Next are three battles of the fifteenth century: Towton, Tewkesbury, and Bosworth. TOWTON FIELD, supposed to be the most fierce and bloody battle that ever happened in any domestic war, was fought between the Houses of York and Lancaster in 1461. On the 29th of March, the armies met at Towton: the Lancastrians were totally routed, and Edward left unquestionably king. The carnage of this terrible field is appalling. Proclamations forbidding quarter were issued before the engagement. Like Leipsic, it reached over the night; but, unlike Leipsic, even the hours of darkness brought no rest. They fought from four o'clock in the afternoon, throughout the whole night, on to noon the next day. Like Waterloo, it was fought on a Sunday. And the accounts of contemporary writers state, in words very like the letters from Mont St. Jean, that, for weeks afterwards the blood stood in puddles, and stagnated in gutters, and that the water of the wells was red. No inaccuracy is more frequent in ancient authors than that of numbers, and generally on the side of exaggeration. But on this occasion we can form a more correct estimate of the carnage by the concurrence of unusually reputable testimonies; and, perhaps, in these times it will give the best idea of it, to say that the number of Englishmen slain exceeded the _sum_ of those who fell at Vimiera, Talavera, Albuera, Salamanca, Vittoria, and Waterloo.[70] TEWKESBURY FIELD has been minutely explored. Mr. Richard Brooke, F.S.A., after narrating, from Holinshed, the circumstances which preceded this memorable battle--from the arrival of Queen Margaret at Weymouth, to the termination of the conflict, and the murder of Prince Edward--points out the field of battle as close to the first mile-stone on the high road leading from Tewkesbury through Tredington to Cheltenham and Gloucester. On the western side of the town of Tewkesbury is the Home-ground, or Home-hill, where once a castle stood; a part of this elevated ground is a field, called "the Gastons," which extends to the first mile-stone, just opposite which, on the eastern side of the road, is a field which has been immemorially called "Margaret's Camp." The battle was, according to tradition, fought on that place, and in the adjacent fields on the southward, as also in those a little eastward of it. In "Margaret's Camp," in the centre is a small circular inclosure, surrounded by a ditch, without hedge or bank, but having some large elm trees growing round its inner edge. This is too insignificant to have been a military entrenchment; but it may have been the place of interment of some of the slain; or is thought to have been formed in comparatively modern times to commemorate the spot where the Lancastrian army was posted. In the field, called "Gup's Hill," Mr. Brooke was told by elderly persons, bones had formerly been discovered.