Events

Battlefields Trust Online Talk: Palm Sunday 1461: Rethinking the Battle of Towton

Wednesday 11th March 2026

Our understanding of the 'Battle of Towton', fought on Palm Sunday 1461, as the largest and bloodiest battle fought on English soil and a decisive Yorkist victory that secured the throne for Edward IV, is based almost entirely on Edward Hall’s account, written in the 1540s, and the colourful imagination of nineteenth-century historians and antiquarians. The truly contemporary sources, especially those written in the 1460s, however, tell a quite different story. This talk will reexamine the earliest sources for the fighting on Palm Sunday 1461 and argue that the course of events was quite different to the widely accepted narrative.

David Grummitt works at the Open University. He is also on the advisory panel of the Battlefields Trust and a Board Member and the Research Officer of the Richard III Society. He has published several books on the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, most notably The Wars of the Roses: War and Martial Culture 1455-1487 (Oxford University Press, 2025) and the first of a three-volume military history of the Wars of the Roses, The Triumph of York 1455-1461 (Helion & Co, 2026).

 

 
 

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