Around 30 years ago, my family and I moved to York. On one of our getting to know the place outings, we drove along a quiet lane and spotted a small stone cross leaning gently to one side of the road. It seemed oddly out of place, surrounded as it was by fields. So we stopped and noted the inscription, which read, "The Battle of Towton 1461." A battle neither of us had heard of.
It wasn't until I came across an article by AA Gill in August 2008 that the story was revealed. Towton, it transpired, was the bloodiest battle ever fought on English soil. An estimated 28,000 men were killed in a single day, which in 1461 equated to roughly one per cent of the entire population.
Gill observed that whilst we've all heard of Agincourt and Dunkirk, Towton somehow got forgotten because “we remember the battles where we won or felt good about ourselves. This was not one of those.” He drew vivid, unsettling attention to the scale and savagery of the slaughter. This was hand-to-hand killing, hour after hour, in freezing weather. Bodies piled up, and the snow turned red. The dead weren’t just soldiers—they were sons, brothers, fathers, conscripted peasants and minor nobles alike. It was a desperate, muddy, close-quarters slaughter, fought in a blizzard, with men using clubs, axes, and daggers when swords failed. There was no quarter, no mercy, and no escape.
Gill ended with a meditation on national memory. Towton, he stated, is largely forgotten not because it was insignificant, but because it was inconvenient. It doesn’t fit the heroic myths we prefer to tell ourselves. He compares the silence of Towton with the noise of our selective remembrance. History, he argued, has an editor—and that editor is shame. “We don’t remember Towton not because it wasn’t important, but because it was.”
Towton stirred my imagination, but it's not until relatively recently that I decided to publish a short work of fiction entitled Blood Blizzard, which follows the fictional Redshaw family up to and beyond the battle.
Blood Blizzard is currently available in Kindle and paperback formats. An audiobook is on its way