再Towton 1/2 - Medieval warfare, December 18th 2010 P100 (中世戦士の遺骨)

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再Towton 1/2 - Medieval warfare, December 18th 2010 P100 (中世戦士の遺骨)

 

Towton is a nondescript village in northern England, between the cities of York and Leeds. Many Britons have never heard of it:school history tend to skip the 400-or-so years between 1066 and the start of the Tudor era. Vistors have to look hard to spot the small roadside cross that marks the site of perhaps the bloodiest battle ever fought in England. Yet the clashing was a turning point in the Wars of the Roses. And, almost 550 years later, the site is changing our understanding of medieval battle.In Shakespeare's cycle of eight plays, the story of the Wars of the Roses is told as an epic drama. In reality it was a messy series of civil wars - an on-again, off-again conflict pitting supporters of the ruling Lancastrian monarchy against backers of the house of York. According to Helen Castor, a historian at Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge, the wars arose from the slow breakdown of English government under Henry VI, a man who was prone to bouts of mental illness and ゛curiously incapable゛even when well. As decision making under Henry drifted, factions formed and enmities deepened. These spiralling conflicts eventually drove Richard Plantagenet, Duke of York, to assert his own claim to the throne. York was named Henry's heir, but he was killed in December 1460. His 18-year-old son, Edward, proclaimed himself king just before the battle of Towton. That set the stage for a vicious fight. Edward had his father and brother to avenge. After killing him, Lancastrian forces had impaled York's head on a lance and adorned it with a paper crown. Following years of skirmishes others had scores to settle, too. In previous encounters, efforts had been made to spare rank-and-file soldiers. At Towton, orders went out that no quarter be given. This was to be winner-takes-all, a brutal fight to the death. The result was a crushing victory for the Yorkists and for the young king. Edward IV went on to rule, with a brief interruption, until his death 22 years later - a death that triggered the final stage of the conflict and the rise of a new dynasty under Henry Tudor. The recorded death toll at Towton may well have been inflated to burnish the legend of Edward's ascent to the crown. Yet there can be little doubt it was an unusually large confrontation. In a letter sent nine days after the battle George Neville, the then chancellor of England, wrote that 28,000 men died that day, a figure in accord with a letter send to his mother. England's total population at the time thought not to have exceeded 3m people. George Goodwin, who has written a book on Towton to coincide with the battle's 550th anniversary in 2011, reckons as many as 75,000 men, perhaps 10% of the country's fighting-age population, took the field that day. They had been dragged into conflict in various ways. Lacking a standing army, the royal claimants called on magnates and issued ゛commissions of array゛to officers in the shires to raise men. Great lords on either side had followings known as ゛affinities゛, comprising people on formal retainers as well as those underless rigid obligations. These soldiers would have been among the more experienced and better-equipped fighters that may (foreign mercenaries were there, too). Alongside them were people lower down the social pyramid, who may have been obliged to practise archery at the weekend as part of the village posse but were not as well trained. Among this confusion of soldiers and weaponary, almost certainly on the losing Lancastrian side, was Towton 25.