No 15th-century source explicitly describes the fighting took that place on Towton Dale on Palm Sunday, 29^th March 1461. There is nevertheless clear archaeological evidence that battle was joined on the current Registered Battlefield area. Given the lack of contemporary evidence, the accounts of the Battle of Towton have traditionally relied principally on the account written by the Tudor chronicler Edward Hall, first published in 1548. It is Hall – and Hall alone – who first described the Yorkist flank march to Castleford after their setback at Ferrybridge and the defeat of the Lancastrian John, Lord Clifford at Dintingdale. They arrived on Towton Dale late in the evening of 28^th March. Hall had the Yorkists facing north with the village of Saxton at their back, facing the Lancastrians arrayed with the village of Towton behind them. In the traditional account the battle began about nine in the morning of Palm Sunday with an arrow storm from the Yorkist lines. As battle commenced, snow began to fall, blowing from the south. The Lancastrians returned fire but their view, and therefore their aim, was hampered by the snow that whirled in their faces. The Lancastrian arrows fell short but unaware of this in the blinding snow they continued to fire until their arrows were exhausted. The Yorkists now advanced and collected some of the fallen arrows of their enemies, then, giving insult to injury, returned them with far greater accuracy. The Lancastrians then advanced, routing the Yorkist cavalry on the right. In a desperate melee, lasting some nine hours, the fortune of battle ebbed and flowed, until the arrival of the duke of Norfolk late in the day tipped the balance in favour of Edward IV and his men. The Lancastrians fled and thousands were killed as they attempted to cross the River Cock en route to Tadcaster.

Almost nothing of Hall’s story is corroborated by the earliest records of the battle, although George Neville, bishop of Exeter’s letter to the papal legate Coppini mentions a melee that lasted from dawn until the tenth hour of night, as well as the drowning of the fleeing Lancastrians in the river near Tadcaster. The only location Neville gives for the battle, however, is ‘near Ferrybridge.’ The Yorkist Act of Attainder in November 1461 tells us a battle took place between ‘Saxtonfield and Towtonfield’, but it was not until the early 1470s that Towton was again mentioned by name in the narrative accounts as a location for the fighting that raged on Palm Sunday. Only one fifteenth-century source provides a detailed account of a battle that was distinct from the encounters earlier that day at Ferrybridge and Sherburn-in-Elmet (although ‘Benet’s Chronicle’, written in the mid-1460s lists actions at Ferrybridge and Sherburn-in-Elmet as well as a third encounter at an unnamed location). Writing in the early 1470s, the Burgundian chronicler Jean de Wavrin described ‘the great battle that took place quite close to York.’ Wavrin’s description of this part of the fighting occasionally contradicts his account of the earlier battle at Ferrybridge (which he had largely copied from earlier Burgundian chronicles which had drawn on newsletters sent to the Low Countries by the earl of Warwick soon after the Yorkist victory). Wavrin describes how the opposing forces were initially separated by some four miles. The Lancastrian vanguard, led by the duke of Somerset and Richard Woodville, Lord Rivers, first attacked the Yorkist cavalry, putting Edward’s men to flight. Edward, however, regrouped his remaining forces and asked them to stand with him and defend his right to the throne. He then dismounted, joining his men to face the onslaught of the main Lancastrian army. The Lancastrians bore the royal banner of Henry VI and were led by the earl of Northumberland. The ensuing melee was fiercely contested, but eventually the Yorkists prevailed ‘through the great prowess primarily of the Earl of March [Edward IV].’ Wavrin claimed that Warwick was injured during this fighting, but he makes no mention of the late arrival of the duke of Norfolk, the weather conditions on the day of battle, or the Lancastrian rout across the Cock Beck. Perhaps significantly and reflecting his own uncertainty over where the fighting took place, Wavrin does not mention Towton or Saxton by name in his account.

Northumberland, Clifford and the lords Dacre and Neville were among the Lancastrian casualties named in newsletters circulated in the battle’s immediate aftermath, with only Lord Fitzwalter among the dead named on the Yorkist side. Contemporary estimates of some 30,000 casualties were likely gross exaggerations, and it seems unlikely that either side could have mustered more than 10,000 men each for the Palm Sunday campaign. The royal family and the dukes of Somerset and Exeter, along with a sizeable part of the Lancastrian army, escaped the battles at Ferrybridge. Sherburn-in-Elmet and on Towton Dale. Within weeks of the defeat, they were again mounting organised resistance to the Yorkist regime in the north of England and attempting to enlist French and Scottish help. Although Edward IV was crowned in Westminster on 26th June 1461, Lancastrian resistance in the north of England was not extinguished until 1464.