Talk:Battle of Towton

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An event in this article is a March 29 selected anniversary (may be in HTML comment)

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I changed the Lancastrian commander 'Lord Clifford' to 'the Duke of Somerset'.

Actually Lord Clifford commanded the small Lancastrian force at the Battle of Ferrybridge, where he died, killed by an arrow.

Ralphspikyhair

[edit] Battle date

I have removed the reference to Palm Sunday because the 29th of March 1461 was a Friday. In 1461 Good Friday was on April 5th, counting back would put March 29th on a Friday and Palm Sunday on the 31st. You can use this program Easter Sunday calculator to find the date of Good Friday in 1461. Also, the calendar of 1461 could be generated with special programs (this one was done with MatLab):

                  Mar 1461
    S     M    Tu     W    Th     F     S
    0     0     0     0     0     1     2
    3     4     5     6     7     8     9
   10    11    12    13    14    15    16
   17    18    19    20    21    22    23
   24    25    26    27    28    29    30
   31     0     0     0     0     0     0

                   Apr 1461
    S     M    Tu      W    Th     F     S
    0     1     2      3     4     5     6
    7     8     9     10    11    12    13
   14    15    16     17    18    19    20
   21    22    23     24    25    26    27
   28    29    30     0     0     0     0

Of course it could be that the battle was fought on Palm Sunday, so the mistake is in the date, but since the remark about Palm Sunday is in parenthesis I removed it instead of changing the date.

On the other hand this calculator: http://www.albion.edu/english/calendar/easter.htm puts Easter on April 5th, making March 29th Palm Sunday!! I will check MatLab once again. --130.161.31.83 13:58, 30 Mar 2005 (UTC)

This discrepancy might be accounted for by the switch from the Julian Calender to the Gregorian in 1582, which deleted (or added? can't remember) about 10 days from the calendar--possibly one of your calculators is taking this into account and not the other, since they're probably made more for recent use than for the 1400s... --dvyost 29 Mar 2005

Here we go, from Gregorian calendar: "Very few countries implemented the new calendar on 15 October 1582 — only Italy, Poland, Spain and Portugal. Non-Catholic countries objected to adopting a Catholic invention. England, Scotland and thereby the rest of the British Empire (including part of what is now the United States) did not adopt it until 1752, by which time it was necessary to correct by eleven days (September 2, 1752 being followed by September 14, 1752). Britain legislated special provisions to make sure that monthly or yearly payments would not become due until the dates that they originally would have in the Julian calendar. "Old Style" and "New Style" are sometimes added to dates to identify which system is used in the British Empire and other countries that did not immediately change." --dvyost 29 Mar 2005

If I remember correctly, this is the battle at which Richard Neville famously killed his own horse and fought on foot, shoulder to shoulder with the foot soldiers - is that worth a mention in the article?

I've often wondered if that's because his men feared he'd run away as he (along with Richard of York and others) had done the night before the Battle of Ludford Bridge 2 years previously. Fizzackerly 13:11, 28 March 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Introductory section

The current introductory section doesn't do a good job of summarizing. What should be added to the introduction is a summary of the results/significance of the battle (besides a lot of people getting killed). I'm declining to be bold here because I'm not sure of my ground in framing such a summary. My stab at it would be along these lines: "The battle was a decisive victory for the Yorkists. The Lancastrian army suffered heavy losses and ceased to exist as an effective fighting force. Most of the surviving Lancastrian leaders acquiesced to Edward's coronation later in the year." I offer that suggestion mostly to illustrate the level of generality that I think is appropriate for the introductory section, not because I'm confident that what I've written is accurate. JamesMLane t c 21:37, 30 March 2007 (UTC)