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It is recorded that on this fatal Tuesday all the elements seemed to unite in adding horror to the scene of carnage.  Shortly before this a great comet had made men fear and wonder; and now, on this morning the sky was overcast with such dense clouds that the land was in darkness; so black were the heavens that nothing like it had been known within the memory of man.  A violent tempest, with a deluge of rain and terrific thunder and lightning, swept over the country.  The terrified monks could not see their books as they chanted the Psalms in the darkened choir, and as they sat in the refectory they could not tell what food lay upon their trenchers.

Meanwhile the battle raged on the hill above the town; desperately the barons fought, but, one by one, they fell overpowered by numbers.  Though the earl was sixty-five years of age he fought “stoutly, like a giant, for the liberties of England” to the end.

We will not dwell on the horror of the battle.  Popular tradition still points to the spot where the great leader was slain, and there, beside a spring called Battlewell, was placed a sacred rood.  Two young de Montforts fell by their father’s side, and many barons, knights, and common soldiers; but few fled.  The stragglers from the defeated army were, many of them, slaughtered, as they attempted their escape; and by Offenham Ferry, where in those times probably stood a bridge, there is a meadow, once an island, which to this day bears the name of “Deadman’s Ait.”  The chroniclers tell of the shameful mutilation of the earl’s corpse, and how the limbs were distributed through the country, but the dismembered body was buried reverently by the monks in the most sacred part of their church, even before the High Altar.  The severed hands were sent by a servant to the wife of Roger Mortimer, at Wigmore Castle in Shropshire.  They arrived, so says the legend, while the Mass was being celebrated, and, at the raising of the Host, they were seen, before the bag containing them was opened, clasped in the attitude of prayer above the head of the messenger.  In fear and trembling, Lady Mortimer returned the bloody trophy.

Prince Edward himself attended the funeral of Henry de Montfort, his cousin and friend, in the Abbey church.

“Such,” sings Robert of Gloucester, “was the murder of Evesham, for battle none it was.”

As in the case of other national heroes of old times, popular fancy was allowed to play unfettered round the memory of this noble family.  In the well-known ballad preserved by Bishop Percy, of “The Beggar’s Daughter of Bednall Green,” it is imagined that Henry de Montfort was rescued at night from the field of battle while still living, by “a baron’s faire daughter,” in search of her father’s body; that she nursed him, and that, on his recovery they married, their daughter being “prettye Bessee.”