Thursday, December 30, 2010

The Battle of Towton revisited

For you lovers of history, especially military history, especially medieval military history, especially British medieval military history, this article is for you.  A very well done, well written article on the archaeological digs at the site of the battle of Towton, one of the many clashes during the conflict history knows as the War of the Roses.  As always, watch for words like 'think', 'believe', 'suggests', as in 'we believe', or 'we think', rather than we know.  Even with all of our scientific advances, we can still only guess at many things that happened in years gone by.  Still, it does do a good job at helping to advance the reality that many of our notions of life in the pre-modern world, especially that period known as the Middle Ages, are perhaps less accurate than we might believe.

The money quote from the article is this:

"At this distance any theories are likely to remain plausible rather than proven."
That's true for more of history than we might care to admit.  Nonetheless, it shows the art involved in reconstructing what we think might have happened. 

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