'd want to be the first to get off the first flight of arrows. Quite possibly the first flight of the Yorkish Sparrows could have well have disabled 8,000, 9,000, 10,000 people, killed and disabled them. Then it had been an out and out archery battle. The traps only lasted 10 minutes, but the death toll and the casualties would have been frightening. The suggestion that there might be archers in the grave pit comes from unusual bone development in some of the skeletons. Back and arm bones seem to have been under particular stress in life. The question for the Bradford team was whether this could have been caused by pulling the longbow. I think one of the most commonly asked questions is, are these guys archers? And although I can't say that hand on heart, it seems to me that pulling a very powerful bow repeatedly from a young age, perhaps one that was meant for an adult, would cause those bones to respond by building up a greater density and a greater... Cross-section. To tie his theory down, Chris needs to compare the Touton bones with those of a present-day bowman. Few people fit the profile of a medieval archer, but Simon Stanley comes close. He has been using the longbow for much of his life. Ever since childhood I've been interested in the bow and arrow. I've been shooting these heavy-type bows for about 14 years. The people that shot the bow, they'd have been physically strong men, used to using the bodies. All your upper body comes into play with these heavy bows, right the way from your lower back to the tops of your shoulders and your neck. So have the years of using the heavy longbow produced changes in Simon Stanley's body similar to those seen in the Towton soldiers? To find out... Simon agreed to a body scan. The scanner in which Simon's placed sends radio waves into his body through a strong magnetic field. Water molecules in bone and flesh show up differently to produce slice-by-slice images of Simon's skeleton and soft tissue. He's 35. He's 35. He's pretty impressive. For the Towton soldiers, 500 years had to pass before their bones revealed the wear and tear of a lifetime. For Simon Stanley, it would be a matter of moments. Yeah, it's fascinating. Yeah, it's really. Chris Knussel had found a quarter of the Tauten skeleton showing unusual bone mass in the left forearm and right upper arm. He thought it might be associated with the distinctive pull-push action of drawing the longbow. And then I think, I think it's a reasonable comment that yes it does look thicker on this side. Yes. Compared with the right one. So your left side is a bit more well developed in that particular... particular slice, the cortical bone is thicker. Yeah. On the left side. On the left side, yeah. And you're right-handed. Yeah. Okay, that's interesting. That's interesting because you wouldn't expect the other way around. I didn't like it much with eyes, because there's a lot of compressive strain on that side. The scan shows that Simon's arms are developed in exactly the same way as the grave warriors. It doesn't prove that the Toutan dead were archers, but that becomes the most likely explanation. Yeah, it fits. We're getting left side from your elbow down into your forearm. Your left side is better developed. Shooting 15 arrows a minute and deadly at 300 yards, these were the kind of men whose firepower had cut a swathe through the flower of French knighthood. At Towton, they met their own end. And among the bodies was one who stood out from all the rest. A big boned man in his late 40s, he lay in the grave spread-eagled among his comrades, still easily identifiable. As we excavated him, it was very obvious that this guy was very robust. His bones were very, not large, but very, very substantial. So he just looked like a big, muscly guy. In death, he's known simply as Burial Number 16. His bones tell a more compelling story. He and his comrades had been hacked to death. The blows that ended their lives were plain to see. But for the archi- Theologists, the skeletons of the Towton dead, had a further revelation still to offer. For no fewer than a third of these grave pit soldiers showed other, older scars, massive wounds from battles long before. The skeletons that were found in the grave pit at Towton showed really terrifying, dreadful wounds. It's a very sobering experience looking at those wounds, but the amazing thing about them is that so many of those skulls showed signs of old injuries which had healed. So you have someone who has already experienced the face of battle. He knows exactly what he's getting into and he's doing it again. The soldier known as Number 16 was such a warrior. His face carries the most dramatic of the healed wounds. Examining him is Shannon Novak, a forensic anthropologist on secondment to Bradford from the University of Utah. Her work has included the investigation of present-day war graves in Croatia. With number 16, she would be looking at the effects of violence inflicted five centuries earlier. My aim was to document the trauma in the same way. I would a modern forensic case, a modern homicide, trying to understand the number of wounds they had, the types of wounds, hopefully being able to interpret some of the weapons used to cause those wounds, and to look at wounds that they'd survived, some of these healed injuries that potentially they'd been in previous battles. When he died, Number 16 was almost 50 years old. He had been born around the time of Agincourt. Warfare had dominated his life, and at least once before Towton had come close to claiming it. Individual 16 received a very, very large blade wound to the left side of the jaw. The force was so great that it also caused a secondary fracture to occur in the chin. The blade coming in, fracture in the chin. This individual survived these large injuries and carried on to fight another battle, obviously. Number 16 was a particular breed of warrior with long experience of the horror of warfare. On the battlefield at Towton, he would have been in good company. There would be many men with long experience in the wars. Many of the old captains who fought on both sides in the Wars of the Roses had gained their experience in the latter stages of the Hundred Years'War in France. And so there was an experienced body of people, veterans I think is the proper way to call them, and that would actually go down through all ranks. What was remarkable was just how cleanly the old war wounds of these veterans had healed. It suggests that battlefield surgery of the time was far more effective than had been previously thought. I think most of us were surprised by the lack of infection in these individuals and in relation to wounds that occurred in some kind of conflict. You would expect some bacteria to be passed on, especially in a large battle. If you're using a blade on numerous individuals, it just seems like a perfect condition for infection to occur. The skill of the surgeon who patched up number 16 puts medical texts of the time in a new light. Illustrated manuals were used to pass on techniques originally acquired from the Arabs. They show doctors practising surgery of the most ambitious kind. The claims have not been taken wholly seriously, but putting a man's jaw back together was one textbook operation which clearly worked. They're all... Quite detailed instructions on how to deal with a wound to the jaw. The first stage was to put wax on the place where the bone was cut. To put a double... layer of dressing on. You use a splint or a piece of shoe leather the length of the jaw and then this is very carefully bandaged onto the head and sewn onto a skull cap. The skull of number 16 is certainly a very interesting one. It's fascinating to see that some of the instructions in medical textbooks. Clearly must have been put into practice. The battered skull of Number 16 became the focus of intense speculation for the archaeologists of Towton. This warrior had recovered from his dreadful battle injuries only to fight again and die here. The mystery of Number 16's identity began to stand for all that was still unknown about the Towton dead. We just couldn't believe what we were seeing, that somebody with such a severe injury to the jaw and presumably also to the tongue and to the soft tissues in the mouth could have survived such an injury and been able to function properly. I presume number 16 would have looked quite impressive, quite horrific to other people. So what had number 16 actually looked like? The archaeologists resolve to bring him back from the dead. The forensic artist, Richard Neve, is to produce a reconstruction of No. 16's skull. The blows which eventually killed him present a problem. They'd completely destroyed his eye socket and cheekbones. He's got a blade wound that runs across the left temporal line, so it's effectively bang, That's disrupted the whole thing, so we've lost the orbit. A little bit of the frontal bone, the upper part of the maxilla. Half the nose. Half the nose. Oh dear, Can we approximate these? Jump the waffle out up. The lower jaw has been severely traumatised, probably 8-10 years prior to death, struck by a blade, horizontally basically across that way, across the body of the mandible. The really difficult thing is going to be how we represent that on the reconstruction, trying to ascertain those structures that have been severed and the kind of appearance that that face would have had with this, what will clearly be a very big scar across that part of the face. The way in which number 16's scars healed are the best clue to his previous life. The sophistication of the surgery that saved him suggests that he was well connected to a noble household. On the whole, the people who would have received medical treatment would have been rich people. On the other hand, I think it's clear that surgeons were not simply treating knights. There are some instructions which are prefaced with the words, if a sergeant goes into battle poorly armed and without an iron hat, then he may well suffer from this kind of wound. What this suggests to me is that people who are employing surgeons in their arms were interested in the survival of their professional warriors. There were few professionals in armies of this time. Most men on the battlefield had no choice but to be there. But some noblemen did have a retinue of paid fighting men, singled out from an early age to wear their livery. Was Number 16 part of such a fighting elite? If he were in a livery, and I almost, I can see him in my mind, he must have been an individual that would have been a livery soldier. I think he appears to have been training from a very young age, before he was physiologically mature. And what I mean by that is sometime prior to the age of, say, 14, 15, he would have been already training. In addition to that, he's a very broad individual, which may suggest either, one, he's that way because of this activity, or probably because he was selected because he's a broad individual. ...were experienced in battle, but even for them, Tauton was a new horror. Both sides were ordered to show no mercy. So great was the slaughter of men... say the chronicles, that the very carcasses hindered them that fought. The figure of 28,000 dead, counted by the heralds, started to circulate within a matter of weeks. Today it's a death toll that invites both disbelief and horror. I think 28,000 dead is a totally implausible number. I mean, if you accept that, then it's rather like accepting that more men died at Towton than did in the disastrous first day of the Somme on 1st July 1916, advancing against machine guns in open field. So what evidence does the grave pit give the archaeologists for the ferocity of the killing? Shannon Novak, more familiar with gunshots than sword cuts, is working out how to identify which weapons produced the wound marks found in the skeletons. To me, this really looks like a blunt instrument with a specific shape that's come in very hard and fast and then be retracted. You've either got something like this, the Warhammer. This one is flattened diamond section as we know from profiling. Let's look at that again. Let's just do it, yeah. That's very square. Now if you imagine he's upright and I'm upright and I swing with that. So something's swinging in and smashing through. And you could deliver a good course of that. From the weapon profiles she developed, Shannon found the most common cause of death was a blade wound from either sword, dagger or battle axe. More stabbing wounds came from the spike of a pole axe or a horseman's hammer, with the victims apparently on the ground. she found only one arrow wound. Beyond doubt, number 16 and his companions were killed at close quarters. But the wound pattern showed something curious. Almost without exception, the men were killed with blows directly to the head, and it appears they were completely unprotected. This is what puzzles me. One individual has head wounds. Multiple head wounds. The one thing you are not going to leave out from going into battle at this period is his head. a helmet because a lot of injuries are going to be received on the head. So again we're back to this problem where lots of these men don't seem to have been wearing helmets. Without helmets and with the death blows targeting the head and face, it was almost as if these men had been singled out for punishment. They died from a blow, probably delivered at arm's length, and then after that, the fate was sort of sealed even further by delivering similar blows to the head region. My own feeling is that some of these individuals may... have actually still been living when they received the second and tertiary and subsequent blows. But obviously the prime primary injury would have caused them to perhaps be less able to defend themselves. And they're just being mutilated. Essentially it's like it's a massacre. The idea of a massacre upsets all conventional notions about the age of chivalry. We imagine battles were conducted according to a code of honor. If so, it was a code from which most at Tauten were excluded. We have an image in our mind of the knight in shining armour galloping across the countryside, rescuing damsels in distress. Something else is the idea of courtesy to other knights and particularly granting mercy to a vanquished opponent. It was an aristocratic ideal, it only extended to other knights. I think they had no compunction at all in mistreating anyone who was not a knight. What that mistreatment might involve was becoming apparent in the laboratory. Some of the wounds around the time of death were unusual and disturbing. Skull showed repeated shallow cuts to the ears, the scalp and face. They raised... It's a grisly possibility. In this case we have at least one individual that seems to have had his nose targeted. Also there's some scratches above the ear, I think on the left side in one individual, a series of parallel scratches. They're in size, so it's not a chopping, it's kind of a cutting, which may suggest that... an ear or for some reason a part of the ear and scalp was removed. And that, again, may suggest they were dealing with a case of mutilation. Suspicions about mistreatment appeared all the stronger with the discovery in the grave of another skeleton, number 24. Uncovering his remains, the team found both arms apparently twisted behind him. The conclusion seemed inescapable. When we came across the skeleton who appeared to have his arms behind his back, which is obviously a very unnatural position, we thought he might have been a prisoner or something with his arms tied behind his back and his legs were touching and the knees as well which was quite unusual as well so we thought this might be a very important skeleton in the analysis. Different scenarios run through your mind at the time. One would assume that he would have been captured. Somebody would have had to have tied his arms behind his back. And there is the idea that this individual may have been tortured, may have been suffered before he died of his injuries. For the archaeologists, a possible hypothesis was taking shape. Lined up by the grave pit, stripped, mutilated, executed. It's a scenario all too familiar to our own century, but still sits uncomfortably with the so-called age of chivalry. This veteran soldier had fought many battles. Did his last one really end with him and his comrades being put to death as prisoners? After 500 years, the battlefield of Towton is not about to surrender its secrets easily. But Shannon Novak's work on the wounds was starting to suggest that Number 16 and his companions might not have died quietly after all. At some point, these individuals had arms and hands free. to defend themselves. Most of the wounds that occur in the body are in the arms and the hands, and these are classic defense wounds. For example, in homicides with stabbings, you'll often see individuals with extensive cuts to their hands down to the bone, because they'll often grab the blade. And what we're seeing at Towton are reminiscent of defense wounds, which says to me their hands weren't bound. Now, independently, Tim Sutherland began to arrive at the same conclusion. Skeleton 24 had appeared to be lying with his arms behind him, and the assumption had been that his hands were tied in that position. But at the bottom of the grave pit, the archaeologists made a bizarre discovery, a single, severed arm quite separate from any body. At first they thought it must be an amputation, but back at the laboratory, Tim Sutherland set to work with his 3D image of the grave to put the bodies back together. What he found was that the new arm actually belonged with skeleton 24. Emptied the grave completely and at the very bottom there appeared to be a spare arm. The result of the investigation into the computer work meant that we could analyse each individual skeleton in an attempt to match the spare arm up with one of the bodies. And what actually happened was that skeleton number 24 superimposed exactly over the spare arm. In the scramble of the original dig, Skeleton24 had been allocated the arm of his neighbour in the grave, giving the impression that he had both arms behind him. The 3D image now showed that his hands couldn't have been tied. The Grave Pit Warriors may not have been helpless victims at all. As number 16 was moulded back to life, the question marks over his death were reappearing. You can see where the wounds that killed him would have gone now as well, so that first wound there. Gone through his eye and the second one down the side of his nose and through the mouth. How was it that this old soldier had come to die? At which point in the battle did he receive the blows that finished him off? And then smack down there, really. Right down the side. Quite uncompromising, wasn't it? Quite uncompromising. Few people have a better overview of the Towton battlefield than Simon Richardson. Archaeologists and metal detectors make a strange alliance, but Simon brings a unique perspective to the work of the Bradford team. He's been searching the battlefield in all weathers for 16 years. I do imagine what it would have been like, what the people were like. You think about the injuries the men would have received, and probably the screams, the men crying. Yeah, it must have been pretty horrendous. When I started out, I expected to find battle axes and swords, breastplates and helmets, but it turned out quite different from what I expected. Simon's finds from the battlefield are small but telling in their personal detail. A signet ring, a buckle from harness or armour, the tip of a scabbard, a broken spur. These are not the glorious booty of war, but the fallout from hand-to-hand fighting, abandoned or lost in flight or death. It feels quite personal really when I find the artefacts. Think of the last person to wear it. Did they actually die, or was it pulled off and they managed to escape? Unusually, Simon plots the position of every object he discovers and shares his data with the archaeologists to build a picture of the fighting's ebb and flow. His 300 finds confirm that the main battle did take place where tradition says. But Towton Hall, where the skeletons were found, is a full mile away. How had the men come to be there? Were they taken to the hall as prisoners, carried there already dead? Or were they killed in the last phase of the battle? The rout. Tradition tells us that the worst slaughter at Towton came in the rout as the Lancastrians fled the field. The valley that had protected their flank now became their killing ground. For the Yorkists, they were easy pickings. The worst possible situation in any battle was to turn your backs on the enemy. These men in the grave, my own personal opinion, is that they were caught in the route. The injuries that are sustained all point towards this being attacks that were made when men were down on the ground, dagger wounds to the backs of their heads, repeated injuries and also mutilation. Shannon Novak began to establish a sequence for the men's wounds using the forensic techniques that she employs on murder investigations. The way in which the fracture lines in the skulls connect reveals the order of the blows, and that order suggests that some men could have been fleeing from the enemy who killed them. This individual is a very good case of being able to sequence injuries. He has a very large blade wound to the back of the head. See, a blade has come in with great force, resulting in fracturing in that area. He also received a very large blade wound to the face. This blade cut from the corner of the left eye, down underneath the nose, through the palate, and into the corner of the tooth. And what happened is this blade wound, again, it came across the face in this direction, and resulted in this suture to open up, and you can see the fracture stops. Here, with the large radiating fracture from the wound to the back of the head. But because it stops, it tells us that this fracture was already in place, and the force, the energy release, started to follow that fracture that already existed. So we know that he received a large, probably mortal wound to the back of the head. While he was presumably down, a blade was drawn. Through his face. This is the evidence. It's a war. These are the men that were there and didn't make it out. And this is what weapons were created for, to be efficient killing tools. There were many who didn't make it out from Towton. 28,000, the chronicles say. A privileged few have a monument and are cloaked for eternity in the myth of chivalry. But for the many, the battlefield where they fell serves as their tomb, and their memorial is in the work of those who are still trying to understand how. and why they died. I do feel as if I know them very well. I do feel that some are particularly close to me and I feel particularly for some of them, what they must have undergone. But it's an incredible thought that all these people who would have fought there and would have died on the battlefield or in the surrounding area are still there. It's only on the battlefield that the archaeologists'questions can now be answered. If there were 28,000 killed that day, it is there that they are to be found. Until more bodies are discovered, we rely on the few from the grave pit for our troubled picture of life and death for the medieval soldier. For Edward the young pretender, Towton was a triumph. Within three months he was crowned King of England. But the battle did not bring peace. The Wars of the Roses would continue for over 20 years more before the factions collapsed into weary reconciliation. For the rank-and-file soldiers of both armies, it was 20 years too late. If the Middle Ages had witnessed the flowering of an age of chivalry, then the Battle of Towton saw its death. Archers and trusted retainers, the men in the grave pit, died horribly, their last moments embodying the worst that one human being can inflict on another. But for one of the Towton dead, there is a belated afterlife. Number 16, the battle-scarred veteran, is ready to confront the world again. Sometime winner, now forever victim, his is the true face of every battle. Perhaps you'd better meet him. So, there we are, you know, he's a regular guy, isn't he? I think now that he's got flesh on his face, you can really imagine him as a person, a live character that actually existed and that was present in the battle. When you just see the bone, it's almost as if the cut is much smaller, as if it affects only that area, but obviously the blade would have been much larger. He certainly looks experienced and mature. He must have undergone a lot of, obviously, physical trauma, but possibly also some psychological trauma from the after-effects of this injury. If you had to face him in a battle sort of situation, it would have been quite scary. You can tell immediately that you would have been experienced. Oh yes, he has that sort of old campaigner look, doesn't he? Yeah,

Its outcome determined the future of the kingdom. Five centuries of myth and legend lie between us and the truth of the Battle of Towton. Forensic science was about to cut through them.

At Towton Hall in 1996, builders were digging foundations for an extension. Just beneath the surface, they found human remains. As the bones came to light, archaeologists called to the site realized what they'd found. A mass grave. And the way in which those inside it had died had been brutal.

I think a lot of people have a very romantic view of medieval warfare and the injuries at Towton really bring these people to life and show what they must have undergone. And it shows a picture that wasn't romantic at all. It shows a picture of a very horrific death. In death, the Towton soldiers were about to yield remarkable information.

For the international team of archaeologists of Bradford University, they would disclose the savage reality of hand-to-hand fighting, demolish the myth of chivalry, and conjure images of a dreadful slaughter. First, the men in the grave had to be exhumed. The pit was a tangled mass of bones, and the archaeologists had little time to work. But using infrared surveying equipment, they were able to record the exact position of each bone to within one millimetre. We survey 16 points on the body, one on the centre of the skull, one on each shoulder, one on each elbow, one on each wrist, three down the spine, three down each leg, which means the 16 points can be used to build up a reconstruction of the skeleton once we've actually excavated it.

Tim Sutherland's survey produced a three-dimensional image of the grave and the separate skeletons layered within it. There were 37 bodies, packed tightly together where they'd been buried on that snow-driven March day 500 years before. One has to imagine that this was a very fierce battle, that as many people as possible had to be buried in as short a time as possible, and in very unfavorable conditions.

And so all the soldiers were almost packed like sardines in a tin, they were closely packed in this grave. Little spaces were used by fitting people in where they could, and there was a very, very tight layering. As the skeletons were unearthed, the work began.

Bone analysis revealed them to have been men and boys aged between 16 and 50. Carbon dating confirmed that they died around the time of the battle. They'd been stripped naked. The cause of death evident in their massive head wounds.

At first we couldn't quite believe the extent of the injuries which some of these people had suffered. One of the individuals had... To 13 skull injuries and it seemed almost that unhuman or unnatural for anybody to be hacked to death in such a way. For the archaeologists, the questions were equally clear.

Who were the men in the Towton grave pit? How exactly had they come to die there? When they died, England had been in turmoil for six years.

The Wars of the Roses were a vicious struggle for the crown. The White and Red Roses representing the rival dynasties of York and Lancaster. It wasn't the simple fight we imagine between Yorkshire and Lancashire.

The war split England between North and South. The Red Rose Lancastrians were mostly men of the North and included Scots. The White Rose Yorkists found their support mostly in Southern England and Wales.

But as in any civil war, there were no clean battle lines. The country was torn into a ragged patchwork of conflicting loyalties. The reigning king, Henry VI, was a Lancastrian, a pious man but with a shaky grip on the throne.

For the followers of his rival, young Edward, Earl of March, the son of York was rising. Edward had led the Yorkists for just 12 weeks following the slaying of his father, Richard, and his brother, Edmund, by Henry's men. Now at Towton, he wanted revenge and to have the crown for himself.

Young, 18-year-old Edward has lost his father, he's lost his 17-year-old brother. Is he going to arrive at the Battle of Towton three months later, full of the milk of human kindness, with a forgiving nature? No.

What he's out for is vengeance. He wants the murderers of his family. I think the scene is set for a particularly brutal and vicious conflict. In the turmoil of civil war, formal records disappear.

Evidence for the ferocity of the fighting at Towton relies on chronicles and folk memory. We're told the Lancastrians had the advantage in numbers. They were on the field first and took advantage of high ground to make a strong, well-defended position.

What's interesting about a battlefield such as Towton is that, contrary to most ideas about medieval generalship, it's actually very well chosen. The Lancastrian right flank is well protected by this steep drop here. So, in actual fact, the general had made every attempt to protect his...

You've got the Yorkists advancing onto the plateau early morning and laying out from this position here along the fields directly over to Castle Hill Wood which is over on that flank there. The Lancastrians were spreading the fields along the edge of that boundary there so in effect it's a shallow valley. armies lined up either side.

The Yorkists had fewer troops but one major advantage, the weather. They had the wind behind them and as dawn broke it was blowing a blizzard straight into the faces of the Lancastrians. Under the snow's cover, Yorkist archers are said to have advanced unseen and shot repeated flights of arrows into the ranks massed against them.

The Lancastrians took heavy casualties and had no choice but to advance and engage the Yorkists hand to hand. The bitter fighting that followed reputedly lasted ten hours. The outcome decided only by the arrival of Yorkist reinforcements.

As the Lancastrians fled, they were cut down. The blood of the 28,000 killed in the battle is said to have made the rivers run red for days. So much for the Towton story, but what facts could the grave pit offer the archaeologists?

The skeletons were a mix of body types, some of them very robust. They ranged in height from as little as 5 foot 2 to just over They're six feet tall. They were fighting men, but the scientists couldn't even tell whose side they'd been on.

I think we probably have individuals from almost every walk of medieval life. I can say that because of the general stature of the individuals. And that suggests they're being drawn from a whole host of lives.

There are some individuals bearing previous injuries, aspects of a very strenuous lifestyle, and others no different from any other medieval population. Because the archaeologists had been able to recover whole skeletons, They could begin to work out the physique of individual bodies. Would this give a clue about the part the men had played in the battle?

In this case it was very important that we had complete individuals because it gave us a fuller picture of what this person went through. Because we had the full skeleton in each case or almost each case, we could work out that some of them were very strongly developed and they might have had dietary deficiencies. But we had quite a lot of individuals with their left arm being further developed than the right arm and that might indicate that they were practicing archery. If the skeletons in the Touton grave include archers, it's significant. On any medieval battlefield, only 10% were knights in armour.

The rest were foot soldiers, mostly conscripts. But in English armies, the archers were the backbone of this infantry. The longbow was their weapon of mass destruction. Practice with the bow was enforced by law in England and had produced a breed of men with formidable killing power. If there is one glory of English arms in the late Middle Ages, it is the bowmen.

Edward I had used large numbers of archers in the late 13th century and of course by the time of Edward III in the mid-14th century, these archers are going abroad. There was plenty to be gained if you were campaigning in France. Great victories like Agincourt would make an archer a rich man.

In the course of the Hundred Years'War with France, English archers became the most feared killing machine of the age. The archers at Towton were the sons and grandsons of the generation that fought at Agincourt, that have learnt their skills in just the same way. They'd have started at a young age. At a young age, I mean, one, it was the law, but I think it had been peer pressure.

They'd see the fathers using the boat and want to have a go at it themselves. I mean, the power of the longboat, it was a great leveller. It didn't matter whether you were a king, duke, knight, whatever.

You could still be shot and killed at long range by just a simple man of the land. But the glories of the Hundred Years'War were long gone. Henry VI's reign had seen the loss of almost all England's possessions abroad. In the snows at Towton, the English bowmen were facing not the French, but their own kind.

They knew what they could expect. When they closed for battle, archer against archer, I think the archers of one side or the other, they'd want to be the first to get off the first flight of arrows. Quite possibly the first flight of the Yorkish Sparrows could have well have disabled 8,000, 9,000, 10,000 people, killed and disabled them.

Then it had been an out and out archery battle. The traps only lasted 10 minutes, but the death toll and the casualties would have been frightening. The suggestion that there might be archers in the grave pit comes from unusual bone development in some of the skeletons. Back and arm bones seem to have been under particular stress in life. The question for the Bradford team was whether this could have been caused by pulling the longbow.

I think one of the most commonly asked questions is, are these guys archers? And although I can't say that hand on heart, it seems to me that pulling a very powerful bow repeatedly from a young age, perhaps one that was meant for an adult, would cause those bones to respond by building up a greater density and a greater... Cross-section. To tie his theory down, Chris needs to compare the Touton bones with those of a present-day bowman. Few people fit the profile of a medieval archer, but Simon Stanley comes close.

He has been using the longbow for much of his life. Ever since childhood I've been interested in the bow and arrow. I've been shooting these heavy-type bows for about 14 years.

The people that shot the bow, they'd have been physically strong men, used to using the bodies. All your upper body comes into play with these heavy bows, right the way from your lower back to the tops of your shoulders and your neck. So have the years of using the heavy longbow produced changes in Simon Stanley's body similar to those seen in the Towton soldiers? To find out... Simon agreed to a body scan.

The scanner in which Simon's placed sends radio waves into his body through a strong magnetic field. Water molecules in bone and flesh show up differently to produce slice-by-slice images of Simon's skeleton and soft tissue. He's 35. He's 35. He's pretty impressive.

For the Towton soldiers, 500 years had to pass before their bones revealed the wear and tear of a lifetime. For Simon Stanley, it would be a matter of moments. Yeah, it's fascinating.

Yeah, it's really. Chris Knussel had found a quarter of the Tauten skeleton showing unusual bone mass in the left forearm and right upper arm. He thought it might be associated with the distinctive pull-push action of drawing the longbow.

And then I think, I think it's a reasonable comment that yes it does look thicker on this side. Yes. Compared with the right one.

So your left side is a bit more well developed in that particular... particular slice, the cortical bone is thicker. Yeah.

On the left side. On the left side, yeah. And you're right-handed.

Yeah. Okay, that's interesting. That's interesting because you wouldn't expect the other way around. I didn't like it much with eyes, because there's a lot of compressive strain on that side. The scan shows that Simon's arms are developed in exactly the same way as the grave warriors.

It doesn't prove that the Toutan dead were archers, but that becomes the most likely explanation. Yeah, it fits. We're getting left side from your elbow down into your forearm. Your left side is better developed.

Shooting 15 arrows a minute and deadly at 300 yards, these were the kind of men whose firepower had cut a swathe through the flower of French knighthood. At Towton, they met their own end. And among the bodies was one who stood out from all the rest. A big boned man in his late 40s, he lay in the grave spread-eagled among his comrades, still easily identifiable. As we excavated him, it was very obvious that this guy was very robust.

His bones were very, not large, but very, very substantial. So he just looked like a big, muscly guy. In death, he's known simply as Burial Number 16. His bones tell a more compelling story.

He and his comrades had been hacked to death. The blows that ended their lives were plain to see. But for the archi- Theologists, the skeletons of the Towton dead, had a further revelation still to offer. For no fewer than a third of these grave pit soldiers showed other, older scars, massive wounds from battles long before. The skeletons that were found in the grave pit at Towton showed really terrifying, dreadful wounds.

It's a very sobering experience looking at those wounds, but the amazing thing about them is that so many of those skulls showed signs of old injuries which had healed. So you have someone who has already experienced the face of battle. He knows exactly what he's getting into and he's doing it again. The soldier known as Number 16 was such a warrior.

His face carries the most dramatic of the healed wounds. Examining him is Shannon Novak, a forensic anthropologist on secondment to Bradford from the University of Utah. Her work has included the investigation of present-day war graves in Croatia. With number 16, she would be looking at the effects of violence inflicted five centuries earlier. My aim was to document the trauma in the same way.

I would a modern forensic case, a modern homicide, trying to understand the number of wounds they had, the types of wounds, hopefully being able to interpret some of the weapons used to cause those wounds, and to look at wounds that they'd survived, some of these healed injuries that potentially they'd been in previous battles. When he died, Number 16 was almost 50 years old. He had been born around the time of Agincourt.

Warfare had dominated his life, and at least once before Towton had come close to claiming it. Individual 16 received a very, very large blade wound to the left side of the jaw. The force was so great that it also caused a secondary fracture to occur in the chin. The blade coming in, fracture in the chin.

This individual survived these large injuries and carried on to fight another battle, obviously. Number 16 was a particular breed of warrior with long experience of the horror of warfare. On the battlefield at Towton, he would have been in good company.

There would be many men with long experience in the wars. Many of the old captains who fought on both sides in the Wars of the Roses had gained their experience in the latter stages of the Hundred Years'War in France. And so there was an experienced body of people, veterans I think is the proper way to call them, and that would actually go down through all ranks.

What was remarkable was just how cleanly the old war wounds of these veterans had healed. It suggests that battlefield surgery of the time was far more effective than had been previously thought. I think most of us were surprised by the lack of infection in these individuals and in relation to wounds that occurred in some kind of conflict.

You would expect some bacteria to be passed on, especially in a large battle. If you're using a blade on numerous individuals, it just seems like a perfect condition for infection to occur. The skill of the surgeon who patched up number 16 puts medical texts of the time in a new light.

Illustrated manuals were used to pass on techniques originally acquired from the Arabs. They show doctors practising surgery of the most ambitious kind. The claims have not been taken wholly seriously, but putting a man's jaw back together was one textbook operation which clearly worked.

They're all... Quite detailed instructions on how to deal with a wound to the jaw. The first stage was to put wax on the place where the bone was cut. To put a double...

layer of dressing on. You use a splint or a piece of shoe leather the length of the jaw and then this is very carefully bandaged onto the head and sewn onto a skull cap. The skull of number 16 is certainly a very interesting one. It's fascinating to see that some of the instructions in medical textbooks. Clearly must have been put into practice.

The battered skull of Number 16 became the focus of intense speculation for the archaeologists of Towton. This warrior had recovered from his dreadful battle injuries only to fight again and die here. The mystery of Number 16's identity began to stand for all that was still unknown about the Towton dead. We just couldn't believe what we were seeing, that somebody with such a severe injury to the jaw and presumably also to the tongue and to the soft tissues in the mouth could have survived such an injury and been able to function properly.

I presume number 16 would have looked quite impressive, quite horrific to other people. So what had number 16 actually looked like? The archaeologists resolve to bring him back from the dead. The forensic artist, Richard Neve, is to produce a reconstruction of No. 16's skull.

The blows which eventually killed him present a problem. They'd completely destroyed his eye socket and cheekbones. He's got a blade wound that runs across the left temporal line, so it's effectively bang, That's disrupted the whole thing, so we've lost the orbit.

A little bit of the frontal bone, the upper part of the maxilla. Half the nose. Half the nose.

Oh dear, Can we approximate these? Jump the waffle out up. The lower jaw has been severely traumatised, probably 8-10 years prior to death, struck by a blade, horizontally basically across that way, across the body of the mandible.

The really difficult thing is going to be how we represent that on the reconstruction, trying to ascertain those structures that have been severed and the kind of appearance that that face would have had with this, what will clearly be a very big scar across that part of the face. The way in which number 16's scars healed are the best clue to his previous life. The sophistication of the surgery that saved him suggests that he was well connected to a noble household. On the whole, the people who would have received medical treatment would have been rich people.

On the other hand, I think it's clear that surgeons were not simply treating knights. There are some instructions which are prefaced with the words, if a sergeant goes into battle poorly armed and without an iron hat, then he may well suffer from this kind of wound. What this suggests to me is that people who are employing surgeons in their arms were interested in the survival of their professional warriors. There were few professionals in armies of this time. Most men on the battlefield had no choice but to be there.

But some noblemen did have a retinue of paid fighting men, singled out from an early age to wear their livery. Was Number 16 part of such a fighting elite? If he were in a livery, and I almost, I can see him in my mind, he must have been an individual that would have been a livery soldier.

I think he appears to have been training from a very young age, before he was physiologically mature. And what I mean by that is sometime prior to the age of, say, 14, 15, he would have been already training. In addition to that, he's a very broad individual, which may suggest either, one, he's that way because of this activity, or probably because he was selected because he's a broad individual.

...were experienced in battle, but even for them, Tauton was a new horror. Both sides were ordered to show no mercy. So great was the slaughter of men...

say the chronicles, that the very carcasses hindered them that fought. The figure of 28,000 dead, counted by the heralds, started to circulate within a matter of weeks. Today it's a death toll that invites both disbelief and horror. I think 28,000 dead is a totally implausible number. I mean, if you accept that, then it's rather like accepting that more men died at Towton than did in the disastrous first day of the Somme on 1st July 1916, advancing against machine guns in open field.

So what evidence does the grave pit give the archaeologists for the ferocity of the killing? Shannon Novak, more familiar with gunshots than sword cuts, is working out how to identify which weapons produced the wound marks found in the skeletons. To me, this really looks like a blunt instrument with a specific shape that's come in very hard and fast and then be retracted. You've either got something like this, the Warhammer. This one is flattened diamond section as we know from profiling.

Let's look at that again. Let's just do it, yeah. That's very square. Now if you imagine he's upright and I'm upright and I swing with that.

So something's swinging in and smashing through. And you could deliver a good course of that. From the weapon profiles she developed, Shannon found the most common cause of death was a blade wound from either sword, dagger or battle axe. More stabbing wounds came from the spike of a pole axe or a horseman's hammer, with the victims apparently on the ground. she found only one arrow wound.

Beyond doubt, number 16 and his companions were killed at close quarters. But the wound pattern showed something curious. Almost without exception, the men were killed with blows directly to the head, and it appears they were completely unprotected. This is what puzzles me. One individual has head wounds.

Multiple head wounds. The one thing you are not going to leave out from going into battle at this period is his head. a helmet because a lot of injuries are going to be received on the head. So again we're back to this problem where lots of these men don't seem to have been wearing helmets.

Without helmets and with the death blows targeting the head and face, it was almost as if these men had been singled out for punishment. They died from a blow, probably delivered at arm's length, and then after that, the fate was sort of sealed even further by delivering similar blows to the head region. My own feeling is that some of these individuals may... have actually still been living when they received the second and tertiary and subsequent blows. But obviously the prime primary injury would have caused them to perhaps be less able to defend themselves.

And they're just being mutilated. Essentially it's like it's a massacre. The idea of a massacre upsets all conventional notions about the age of chivalry.

We imagine battles were conducted according to a code of honor. If so, it was a code from which most at Tauten were excluded. We have an image in our mind of the knight in shining armour galloping across the countryside, rescuing damsels in distress. Something else is the idea of courtesy to other knights and particularly granting mercy to a vanquished opponent.

It was an aristocratic ideal, it only extended to other knights. I think they had no compunction at all in mistreating anyone who was not a knight. What that mistreatment might involve was becoming apparent in the laboratory.

Some of the wounds around the time of death were unusual and disturbing. Skull showed repeated shallow cuts to the ears, the scalp and face. They raised...

It's a grisly possibility. In this case we have at least one individual that seems to have had his nose targeted. Also there's some scratches above the ear, I think on the left side in one individual, a series of parallel scratches.

They're in size, so it's not a chopping, it's kind of a cutting, which may suggest that... an ear or for some reason a part of the ear and scalp was removed. And that, again, may suggest they were dealing with a case of mutilation.

Suspicions about mistreatment appeared all the stronger with the discovery in the grave of another skeleton, number 24. Uncovering his remains, the team found both arms apparently twisted behind him. The conclusion seemed inescapable. When we came across the skeleton who appeared to have his arms behind his back, which is obviously a very unnatural position, we thought he might have been a prisoner or something with his arms tied behind his back and his legs were touching and the knees as well which was quite unusual as well so we thought this might be a very important skeleton in the analysis.

Different scenarios run through your mind at the time. One would assume that he would have been captured. Somebody would have had to have tied his arms behind his back.

And there is the idea that this individual may have been tortured, may have been suffered before he died of his injuries. For the archaeologists, a possible hypothesis was taking shape. Lined up by the grave pit, stripped, mutilated, executed. It's a scenario all too familiar to our own century, but still sits uncomfortably with the so-called age of chivalry. This veteran soldier had fought many battles.

Did his last one really end with him and his comrades being put to death as prisoners? After 500 years, the battlefield of Towton is not about to surrender its secrets easily. But Shannon Novak's work on the wounds was starting to suggest that Number 16 and his companions might not have died quietly after all.

At some point, these individuals had arms and hands free. to defend themselves. Most of the wounds that occur in the body are in the arms and the hands, and these are classic defense wounds.

For example, in homicides with stabbings, you'll often see individuals with extensive cuts to their hands down to the bone, because they'll often grab the blade. And what we're seeing at Towton are reminiscent of defense wounds, which says to me their hands weren't bound. Now, independently, Tim Sutherland began to arrive at the same conclusion. Skeleton 24 had appeared to be lying with his arms behind him, and the assumption had been that his hands were tied in that position.

But at the bottom of the grave pit, the archaeologists made a bizarre discovery, a single, severed arm quite separate from any body. At first they thought it must be an amputation, but back at the laboratory, Tim Sutherland set to work with his 3D image of the grave to put the bodies back together. What he found was that the new arm actually belonged with skeleton 24. Emptied the grave completely and at the very bottom there appeared to be a spare arm. The result of the investigation into the computer work meant that we could analyse each individual skeleton in an attempt to match the spare arm up with one of the bodies. And what actually happened was that skeleton number 24 superimposed exactly over the spare arm.

In the scramble of the original dig, Skeleton24 had been allocated the arm of his neighbour in the grave, giving the impression that he had both arms behind him. The 3D image now showed that his hands couldn't have been tied. The Grave Pit Warriors may not have been helpless victims at all. As number 16 was moulded back to life, the question marks over his death were reappearing.

You can see where the wounds that killed him would have gone now as well, so that first wound there. Gone through his eye and the second one down the side of his nose and through the mouth. How was it that this old soldier had come to die? At which point in the battle did he receive the blows that finished him off?

And then smack down there, really. Right down the side. Quite uncompromising, wasn't it?

Quite uncompromising. Few people have a better overview of the Towton battlefield than Simon Richardson. Archaeologists and metal detectors make a strange alliance, but Simon brings a unique perspective to the work of the Bradford team. He's been searching the battlefield in all weathers for 16 years.

I do imagine what it would have been like, what the people were like. You think about the injuries the men would have received, and probably the screams, the men crying. Yeah, it must have been pretty horrendous.

When I started out, I expected to find battle axes and swords, breastplates and helmets, but it turned out quite different from what I expected. Simon's finds from the battlefield are small but telling in their personal detail. A signet ring, a buckle from harness or armour, the tip of a scabbard, a broken spur. These are not the glorious booty of war, but the fallout from hand-to-hand fighting, abandoned or lost in flight or death. It feels quite personal really when I find the artefacts.

Think of the last person to wear it. Did they actually die, or was it pulled off and they managed to escape? Unusually, Simon plots the position of every object he discovers and shares his data with the archaeologists to build a picture of the fighting's ebb and flow. His 300 finds confirm that the main battle did take place where tradition says.

But Towton Hall, where the skeletons were found, is a full mile away. How had the men come to be there? Were they taken to the hall as prisoners, carried there already dead? Or were they killed in the last phase of the battle? The rout.

Tradition tells us that the worst slaughter at Towton came in the rout as the Lancastrians fled the field. The valley that had protected their flank now became their killing ground. For the Yorkists, they were easy pickings. The worst possible situation in any battle was to turn your backs on the enemy.

These men in the grave, my own personal opinion, is that they were caught in the route. The injuries that are sustained all point towards this being attacks that were made when men were down on the ground, dagger wounds to the backs of their heads, repeated injuries and also mutilation. Shannon Novak began to establish a sequence for the men's wounds using the forensic techniques that she employs on murder investigations. The way in which the fracture lines in the skulls connect reveals the order of the blows, and that order suggests that some men could have been fleeing from the enemy who killed them. This individual is a very good case of being able to sequence injuries.

He has a very large blade wound to the back of the head. See, a blade has come in with great force, resulting in fracturing in that area. He also received a very large blade wound to the face. This blade cut from the corner of the left eye, down underneath the nose, through the palate, and into the corner of the tooth. And what happened is this blade wound, again, it came across the face in this direction, and resulted in this suture to open up, and you can see the fracture stops.

Here, with the large radiating fracture from the wound to the back of the head. But because it stops, it tells us that this fracture was already in place, and the force, the energy release, started to follow that fracture that already existed. So we know that he received a large, probably mortal wound to the back of the head. While he was presumably down, a blade was drawn. Through his face.

This is the evidence. It's a war. These are the men that were there and didn't make it out. And this is what weapons were created for, to be efficient killing tools.

There were many who didn't make it out from Towton. 28,000, the chronicles say. A privileged few have a monument and are cloaked for eternity in the myth of chivalry.

But for the many, the battlefield where they fell serves as their tomb, and their memorial is in the work of those who are still trying to understand how. and why they died. I do feel as if I know them very well. I do feel that some are particularly close to me and I feel particularly for some of them, what they must have undergone. But it's an incredible thought that all these people who would have fought there and would have died on the battlefield or in the surrounding area are still there.

It's only on the battlefield that the archaeologists'questions can now be answered. If there were 28,000 killed that day, it is there that they are to be found. Until more bodies are discovered, we rely on the few from the grave pit for our troubled picture of life and death for the medieval soldier. For Edward the young pretender, Towton was a triumph. Within three months he was crowned King of England.

But the battle did not bring peace. The Wars of the Roses would continue for over 20 years more before the factions collapsed into weary reconciliation. For the rank-and-file soldiers of both armies, it was 20 years too late.

If the Middle Ages had witnessed the flowering of an age of chivalry, then the Battle of Towton saw its death. Archers and trusted retainers, the men in the grave pit, died horribly, their last moments embodying the worst that one human being can inflict on another. But for one of the Towton dead, there is a belated afterlife.

Number 16, the battle-scarred veteran, is ready to confront the world again. Sometime winner, now forever victim, his is the true face of every battle. Perhaps you'd better meet him.

So, there we are, you know, he's a regular guy, isn't he? I think now that he's got flesh on his face, you can really imagine him as a person, a live character that actually existed and that was present in the battle. When you just see the bone, it's almost as if the cut is much smaller, as if it affects only that area, but obviously the blade would have been much larger.

He certainly looks experienced and mature. He must have undergone a lot of, obviously, physical trauma, but possibly also some psychological trauma from the after-effects of this injury. If you had to face him in a battle sort of situation, it would have been quite scary. You can tell immediately that you would have been experienced.

Oh yes, he has that sort of old campaigner look, doesn't he? Yeah,

Transcript for:The Bloodshed of Towton Battle

Transcript for:
The Bloodshed of Towton Battle