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Erich Raeder

Erich Johann Albert Raeder (24 April 1876 – 6 November 1960 ) was a German admiral who played a major role in the naval history of World War II, and was convicted of war crimes after the war. Raeder attained the highest possible naval rank, that of grand admiral, in 1939, becoming the first person to hold that rank since Henning von Holtzendorff in 1918. Raeder led the Kriegsmarine for the first half of the war; he resigned in January 1943 and was replaced by Karl Dönitz. At the Nuremberg trials he was sentenced to life imprisonment but was released early owing to failing health in 1955.

Early years
Raeder was born into a middle-class Protestant family in Wandsbek in the Prussian province of Schleswig-Holstein in the German Empire. His father was a headmaster.

Raeder idolised his father Hans Raeder, who as a teacher and a father was noted for his marked authoritarian views, and who impressed upon his son the values of hard work, thrift, religion and obedience – all values that Raeder was to preach throughout his life. Hans Raeder also taught his children to support the existing government of alleged "non-political" experts led by Bismarck who were said to stand "above politics" and were alleged to only do what was best for Germany. In the same way, Hans Raeder warned his children that if Germany were to become a democracy, that would be a disaster as it would mean government by men "playing politics"-doing what was only best for their petty sectarian interests instead of the nation.

Like many other middle-class Germans of his time, Hans Raeder had a strong dislike for the Social Democrats, who he charged were playing "party politics" in the Reichstag by promoting working class interests instead of thinking about the national good, a stance that his son also adopted. Throughout his entire life, Raeder claimed that he was apolitisch (someone was "above politics", i.e. someone who only thought about the good of the nation instead of his party), and as an "apolitical" officer, Raeder thus maintained that his support for sea power was based upon objective consideration of the national good.

Imperial German Navy
Raeder joined the Kaiserliche Marine (Imperial Navy) in 1894 and rapidly rose in rank, becoming chief of staff for Franz von Hipper in 1912. Raeder's rise up the ranks was due mostly to his intelligence and hard work though from 1901 to 1903 Raeder served on the staff of Prince Heinrich of Prussia, and gained a powerful patron in the process. Owing to his cold and distant personality, Raeder was a man whom even his friends often admitted to knowing very little about. The dominating figure of the Navy was Admiral Alfred von Tirpitz, the autocratic State Secretary of the Navy. Tirpitz's preferred means of obtaining "world power status" was through his Risikotheorie (risk theory) where Germany would build a Risikoflotte (Risk Fleet) that would make it too dangerous for Britain to risk a war with Germany, and thereby alter the international balance of power decisively in the Reich favor. Tirpitz transformed the Navy from the small coastal defense force of 1897 into the mighty High Seas Fleet of 1914.

In 1904, Raeder, who spoke fluent Russian, was sent to the Far East as an observer of the Russo-Japanese War. Starting in 1905, Raeder worked in the public relations section of the Navy, where he first met Tirpitz and began his introduction to politics by briefing journalists to run articles promoting the Seemachtideologie and meeting politicians who held seats in the Reichstag in order to convert them to the Seemachtideologie. Working closely with Tirpitz, Raeder was heavily involved in the lobbying the Reichstag to pass the Third Navy Law of 1906 which committed Germany to building "all big gun battleships" to compete with the new British Dreadnought-class battleship in the Anglo-German naval race that had only begun at the start of the 20th century.

Raeder was the captain of Kaiser Wilhelm II's private yacht in the years leading up to World War I. In itself, this was not a rewarding post, but often people in this post were quickly promoted afterwards.

World War I
Raeder served as Hipper's chief of staff during World War I, as well as in combat posts. He took part in the Battle of Dogger Bank in 1915 and in the Battle of Jutland in 1916. Raeder later described Hipper as an admiral who "hated paperwork"; accordingly, Hipper delegated considerable power to Raeder, who thus enjoyed more influence than his position as chief of staff would suggest.

During and after World War I the German navy was divided into two schools of thought. One, led by Admiral Alfred von Tirpitz (1849–1930), consisted of avid followers of the teachings of the American historian Alfred Thayer Mahan (1840–1914) and believed in building a "balanced fleet" centered around the battleship that would seek out and win a decisive battle of annihilation (Entscheidungsschlacht) against the Royal Navy in the event of war. The other school, led by Commander Wolfgang Wegener (1875–1956), argued that because of superior British shipbuilding capacity Germany could never hope to build a "balanced fleet" capable of winning an Entscheidungsschlacht, and so the best use of German naval strength was to build a fleet of cruisers and submarines that would wage a guerre de course (commerce raiding against an enemy's merchant shipping). After reading all three of Wegener's papers setting out his ideas, Admiral Hipper decided to submit them to the Admiralty in Berlin, but changed his mind after reading a paper by Raeder attacking the Wegener thesis as flawed. This marked the beginning of a long feud between Raeder and Wegener, with Wegener claiming that his former friend Raeder was jealous of what Wegener insisted were his superior ideas.

In May 1916 Raeder played a major role planning a raid by Hipper's battlecruisers that aimed to lure out the British battlecruiser force which would then be destroyed by the main High Seas Fleet. This raid turned into the Battle of Jutland. Raeder played a prominent role, and was forced midway through the battle to transfer from SMS Lützow to SMS Moltke as a result of damage to Hipper's flagship.

As chief of staff to Admiral Hipper he was closely involved in a plan of Hipper's for a German battlecruiser squadron to sail across the Atlantic and sweep through the waters off Canada down to the West Indies and on to South America to sink the British cruisers operating in those waters, and thereby force the British to redeploy a substantial part of the Home Fleet to the New World. Though Hipper's plans were rejected as far too risky, they significantly influenced Raeder's later thinking.

On 14 October 1918, Raeder received a major promotion with appointment as deputy to Admiral Paul Behncke, the Naval State Secretary. Raeder had doubts about submarines, but he spent the last weeks of the war working to achieve the Scheer Programme of building 450 U-boats.

On 28 October 1918 the Imperial German fleet mutinied. Raeder played a major role in attempting to crush the mutiny.

Weimar Republic
Raeder's two younger brothers were both killed in action in the First World War, and in 1919 his first marriage, which had been under heavy strain due to war-related stress, ended in divorce. For the puritanical Raeder, the divorce was a huge personal disgrace, and for the rest of his life he always denied his first marriage. The years 1918–1919 were some of the most troubled in his life.

High Seas Fleet mutiny
In the winter of 1918–19, Raeder was closely involved in the efforts of the naval officer corps, strongly backed by the Defense Minister Gustav Noske to disband the sailors' councils established after the mutiny. Noske was a Majority Social Democrat with firm "law and order" views. During this period, Raeder served as the liaison between the naval officer corps and Noske, and it was Raeder who suggested to Noske on 11 January 1919 that Adolf von Trotha be appointed commander-in-chief of the Navy. Tirpitz's attacks on the Emperor's leadership during the war had caused a split in the officer corps between the followers of "the Master" and the Kaiser, and Raeder saw Trotha as the only officer acceptable to both factions. Noske in turn asked the Navy for volunteers for the Freikorps to crush uprisings from the Communists. The Navy contributed two brigades to the Freikorps. The price to the Navy for supporting the Freikorps was the continuation of the Navy's "state-within-the state" status, and the end of attempts to democratize the military. Under the Weimar Republic, the military considered itself überparteilich (above party), which did not mean political neutrality as implied. The military argued that there were two types of "politics": parteipolitisch (party politics) which was the responsibility of the politicians, and staatspolitisch (state politics) which was the responsibility of the military. Staatspolitisch concerned Germany's "eternal" interests and the "historic mission" of winning world power, which was to be pursued regardless of what the politicians or the people wanted.

Kapp putsch
After the war, in 1920, Raeder was involved in the failed Kapp Putsch when, together with almost the entire naval officer corps, he declared himself openly for the "government" of Wolfgang Kapp against the leaders of the Weimar Republic. In the summer of 1920 Raeder married his second wife, with whom he later had one son.

After the failure of the Kapp Putsch he was marginalized in the Navy, being transferred to the Naval Archives, where for two years he played a leading role in writing the official history of the Navy in World War I. After this, Raeder resumed his steady rise in the navy hierarchy, becoming Vizeadmiral (vice admiral) in 1925.

Commander-in-chief
On 1 October 1928, Raeder was promoted to admiral and made chief of the Naval Command (Chef der Marineleitung) of the Reichsmarine, the Weimar Republic Navy. On 1 June 1935, the Reichsmarine was renamed the Kriegsmarine and Raeder became its commander-in-chief with the title of Oberbefehlshaber der Kriegsmarine. On 20 April 1936, Raeder was promoted to the new rank of Generaladmiral and granted the rank and authority of a Reichsminister but without the formal title. On 30 January 1937, Hitler conferred the Golden Party Badge on Raeder, thereby enrolling him in the Party (membership number 3,805,228).

World War II

Raeder believed the navy was unprepared for the start of World War II by at least five years. The surface fleet was inadequate to fight the Royal Navy and instead adopted a strategy of convoy raiding. Raeder wanted the Kriegsmarine to play an active part because he feared the budget would be cut after the war. The smaller ships were dispersed around the world in order to force the Royal Navy to disperse their ships to combat them, while the battleships would carry out raids in the North Sea, with a view towards gradually reducing the Royal Navy's strength at home.

Raeder was unhappy with the outcome of the Battle of the River Plate and believed that Hans Langsdorff should not have scuttled the ship, but instead sailed out to engage the Royal Navy. Fleet commander Hermann Boehm was held responsible and was sacked by Raeder, who also issued orders that ships were to fight until the last shell and either win or sink with their flags flying.

The Allies were using Norwegian airfields to transfer aircraft to the Finns fighting against the Soviets in the Winter War, as well as mining Norwegian waters, and the Germans were alarmed by these developments. If the Allies were to use Norwegian naval bases or successfully mine Norwegian waters, they could cut off Germany's vital iron ore imports from Sweden and tighten the blockade of Germany. The Allies had made plans to invade Norway and Sweden in order to cut off those iron ore shipments. Admiral Rolf Carls, commander of the Kriegsmarine in the Baltic Sea region, proposed the invasion of Norway to Raeder in September 1939. Raeder briefed Hitler on the idea in October, but planning did not begin until December 1939. The operation was in low-priority planning until the Altmark incident in February 1940, during which a German tanker carrying 300 Allied prisoners in then-neutral Norwegian waters was boarded by sailors from a Royal Navy destroyer and the prisoners were freed. After this, plans for the Norwegian invasion took on a new sense of urgency. The invasion proved costly for the Kriegsmarine, which lost a heavy cruiser, two of its six light cruisers, 10 of its 20 destroyers and six U-boats. In addition, almost all of the other capital ships were damaged and required dockyard repairs, and for a time the German surface fleet had only three light cruisers and four destroyers operational in the aftermath of the Norwegian campaign.

The swift victory over France allowed the Kriegsmarine to base itself in ports on France's west coast. This was strategically important as German warships would no longer have to navigate through the dangerous English Channel in order to return to friendly ports, as well as allow them to range farther out into the Atlantic to attack convoys. With the surrender of France, Raeder saw the opportunity to greatly enhance the navy's power by confiscating the ships of the French Navy and manning them with his crews. Hitler however, vetoed this idea, afraid that doing so would push the French navy to join the Royal Navy. British fears of Raeder's plan resulted in the Attack on Mers-el-Kébir, in which the Royal Navy attacked the French navy despite being at peace with France.

On 11 July 1940, Hitler and Raeder agreed to continue building the battleships called for by Plan Z. Raeder also had bases built at Trondheim on the Norwegian Sea and at Saint-Nazaire and Lorient on the Bay of Biscay. At this time, Raeder and other senior officers began submitting memos to invade (among others) Shetland, Iceland, the Azores, Iran, Madagascar, Kuwait, Egypt and the Dutch East Indies.

In January 1941, the battlecruisers GERMAN BATTLECRUISER Scharnhorst and GERMAN BATTLECRUISER Gneisenau were sent on a successful commerce-raiding mission in the Atlantic. On 18 March, following the beginning of Lend-Lease, Raeder wanted to start firing on US warships even if unprovoked. He declined to invade the Azores because of the surface ship losses the previous year. Raeder urged Hitler to declare war on the United States throughout 1941 so the Kriegsmarine could begin sinking American warships escorting British convoys.

In April 1941, Raeder planned to follow up the success of Scharnhorst and Gneisenau's commerce-raiding mission with an even larger mission involving a battleship, two battlecruisers and a heavy cruiser under the command of Lütjens, codenamed Operation Rheinübung. The original plan was to have the battlecruisers Scharnhorst and Gneisenau involved in the operation, but Scharnhorst was undergoing heavy repairs to her engines, and Gneisenau had just suffered a damaging torpedo hit days before which put her out of action for six months. In the end only the GERMAN BATTLESHIP Bismarck and GERMAN CRUISER Prinz Eugen were sent out on the mission, which ended with Bismarck's sinking. The debacle almost saw the end of using capital ships against merchant shipping. Hitler was not pleased and saw the resources used in the construction and operation of the large Bismarck as a poor investment.

In late 1941, Raeder planned the "channel dash" which sent the remaining two battleships in the French ports to Germany, for further operations in Norwegian waters. The plan was to threaten the Lend-Lease convoys to the Soviet Union, to deter an invasion of Norway, and to tie down elements of the Home Fleet that might otherwise have been used in the Atlantic against the U-boat wolfpacks.

After the attack on Pearl Harbor Raeder, along with Field Marshal Keitel and Reichsmarschall Göring, urged Hitler to immediately declare war on the United States in view of the US war plan Rainbow Five, and to begin the U-boat attacks off the US east coast, which was later called the "Second Happy Time" by German submariners.

Resignation
On 30 January 1943, following Hitler's outrage over the Battle of the Barents Sea, Karl Dönitz, the supreme commander of the Kriegsmarine's U-boat arm, was promoted to grand admiral, and Raeder was named admiral inspector, a ceremonial office. Raeder had failed to inform Hitler of the battle, which Hitler learned about from the foreign press. Hitler thought the Lützow and GERMAN CRUISER Admiral Hipper lacked fighting spirit, according to Albert Speer. The reorganisation fitted Speer's goal of working more closely with Dönitz.

Nuremberg trial
Raeder was captured by Soviet troops on 23 June 1945 and imprisoned in Moscow. At the end of July, he was taken to Nuremberg to stand trial on the counts of: (1) conspiracy to commit crimes against peace, war crimes, and crimes against humanity; (2) planning, initiating, and waging wars of aggression; and (3) crimes against the laws of war.

Raeder was found guilty on all counts and sentenced to life imprisonment. He was surprised as he had expected to be sentenced to death. His wife, supported by German veterans, led several campaigns to free him until, on account of his ill health, he was released on 26 September 1955.

Death
Raeder wrote his autobiography, Mein Leben, using a ghostwriter.

He died of natural causes in Kiel on 6 November 1960. His wife had died the previous year. He is buried in the Nordfriedhof (North Cemetery) in Kiel. Former Grand Admiral Karl Dönitz attended his funeral on 12 November 1960.

Dates of Navy rank

 * Seekadett (Sea cadet): 26 Apr 1894
 * Fähnrich zur See (Midshipman): 13 May 1895
 * Leutnant zur See (Acting Sub-Lieutenant): 25 Oct 1897
 * Oberleutnant zur See (Sub-Lieutenant): c. 1900
 * Kapitänleutnant (Lieutenant): c. 1905
 * Korvettenkapitän (Lieutenant-Commander): 15 Apr 1911
 * Fregattenkapitän (Commander): c. 1915
 * Kapitän zur See (Captain): 19 Nov 1919
 * Konteradmiral (Rear-Admiral): 1 Aug 1922
 * Vizeadmiral (Vice-Admiral): 1 Apr 1925
 * ''Admiral (Admiral): 1 Oct 1928
 * Generaladmiral (General-Admiral): 10 Apr 1936
 * Grossadmiral (Grand Admiral): 1 Apr 1939

Awards and decorations

 * Order of the Double Dragon, 3rd class, 2nd Level (China, 10 October 1898)
 * China Medal (German Empire, 12 December 1901)
 * Order of the Red Eagle, 4th class (Prussia, 22 June 1907)
 * Honorary Knight 2nd class of the House and Merit Order of Peter Frederick Louis with Silver Crown (Oldenburg, 17 September 1907)
 * Order of the Red Eagle, 4th class with Crown (Prussia, 5 September 1911)
 * Commander's Cross of the Order of Franz Joseph (Austria, 16 September 1911)
 * Commander's Cross of the Order of the Redeemer (Greece, 14 May 1912)
 * Order of Saint Stanislaus, 2nd class (Russia, 16 April 1913)
 * Iron Cross (1914) 2nd Class (19 November 1914) & 1st Class (18 February 1915)
 * Imtiyaz Medal in silver with Swords
 * Ottoman War Medal (also known as the "Gallipoli Star" or "Iron Crescent")
 * Friedrich August Cross, 1st and 2nd class (Oldenburg)
 * Knight's Cross of the Royal House Order of Hohenzollern with swords (5 June 1916)
 * Military Merit Order, 4th class with swords and crown (Bavaria, 20 December 1916)
 * War Commemorative Medal (Bulgaria, 20 November 1917)
 * Military Merit Cross, 3rd class with war decoration (Austria-Hungary, 4 September 1918)
 * Honorary doctorate from the Faculty of Philosophy, University of Kiel (31 May 1926)
 * Grand Cross of the Order of Naval Merit (Spain, 16 November 1928)
 * Commander's Cross with Star of the Order of Merit (Chile, September 1928)
 * World War Commemorative Medal with swords on (Hungary, 3 June 1931)
 * Grand Officer of the Order of Saints Maurice and Lazarus (Italy, 7 May 1934)
 * Grand Cross of the Order of Military Merit (Bulgaria, 28 June 1934)
 * Cross of Honour (9 October 1934)
 * Order of Merit, 1st class (Hungary, 5 December 1934)
 * Grand Cross of the Order of the White Rose of Finland (27 February 1936)
 * Wehrmacht Long Service Award, 1st class (2 October 1936)
 * Olympic Games Decoration, 1st class (16 August 1936)
 * Golden Party Badge (30 January 1937)
 * Grand Cross of the Order of Saints Maurice and Lazarus (Italy, 20 September 1937)
 * Order of the Rising Sun, 1st class (Japan, 9 November 1937)
 * War Memorial Medal (Bulgaria, 30 November 1937)
 * Golden Medal of Honour of Hamburg (1 April 1939)
 * Grand Cross of the Order of Naval Merit in White (Spain, 21 August 1939)
 * Sudetenland Medal (25 October 1938) with "Prague Castle" clasp (Sudetenspange) (19 September 1939)
 * Memel Medal (26 October 1939)
 * Clasp to the Iron Cross, 1st and 2nd class (30 September 1939)
 * Knight's Cross of the Iron Cross (nr.1) (30 September 1939) as Großadmiral and Oberbefehlshaber der Kriegsmarine
 * Commander Grand Cross of the Order of the Sword (Sweden, 18 October 1940)
 * Grand Cross of the Order of the Sword (Sweden, 24 October 1940)
 * Grand Cross of the Military Order of Savoy (4 April 1942)
 * Grand Cross Order of the Crown of King Zvonimir with swords and other decorations (Croatia, 26 September 1942)
 * Grand Cross of the Order of Merit of the Kingdom of Hungary with war ribbon with swords (Hungary, 8 February 1943)
 * Grand Cross of Order of St Alexander with swords (Bulgaria, 3 September 1941)
 * Order of Michael the Brave, 1st, 2nd and 3rd Class (Romania, 14 October 1941)
 * Grand Cross of the Order of the Cross of Liberty (Finland, 25 March 1942)

title: Erich Raeder


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Bruce Nauman

Bruce Nauman (born December 6, 1941) is an American artist. His practice spans a broad range of media including sculpture, photography, neon, video, drawing, printmaking, and performance. Nauman lives near Galisteo, New Mexico.

Life and work
Nauman was born in Fort Wayne, Indiana, but his father's work as an engineer for General Electric meant that the family moved often. He studied mathematics and physics at the University of Wisconsin–Madison (1960–64), and art with William T. Wiley and Robert Arneson at the University of California, Davis (1965–6). In 1964, he gave up painting to dedicate himself to sculpture, performance and cinema collaborations with William Allan and Robert Nelson. He worked as an assistant to Wayne Thiebaud. Upon graduation (MFA, 1966), he taught at the San Francisco Art Institute from 1966 to 1968, and at the University of California at Irvine in 1970. In 1968, he met the singer and performance artist Meredith Monk and signed with the dealer Leo Castelli. Nauman moved from Northern California to Pasadena in 1969. In 1979, Nauman further moved to Pecos, New Mexico. In 1989, he established a home and studio in Galisteo, New Mexico, where he continued to work and live with his second wife, the painter Susan Rothenberg until her death in 2020. Nauman has two children, Erik and Zoë, with his first wife, Judy Govan, and he also has two grandchildren.

Confronted with "What to do?" in his studio soon after graduating, Nauman had the simple but profound realization that “If I was an artist and I was in the studio, then whatever I was doing in the studio must be art. At this point art became more of an activity and less of a product.” Nauman set up a studio in a former grocery shop in the Mission district of San Francisco and then in a sublet from his university tutor in Mill Valley. These two locations provided the setting for a series of performed actions which he captured in real time, on a fixed camera, over the 10-minute duration of a 16mm film reel. Between 1966 and 1970, he made several videos, in which he used his body to explore the potentials of art and the role of the artist, and to investigate psychological states and behavioural codes.

Much of his work is characterized by an interest in language, often manifesting itself as visual puns. He has an interest in setting the metaphoric and descriptive functions of language against each other. For example, the neon Run From Fear – Fun From Rear, or the photograph Bound To Fail, which literalizes the title phrase and shows the artist's arms tied behind his back. He seems to be fascinated by the nature of communication and language's inherent problems, as well as the role of the artist as supposed communicator and manipulator of visual symbols.

In the 1960s, Nauman began to exhibit his work at Nicholas Wilder's gallery in Los Angeles and in New York at Leo Castelli in 1968 along with early solo shows at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the Whitney Museum in 1972.

Nauman's use of neon as a medium recurs in his works over the decades. He uses neon to make allusions to the numinous connotations of light, similar to Mario Merz, who used neon to bring new life to assemblages of mundane objects. Neon also connotes the public atmosphere by the means of advertising, and in his later works he uses it ironically with private, erotic imagery as seen in his Hanged Man (1985).

His Self Portrait as a Fountain (1966) shows the artist spouting a stream of water from his mouth. At the end of the 1960s, Nauman began constructing claustrophobic and enclosed corridors and rooms that could be entered by visitors and which evoked the experience of being locked in and of being abandoned. A series of works inspired by one of the artist's dreams was brought together under the title of Dream Passage and created in 1983, 1984, and 1988. In his installation Changing Light Corridor with Rooms (1971), a long corridor is shrouded in darkness, whilst two rooms on either side are illuminated by bulbs that are timed to flash at different rates.

Since the mid-1980s, primarily working with sculpture and video, Nauman developed disturbing psychological and physical themes incorporating images of animal and human body parts, depicting sadistic allusions to games and torture together with themes of surveillance. In 1988, after a hiatus of nearly two decades focused on time-based media, he resumed his work with cast objects.

Selected works
Some of Nauman's best-known works include:

 * A Rose Has No Teeth (1966) - Lead, 7.5 x 8 x 2.25 in.
 * Eleven Color Photographs (1966-1967/1970) - Portfolio of eleven color photographs, various sizes, all approx. 19.75 x 23 in. edition of 8 Published by Leo Castelli Gallery, New York
 * Art Make-Up (1967) - video in which Nauman slowly covers his face and upper torso with white, then pink, then green, then black makeup, until by the end he looks like a negative image Initially the films were intended to be projected simultaneously on four walls of a room. Although this form of installation was never realized for this piece, Nauman employed the method for subsequent film and video installations.
 * The True Artist Helps the World by Revealing Mystic Truths (1967) – a spiraling neon sign with this slogan.
 * Flesh to White to Black to Flesh (1968) 51 minutes b&w, sound. Nauman puts on white makeup, then black makeup, then returns to his ordinary skin color.
 * Burning Small Fires (1969) - artist's book for which Nauman burned Ed Ruscha's book Various Small Fires and Milk (1964), photographed it, and edited a book of his own.
 * Wall-Floor Positions (1969) - Videotape, black and white, sound, 60 mins. to be repeated continuously.
 * Pacing Upside Down(1969) 60 minutes b&w. With his arms held over his head, hands crossed, Nauman is moving jerkily around a perimeter defined by a square drawn on the studio floor, filmed by a fixed camera, placed upside down.
 * Audio Video Piece for London, Ontario (1969–70) - Nauman uses a closed-circuit television, a camera, and an audio recording to confuse sensory perception as the television broadcasts images and rhythmic noises of an adjoining room.
 * LA AIR (1970) – A soft-cover artist's book, featuring only 10 color illustrations [photographs] of the polluted Los Angeles skyline. It complements and extends the sky-blue pages of Nauman's earlier book CLEA RSKY (1968–69). No text.
 * Henry Moore bound to fail, back view (1967–1970) – cast wax relief of a man's back with arms tied by ropes. In 2001, this work sold for $9 million at auction. This is one of the highest prices paid for Nauman's work.
 * Please/Pay/Attention/Please (1973) - Collage and letraset, 27.5 x 27.5 in.
 * Elke allowing the floor to rise up over her face(1973) 39 minutes color sound. She lies on her back, turns over, moves around as the video makes her seem to sink below the floor.
 * Tony Sinking into the Floor, Face Up, and Face Down(1973) 60 minutes. Tony lies there as if dead, then slowly wakes up, as the editing makes him seem to sink into the floor.
 * Good Boy Bad Boy (1985) - Two video monitors, two videotape players, two videotapes (color, sound). dimensions variable.
 * Clown Torture (1987) – in four separate stacked video screens, a clown screaming "No" repeatedly, a clown telling an annoying children's joke, a clown balancing goldfish bowls, and a clown sitting on a public toilet.
 * Vices and Virtues (1988) – Atop the Charles Lee Powell Structural Systems Laboratory on the campus of the University of California, San Diego as part of the Stuart Collection of public art: neon signs seven feet tall, alternating the seven vices and seven virtues: FAITH/LUST, HOPE/ENVY, CHARITY/SLOTH, PRUDENCE/PRIDE, JUSTICE/AVARICE, TEMPERANCE/GLUTTONY, and FORTITUDE/ANGER.
 * Learned Helplessness in Rats (Rock and Roll Drummer) (1988) – Plexiglass maze, closed circuit video camera, video projector, two videotape players, two monitors, and two videotapes. Collection of MOMA.
 * Animal Pyramid (1989) – a stack of seventeen taxidermy molds rising to twelve feet
 * World Peace (1996) – five projectors or video players displaying four women and a man each speaking simultaneous monologues about world peace and endlessly rehearsing the words 'We'll talk – They'll listen / You'll talk – We'll listen / They'll talk – You'll listen'.
 * Stadium Piece (1998–99) – outdoor M-shaped staircase, part of the Western Washington University Public Sculpture Collection
 * Setting a Good Corner (Allegory & Metaphor) (1999) – looping video of the artist setting a corner fencepost.
 * Mapping the Studio I (Fat Chance John Cage) (2001) – multiple projections record nocturnal activity by the artist's cat and various mice in his studio over the summer of 2000.
 * Raw Materials (2004) – sound installation displayed in the Turbine Hall of Tate Modern, bringing together 21 audio pieces made over a period of 40 years.
 * One Hundred Fish Fountain (2005) comprises hollow bronze fish, cast from catfish, bass, whitefish and other species, suspended by wires from the ceiling at different heights, as if swimming in deep water. Below them is a broad, shallow basin, cobbled together from rubber sheeting, which measures 25 feet by 28 feet, from which water is pumped up to each fish through a hose connected to its belly. The environmentally scaled sculpture all but fills the room, allowing just a narrow track for the viewer to edge around the perimeter, in much the same way as Nauman's early corridor works first invited then restricted movement.
 * Untitled "Leave the Land Alone" (1969/2009) – premiered as a public skywriting project over Pasadena for the Armory Center for the Arts in September 2009, initiated by curator Andrew Berardini. The plane circled around and rewrote the brief sentence "Leave the Land Alone" several times. This work connects with LAAIR as well as lambastes the land art movement
 * Days/Giorni (2009) – two rows of wafer-thin white speakers that played 14 recordings of seven people chanting the days of the week, either in English (“Days”) or Italian (“Giorni”). Purchased in a 50–50 deal by the Museum of Modern Art in New York and Maja Oeri, a MoMA trustee whose Emanuel Hoffmann Foundation is at the Schaulager in Basel, Switzerland.
 * For Beginners (all the combinations of the thumb and fingers) (2010) – video depicting Nauman's hands enacting all the possible combinations of the four fingers and thumb – 31 positions in all – accompanied by his verbal enumeration of each finger combination. Purchased in a 50–50 deal by François Pinault and LACMA.
 * For Beginners (instructed piano) (2010) - sound piece featuring a tentative piano solo by the artist-musician Terry Allen.

Commissions
In 1990, the Greater Des Moines Public Art Foundation commissioned a cast bronze version of Nauman's Animal Pyramid (1989), a stack of seventeen taxidermy molds rising to twelve feet. It is installed in the grounds of the Des Moines Art Center, Iowa.

Collections
Nauman's work is in the collections of the Art Institute of Chicago; Kunstmuseum Basel; the Hallen für Neue Kunst Schaffhausen; Kunsthaus, Zürich; Hamburger Bahnhof/Friedrich Christian Flick Collection, Berlin; Museum Brandhorst, Munich; Centre Pompidou, Paris; the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum and the Museum of Modern Art in New York; the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, DC; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago;Tate Modern in London, New Mexico Museum of Art, di Rosa, and the Walker Art Center, among many others.

Recognition

Bruce Nauman holds honorary Doctor of Fine Arts degrees from the San Francisco Art Institute and the California Institute of the Arts. His awards include:

Time named Nauman one of their 100 most influential people in 2004. In 2006, Artfacts.net ranked Nauman as number one among living artists, followed by Gerhard Richter and Robert Rauschenberg. In 2013, Complex ranked Wall-Floor Positions the 19th best work of performance art in history.
 * 1993 - Wolf Prize for his distinguished work as a sculptor and his extraordinary contribution to twentieth-century art
 * 1994 - the Wexner Prize
 * 1999 - Golden Lion of the Venice Biennale.
 * 2004 - Praemium Imperiale for sculpture
 * 2008 - United States Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs (ECA) announced the selection of Bruce Nauman as the American representative to the 2009 Venice Biennale where he won the prestigious Golden Lion.
 * 2014 - Austrian Frederick Kiesler Prize for Architecture and the Arts

Influences
Nauman has cited as major influences the following writers, philosophers, and artists: Nauman was a part of the Process Art Movement.
 * HC Westermann
 * Samuel Beckett
 * Ludwig Wittgenstein - Throughout Nauman's long career, to a greater or lesser extent, Nauman has credited Wittgenstein as an influence of his work. He has spoken of this influence in several interviews. In a 1970 interview Nauman speaks to the broader sense of Wittgenstein's influence: “Just the way Wittgenstein proceeds in thinking about things, his awareness of how to think about things. I don't think you can point to any specific piece that's the result of reading Wittgenstein, but it has to do with some sort of process of how to go about thinking about things.” This sentiment was also stated in a 1980 article. Nauman makes these statements even though he has pointed to a piece that was directly influenced, in a 1966 interview where Nauman speaks about the piece “A rose has no teeth”, the title of which was a direct quote from one of Wittgenstein's "language games". This relationship is something that art writers have continued to see in his work throughout his career, especially in his linguistic works, whether written or spoken. Arthur C. Danto speaks of Nauman's work and his relationship to Wittgenstein in an article written in 1995: “A great deal of the work of Bruce Nauman consists in issuing commands ... it is perhaps helpful to consider those works as having at times the framework and logic of language games — which means, since the works are often directed at us, that we are meant to do something in response ... designed as language games, they address us less as viewers than participants. To experience a Nauman is to interact with it in some way that goes beyond appreciating it as a work of art." In a similar line of thinking, Janet Kraynak  in the book "Please pay attention please" makes a case that a set of works has a similar effect, by the fact that all the pieces "Contain Directive or imperative verbs, calling out 'You'", bringing the viewer into this language game that Nauman is setting up.
 * John Cage
 * Philip Glass
 * La Monte Young
 * Meredith Monk

Art market
Nauman's earliest supporters, in the 1970s, were mainly European patrons and institutions, such as the Kunstmuseum Basel. Chicago-based collector Gerald Elliott was the first American to amass a sizable number of Naumans, including the 1966 plaster sculpture Mold for a Modernized Slant Step, all of which went to the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, when he died in 1994. Emerging later as a prominent buyer was Friedrich Christian Flick, who collected more than 40 pieces from throughout Nauman's career.

Two of Nauman's early auction records were for monumental neons, both walls of blinking punning phrases: Sotheby's New York hammered down One Hundred Live and Die (1984) to the Benesse Art Site, in Naoshima, Japan, for $1.9 million in 1992, and five years later sold Good Boy/Bad Boy (1986–87) to the Daros Collection in Zürich for $2.2 million. Nauman's neon work Violins Violence Silence (1981/82) realized $4 million at Sotheby's New York in 2009.

By 2001, the sculpture Henry Moore Bound to Fail (1967), a wax and plaster cast of Nauman's own arms tied behind his back, had set a new auction record for postwar art when Christie's sold it for $9.9 million to François Pinault. In 2002, Sperone Westwater Gallery sold Mapping the Studio (Fat Chance John Cage) (2001), four videos showing Nauman's cat chasing mice during the night, for $1.2 million apiece to such museums as Tate Modern, London; Dia Art Foundation, New York; Kunstmuseum Basel; and Centre Pompidou, Paris.

Nauman is represented by Sperone Westwater Gallery, New York, and Galerie Konrad Fischer, Düsseldorf and Berlin (since 1968).

license: Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/

title: Bruce Nauman


text:
Wikipedia:Logging in bug reports

'''This is an archive only of bug reports from Phase II of the Wikipedia software (used before June 20, 2002). Please see Bug reports for instructions on adding bug reports for the current system.'''

Return to Bug reports/Phase II

First hit doesn't show login, all subsequent hits do

2002/03/28: When I enter Wikipedia from outside the page shows my IP instead of my username. When I follow a link within Wikipedia the cookie is noticed and my login name appears. I obviously have cookies set and working, since it does notice. I use Mozilla 0.9.9 and Galeon 1.2 on Linux. I'd like to enter to the Recent Changes page, but since the first page doesn't recognise my cookie, it only displays 50 entries and not the number I have indicated in my preferences. -- Seindal

 * This might be a Mozilla issue as well. NS4.77 did the initial login right.
 * IE 6.0.260 for WinNT has the same problem. Koyaanis Qatsi
 * Internet Explorer 5 for Macintosh has the same problem, and so does Netscape 4.76. Dreamyshade

 * This might be related to "Log in doesn't set cookie path" below. If the first page is http://www.wikipedia.com/, then this doesn't get the cookie; I've set my first page to http://www.wikipedia.com/wiki/ to get around this, and the first page does show my login name. --Carey Evans

 * This is it! I inspected the cookie and it has a path component of /wiki.  A workaround for individual users is to change the entry point to /wiki, but a general solution would be to have the top page redirect to /wiki/, thus bringing the user within the realm of the cookie. -- Seindal

I can't log in.

2002/03/22: I set no password under UseMod, now I can't log in under the new PHP script. I'm still logged on on one computer by a cookie, but I can't log on from any other computer, without a password. I also am unable to change my password from the computer I am logged on from without a password. -Aidan Elliott-McCrea

I created a new user with username novalis. I can log in, but whenever I follow any link from the login page, I am not logged in. I get the following cookies when I log on:

WikiUserID=939

WikiLoggedIn=yes

Neither seem to have domain or path information (So, I'm using konqeror to test this, and I don't trust its reporting). They appear to expire in about ten minutes, but that's not what's causing the bug. I get the same bug in Galeon and Konqueror and Lynx and Links, so it's probably not client-side.

3/14/2002

 * I've seen the same thing; for me it went away when I checked "Save password in a cookie" at login time (which of course I don't want to do on a public PC). AxelBoldt

Also tried logging out, but the system won't log me out because of the cookie thing. Advice would be nice! JHK
 * We're working on it. :(

Log in doesn't set cookie path

(2002/1/25) The Set-Cookie header returned from the log in page doesn't include a path= variable. Most browsers default to "/"; Lynx, at least, defaults to the path of the page, so login doesn't work. Carey Evans

(2002/02/20) Actually, it looks like Mozilla defaults to the path to the page. When I wrote the report above, this was "" (for /wiki.phtml); now it's "/wiki". This means that special:userLogout doesn't work for anyone who logged in before the path was changed, because it doesn't touch the cookie with path "". --Carey Evans

title: Wikipedia:Logging in bug reports


text:
Battle of Wakefield

The Battle of Wakefield took place in Sandal Magna near Wakefield in northern England, on 30 December 1460. It was a major battle of the Wars of the Roses. The opposing forces were an army led by nobles loyal to the captive King Henry VI of the House of Lancaster and his Queen Margaret of Anjou on one side, and the army of Richard, Duke of York, the rival claimant to the throne, on the other.

For several years before the battle, the Duke of York had become increasingly opposed to the weak King Henry's court. After open warfare broke out between the factions and Henry became his prisoner, he laid claim to the throne, but lacked sufficient support. Instead, in an agreement known as the Act of Accord, he was made Henry's heir to the throne, displacing from the succession Henry's and Margaret's 7-year-old son Edward, Prince of Wales. Margaret of Anjou and several prominent nobles were irreconcilably opposed to this accord, and massed their armies in the north. Richard of York marched north to deal with them, but found he was outnumbered.

Although he occupied Sandal Castle, York sortied from the castle on 30 December. His reasons for doing so have been variously ascribed to deception by the Lancastrian armies, or treachery by some nobles and Lancastrian officers who York thought were his allies, or simple rashness or miscalculation by York. He was killed and his army was destroyed. Many of the prominent Yorkist leaders and their family members died in the battle or were captured and executed.

Background
King Henry VI ascended the throne in 1422, when he was only nine months old. He grew up to be an ineffective king, and prone to spells of mental illness. There were increasingly bitter divisions among the officials and councillors who governed in Henry's name, mainly over the conduct of the Hundred Years' War with France. By the early 1450s, the most important rivalry was that between Richard, Duke of York, and Edmund Beaufort, Duke of Somerset. York argued for a more vigorous prosecution of the war, to recover territories recently lost to the French, while Somerset belonged to the party which tried to secure peace by making concessions. York had been Lieutenant in France for several years and resented being supplanted in that office by Somerset, who had then failed to defend Normandy against French armies.

York was not only the wealthiest magnate in the land, but was also descended through both his parents from King Edward III, leading to calls that he be recognised as successor to the childless King Henry. His rival, Somerset, belonged to the Beaufort family, who were distant cousins of King Henry. Originally illegitimate, the Beauforts had been made legitimate by an act of Parliament but were supposedly barred from the line of succession to the throne. However, there was always the possibility that this could be circumvented and the Beaufort line eventually produced King Henry VII and the Tudor dynasty (via Somerset's niece, Margaret Beaufort).

York was appointed Lieutenant of Ireland, effectively exiling him from court, while Somerset increased his influence over the king. In 1452, York marched on London in an attempt to force Henry to dismiss Somerset from the government, but at this stage he lacked support and was forced to swear not to take arms against the king at Old St Paul's Cathedral. Then in 1453, Henry VI suffered a complete mental breakdown. The Great Council of peers appointed York Lord Protector and he governed the country responsibly, but Henry recovered his sanity after eighteen months and restored Somerset to favour. During Henry's madness his queen, Margaret of Anjou, had given birth to a son, which dashed York's hopes of becoming king if Henry died.

Fearing arrest for treason, York and his most prominent allies, the Nevilles (York's brother in law, the Earl of Salisbury and his son, the Earl of Warwick, later known as the "Kingmaker"), finally resorted to armed force in 1455. At the First Battle of St Albans, many of York's and Salisbury's rivals and enemies were killed, including Somerset, the Earl of Northumberland (whose family, the Percys, had been involved in a long-running feud with the Nevilles) and Lord Clifford.

After the battle, York reaffirmed his loyalty to King Henry, who had been found abandoned in a shop in the town. He was reappointed Lord Protector and Lieutenant of Ireland. Margaret of Anjou nevertheless suspected York of wishing to supplant her infant son, Edward, as Henry's successor, and the heirs of the Lancastrian nobles who were killed at St Albans remained at deadly feud with York.

Events of the year preceding Wakefield
After an uneasy peace during which attempts at reconciliation failed, hostilities broke out again in 1459. Richard of York once again feared indictment for rebellion by a Great Council dominated by his opponents. He and the Nevilles concentrated their forces near York's stronghold at Ludlow Castle in the Welsh Marches but at the confrontation with the much larger royal army which became known as the Battle of Ludford, some of Warwick's contingent from the garrison of Calais, led by experienced captain Andrew Trollope, defected overnight. York and the Nevilles promptly abandoned their troops and fled. The next day, the outnumbered and leaderless Yorkist army surrendered.

York went to Ireland, where he had unchallenged support, while Salisbury, Warwick and York's eldest son Edward, Earl of March, made their way to Calais, where Warwick was Constable. They narrowly forestalled the new Duke of Somerset who, with Trollope, had been sent to regain it. Lancastrian attempts to reassert their authority over Ireland and Calais failed, but York and his supporters were declared traitors and attainted. The victorious Lancastrians became reviled for the manner in which their army had looted the town of Ludlow after the Yorkist surrender at Ludford Bridge, and the repressive acts of a compliant Parliament of Devils which caused many uncommitted peers to fear for their own property and titles. The country remained in disorder.

In 1460, the Nevilles invaded England through a foothold they had already established at Sandwich and rapidly secured London and the South of England where Warwick had popular support. Warwick and March then advanced north to engage Henry's army in the Midlands. At the Battle of Northampton, part of the Lancastrian army defected and the rest were decisively defeated. Henry was captured on the battlefield for the second time. He was taken to London, and confined in the Bishop of London's palace. George Neville, Bishop of Exeter, was appointed Chancellor of England and Viscount Bourchier (another of York's brothers in law) was appointed Treasurer.

The Duke of York landed in Chester some weeks later and made his way to London with much pomp. Entering Parliament, he attempted to claim the throne, but was met with stunned silence. Even his close allies were not prepared to support such a drastic step. Instead, after the House of Lords had considered his claim, they passed the Act of Accord, by which Henry would remain king, but York would govern the country as Lord Protector. Henry's son was disinherited, and York or his heirs would become king on Henry's death. The powerless and frightened Henry was forced to assent.

Lancastrian moves
When the Battle of Northampton was fought, Queen Margaret and her seven-year-old son Edward had been at Eccleshall Castle near Stafford. After many adventures with brigands and outlaws, they fled via Cheshire to Harlech Castle in North Wales, where they joined Lancastrian nobles (including Henry's half-brother Jasper Tudor and the Duke of Exeter) who were recruiting armies in Wales and the West Country. They later proceeded by ship to Scotland, where Margaret gained troops and other aid for the Lancastrian cause from the queen and regent, Mary of Guelders, in return for the surrender of the town and castle of Berwick upon Tweed.

At the same time, other Lancastrians were rallying in Northern England. Many of them, including the Earl of Northumberland and Lords Clifford and Ros, had estates and influence in the north. They were later joined by the Duke of Somerset and the Earl of Devon, who brought their forces from the West Country. Northumberland, Clifford and Somerset were the sons of York's and Salisbury's rivals who had been killed at St. Albans. The Lancastrian forces mustered near Kingston upon Hull, and were said (in Gregory's Chronicle, a near-contemporary account) to number 15,000. A substantial part of these forces encamped at Pontefract began pillaging York's and Salisbury's estates nearby.

York's response
Faced with these challenges to his authority as Protector, York despatched his eldest son Edward to the Welsh Marches to contain the Lancastrians in Wales and left the Earl of Warwick in charge in London. He himself marched to the north of England on 9 December, accompanied by his second son Edmund, Earl of Rutland, and the Earl of Salisbury. He tried to bring a train of artillery under "one called Lovelace, a gentleman of Kent" but bad weather forced the artillery to return to London.

York's and Salisbury's army was said by some to number 8,000 to 9,000 men, but by others to be only a few hundred strong, as York intended to recruit local forces with a Commission of Array. He had probably underestimated both the numbers of the Lancastrian army in the north and the degree of opposition he had provoked by his attempt to seize the throne. On an earlier expedition to the north during his first protectorship in 1454, he and the Nevilles had easily subdued a rebellion by the Percys and the Duke of Exeter. In 1460, not only had almost every other northern peer joined the Lancastrian army, but York's nominal supporters were also divided. The Nevilles were one of the wealthiest and most influential families in the North and in addition to controlling large estates, the Earl of Salisbury had held the office of Warden of the Eastern March for several years. However, in the Neville–Neville feud, the cadet branch of the family headed by Salisbury had largely disinherited and eclipsed the senior branch (sometimes referred to as the "northern Nevilles") under his great-nephew, the Earl of Westmoreland. Westmoreland had spent several years trying to recover his lands. He had since become too ill, perhaps with some mental disorder, to play any active part. His younger brother, John Neville of Raby, had much to gain by York's and Salisbury's destruction.

The Lancastrians were still being reinforced. On 16 December, at the Battle of Worksop in Nottinghamshire, York's vanguard clashed with Somerset's contingent from the West Country moving north to join the Lancastrian army, and was defeated.

Battle
On 21 December, York reached his own fortress of Sandal Castle near Wakefield. He sent probes towards the Lancastrian camp at Pontefract 9 mi to the east, but these were repulsed. York sent for help to his son Edward, but before any reinforcements could arrive, he sortied from the castle on 30 December.

It is not known for certain why York did so. One theory was later recounted in Edward Hall's chronicle, written a few decades after the event, but partly from first-hand sources, and the contemporary Burgundian Jean de Waurin's chronicle. In a stratagem possibly devised by the veteran Andrew Trollope (who by Waurin's account had also sent messages to York via feigned deserters that he was prepared to change sides once again) half the Lancastrian army under Somerset and Clifford advanced openly towards Sandal Castle, over the open space known as "Wakefield Green" between the castle and the River Calder, while the remainder under Ros and the Earl of Wiltshire were concealed in the woods surrounding the area. York was probably short of provisions in the castle and, seeing that the enemy were apparently no stronger than his own army, seized the opportunity to engage them in the open rather than withstand a siege while waiting for reinforcements.

Other accounts suggested that, possibly in addition to Trollope's deception, York was fooled by some of John Neville of Raby's forces displaying false colours into thinking that reinforcements sent by Warwick had arrived. By another contemporary account, William Worcester's Annales Rerum Anglicorum, John Neville himself obtained a Commission of Array from Richard of York to raise 8,000 men to fight on York's side under the Earl of Westmoreland. Having gathered this force and enticed York to leave the castle to rendezvous with him, John Neville then defected to the Lancastrians.

Another suggestion was that York and Somerset had agreed a truce during Christmas until 6 January, the Feast of Epiphany, but the Lancastrians had no intention of honouring the truce. On three successive days, they sent heralds to provoke York into premature action with insulting messages and when York moved into the open the Lancastrians treacherously attacked earlier than had been agreed, catching York at a disadvantage while many of his men were absent foraging for supplies.

The simplest suggestion was that York acted rashly. For example, historian John Sadler states that there was no Lancastrian deception or ambush; York led his men from the castle on a foraging expedition (or by popular belief, to rescue some of his foragers who were under attack) and as successive Lancastrian contingents joined the battle (the last being Clifford's division, encamped south and east of Sandal Magna), York's army was outnumbered, surrounded and overwhelmed.

The Yorkists marched out of Sandal Castle down the present-day Manygates Lane towards the Lancastrians located to the north of the castle. It is generally accepted that, as York engaged the Lancastrians to his front, others attacked him from the flank and rear, cutting him off from the castle. In Edward Hall's words:

"... but when he was in the plain ground between his castle and the town of Wakefield, he was environed on every side, like a fish in a net, or a deer in a buckstall; so that he manfully fighting was within half an hour slain and dead, and his whole army discomfited."

Casualties
One near-contemporary source (Gregory's Chronicle) claimed that 2,500 Yorkists and 200 Lancastrians were killed, but other sources give wildly differing figures, from 2,200 to only 700 Yorkists dead.

The Duke of York was either killed in the battle or captured and immediately executed. Some later works support the folklore that he suffered a crippling wound to the knee and was unhorsed, and he and his closest followers then fought to the death at that spot; others relate the account that he was taken prisoner (by one Sir James Luttrell of Devonshire), mocked by his captors and beheaded.

His son Edmund, Earl of Rutland, attempted to escape over Wakefield Bridge, but was overtaken and killed, possibly by Clifford in revenge for his father's death at St Albans. Salisbury's second son Sir Thomas Neville also died in the battle. Salisbury's son in law William, Lord Harington, and Harington's father, William Bonville, were captured and executed immediately after the battle. (The Bonvilles had been engaged in a feud with the Earl of Devon and the Courtenay family in Devon and Cornwall.) Salisbury himself escaped the battlefield but was captured during the night, and was taken to the Lancastrian camp. Although the Lancastrian nobles might have been prepared to allow Salisbury to ransom himself, he was dragged out of Pontefract Castle and beheaded by local commoners, to whom he had been a harsh overlord. The mob may have been led by the "Bastard of Exeter", an illegitimate son of the Duke of Exeter.

Among the "commoners" in York's army who were killed was John Harrowe, a prominent mercer of London, described as a "captain of the foot".

Aftermath
After the battle the heads of York, Rutland and Salisbury were displayed over Micklegate Bar, the south-western gate through the York city walls, the Duke wearing a paper crown and a sign saying "Let York overlook the town of York".

The death of Richard of York did not end the wars, or the House of York's claim to the throne. The northern Lancastrian army which had been victorious at Wakefield was reinforced by Scots and borderers eager for plunder, and marched south. They defeated Warwick's army at the Second Battle of St Albans and recaptured the feeble-minded King Henry, who had been abandoned on the battlefield for the third time, but were refused entry to London and failed to occupy the city. Warwick and Edward of March reoccupied London, and within a few weeks, Edward of March was proclaimed King Edward IV.

At the first Battle of St Albans, York had been content with the death of his rivals for power. At Wakefield and in every battle in the Wars of the Roses thereafter, the victors would eliminate not only any opposing leaders but also their family members and supporters, making the struggle more bitter and revenge driven.

A monument erected on the spot where the Duke of York is supposed to have perished is positioned slightly south of the more likely spot where an older monument once stood, but which was destroyed during the English Civil War. A cross in memory of York's son, Rutland, was erected at the Park Street end of Kirkgate in Wakefield. Archaeologist Rachel Askew suggests that the memorial cross to the Duke of York may be fictional as the late-16th- and early-17th-century antiquarian John Camden did not mention it in his description of the location.

In literature and folklore
Many people are familiar with William Shakespeare's melodramatic version of events in Henry VI, Part 3, notably the murder of Edmund of Rutland, although Edmund is depicted as a small child, and following his unnecessary slaughter by Clifford, Margaret torments his father, York, before murdering him also. In fact, Rutland, at seventeen, was more than old enough to be an active participant in the fighting. Margaret was almost certainly still in Scotland at the time.

The battle is said by some to be the source for the mnemonic for remembering the traditional colours of the rainbow, Richard Of York Gave Battle in Vain, and also the mocking nursery rhyme, "The Grand Old Duke of York", although this much more likely refers to the eighteenth-century Duke of York, son of George III.

"Dicky's Meadow", a well-known Northern expression, is commonly believed to refer to Sandals Meadow, where the battle of Wakefield took place and where Richard met his end. The common view held that Richard was ill-advised to fight here. The expression is usually used to warn against risky action, as in "If you do that you'll end up in Dicky's Meadow." However, the first known usage of that phrase did not appear until the 1860s, around 400 years after the battle took place.

title: Battle of Wakefield


text:
Battle of Towton

The Battle of Towton took place on 29 March 1461 during the Wars of the Roses, near Towton in North Yorkshire, and "has the dubious distinction of being probably the largest and bloodiest battle on English soil". Fought for ten hours between an estimated 50,000 soldiers in a snowstorm on Palm Sunday, the Yorkist army achieved a decisive victory over their Lancastrian opponents. As a result, Edward IV deposed the Lancastrian Henry VI and secured the English throne.

Henry VI succeeded his father Henry V when he was nine months old in 1422, but was a weak, ineffectual and mentally unsound ruler, which encouraged the nobles to scheme for control over him. The situation deteriorated in the 1450s into a civil war between his Beaufort relatives and Queen Margaret of Anjou on one side, with those of his cousin Richard, Duke of York, on the other. In October 1460, Parliament passed the Act of Accord naming York as Henry's successor, but neither the queen nor her Lancastrian allies would accept the disinheritance of her son, Edward of Westminster, Prince of Wales. They raised a large army, which defeated and killed York and his second son Edmund at Wakefield in December. Financed by the City of London, York's son and heir, Edward, found enough backing to denounce Henry and declare himself king. The Battle of Towton was to affirm the victor's right through force of arms to rule over England.

On reaching the battlefield, the Yorkists found themselves heavily outnumbered, since part of their force under the Duke of Norfolk had yet to arrive. The Yorkist leader Lord Fauconberg turned the tables by ordering his archers to take advantage of the strong wind to outrange their enemies. The one-sided missile exchange, with Lancastrian arrows falling short of the Yorkist ranks, provoked the Lancastrians into abandoning their defensive positions. The ensuing hand-to-hand combat lasted hours, exhausting the combatants. The arrival of Norfolk's men reinvigorated the Yorkists and, encouraged by Edward, they routed their foes. Many Lancastrians were killed while fleeing; some trampled one another and others drowned in the rivers, which are said to have run red with blood for several days. Several high-ranking prisoners were also executed.

The strength of the House of Lancaster was severely reduced as a result of this battle. Henry fled the country and many of his most powerful followers were dead or in exile after the engagement, leaving a new king, Edward IV, to rule England. In 1929 the Towton Cross was erected on the battlefield to commemorate the event. Various archaeological remains and mass graves related to the battle have been found in the area centuries after the engagement.

Setting
In 1461 England was in the sixth year of the Wars of the Roses, a series of civil wars between the houses of York and Lancaster over the English throne. The Lancastrians backed the reigning King of England, Henry VI, a weak and indecisive man who suffered from intermittent bouts of madness. The leader of the Yorkists was initially Richard, Duke of York, who resented the dominance of a small number of aristocrats favoured by the king, principally his close relatives, the Beaufort family. Fuelled by rivalries between influential supporters of both factions, York's attempts to displace Henry's favourites from power led to war. After capturing Henry at the Battle of Northampton in 1460, the duke, who was of royal blood, issued his claim to the throne. Even York's closest supporters among the nobility were reluctant to usurp the dynasty; the nobles passed by a majority vote the Act of Accord, which ruled that the duke and his heirs would succeed to the throne upon Henry's death.

The Queen of England, Margaret of Anjou, refused to accept an arrangement that deprived her son—Edward of Westminster—of his birthright. She had fled to Scotland after the Yorkist victory at Northampton; there she began raising an army, promising her followers the freedom to plunder on the march south through England. Her Lancastrian supporters also mustered in the north of England, preparing for her arrival. York marched with his army to meet this threat but he was lured into a trap at the Battle of Wakefield and killed. The duke and his second son, Edmund, Earl of Rutland, were decapitated by the Lancastrians and their heads were impaled on spikes atop the Micklegate Bar, a gatehouse of the city of York. The leadership of the House of York passed to the duke's heir, Edward.

The victors of Wakefield were joined by Margaret's army and marched south, plundering settlements along the way. They liberated Henry after defeating the Yorkist army of Richard Neville, Earl of Warwick, in the Second Battle of St Albans and continued pillaging on their way to London. The city of London refused to open its gates to Henry and Margaret for fear of being looted. The Lancastrian army was short of supplies and had no adequate means to replenish them. When Margaret learned that Richard of York's eldest son, Edward, Earl of March, and his army had won the Battle of Mortimer's Cross in Herefordshire and were marching towards London, she withdrew the Lancastrians to York. Warwick and the remnants of his army marched from St Albans to join Edward's men and the Yorkists were welcomed into London. Having lost custody of Henry, the Yorkists needed a justification to continue the rebellion against the king and his Lancastrian followers. On 4 March Warwick proclaimed the young Yorkist leader as King Edward IV. The proclamation gained greater acceptance than Richard of York's earlier claim, as several nobles opposed to letting Edward's father ascend the throne viewed the Lancastrian actions as a betrayal of the legally established Accord.

The country now had two kings—a situation that could not be allowed to persist, especially if Edward were to be formally crowned. Edward offered an amnesty to any Lancastrian supporter who renounced Henry. The move was intended to win over the commoners; his offer did not extend to wealthy Lancastrians (mostly the nobles). The young king summoned and ordered his followers to march towards York to take back his family's city and to depose Henry formally through force of arms. The Yorkist army moved along three routes. Warwick's uncle, Lord Fauconberg, led a group to clear the way to York for the main body, which was led by Edward. The Duke of Norfolk was sent east to raise forces and rejoin Edward before the battle. Warwick's group moved to the west of the main body, through the Midlands, gathering men as they went. On 28 March, the leading elements of the Yorkist army came upon the remains of the crossing in Ferrybridge crossing the River Aire. They were rebuilding the bridge when they were attacked and routed by a band of about 500 Lancastrians, led by Lord Clifford.

Learning of the encounter, Edward led the main Yorkist army to the bridge and was forced into a gruelling battle: although the Yorkists were superior in numbers, the narrow bridge was a bottleneck, forcing them to confront Clifford's men on equal terms. Edward sent Fauconberg and his horsemen to ford the river at Castleford, which should have been guarded by Henry, Earl of Northumberland, but he arrived late, by which time the Yorkists had crossed the ford and were heading to attack the Lancastrians at Ferrybridge from the flank. The Lancastrians retreated but were chased to Dinting Dale, where they were all killed, Clifford being slain by an arrow to his throat. Having cleared the vicinity of enemy forces, the Yorkists repaired the bridge and pressed onwards to camp overnight at Sherburn-in-Elmet. The Lancastrian army marched to Tadcaster, about 2 mi north of Towton, and made camp. As dawn broke the two rival armies struck camp under dark skies and strong winds. Although it was Palm Sunday, a day of holy significance to Christians, the forces prepared for battle and a few documents named the engagement the Battle of Palme Sonday Felde but the name did not gain wide acceptance. Popular opinion favoured naming the battle after the village of Towton because of its proximity and it being the most prominent in the area.

Force compositions
The armies gathered at Towton were among the largest at the time. Contemporary sources (like Gregory's Chronicle) claimed that the soldiers on each side numbered in the hundreds of thousands. These figures are thought to be exaggerated, and modern historians believe that a combined figure of 50,000–65,000 is more likely, between one and two per cent of the English population at the time. An analysis of 50 skeletons found in mass graves between 1996 and 2003 showed most were 24 to 30 years old and many were veterans of previous engagements.

Henry's physical and mental frailty was a major weakness for the Lancastrian cause, and he remained in York with Margaret. In contrast the 18-year-old Edward was a tall and imposing sight in armour and led from the front: his preference for bold offensive tactics determined the Yorkist plan of action for this engagement. His presence and example were crucial to ensuring the Yorkists held together through the long and exhausting struggle. Approximately three-quarters of English peers fought in the battle; eight were with the Yorkist army, whereas the Lancastrians had at least nineteen.

Of the other Yorkist leaders, Warwick was absent from the battle, having suffered a leg wound at Ferrybridge. Norfolk was too old to participate and his contingent was commanded by Walter Blount and Robert Horne; this may have been an advantage, since he was regarded as an unpredictable ally. Edward relied heavily on Warwick's uncle, Lord Fauconberg, a veteran of the Anglo-French wars, highly regarded by contemporaries for his military skills. He demonstrated this in a wide range of roles, having captained the Calais garrison, led naval piracy expeditions in the Channel, and commanded the Yorkist vanguard at Northampton.

The senior Lancastrian general was Henry Beaufort, Duke of Somerset, an experienced leader credited with victories at Wakefield and St Albans, although others suggest they were due to Sir Andrew Trollope. Trollope was an extremely experienced and astute commander, who served under Warwick in Calais, before defecting to the Lancastrians at Ludford Bridge in 1459. Other notable Lancastrian leaders included Henry Holland, Duke of Exeter, and northern magnates the Earl of Northumberland, Lord de Ros and Lord Dacre. Another leading Lancastrian, Lord Clifford, had been killed by an arrow in the throat at Ferrybridge.

Deployment

Very few historical sources give detailed accounts of the battle and they do not describe the exact deployments of the armies. The paucity of such primary sources led early historians to adopt Hall's chronicle as their main resource for the engagement, despite its authorship 70 years after the event and questions over the origin of his information. The Burgundian chronicler Jean de Waurin (c. 1398 – c. 1474) was a more contemporary source, but his chronicle was made available to the public only from 1891, and several mistakes in it discouraged historians at that time from using it. Later reconstructions of the battle were based on Hall's version, supplemented by minor details from other sources.

The battle took place on a plateau between the villages of Saxton (to the south) and Towton (to the north). The region was agricultural land, with plenty of wide open areas and small roads on which to manoeuvre the armies. Two roads ran through the area: the Old London Road, which connected Towton to the English capital, and a direct road between Saxton and Towton. The steeply banked Cock Beck flowed in an S-shaped course around the plateau from the north to west. The plateau was bisected by the Towton Dale, which ran from the west and extended into the North Acres in the east. Woodlands were scattered along the beck; Renshaw Woods lined the river on the north-western side of the plateau, and south of Towton Dale, Castle Hill Wood grew on the west side of the plateau at a bend in the beck. The area to the north-east of this forest would be known as Bloody Meadow after the battle.

According to Gravett and fellow military enthusiast Trevor James Halsall, Somerset's decision to engage the Yorkist army on this plateau was sound. Defending the ground just before Towton would block any enemy advance towards the city of York, whether they moved along the London–Towton road or an old Roman road to the west. The Lancastrians deployed on the north side of the dale, using the valley as a "protective ditch"; the disadvantage of this position was that they could not see beyond the southern ridge of the dale. The Lancastrian flanks were protected by marshes; their right was further secured by the steep banks of the Cock Beck. The width of their deployment area did not allow for a longer front line, depriving the Lancastrians of the opportunity to use their numerical superiority. Waurin's account gave rise to the suggestion that Somerset ordered a force of mounted spearmen to conceal itself in Castle Hill Wood, ready to charge into the Yorkist left flank at an opportune time in battle.

The Yorkists appeared as the Lancastrians finished deployment. Line after line of soldiers crested the southern ridge of the dale and formed up in ranks opposite their enemies as snow began to fall. Edward's army was outnumbered and Norfolk's troops had yet to arrive to join them. The Yorkist vanguard was commanded by Lord Fauconberg. Hall names John Wenlock and John Dinham and others as commanders of the Yorkist rearguard. Sources variously mention the Duke of Somerset, Trollope, the Earl of Northumberland and the Duke of Exeter as the commanders of the Lancastrian host, but show little agreement as to which portion of the host each of them was assigned.

Fighting

As Somerset was content to stand and let his foes come to him, the opening move of the battle was made by the Yorkists. Noticing the direction and strength of the wind, Fauconberg ordered all Yorkist archers to step forward and unleash a volley of their arrows from what would be the standard maximum range of their longbows. With the wind behind them, the Yorkist missiles travelled farther than usual, plunging deep into the masses of soldiers on the hill slope.

The response from the Lancastrian archers was ineffective as the heavy wind blew snow in their faces. They found it difficult to judge the range and pick out their targets and their arrows fell short of the Yorkist ranks; Fauconberg had ordered his men to retreat after loosing one volley, thus avoiding any casualties. Unable to observe their results, the Lancastrians loosed their arrows until most had been used, leaving a thick, prickly carpet in the ground in front of the Yorkists.

After the Lancastrians had ceased loosing their arrows, Fauconberg ordered his archers to step forward again to shoot. When they had exhausted their ammunition, the Yorkists plucked arrows off the ground in front of them—arrows loosed by their foes—and continued shooting. Coming under attack without any effective response of its own, the Lancastrian army moved from its position to engage the Yorkists in close combat. Seeing the advancing mass of men, the Yorkist archers shot a few more volleys before retreating behind their ranks of men-at-arms, leaving thousands of arrows in the ground to hinder the Lancastrian attack.

As the Yorkists reformed their ranks to receive the Lancastrian charge, their left flank came under attack by the horsemen from Castle Hill Wood mentioned by Waurin. The Yorkist left wing fell into disarray and several men started to flee. Edward had to take command of the left wing to save the situation. By engaging in the fight and encouraging his followers, his example inspired many to stand their ground. The armies clashed and archers shot into the mass of men at short range. The Lancastrians continuously threw fresher men into the fray and gradually the numerically inferior Yorkist army was forced to give ground and retreat up the southern ridge. Gravett thought that the Lancastrian left had less momentum than the rest of its formation, skewing the line of battle such that its western end tilted towards Saxton.

The fighting continued for three hours, according to research by English Heritage, a government body in charge of conservation of historic sites. It was indecisive until the arrival of Norfolk's men. Marching up the Old London Road, Norfolk's contingent was hidden from view until they crested the ridge and attacked the Lancastrian left flank. The Lancastrians continued to give fight but the advantage had shifted to the Yorkists. By the end of the day, the Lancastrian line had broken up, as small groups of men began fleeing for their lives. Polydore Vergil, chronicler for Henry VII of England, said combat lasted for a total of 10 hours.

Rout

The tired Lancastrians flung off their helmets and armour to run faster. Without such protection, they were much more vulnerable to the attacks of the Yorkists. Norfolk's troops were much fresher and faster. Fleeing across what would later become known as Bloody Meadow, many Lancastrians were cut down from behind or were slain after they had surrendered. Before the battle, both sides had issued the order to give no quarter and the Yorkists were in no mood to spare anyone after the long, gruelling fight. A number of Lancastrians, such as Trollope, also had substantial bounties on their heads. Gregory's chronicle stated 42 knights were killed after they were taken prisoner.

Archaeological findings in the late 20th century shed light on the final moments of the battle. In 1996 workmen at a construction site in the village of Towton uncovered a mass grave, which archaeologists believed to contain the remains of men who were slain during or after the battle in 1461. The bodies showed severe injuries to their upper torsos; arms and skulls were cracked or shattered. One exhumed specimen, known as Towton 25, had the front of his skull bisected: a weapon had slashed across his face, cutting a deep wound that split the bone. The skull was also pierced by another deep wound, a horizontal cut from a blade across the back.

The Lancastrians lost more troops in their rout than from the battlefield. Men struggling across the Cock Beck were dragged down by currents and drowned. Those floundering were stepped on and pushed under water by their comrades behind them as they rushed to get away from the Yorkists. As the Lancastrians struggled across the beck Yorkist archers rode to high vantage points and shot arrows at them. The dead began to pile up and the chronicles state that the Lancastrians eventually fled across these "bridges" of bodies. The chase continued northwards across the River Wharfe, which was larger than Cock Beck. A bridge over the river collapsed under the flood of men and many drowned trying to cross. Those who hid in Tadcaster and York were hunted down and killed.

A newsletter dated 4 April 1461 reported a widely circulated figure of 28,000 casualties in the battle, which Charles Ross and other historians believe was exaggerated. The number was taken from the heralds' estimate of the dead and appeared in letters from Edward and the Bishop of Salisbury, Richard Beauchamp. Letters from an ambassador and a merchant from the duchy of Milan broke this number down into 8,000 dead for the Yorkists and 20,000 for the Lancastrians; in contrast, bishops Nicholas O'Flanagan (Elphin) and Francesco Coppini reported only 800 dead Yorkists. Other contemporary sources gave higher numbers, ranging from 30,000 to 38,000; Hall quoted an exact figure of 36,776. An exception was the Annales rerum anglicarum, which stated the Lancastrians had 9,000 casualties, an estimate Ross and Wolffe found to be more believable. A more recent analysis of the sources and archaeological evidence, which posits that accounts of Towton were combined with those of the actions of Ferrybridge and Dintingdale, suggests total casualty figures in the range 2,800–3,800.

The Lancastrian nobility sustained heavy losses. The Earl of Northumberland, lords Welles, Mauley and Dacre, and Sir Andrew Trollope fell in battle, while the earls of Devon and Wiltshire were afterwards taken and executed. Lord Dacre was said to have been killed by an archer who was perched in a "bur tree" (a local term for an elder). In contrast, the Yorkists lost only one notable member of the gentry, Horne, at Towton.

Aftermath

On receiving news of his army's defeat, Henry fled into exile in Scotland with his wife and son. They were later joined by Somerset, Ros, Exeter, and the few Lancastrian nobles who escaped from the battlefield. The Battle of Towton severely reduced the power of the House of Lancaster in England; the linchpins of their power at court (Northumberland, Clifford, Ros, and Dacre) had either died or fled the country, ending the house's domination over the north of England. Edward further exploited the situation, naming 14 Lancastrian peers as traitors. Approximately 96 Lancastrians of the rank of knight and below were also attainted: 24 of them members of parliament.

The new king preferred winning over his enemies to his cause; the nobles he attainted either died in the battle or had refused to submit to him. The estates of a few of these nobles were confiscated by the crown but the rest were untouched, remaining in the care of their families. Edward also pardoned many of those he attainted after they submitted to his rule.

Although Henry was at large in Scotland with his son, the battle put an end (for the time being) to disputes over the country's state of leadership since the Act of Accord. The English people were assured that there was now one true king; Edward. He turned his attention to consolidating his rule over the country, winning over the people and putting down the rebellions raised by the few remaining Lancastrian diehards. He knighted several of his supporters and elevated several of his gentry supporters to the peerage; Fauconberg was made the Earl of Kent. Warwick benefited from Edward's rule after the battle. He received parts of Northumberland's and Clifford's holdings, and was made "the king's lieutenant in the North and admiral of England." Edward bestowed on him many offices of power and wealth, further enhancing the earl's considerable influence and riches.

By 1464, the Yorkists had "wiped out all effective Lancastrian resistance in the north of England." Edward's reign was not interrupted until 1470; by then, his relationship with Warwick had deteriorated to such an extent that the earl defected to the Lancastrians and forced Edward to flee England, restoring Henry to the throne. The interruption of Yorkist rule was brief, as Edward regained his throne after defeating Warwick and his Lancastrian cohorts at the Battle of Barnet in 1471.

Literature

In the sixteenth century William Shakespeare wrote a number of dramatisations of historic figures. The use of history as a backdrop, against which the familiar characters act out Shakespeare's drama, lends a sense of realism to his plays. Shakespeare wrote a three-part play about Henry VI, relying heavily on Hall's chronicle as a source. His vision of the Battle of Towton (Henry VI, Part 3, Act 2, Scene 5), touted as the "bloodiest" engagement in the Wars of the Roses, became a set piece about the "terror of civil war, a national terror that is essentially familial". Historian Bertram Wolffe said it was thanks to Shakespeare's dramatisation of the battle that the weak and ineffectual Henry was at least remembered by English society, albeit for his pining to have been born a shepherd rather than a king.

Shakespeare's version of the battle presents a notable scene that comes immediately after Henry's soliloquy. Henry witnesses the laments of two soldiers in the battle. One slays his opponent in hope of plunder, only to find the victim is his son; the other kills his enemy, who turns out to be his father. Both killers have acted out of greed and fell into a state of deep grieving after discovering their misdeeds. Shakespearian scholar Arthur Percival Rossiter names the scene as the most notable of the playwright's written "rituals". The delivery of the event follows the pattern of an opera: after a long speech, the actors alternate among one another to deliver single-line asides to the audience. In this scene of grief, in a reversal of the approach adopted in his later historical plays, Shakespeare uses anonymous fictional characters to illustrate the ills of civil war while a historical king reflects on their fates. Michael Hattaway, emeritus professor of English Literature at the University of Sheffield, comments that Shakespeare intended to show Henry's sadness over the war, to elicit the same emotion among the audience and to expose Henry's ineptitude as king.

The Battle of Towton was re-examined by Geoffrey Hill in his poem "Funeral Music" (1968). Hill presents the historical event through the voices of its combatants, looking at the turmoil of the era through their eyes. The common soldiers grouse about their physical discomforts and the sacrifices that they had made for the ideas glorified by their leaders. They share their superiors' determination to seek the destruction of their opponents, even at the cost of their lives. Hill depicts the participants' belief that the event was pre-destined and of utmost importance as a farce; the world went about its business regardless of the Battle of Towton.

An episode in C. J. Sansom’s historical novel Sovereign, set in 1541, sixty years after the battle, concerns a Towton farmer appealing to King Henry VIII to be compensated for the time and effort he has to spend on turning over to the Church the skeletons discovered nearly every day on his land.

Legacy
Obtaining an accurate figure for casualties has been complicated: remains were either moved or used by farmers as fertiliser, and corpses were generally stripped of clothing and non-perishable items before burial. However some survived when later buildings were constructed over their graves; the first were uncovered in 1996 and excavations have so far uncovered more than 50 skeletons from the battle. An analysis of their injuries shows the brutality of the contest, including extensive post-mortem mutilations.

15th-century documents confirm some casualties were reburied in graveyards at Saxton and a chapel constructed for the purpose by Richard III in 1484. His death at the Battle of Bosworth in 1485 meant the building was never completed and eventually collapsed. In 1929 stones allegedly from the chapel were used to create the Towton Cross, also known as Lord Dacre's Cross, which commemorates those who died in the battle.

Lord Dacre was buried at the church of All Saints in Saxton and his tomb was reported in the late 19th century to be well maintained, although several of its panels had been weathered away. The tree from which Dacre's killer was supposed to have shot his arrow had been cut down by the late 19th century. In 2010 fragments from what are some of the earliest known handguns found in Britain were discovered on the battlefield.

Views of the Wars of the Roses in general and of the battle as a charnel house were formed by Shakespeare and endured for centuries. However at the start of the 21st century the battle was no longer prominent in the public consciousness. Journalists lamented that people were ignorant of the Battle of Towton and of its significance. According to English Heritage the battle was of the "greatest importance": it was one of the largest, if not the largest, fought in England and resulted in the replacement of one royal dynasty by another. Hill expressed a different opinion. Although impressed with the casualty figures touted by the chroniclers, he believed the battle brought no monumental changes to the lives of the English people.

The Battle of Towton was associated with a tradition previously upheld in the village of Tysoe, Warwickshire. For several centuries a local farmer had scoured a hill figure, the Red Horse of Tysoe, each year, as part of the terms of his land tenancy. Although the origins of the tradition have never been conclusively identified, it was locally said this was done to commemorate the Earl of Warwick's inspirational deed of slaying his horse to show his resolve to stand and fight with the common soldiers. The tradition died in 1798 when the Inclosure Acts implemented by the English government redesignated the common land on which the equine figure was located as private property. The scouring was revived during the early 20th century but has since stopped.

title: Battle of Towton