In 1322 a black calf was born at Chartley Park, a few miles west of Burton, and people who knew the legend understood what it meant. The de Ferrers family kept a herd of white cattle with black ears, descended from wild beasts caught when the park was carved out of Needwood Forest. The birth of a dark-hued calf in the herd, the story went, foretold a death in the family. That year the omen came true on a scale no one expected. Thomas, 2nd Earl of Lancaster, the most powerful baron in England, was about to fight his cousin King Edward II at a medieval bridge across the Trent. He would lose. The de Ferrers, who had backed him, would lose with him. And the next ten months would end with Thomas himself executed on his own lands at Pontefract, kneeling toward Scotland because his enemies refused him the courtesy of facing south toward London.
Thomas of Lancaster had spent two decades hating his cousin's choice of friends. Edward II promoted young favourites, men widely understood to be his lovers, and elevated them to positions of regency and royal power. The first was Piers Gaveston, made Earl of Cornwall and, at one point, regent of the realm in Edward's absence. Lancaster had Gaveston seized and beheaded in 1312. Edward neither forgot nor forgave. By 1321 a new favourite, Hugh Despenser the Younger, had risen high enough to threaten the holdings of the Welsh Marcher Lords, and Lancaster joined them in open rebellion against the king. Edward defeated the Marcher allies in Wales over the winter, then turned north toward Lancaster. The two armies converged on the Trent in early March 1322. Lancaster fortified the medieval bridge at Burton, a 36-arched structure that was effectively the only crossing of the Trent and Dove to the north. He intended to hold the river line and force Edward into a costly assault.
Edward arrived at Cauldwell on 7 March with his army, planning to use the ford at Walton-on-Trent to outflank Lancaster instead of attacking the fortified bridge. The river had other plans. Floodwaters delayed him for three days. During the wait some of his force was deployed opposite Lancaster's men at the bridge, both sides watching each other across the swollen Trent. Lancaster waited for reinforcements from his close friend Robert de Holland, who had encamped at Dalbury six miles north with the troops raised in Cheshire. What Lancaster did not know was that Holland had received a secret order from the king on 4 March commanding him to join the royal army. Holland was holding back, waiting to see which way the battle went before committing his men. It was a betrayal that would haunt him: when he eventually turned his troops over to the king at Derby on 13 March, Edward received him coldly. Holland was imprisoned at Dover Castle and stripped of his estates.
On 10 March Edward's main force crossed at Walton and advanced on Burton from the south. Lancaster moved his men out of the town to face the king in open battle, then saw how badly he was outnumbered and withdrew northwards. The fighting was brief and the casualties light by medieval standards, but they included Sir Roger D'Amory, constable of Corfe Castle, who was injured in the engagement and carried to Tutbury, where he died of his wounds. Edward's anger at D'Amory's earlier loyalty to Lancaster outlived the knight; when the king took Tutbury he ordered D'Amory's corpse to be posthumously executed for treason, a strange medieval gesture that says everything about the bitterness of dynastic civil war. The Abbot of Burton was later charged with concealing £200 in goods left behind by Lancaster, though the abbot insisted he had found only a single silver cup, which he duly handed over. In 1831 a large hoard of silver coins was discovered in the River Dove near Tutbury, suspected to be part of Lancaster's lost treasure. The abbot may have been telling the truth.
Lancaster's retreat became a rout. The king's men pursued him north, and on 16 March he was caught at the Battle of Boroughbridge by royal forces and a force from Cumberland. Captured, sent to his own castle at Pontefract, tried summarily, and condemned, he was beheaded on 22 March 1322. It was an ignominious end for a man who had refused to fight the Scots at Bannockburn and who had once executed the king's favourite with the same brisk medieval efficiency. The victory removed the immediate threat to Edward's rule. The Despenser regime tightened its hold. The next year Edward, in formal thanksgiving, awarded Burton Abbey the advowsons of Tatenhill and Hanbury, lands previously held by Lancaster, in "perpetual memory of the glorious victory which God gave to the King over his enemies." The triumph did not last. Edward proved unable to control the country he had won, and in 1327 he was forced to abdicate in favour of his son Edward III. A local tradition places Robin Hood at the Battle of Burton Bridge, fighting for Lancaster. There is no evidence for it. There rarely is.
Located at 52.81N, 1.62W, in central Burton upon Trent at the modern bridge that replaced the medieval 36-arch structure. From the air the river crossing point is unmistakable: the Trent winds through the town, and the line of the medieval bridge can be traced along the modern road alignment. East Midlands Airport (EGNX) lies 14 nm east-northeast, Birmingham (EGBB) 20 nm south-west. The site of the ford at Walton-on-Trent, where Edward's army actually crossed, is 2 nm downstream to the south. A 1,500-foot pass on a clear day shows the river, the modern town centre, and the ridgelines to the south from which Edward's army descended.