Battle of Towton - Legacy

Legacy

In 1483 King Richard III, younger brother of Edward, started to build a chapel to commemorate the battle. Richard died at the Battle of Bosworth Field in 1485 and the building was never completed. It eventually fell into disrepair and collapsed. The ruins of the structure were evident five centuries later. In 1929, a stone cross supposedly from the chapel was used to erect the Towton Cross (also known as Lord Dacre's Cross) to commemorate those who died in the battle. Several mounds on the battlefield were thought to contain casualties of the battle, although historians believe these to be tumuli of much earlier origin. More burial sites related to the battle are found on Chapel Hill and around Saxton. Lord Dacre was buried at the Church of All Saints in Saxton and his tomb was reported in the late 19th century to be well maintained, although several of its panels had been weathered away. The bur tree from which Dacre's killer shot his arrow was cut down by the late 19th century, leaving its stump on the battlefield. Centuries after the battle, various relics that have been found in the area include rings, arrowheads and coins.

The people of Elizabethan-era England remembered the battle as dramatised by Shakespeare, and the image of the engagement as the charnel house where many sons of England were cut down endured for centuries. However, at the start of the 21st century, the "largest and bloodiest battle ever fought on English soil" was no longer prominent in the public consciousness. British journalists lamented that people were ignorant of the Battle of Towton and of its significance. According to English Heritage, the battle was of the "greatest importance"; it was one of the largest, if not the largest, fought in England and it resulted in the replacement of one royal dynasty by another. Hill expressed a different opinion. Although impressed with the casualty figures touted by the chroniclers, he believed the battle brought no monumental changes to the lives of the English people.

The Battle of Towton was associated with a tradition previously upheld in the villages of Tysoe, Warwickshire. For centuries the villagers had made it a point to clear an area on a slope of the Vale of the Red Horse on each anniversary of the engagement, exposing a large figure of a horse cut into the red soil. They claimed to do this to honour the Earl of Warwick's inspirational deed of slaying his horse to show his resolve to stand and fight with the common soldiers. Local historian Mary Dormer Harris believed that the villagers modified the original Red Horse, which dated to pre-historic times, to a version that reflected mediaeval horses. The tradition died in 1798 when the Inclosure Acts implemented by the English government redesignated the common land, on which the equine figure was located, as private property. The scouring was revived during the early 20th century but has since stopped.