the men-at-arms were enveloped, and the softness of the ground, it was with the utmost difficulty they could either move or lift their weapons, notwithstanding their lances had been shortened to enable them to fight closely,—­that the horses at every step sunk so deeply into the mud, that it required great exertion to extricate them,—­and that the narrowness of the place caused their archers to be so crowded as to prevent them from drawing their bows.”  Michelet’s description of the day is the best that can be read, and he tells us, that, when the signal of battle was given by Sir Thomas Erpingham, the English shouted, but “the French army, to their great astonishment, remained motionless.  Horses and knights appeared to be enchanted, or struck dead in their armor.  The fact was, that their large battle-steeds, weighed down with their heavy riders and lumbering caparisons of iron, had all their feet completely sunk in the deep wet clay; they were fixed there, and could only struggle out to crawl on a few steps at a walk,” Upon this mass of chivalry, all stuck in the mud, the cloth-yard shafts of the English yeomen fell like hailstones upon the summer corn.  Some few of the French made mad efforts to charge, but were annihilated before they could reach the English line.  The English advanced upon the “mountain of men and horses mixed together,” and butchered their immovable enemies at their leisure.  Plebeian hands that day poured out patrician blood in torrents.  The French fell into a panic, and those of their number who could run away did so.  It was the story of Poitiers over again, in one respect; for the Black Prince owed his victory to a panic that befell a body of sixteen thousand French, who scattered and fled without having struck a blow.  Agincourt was fought on St. Crispin’s day, and a precious strapping the French got.  The English found that there was “nothing like leather.”  It was the last battle in which the oriflamme was displayed; and well it might be; for, red as it was, it must have blushed a deeper red over the folly of the French commanders.

The greatest battle ever fought on British ground, with the exceptions of Hastings and Bannockburn,—­and greater even than Hastings, if numbers are allowed to count,—­was that of Towton, the chief action in the Wars of the Roses; and its decision was due to the effect of the weather on the defeated army.  It was fought on the 29th of March, 1461, which was the Palm-Sunday of that year.  Edward, Earl of March, eldest son of the Duke of York, having made himself King of England, advanced to the North to meet the Lancastrian army.  That army was sixty thousand strong, while Edward IV. was at the head of less than forty-nine thousand.  After some preliminary fighting, battle was joined on a plain between the villages of Saxton and Towton, in Yorkshire, and raged for ten hours.  Palm-Sunday was a dark and tempestuous day, with the snow falling heavily.  At first the wind was favorable to the Lancastrians,