It was the end of March 1461. Edward IV had been proclaimed king, but the crown still belonged - depending on who you asked - to Henry VI, whose army was waiting in Yorkshire behind the Aire River. The bridge at Ferrybridge had been broken by the Lancastrians, the river was running winter-cold, and the Earl of Warwick was about to try to cross it anyway with planks and stubborn men. Three days of fighting would follow. It would end at Towton, in a snowstorm, in the largest battle ever fought on British soil.
On 27 March, Warwick - leading Edward's vanguard - reached the broken bridge at Ferrybridge. A small but determined Lancastrian force held the far bank. Warwick's men set planks across the gaps the Lancastrians had cut, working under a hail of arrows while comrades fell into freezing water. Men drowned. Men were shot. Eventually the crossing held and the Lancastrians were driven off. Warwick had his men repair the bridge properly and made camp on the north side of the Aire. The next morning ought to have been about consolidating, waiting for Edward's main army. It was not.
Early the next morning - 28 March 1461, traditionally, though some historians now think it may have been before dawn on the 29th - a large Lancastrian party under Lord Clifford and John, Lord Neville, attacked Warwick's camp. The Yorkists were caught completely off guard. Casualties piled up fast. Warwick's second-in-command, Lord FitzWalter, was mortally wounded trying to rally his men and would die a week later. The Bastard of Salisbury - Warwick's own half-brother - was killed. Warwick himself was struck by an arrow in the leg. The chronicler Jean de Wavrin recorded that nearly 3,000 men died in the fighting. This was no skirmish. It was a running disaster, and the men trying to die well in it had names: FitzWalter trying to rally his line, the Bastard of Salisbury cut down, the wounded earl pulling back across the river he had just crossed.
Edward arrived with the main Yorkist army and joined Warwick at the ruined bridge. They sent Warwick's uncle, Lord Fauconberg, upstream with the cavalry to ford the Aire at Castleford and circle round. Fauconberg caught up with Clifford in sight of the main Lancastrian army and broke him in a fierce engagement. Lord Clifford was killed by an arrow in the throat. He had, according to the chroniclers, removed the gorget - the piece of plate armour protecting the throat - to issue commands more easily. It was a small command-and-control decision that cost him his life. The Wars of the Roses produced many such moments: a personal calculation about how to lead, and then an arrow that did not care.
Historians now suggest that what looks in the chronicles like a sequence over two or three days may actually have been three engagements in one - Ferrybridge before dawn, Dintingdale a few hours later, and Towton itself by late morning. If so, the casualty figures usually attributed to Towton include the men killed at Ferrybridge and Dintingdale. Either way, by sunset on Palm Sunday, the Lancastrian army had been broken in the snow on the rolling ground south of Tadcaster. Edward IV's throne was secure for the next nine years. Henry VI fled into exile. Lord Clifford lay where he had fallen - the man whose arrow at the throat ended a personal feud that had begun when his own father was killed at Wakefield three months earlier, the killing chain of a war that would not finish until 1487.
Located at 53.71N, 1.27W on the River Aire near the village of Ferrybridge in West Yorkshire, about 12 nm east of Leeds. Leeds East (EGCB) lies about 8 nm west; Doncaster Sheffield (formerly EGCN) is about 15 nm south. The modern landscape is dominated by the A1(M) motorway crossing the Aire, and historically by the three cooling-tower clusters of Ferrybridge Power Stations - though the Ferrybridge C towers were demolished in 2019 and the site is being redeveloped. The medieval bridge crossing is in the village core; the Towton battlefield lies about 6 nm north on the Tadcaster road.