Persons residing near the field of battle, readily point out the place, where Lord Dacre {96} is said to have been slain, and which I have several times made a point of visiting, in the course of my rambles there; it is in a field called Nor Acres (or North Acre), which seems to have been originally much larger, and to have been subdivided. It belongs to Lord Hawke, and lies a couple of fields’ breadth to the eastward of the public road, and opposite the large meadow before noticed, and extends a considerable distance to the eastward. Dr. Whitaker states, that when Glover made his visitation in 1583, he heard the tradition, that Lord Dacre was shot at Towton Field, by a boy “out of a burtree,” and that “the place where he was slayne is called the North Acres, whereupon they have this rhyme:— “The Lord of Dacres was slayne in the North Acres.” {97} It is remarkable that the farmer who occupies the field, and others whom I conversed with, repeated the tradition, and told me that Lord Dacre was slain by an arrow shot by a boy from an auberry-tree, evidently meaning the same shrub as that called burtree by Dr. Whitaker, who states that he did not know what the burtree was. I was quite satisfied that the word auberry, was a provincial name for the elder-tree, and requested a person near the spot, to point out such a tree to me, and, as I anticipated, I was shown the elder-tree. Following the depression or valley before mentioned, to the eastward, and at the corner of the second field from the public road, there was, until within about the last twelve or thirteen years, a square space, enclosed with an embankment, containing about half an acre; it was not usually ploughed, but in grass; and was said to have been a place of interment of many of the corpses after the battle; it lay on the corner of the Nor Acres (or North Acre) Field, at the southward; but the embankment is now thrown down, and the land has been ploughed. According to tradition, the greatest slaughter took place at or near the Nor Acres Field. Great numbers of the slain were interred in Saxton Churchyard, in a large trench or pit on the north side of the church. Their bones were exposed to view, lying about four feet below the surface, in making a vault not many years ago, and again, subsequently, in making another, in 1848, as will be noticed in another place; we may conclude that they were the bones of Yorkists of some consideration, from the circumstance of the survivors taking the trouble of interring the remains in consecrated ground, at some little distance from the field of the battle. The persons whose bones were so exposed, must have been either young, or in the prime of life, because the skulls were remarkable for the soundness and excellence of the teeth.