{46a} The number of the slain and drowned is stated to have amounted to nearly 10,000. There seems to have been, from times of very remote antiquity, a bridge over the river at Northampton, near the castle; but from the narrow and inconvenient form of bridges at the date of the battle, it could not afford much chance of escape to many of the fugitives. The present bridge is modern, and not upon the site of the old one. {46b} “The Erles of March, Warwick, and Salisbyri, cam from Calays to Dovar, and so to London and Northampton, and there faute with owte the town, where the Duke of Bokingham, the Erle of Shrobbesbyri, the Viscount Beaumont, the Lorde Egremont, were slayn, and many knighttes and squyers with other, and the King taken prisoner.”—Leland’s _Coll._ vol. ii. fo. 497 [714]. {46c} John Talbot, second Earl of Shrewsbury, was the son and heir of John Talbot, first Earl of Shrewsbury, the celebrated commander, renowned for his warlike exploits in France, and slain by a cannon shot at the battle of Castillon, near Bourdeaux, on the 7th {46f} of July, 1453, and of his wife Maud, daughter and heiress of Thomas Neville, Lord Furnival. {46d} He was originally John Lord Beaumont, son of Henry Lord Beaumont and Elizabeth his wife, daughter of William Lord Willoughby of Eresby, and was in the eighteenth year of Henry VI. advanced to the dignity of a Viscount (a title not previously used in England), by the title of Viscount Beaumont, with precedence over all Barons of the realm; after his death at the battle of Northampton, he was succeeded in his title, and his principles, by his son and heir, William Viscount Beaumont, who fought on the Lancastrian side at the battle of Towton, for which he was included in the act of attainder of 1st Edward IV., but was restored by Parliament in the first, and died in the twenty-fourth year of Henry VII. {46e} Thomas Percy, Lord Egremont, originally Sir Thomas Percy, Knight (the third son of Henry, the second Earl of Northumberland, who was slain at the first battle of Saint Alban’s in 1455, and Eleanor his wife, daughter of Ralph Neville, first Earl of Westmoreland, and widow of Richard Lord Spencer), was created Lord Egremont, in the twenty-eighth year of Henry VI. {46f} On the 7th of July, 1453, according to Ralph Brooke, p. 196; on the 20th of July, according to Dugdale, vol. i. p. 330; but on the 7th of July, on the same page, where he professes to give a copy of the epitaph of the Earl of Shrewsbury, slain in the battle near Bourdeaux, from his monument at Whitchurch, in Shropshire.