by Sean McGlynn
The armies clashed in the midst of heavy, driving snow. A change of wind direction curtailed the flight of Lancastrian arrows, while carrying the Yorkist ones further, a disadvantage which forced the Lancastrians onto the attack (as English archers forced the French to do at Agincourt). In the long, intense mêlée that followed, the Yorkists were on the point of being driven from the field, but lack of Lancastrian follow-up support granted Edward the opportunity to brace his men for a counter-surge which broke the Lancastrian line. From that moment, a closely contested battle was transformed into one-sided slaughter. Those that could headed for York to take refuge behind its walls. Some fled across Bloody Meadow, well-named for the carnage that chased at their heels. Others made their way to the river Cock, where steep gradients, rendered slippery with snow, caused many fatally to lose their footing. These fared no better: frantically looking for a place to ford the river, they proved easy targets for the cavalry preying on the banks. Those wading across the river were quickly picked off by archers; many met their end not at the hands of the enemy but from drowning in the freezing waters of the river. Such was the butchery here that locals later recalled a scene of so many corpses falling on each other that they actually dammed the river – in what became known as the ‘Bridge of Bodies’. Those making it to York were pursued and many were cut down in its streets, long after the battle itself was over. One chronicler informs us that forty-two Lancastrian knights were rounded up and executed. Decapitation was the usual means of despatch in the Wars of the Roses.
The grave pits record the wounds inflicted on the soldiers’ skeletons: the majority of possible fatal wounds appeared on heads, necks or shoulders, with the blows coming from behind. The preponderance of such blows, especially to the head (one skull received eight blows on the battlefield), would indicate that the victims were without helmets, like the massacred prisoners at Agincourt, adding to the conjecture that these soldiers had been executed. Philip of Commines writes that Edward informed him that after a victorious battle the King would mount his horse and order his men to spare the commoners and instead kill the lords. This draws attention to a relatively new departure in concepts of military chivalry that was witnessed most notably in England in the late Middle Ages: the higher orders were not only no longer secure in their presumption of safety if taken prisoner; they were actively targeted for killing, as happened at Towton.
Despite Edward’s apparent concern for the ordinary soldier, this unfortunately did not translate into battle conditions that were any less deadly for them, as the enormous casualty rate at Towton shows. Here, even if the rank and file were not despatched as non-combatant prisoners, they were massacred in droves as they threw away their weapons and attempted to flee the battlefield. Many of the wounds found on the skeletons might be similar to those found on executed victims, but they are also indicative of trauma suffered by men being pursued in a rout.
The increased risk for knights and nobility is reaffirmed at another battle in the Wars of the Roses: that of Tewkesbury in Gloucestershire, fought a decade later on 4 May 1471. Once again, Edward IV defeated the Lancastrians, this time finally securing his throne. Once again, there was a rout of the vanquished. During this last phase of the battle, Prince Edward of Lancaster, the contender for the throne, was killed. Accounts tell of how he requested quarter in vain; the Crowland chronicler, considered the most reliable, claims that he and other Lancastrian leaders were deliberately struck down and eliminated at the first opportunity. Others, including the Duke of Somerset, escaped the initial carnage and took refuge in the abbey church of Tewkesbury, claiming protection of sanctuary. Initially, while still feeling magnanimous under the euphoria of such a decisive battle, Edward pardoned those inside. However, he soon shrugged off his clemency and, two days after the battle, he had his troops enter the church and drag the Lancastrians outside. They were summarily executed. Amongst those decapitated were the Duke of Somerset and a notable religious figure, John Langstrother, Prior of the Order of St John. Warkworth’s Chronicle relates how these and others
were taken and beheaded afterwards, where the king had pardoned them in the abbey church of Tewkesbury…. A priest had turned out at his mass and the sacrament in his hands, when King Edward came with his sword into the church. [The priest] required him by virtue of the sacrament that he should pardon all…. They might have gone and saved their lives; however, on Monday after, they were beheaded notwithstanding the king’s pardon.50
Killings of sanctuary refugees also took place in the church of Didbrook, ten miles from Tewkesbury. Edward’s apologists asserted the dubious claim that Tewkesbury had never been officially declared as a sanctuary; they hoped to mitigate Edward’s dismissal of religious norms and the fact that his soldiers had actually killed some Lancastrians within the church itself. It was, of course, just self-justifying spin to cover the cynical brutality of the act. It has been argued that Edward was well within his rights to command the deaths of his prisoners: these men were guilty of treason against the King; some had even been pardoned before for the very same crime. But the whole point of the Wars of the Roses was that those fighting against the ‘king’ did not recognize him as their rightful monarch. As ever, might makes right.
The fog of war was commonly exploited to shroud questionable acts that would later be recounted as the consequence of glorious victory. At Tewkesbury, Edward, Prince of Wales, met his end. It is uncertain how he died, although contemporary sources suggest he was struck down while he was fleeing the battle and crying for assistance from his brother-in-law, the perennial turncoat George, duke of Clarence, who was fighting on the King’s side. Edward’s death meant, at a stroke, the end of the Lancastrian line and an immediate diminution of the threat to Edward IV’s throne. This lessening threat was diminished even further by the post-battle executions.
We see similar motivations at the Battle of Shrewsbury on 21 July 1403. Here, the usurper king Henry IV was facing a rebel army headed by Sir Henry Percy, the earl of Northumberland (more famously known as ‘Hotspur’). Once again, the very throne of England was the goal; with such high stakes, any vestiges of chivalric notions were discarded even before the battle had begun. As Alistair Dunn has noted, ‘at Shrewsbury, the objective of each side was nothing short of the annihilation of the enemy, and, if possible, that of as many of his kin and supporters as could be ridden down and slain’.51 High rank and eminence did not guarantee safety on that bloody day. On the loyalist side, Sir Walter Blount, the King’s standard bearer, and Earl of Stafford and his knightly retinue were all cut down. Inflicting such losses only made matters worse for the rebels when they lost. The illustrious Thomas Percy, earl of Worcester, pleaded for his life, but was immediately beheaded. When asked what should be the fate of the rebel prisoners, the loyalist general Sir John Stanley instructed his troops: ‘Burn and slay! Burn and slay!’ The arrow stuck in his throat at the time did not predispose him towards clemency; but nor did the significant losses incurred by the royal army. Once again – a repeated theme of this book – the role of vengeance in medieval military atrocity should not be underplayed. Nearly fifteen hundred bodies were found in the rebel burial pit. The closeness in time of battlefield slaughter and contiguous execution of prisoners while the dust of combat was still settling may serve to blur the distinction between the two, separate events. The bloodlust of battle could still be coldly directed towards killing after the fighting had ceased.
CONCLUSIONS
The killing of high-ranking prisoners was still the exception to the norm in medieval warfare, but had become increasingly less so in England since the disastrous reign of Edward II, from whose time, as we have seen, political motivation and justification were merged with the military context. Before Edward’s reign, harsh punishment meted out to defeated enemies of note was frequently measured in shaming, but not mortal, acts. William the Lion, king of Scotland, when captured at Alnwick in 1174, suffered the familiar fate of being tied to a horse’s tail and dragged along.
When Prince Louis, son and heir to Philip II of France, was defeated by the English loyalist forces in 1217, he was compelled to sign the Treaty of Lambeth in nothing but his woollen underwear. (Louis compromised on this act of penitence, wearing a mantle over his embarrassment.) Prison and shackles were offensive enough to one’s honour, but King John was judged by contemporaries to have been vindictively abusive in his treatment of prisoners caught at Mirebeau, near Poitiers, in 1202. These he manacled and paraded on carts on the way to prison; this was considered especially humiliating as it suggested connotations with the executioner’s tumbrel for hangings. (As previously discussed, noble prisoners considered hanging as the most degrading form of death, associated as it was with the punishment appropriate for common criminals.) The fact that twenty-two of John’s captives were to die under the severe conditions in which they were held added injury to insult, prompting many leading figures in France and Normandy to defect to the French. When John looked for much-needed allies in 1203 and 1204, too few were forthcoming to help him save his duchy of Normandy: his treatment of prisoners captured in war had alienated a critical contingent of support and had therefore been massively counter-productive.
As we have seen, it was much simpler dealing with the rank and file, the ‘plebs’ as chroniclers sometimes called them: these were commonly despatched without consciences being much troubled. Especially vulnerable were crossbowmen and archers, testimony to their deadly efficiency and the thirst for vengeance for fallen comrades. Saladin, as discussed above, was not lenient to crossbowmen; in 1153, Count Henry of Anjou (soon to be Henry II) gave quarter to the knights of Crowmarsh Castle, but executed its sixty archers; King John spared the garrison at Rochester in 1215, but hanged its crossbowmen; Henry III saw that over three hundred archers were beheaded in the civil war in 1264. Even in the early period of high chivalry, when knights had even less to fear from their often familiar opponents and battles often witnessed only a handful of their deaths, the infantry were customarily cut down in droves, as happened at Dol in 1173. At Tinchebray, Normandy, in 1106, Henry lost just two knights, while over two hundred infantry were killed.
This picture does, however, require a little clarification. It is commonplace to believe that soldiers of the lower orders were massacred simply because they had no value in ransom. This is not true, as we shall see in a later chapter. However, in certain situations and in certain places, circumstances dictated that it was either not practicable or not militarily sensible to allow the infantry to live. An example of the former might be a fast-moving campaign where the captors could not hang around for ransoms, or for it not to be expedient for relatives to follow the army with release money or goods, especially if the soldiers caught were fighting far from their homes. In cold economic terms, guarding prisoners might also mean an encumbrance to the pursuit of booty. Examples of the latter have been discussed at Agincourt, Acre and Wexford, where the weight of numbers proved deeply problematic. The number of deaths of infantry also reflects military reality: the foot soldier rarely had armoured protection equivalent to that of the knight; and, by definition, he lacked a horse to facilitate his quick escape from the battlefield.
When foot soldiers escaped death at the hands of their captors, they may not have avoided terrible punishment. Roger of Wendover describes one stock treatment meted out to them. During the Albigensian Crusade in 1228, the Count of Toulouse ambushed a French force and took, so Wendover believes, as many as two thousand prisoners. ‘After they had all been stripped to the skin, the count ordered the eyes of some to be torn out, the ears and noses of others to be slit, and the feet and hands of others to be cut off; after thus shamefully mutilating them, he sent them to their homes, a deformed spectacle to their fellow Frenchmen.’52 Such actions, like mass killings, were practical demonstrations that served as a warning to the enemy, to deflate their morale, hinder recruitment and simply to reduce by physical means the manpower available for fighting. However, as the Middle Ages moved into its later stages, mutilations were not quite so common, as guerre mortelle increased in frequency and fewer prisoners of any rank were taken quite so readily. In his war against Ghent in 1451–3, Philip the Good, duke of Burgundy, explicitly ordered the slaying of all prisoners; as rebels, they deserved nothing else. In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, German and Swiss mercenaries, the backbone of many a national army, were notorious for not taking prisoners. Thus a Swiss battle order of March 1476 instructed that there were to be no prisoners, as all enemy soldiers, regardless of rank, were to be killed; the result was the annihilation of some six thousand Italians. Where possible, physical elimination of the enemy on such a scale was an eminently practical measure, a savage exercise in pure numbers.
Mass killing could even be endorsed and presented as a public good, especially when it came to the universally hated mercenaries, not noted for their own merciful tendencies. Mercenaries on the losing side could expect little clemency; none was given to the Flemings in England in 1174, nor to those at Bouvines in 1214, where their ferocious last stand was a desperate acknowledgement of their expected fate. When Philip Augustus moved against routiers (bands of mercenary brigands) in 1182, he was lauded for his ruthlessness. He was also enthusiastically assisted by civilian local defence associations which grouped together to hang five hundred routiers at one mass execution. Of course, kings continued to employ mercenaries in their armies in great numbers (Philip Augustus as much as anyone) and their leaders – such as Cadoc, Mercadier and John Hawkwood – were rewarded with land, honour and titles. War was the most upwardly mobile profession throughout the medieval period.
The treatment dished out to the ‘plebs’, the rough rustici, in turn did not predispose them to politely doff their caps at their social betters on the battlefield. Outbreaks of peasant revolt were common, and sometimes on a scale large enough to threaten the social order: the Jacquerie in fourteenth-century France, the Peasants’ Revolt in England (1381) and another in Germany (1524–5). When Flemish townsmen and peasants defeated the cream of French chivalry at Courtrai in 1302, they could have reaped a fortune in ransom; instead, following orders to ‘kill all that has spurs on’, they slew somewhere between forty and fifty per cent of French knights, including their illustrious leader, Count Robert of Artois. At the naval battle of Sandwich in 1217, defeated French knights dived into the Channel rather than surrender to English sergeants; only with great effort did English knights prevent these sergeants from executing on the spot thirty-two French knights taken when their ship was boarded. Much has been made by historians of the slaughter of notable prisoners at Agincourt, an action carried out by the lower-class archers; but Crécy, that other signal victory for the English in the Hundred Years War, was also marred by massacre. Froissart describes what happens when non-knightly soldiers roam the battlefield when the main combat is over:
Among the English there were pillagers and irregulars, Welsh and Cornishmen armed with long knives, who went out after the French and, when they found any in difficulty, whether they were counts, barons, knights or squires, they killed them without mercy. Because of this, many were slaughtered that evening, regardless of their rank…. The King of England was afterwards very angry that none had been taken for ransom, for the number of dead lords was very great.53
A scene from Bouvines in 1214 nicely encapsulates the social divide on the battlefield. The Count of Boulogne, one of the allied commanders against Philip II of France, is trapped under his horse. Animated by the competitive and lucrative business of ransoming, half a dozen French knights engage in a heated dispute in the midst of combat over who shall claim the Count as his prisoner. Meanwhile, hovering about the Count is a lowly youth with no prospect of receiving any share of future ransom. Knife in hand, he sets about the unfortunate victim, alternatively prodding him with his weapon and trying to remove his armour to deliver the fatal blow. All the time, the Count is screaming for any one of the knights to take him prisoner and thus ensure his safety.
Poor
discipline could, and on occasion did, contribute to massacres of prisoners; but for all the examples of military disorder in the medieval period, there are counter-examples of commands being strictly enforced, even after battle, when soldiers’ bloodlust was still high and the pursuit of booty was paramount. Following the great French victory at Bouvines in 1214, late in the day trumpets were sounded to recall the French from chasing down the enemy and seizing plunder. King Philip gave the order, as he was concerned that there were insufficient men left to guard his huge trawl of prisoners, many of whom were of great political value; he feared elements of the defeated enemy might regroup and attempt their rescue. In another time and place, like Agincourt, these prisoners might not have been so lucky as to live. In fact, discipline was frequently an essential element of massacre: at Waterford, the prisoners were executed only after deliberation, despite leading dissenting voices; at Agincourt, the massacre was carried out only when the archers and sergeants proved more disciplined than the insubordinate knights. Forgoing the immediate profits of war required substantial restraint but was possible owing to the unrelenting pressure of the imperative of war. Geoffrey de Charny’s mid-fourteenth-century Book of Chivalry was alive to the dangers of placing personal financial gain before collective military victory:
