england – STEPHEN TOMLIN

Where are the men who came before us/ Who led hounds and hawks to the hunt, / Who commanded fields and woods? / Where are the elegant ladies in their boudoirs / Who braided gold through their hair / And had such fair complexions?

Extract from an anonymous poem c. 1275, trans. Michael R Burch)

There are more than one and a quarter million objects on display in the Victoria & Albert Museum. Since 2009 the medieval and Renaissance treasures are displayed in five galleries in that vast C19^th cultural complex. On our recent London visit we confined ourselves to just one gallery, and were not disappointed with what was discovered. Here’s a bit about a handful of treasures on display connected with the west and north of England.

The wealth and power of a medieval English king pales in comparison to the richest and most splendid of European courts upheld by the magnificent Dukes of Burgundy, centred on what is now roughly southern Holland and northern Belgium. These towns and cities were the nexus of the continent’s major trading centres in luxury goods and services. This huge Flemish tapestry dated 1425-30, completely covers the gallery end wall. Formerly lodged at Hardwick Hall Derbyshire it was accepted by HMG in lieu of death duties on the estate of the 10^th Duke of Devonshire.

Conspicuous wealth is on show here, the tapestry’s narrative function as great as that of its role decorating and insulating a castle or household interior. Only Kings and aristocrats were allowed to hunt game, like the bears and boars depicted here, and participants attire is strictly status related, eschewing practical hunting clobber. The ladies fur for example is miniver, an expensive pelt from the bellies of hundreds of Baltic squirrels culled in winter.

Three unique half-life size oak figures stand out against a background of the great tapestry. A knight, his squire and man-at-arms; three orders of society in a great feudal household. Dating from the early 1500’s, they’re believed to have supported heraldic devices, and were placed high in the great hall of Kirkoswald or Naworth castle in Cumberland, properties held by the powerful Dacre dynasty. The armed man’s helmet or sallet was an essential piece of soldering kit but it also limited the wearer’s vision and impaired his breathing. In 1461, during the battle of Towton, a helmetless Lord Dacre was killed by an arrow while taking a desperately needed drink of water. A monument marks the fatal spot of that terrible battle in the Wars of the Roses. (We visited in 2025 https://stephentomlin.co.uk/2025/05/01/towton-field/)

The tragic epic romance of Tristan and Isolde in Cornwall had huge appeal to the wealthy elites right across Europe and lots of art work reference it. This superb broadcloth bed covering, made in Florence for a rich merchant family between 1360-1400, really goes to town on the tale.

It’s a wonderful display of compressed narrative detail chronicling the epic story, with extra pieces attached at various times, fashioned from linen and cotton. Kim, who comes from a long line of quilters, was particularly impressed with the skill involved in its execution.

Surviving examples of luxury medieval Islamic glassware are exceptionally rare so this pristine one from Syria or Egypt dated to c.1350 has special significance. A talisman of the Musgrave family at their seat of Hartley castle and later at Edenhall in Cumbria ‘The Luck of Eden Hall’ has been protected in part by the 15^th century leather case and – if local legend is to be believed – by fleeing fairies, who left it in human hands with the warning ‘If this cup should break or fall / Farewell the luck of Eden Hall.’ Curiously, in northern farming circles it remains customary to gift ‘luck money’ to the buyer of one’s stock at market as a token of goodwill.

Finally…this small C14^th alabaster fragment of a lost altarpiece from a Midlands church is a fine example of a deposition. The top figure’s steadying arm on the cross and Joseph of Aramathea’s handling of the slumped body of Christ help fix a moment of tender compassion. The odd missing head or hands of the other figures bear witness to the vagaries of time, or the action of iconoclasts. Along with the faded original bright colouring, this narrative scene exudes a sense of loss and sacrifice.

‘Recall the cold of Towton on Palm Sunday before dawn…fastidious trumpets shrilling into the ruck: some trampled acres, parched, sodden or blanched by sleet, stuck with strange postured dead. Recall the winds flurrying, darkness over the human mire.’ (Geoffrey Hill: King Log)

On 29^th March 1461 two great armies met in battle outside the village of Towton, on the high wide limestone ridge country between Leeds and York. This was to prove a watershed event in the intermittent C15th civil conflict known as the ‘Wars of the Roses’. A dynastic power struggle between the aristocratic affinity who supported the pious Lancastrian King Henry V1, led by his fearsome warrior wife, Margaret of Anjou and the charismatic Yorkist claimant to the throne, Edward Earl of March, heir to the rival house of York

The Lancastrian forces were mainly northerners, the Yorkists drawn mostly from the south and midlands. The 19 year old Edward had lost both his father, Richard Duke of York and younger brother Edmund, Duke of Rutland at the Battle of Wakefield three months earlier. Edward’s revengeful victory at Towton lead to the deposition and imprisonment of Henry, the exile of Margaret and to him being crowned as Edward IV.

The weather played a key role in determining the battle’s outcome that fateful Palm Sunday. A snowstorm blinded the oncoming Lancastrian forces and the mass of Yorkist arrows borne on the bitter wind inflicted heavy losses on their tight battle formations. This pressurised the Lancastrian host to advance through the teeth of the storm, which in turn pushed the Yorkists backward. Only the last minute arrival of reinforcements from the south, led by the Duke of Norfolk, halted their slow retreat and raised the morale. After yet more fierce hand to hand combat the Lancastrian army finally broke. Panic and hot pursuit ensued. The main line of retreat for the fleeing soldiery was on the old London road towards Tadcaster, over a narrow bridge crossing the Cock Beck below, to the west.

Some escaped that way while others, the mass of lightly protected infantry and archers, were not so lucky. No quarter would be asked or given. Jammed with the dead and dying, a desperate brute slaughter took place, the beck running red with the blood of butchered bodies that piled up, damming its course. Towton would go down in history as the biggest, longest and bloodiest of battles to be fought on British soil.

The late April day we visited was clear skied, cool and fresh. After a good pub lunch at the Rockingham Arms in Towton village we drove down the B road to where the official ‘Battlefield Walk’ started, by a simple monument known as the Dacre Cross, named after a Lancastrian lord killed in the battle. A weathered wreath of red and white roses left at its base to mark the anniversary a couple of weeks earlier lent the exposed spot a melancholy air. The path sets out alongside fertile soil recently sown and banked, Toblerone like, for potatoes. One couldn’t help wondering if the blood and bone spilt here, albeit centuries since, makes for a good crop year on year.

The lie of the land proved crucial to the course and outcome of the fighting and the locally based volunteers of the Towton Battlefield Society have done a great job in establishing and maintaining the 2.5 mile trail, complete with information boards at key points.

On one side stretches the undulating main battlefield site, where thousands of soldiers fought in hand to hand combat. Recently unearthed archaeological evidence points to the use of small cannon on the field of battle, a first for any in England. Excavations on private land around the village property of Towton Hall thirty years ago also revealed 50 skeletons dated to this period, packed into a mass grave, all displaying signs of injury or violence.

Today this section of the former great field system has been sown for what we took for either barley or wheat, surrounded by headlands of some kind of green manure, then grass banks or wire, with hardly a hedge in sight to break or block the overview..

On the other side of the path the land falls suddenly and steeply down to the narrow winding Cock beck, a tributary of the River Wharfe.. Here we gazed over a typical pastoral scene of deciduous woodland within pastureland on which ewes and lambs were grazing, with willows, alder and poplars hiding the waterside at bottom.

I’m struck by the mass of white flowers we passed – dead nettle, stitchwort and crab apple blossom, combined with the presence of those Spring lambs, that somehow, unconsciously adds to the symbolism of the Yorkist victory here at the heart of the White Rose county.

The warfare these days is between landowners and poachers, as the vehicular concrete barriers we came across at roadside field entrances testify to. Whether poaching of gamebirds, deer or hares (or all) remains unknown.

Towton Battlefield walk is an engaging accessible circuit, rarely busy one suspects. We encountered only four people on our stroll, all dog walkers, and the way is clearly interpreted and cared for. It has a particular atmosphere and ably communicates the brute horror of medieval warfare, made more so when seen against an overlay of the modern day farmed countryside. Well worth a visit, especially at a time of year somewhere near the anniversary. Find out more at the Battlefield Society’s website: www.towton.org.uk

Tag: england

Medieval Treasures

Towton Field