Fatal Colours: The Battle of Towton, 1461 by George Goodwin (Phoenix, £9.99) (From York Press)

Fatal Colours: The Battle of Towton, 1461 by George Goodwin (Phoenix, £9.99)

10:56am Saturday 11th February 2012 in Books By Stephen Lewis

LAST year was the 550th anniversary of the Battle of Towton, widely regarded as the bloodiest ever fought on English soil.

George Goodwin’s Fatal Colours, first published in hardback last year for the anniversary, did the battle full justice.

One critic described it as ‘elegiac’. TV historian David Starkey, who penned an introduction to it, went even further. “Fatal Colours is more than a book about one battle, vivid, humane and superbly researched though it is,” he wrote. “It is an account of a moment of profound crisis in English politics.”

And so it is. Goodwin’s book, now published in paperback, builds up gradually to that terrible (and bitterly cold) day when the armies of two competing Kings of England – one Lancastrian, one Yorkist – lined up on a ridge at Towton to slaughter one another.

It charts the disastrous reign of King Henry VI (son of Henry V), setting the scene for the battle which was to end that reign on a bloody ridge not far from York.

The description of the battle itself forms the climax to the book, however – and it is hauntingly powerful.

When the Lancastrian lines broke, many of the terrified soldiers fled from the ridge down a steep slope to what is now known as ‘bloody meadow’ and the Cock Beck.

The Lancastrians themselves had torn down the bridge over the beck before the battle, to protect their rear.

But during their panicked flight, a new bridge grew up, Goodwin writes: “A bridge formed by men who had been dragged under the surface, whether by the press of their comrades or because their multi-layered jacks (protective clothing) continued absorbing water… It was also partly formed by others who, slowed to a standstill in the crush of crossing, had proved easy targets for arrow or hammer…”

The name of this bridge survives to this day, Goodwin notes: the Bridge of Bodies.

A sobering, revealing account of a dreadful day and a dreadful war.