Meanwhile the aspect of the field was too terrible even to be described without a shudder. All on the ridge between Towton and Saxton were heaps of dead, and wounded, and dying; and the blood of the slain lay caked with the snow that covered the ground, and afterward, dissolving with it, ran down the furrows and ditches for miles together. Never, indeed, in England, had such a scene of carnage been witnessed as that upon which the villagers of Towton and Saxton looked out from their lowly cottages, and of which the citizens of York heard flying rumors, as, in common with Christendom, they celebrated the festival commemorative of our Redeemer's entry into Jerusalem. At length, when the battle had lasted well-nigh ten hours, and thousands had fallen in the sanguinary conflict, fortune so far favored the Red Rose that it seemed as if those long Border spears, so seldom couched in vain, were destined to win back the crown of St. Edward for Henry of Windsor. The Yorkists were, in fact, giving way; and Warwick must have felt that his charger had been sacrificed in vain, and that his head was not unlikely to occupy a place between those of York and Salisbury over the gates of the northern capital, when, through the snow which darkened the air and drifted over the country, another army was seen advancing from the south; and into the field, fresh and in no humor to avoid the combat, came the fighting men of Norfolk, under the banner of the princely Mowbrays, to the aid of Edward's wavering ranks. This new arrival of feudal warriors speedily turned the scale in favor of York; and while Edward animated his adherents, and Warwick urged the Yorkists to renewed exertion, the Lancastrians, after an attempt to resist their fate, at first slowly and frowning defiance on their foes, but gradually with more rapid steps, commenced a retreat northward. Among the thousands who, on that stormy Palm Sunday, took the field with Red Roses on their gorgets, there was no better or braver knight than Ralph, Lord Dacre. From his castle of Naworth, in Cumberland, Dacre had brought his riders, arrayed under the ancestral banner-- "That swept the shores of Judah's sea, And waved in gales of Galilee"--