A Bowman at Towton - Part One
Created | Updated Feb 19, 2006
Author's Note: This piece came about when a friend mentioned that his 11-year-old twins had taken part in a school project on the Battle of Towton. Working in groups, the children had to invent a character and then tell the story of the battle and its context through this character's experience. My friend was clearly impressed by their 'Diary of John Hand'. It Judging from his description, it must have mixed historical detail with some touching and thought-provoking views about brotherhood and chivalry. I was struck too, and so I read up on the battle a little and got hooked. I soon found myself writing my own take on John Hand's life.
Towton remains the bloodiest battle so far fought on British soil. The historical facts here are authentic, or at least true to contemporary records. (What war diary is ever true?) Everything happened pretty much as described, except for the personal involvement of John Hand himself. As for John's depiction: he's more true-to-life than another better-known Nottingham bowman, in my opinion, anyway.
For The Post, the piece has been split into three parts. I had hopes that this might make the Edited Guide, but an imaginary hero proved too much for the sticklers. I hope you enjoy it anyway.
Pinniped - January 2006
I was young and headstrong in those days. It was in the early summer of 1485, in the manor-yard at Carlton Barron, that I heard the soldiers speak. Their oratory filled me with a burning desire to right wrongs. This land of ours had been sloughed in war so long that nobody remembered anything else. I thought there was a chance back then, to end it all through one last contest and to claim a long-sought respite. So it was that I resolved to fight for York, just as my father had done. There was a purpose in my step as I strode back to the house.
He was still in the little field, hoe in hand, as I approached. I told him simply that I had decided to go to the war, and he looked at me with his dark eyes and there was a long silence. I could never tell what he was thinking, not in those days when I was too impatient to understand his circumspection. Finally, he said that he would fetch the bow.
He took it down from its place in the rafters and he closed my fingers about the grip. There was only the great stave and a broken string, still twined to the knocks. There were no arrows nor any of the other tools and small items he must once have possessed. My father, I knew, had no desire to maintain the weapon. His attachment was only to the wood.
'If you must fight,' he said, quietly, 'then do so as a bowman. I do not want my son hacked to pieces in the press.'
'You don't want me to fight at all,' I said, sullenly. 'But it's my choice, not yours.'
He put his hand on my shoulder, and I struggled to feel like a man of twenty years instead of a child. 'If you will hear of my experience, then you might choose better,' he said.
'How long will it take?' I demanded, my impatience still brimming.
'Fetch the hoe,' he said. 'We're finished out there for today.' When I returned with it, he was sitting on the ground with his back to the water-trough and the sun was straight overhead. He motioned to me to sit beside him, but I was determined to remain standing and so get this over with quickly.
'You fought at Towton,' I sneered. 'I know all that already.'
He gave me the slow gaze again. 'That was not my first battle,' he replied, evenly. 'Did you ever hear of Formigny?'
I hadn't. It sounded French, and I said so.
'Let's start at the beginning,' he said.
My father's name was John Hand, and he was born in Nottingham. These are the things I was taught by him that day, and on many days afterwards, as I learned to listen better and to think more carefully.
In the weeks leading up to the momentous Eastertide of 1461, the Houses of Lancaster and York agreed about one thing only: the coming battle would be winner-takes-all.
Both sides assembled the full might of their support. The size of the forces at Towton Field will never be known with certainty, but it is beyond dispute that both armies were immense by the standards of our day. According to some accounts, one in every fifty living Englishmen bore arms in this single confrontation. There is no doubt, too, that the casualties were far higher than in any other battle on British soil, before or since. Some chroniclers put the death-toll above thirty thousand. The great majority of the dead were Lancastrians, and very many of them died in the hour of nightfall, in the rout on Bloody Meadow after a day of deadlock.
When he told me that last fact, at noon outside our little house in the summer of my twentieth year, I grinned with pleasure. I was surprised when he scowled and called me a fool, but now at last I understand.
Since before my father was born, and indeed since before his father was born, we had fought the French. The war was interminable, its origins a thing of legend. When I was a child, a few old men still told of the glory of Agincourt and the supremacy of the English longbow. But by my father's time, all that had faded. A witch called Jeanne d'Arc had turned the tide, and she turned it in spirit as well as in feats of arms. Although she was killed she could not be killed.
Edmund Beaufort, 2nd Duke of Somerset and despised general of the House of Lancaster, presided abysmally over the last campaigns. One by one, the hard-won garrisons were lost until only Calais was left. By Formigny, fought in April 1450, the French had cannon, the 'culvrin' gun and heavy cavalry, too. They had Clermont and Richemont and an irresistible sense of destiny. More than three thousand Englishmen fell, against two hundred on the French side.
Back in England, civil war was brewing. Henry VI, the puppet of Lancaster, drooled and raved on the throne. Somerset was released from the Tower during one of Henry's lucid spells and was pitted against Richard of York. At St Albans in 1455, my father's nemesis finally won a battle, and died in doing so. His heir, Henry Beaufort, became Duke and defender of the House of Lancaster. Effective rule fell to Margaret of Anjou, Henry's queen.
This new war on our home soil forced almost every Englishman to take sides. Many veterans of the disasters in Normandy and Gascony were repelled by the idea of another Beaufort protecting a French sovereign, and so they were drawn to the Yorkist cause.
'Formigny was terrible,' said my father, quietly. 'But it was not as terrible as the retreat, if you could call it a retreat. Those of us who survived were a remnant of a broken army. We blundered from Caen to Calais, expecting all the time to be confronted and killed. Near Rouen we were rounded up and they saw I was a bowman. I knew all the tales of the French cutting off their prisoners' hands and fingers to make sure that none would ever return to fight, but they did no such thing. They merely took our weapons, rolled us in the dirt and hounded us out of the town.'
There was a faint expression of anger in his usually-placid countenance. 'Right across France, it was the same,' he whispered. 'Harrying and herding, abuse and ridicule, but nowhere did we encounter fear. They did not think we were any sort of threat, and that was the worst thing to live with. I hated them for that, and it was that anger inside me that made me stupid enough to fight again.'
He nodded in the direction of the bow that was leaning beside the door. 'It took me years to find a faultless yew bough,' he said. 'When at last I did so, I stripped it and steeped it and I made a bow better than the one I lost in Normandy. I couldn't wait for the day that I would be called upon to draw it. I swore that in future I would give no quarter, and neither would I ask for any. The next time, it would be better to die than to survive defeat and to linger on unmanned.'
'That's just the way I feel today!' I blurted out, and instantly regretted it. He didn't show his anger, but the contempt in his words revealed it clearly enough.
'Ah, but I was not as foolish as you,' he retorted. 'I wasn't a reckless youth hankering for a chance to assert my manhood. I was an accomplished bowman already and I was getting better all the time through diligent practice. I was a freeman, I had my own strip of land and I was a husband and a father, since your sisters were already born. But none of those privileges meant what they should have meant to me, because I was consumed by a desire for revenge. For ten years I waited for my chance to take it, and when the chance came, it filled a single week of my life. That week changed my outlook forever. It taught me the real consequences of war, so that when my son was finally born three years later, I didn't rejoice over fathering a potential warrior. I prayed instead that the child would not be lured by notions of a soldier's honour in the way that I had been.'
The intensity of his tirade receded, to be replaced by his familiar calm. 'Now,' he said. 'You have heard the beginning. Will you hear the rest before you make your choice?'
'Yes, please, father,' I answered meekly, and sat down at his feet.
Richard, Duke of York, should have been our King by right, but he was frustrated by Henry's guardians. When Richard died in 1860, his eldest son resolved to unseat the Lancastrian usurper. Edward's forces set off on their northward march from London at the beginning of March 1461, gathering support on their way to the battle that would resolve the dispute once and for all.
It was in the early evening of Sunday, 22 March, that my father met Brotherton and began his terrible adventure. John Hand was 38 years old. Their meeting-place was the manor-yard at Carlton Barron — the selfsame place where I was enticed by the succeeding generation's call to arms.
The younger man was a Yorkist captain, hardened beyond his years and charged with mustering all the competent fighting men that he could find. The rabble summoned to Carlton Manor, old men and children brandishing billhooks and scythes, proved to be a disappointment. Only the man with the bow, dark-eyed and stern, showed any promise.
I have my own picture of the scene in my mind:
'Draw it,' scoffs the captain, Brotherton. Without a word, John Hand raises the bow and pulls it back. The veins in his forearm bulge. The great arc flexes pent, perfectly motionless, silent but for the soft creak of dreadful tension.
The captain clears his throat, all doubt dispelled. 'You've used it in anger, I presume. In France?'
My father nods.
'You fought for Somerset, then? Will you now fight against him?'
After a moment's hesitation, another nod.
'Have you heard of Lord Fauconberge?'
This time the dark eyes are blank.
'I'm going to recommend you to the finest commander of bowmen in England,' the captain whispers. 'Don't disappoint him.'
It would be another three days before my father met Fauconberge. Early in the morning after his encounter with Brotherton, he gathered a few possessions in his satchel and shouldered his bow. Then he took leave of his family and joined the party on the northward road...
To be continued in the next edition of The Post...
