Atlas of History’s Greatest Military Victories, by Jeremy Harwood – review

Final proof – if any were needed – that Englishmen are not made of the same mettle as their rough, tough ancestors is provided on the website of the Towton Battlefield Society, who have cancelled their annual re-enactment of England’s bloodiest battle this Sunday ‘for safety’s sake…’ on the grounds that the battlefield has been waterlogged by this year’s unremitting wet weather.

This is an irony of ironies. For those who fought the original battle on the high Yorkshire plateau of Towton on Palm Sunday, March 28th 1461, during the Wars of the Roses, were not constrained by the same health and safety fears. Instead, between 50-80,000 men stood toe to ironclad toe for around ten hours in a driving snowstorm, shooting, hacking, stabbing and clubbing each other down. At the end of the slaughter – and the rout which followed, when fleeing Lancastrians were pursued pell-mell across the fields by the victorious Yorkists – around 28,000 (an estimated 1 per cent of the total population of England at the time) – lay dead or dying.