Episode Details

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When we read about a famous medieval battle, we often expect a vivid narrative complete with exact troop numbers, stirring speeches, and dramatic weather. But what happens when you open a second chronicle and the numbers change, the commander is someone else, and the weather is entirely different? This episode explores how historians navigate the deeply contradictory sources of medieval warfare, using the 1461 Battle of Towton as a central case study.

By examining the gaps between narrative chronicles, administrative pay accounts, heraldic lists, and battlefield archaeology, we can see how medieval combat is actually reconstructed. The most elaborate texts are often the most heavily biased and literary, while the driest financial records and the silent evidence of mass graves provide entirely different kinds of truth. Historians must weigh these imperfect traces against one another rather than simply choosing the most entertaining story.

I wanted to understand why the most detailed accounts of the past often fail us, and what we are actually left with when we demand certainty. Working through this episode, I kept returning to one question: how do we know anything at all when our sources disagree on basic facts? The result is not a definitive record of a single afternoon, but a clearer, more honest picture of how medieval history reaches us, fragments and all.