The Lancastrians, having chosen their ground, naturally did not oppose the Yorkists' advance. The latter climbed the southern slope, and marched across the plateau, a fall of snow preventing either party seeing the other until they faced each other at a distance of a quarter of a mile across Towton Dale. From this time, if not before, the snow was driving in the faces of the Lancastrians, and Falconbridge utilised this advantage very cleverly. He ordered his archers to advance and begin shooting at the enemy, whom they could dimly see: as soon as the Lancastrians, annoyed by the arrows which they could not see coming, began to reply, he withdrew his men a short distance, and let the enemy waste their shafts on the open ground. Presently the hail of Lancastrian arrows slackened, as the supply ran short, and Falconbridge once more sent his archers forward, and so galled the defenceless enemy that they advanced to come to close quarters. The Lancastrians had thus to attack up-hill through the blinding snow, instead of compelling their antagonists to assail them at a disadvantage. A hand-to-hand conflict all along the line followed. Both sides fought stubbornly: orders had been given on both sides, so the chronicler says, to give no quarter. How long this continued it is hard to say: the armies may very well have been face to face by seven in the morning, though one account names nine o'clock. The losses on the victorious side, enormous for a hand-to-hand battle, in which the front lines only can fall, prove that it must have lasted a long while. About noon Norfolk, coming up at length from Ferrybridge by the great road, took the Lancastrians in flank. Still it was only gradually that they gave way: the battle had lasted for ten hours before the Lancastrians finally broke and fled by the only way open to them, towards the narrow bridge over the Cock. The swollen stream was scarcely fordable, the bridge was soon blocked, thousands were trampled down in the water, till the latest fugitives escaped over a causeway of their comrades' bodies. In modern times many thousands of the defeated army would have been taken prisoners, as happened at Blenheim when Marlborough pinned the French right against the Danube. The fury of civil war in the fifteenth century allowed very few prisoners to be made. Over 30,000 corpses are said to have been buried near Towton, of whom about a quarter were Yorkists. How many more found their last resting-place in the river cannot be guessed; all we know is that the Lancastrian army was to all intents and purposes annihilated.