Blood Red Roses: The Archaeology of a Mass Grave from the Battle of Towton, A.D. 1461 ed. by Veronica Fiorato, Anthea Boylston, and Christopher Knüsel (review)

REVIEWS concerning the seer. Dames's narrative begins with a retelling and analysis of the birth ofMerlin, and ends with a call to restore, in Britain's new National Forest, the 'Clas Merdin Britain, where spirit and body were fully integrated, and where the holiness ofmatter had been assumed as a sacred norm' (pp. 183-84). Along the way the reader is treated to beautifully written and vivid prose, wonderful color and B&W pictures ofCeltic artifacts and the Welsh landscape, and an occasional map or excavation diagram. No single type ofevidence is given priority in this study, but all are interwoven to construct a flowing, often poetic narrative. This may appeal to many readers, but scholars will be left wondering about the methodology and rules to which Dames adheres yet never adequately describes. 'Since Merlin epitomized a poetic synthesis,' writes Dames, 'involving landscape, language, place-names, folklore, early texts, pre-Christian religion and a social order different from our own, there is a need to integrate archaeology's findings into this broader context' (p. 12). Those who share this need to synthesize may enjoy Dames's broad-ranging study of Merlin in Wales. The archaeologists whose work Dames cites, however, do not feel this need, and indeed would feel that their work was being misused 'to address contemporary needs,' as Dames admits. Similarly, the historian will find too many errors and uncritical repetition of'tradition' in Dames's book to see it as a useful contribution to our understanding of the historical dimension of Merlin and medieval Wales. CHRISTOPHER A. SNYDER Marymount University VERONICA FIORATO, ANTHEA BOYLSTON, and CHRISTOPHER KNÜSEL, eds., Blood Red Roses: TheArchaeobgy ofa Mass Gravefrom the Battle ofTowton, A.D. 1461. Oxford: Oxbow Books, 2000. Pp. x, 278. isbn: 1-84217-025-2. £30. The bloodiest battle ever fought in Britain took place on 29 March 1461, when a retreating Lancastrian army turned on its Yorkist pursuers on a plateau near the village ofTowton in Yorkshire. Everyone would have known that whoever retreated would be slaughtered on the sides of the plateau, and the Lancastrians gave their men a further incentive to fight by breaking down the bridge behind them. The battle lasted all day and the casualties, on the battlefield and by drowning, were enormous. The heralds who supervised the burial ofthe dead counted 28,000 corpses; a well-informed later chronicler said 38,000. The modern equivalent ofthat, scaled up for population growth, is a quarter ofa million men killed. In 1996, building work discovered one ofthe mass graves in which the dead had been buried. This book tells the story ofan emergency excavation organised by the county archaeology service and Bradford University, which has a particular interest in funerary archaeology. The scientific side is generally admirable, although the need to use whoever was available produced a muddled chapter about the battlefield from a Ph.D. student, which the editors should have sorred out. The team had to work against time and were short of money, but an elegant use of acetate sheet recording made the most ofboth. 114ARTHURIANA The excavation record shows that the bodies were stripped and packed very closely, presumably to reduce the huge labour of burying so many in winter-hardened ground. The thirty-eight more or less complete skeletons were broadly representative of the male population in health, physique, and musculature; there was clearly no exemption from military service in the campaign for thevertically challenged. Many had muscular development suggesting life-long archery training: a few had major healed wounds suggesting previous military service, one of whom ('Towton 16') had ossified gluteal muscles perhaps caused by spending a great deal of time on horseback. He may have been an officer. Although archery played an important part in the battle, almost all the dead were killed by blows from edged weapons, specifically blows to the head inflicted by right-handed opponents. Towton 16's death is ingeniously reconstructed as a horrific series of seven blows ofthat kind. The dead men must have had effective upper-body armour, but no helmets. One contributor suggests that archers might not have worn them, another that helmets could have been knocked off as men slipped...