Battle of Bramham Moor Information
Battle of Bramham Moor The Battle of Bramham Moor took place on 19 February 1408. In 2008, the Council celebrated the 600th anniversary.
The key activities involved:
The key activities involved:
- Placing of a memorial stone on the new local access road (near Spen Common Lane)
- Placing of an information board alongside the stone explaining the history surrounding the battle
- Official opening by the Duke of Northumberland on 28 June 2008
- Followed by the Bramham Annual Village Gala which had a medieval theme
- Leaflets giving further information were distributed with the Parish Magazine (copies still available - contact the Clerk)
For further information see below.
The following residents were involved in the project: Moira Pool, Ruth & Ian Watson, Anne Palmer, Yvonne Banerjea, Keith Innocent, Rachel & Nick Lane Fox and members of the Parish Council.
In addition to the above, the Council is indebted to the following for their assistance: Chris Hunwick (Archivist, Alnwick Castle), Prof Mark Ormrod (York University), Adrian Bury Associates, the Royal Armouries and the British Library.
THE BATTLE OF BRAMHAM MOOR 1408
A minor skirmish with a major outcome
Lord Percy, 1st Earl of Northumberland defeated an invading Scottish army at Homildon in 1402 and captured a large number of Scottish nobles. King Henry IV forbade him to benefit from the tradition of ransoming of prisoners.
In consequence, in 1403, Percy with his younger brother Thomas and famous son Hotspur declared their support for Edmund Mortimer as pretender to the throne. However, Hotspur was killed at Shrewsbury in the same year while he was trying to join forces with Owen Glendower’s Welsh rebellion, and Thomas was captured and subsequently beheaded. Percy lost his title of Constable of England and was fined. By 1405 he was plotting again; he supported Richard le Scrope, Archbishop of York, and Thomas Mowbray, Earl of Nottingham in another unsuccessful rebellion following which Percy with Lord Bardolph escaped and with 300 men fled to Scotland. Both Scrope and Nottingham were executed and Percy’s estates were confiscated. After a year in Scotland he and Bardolph travelled to Wales, France and Flanders seeking help but with little success before returning in the summer of 1407 where they set about raising a new force ready to move southward. Their best hope was that discontent in England was sufficient to win them the necessary support.
Percy made his final attempt to seize the throne for Mortimer in 1408. Having gathered together his army of lowland Scots and loyal Northumbrians, but without the full support expected from his tenants (the winter of 1407-8 was the worst in living memory, with heavy snow, just the conditions to encourage men to stay at home), he marched south in February toward York. Reaching Thirsk, Percy and his deputy Bardolph invited people to rise but they failed to gain widespread support.
THE BATTLE
Learning of the approach of Percy’s army, Sir Thomas Rokeby, the High Sheriff of Yorkshire, gathered together a force of local Yorkshire levies and noble retinues and blocked the river bridge at Knaresborough. Percy’s army advanced via Boroughbridge and Wetherby, where he hoped to raise his tenants then, with Rokeby in pursuit, passed through Tadcaster before the two forces met on Bramham Moor (then an unenclosed common), on 19th February 1408. The exact sizes and compositions of the contending armies are not recorded but they were certainly far smaller than the thousands engaged at Shrewsbury three years earlier and little detail of the actual engagement survives.
Percy is said to have positioned his men and awaited Rokeby’s arrival at 2 pm when battle was instantly joined and, though not long in duration, was said to be furious and bloody. It is generally believed Rokeby charged the northern forces and violent hand-to-hand combat ensued in a huge melee, probably with little tactical direction. The battle, often referred to as Camp Hill, ranged over the area bounded by Camp Hill, Headley Hall and Oglethorpe Hills either side of the road to Toulston. The training of the loyalist yeomanry was probably a decisive factor against the rebels who were quickly defeated after Bardolph was mortally wounded in the early stages - very few escaped back to Scotland. The Earl himself, at the age of 66, died in a rearguard action. He is believed to have died in the small hollow that lies between Oglethorpe Hills and Old Wood some 250 metres to the north of, though hidden from, Toulston Lane, where he was either killed fighting or was captured and summarily executed. The Earl’s head was cut off, fixed on a hedge stake, and carried with mock procession to London where it was put on display and the four parts of his torso were exposed at Newcastle, Berwick, York and Lincoln. After several months, the Earl’s remains were buried at the right side of the high altar in York Minster beside the grave of his son, Hotspur, on 2nd July 1408. The Earl’s death is commemorated by a small memorial, in a copse off Toulston Lane.
Bardolph’s head with one of his quarters was also sent to London. Sixteen others were beheaded and quartered and, when Henry IV arrived in York, many more were condemned to death and many heavily fined. A number of the unknown dead from the battlefield now lie in two communal graves at the east end of Bramham churchyard where the cherry trees stand today.
THE AFTERMATH
For this victory Sir Thomas Rokeby received a grant for life of Spofforth, one of the largest Percy manors in Yorkshire, from a grateful king. With the threat of rebellion in the North removed, he was able to direct his forces against the Welsh and, when Harlech Castle fell in 1409, Glendower fled to the hills never to return. Thus the relatively small engagement at Bramham Moor effectively secured the position of the Lancastrian monarchy for the next half century.
Nevertheless the usurpation of Henry IV continued to rankle, ultimately giving rise to conflict between the Yorkists and the Lancastrians in the Wars of the Roses. On Palm Sunday 1461 at the battlefield of Towton, 3½ miles south east of Bramham Moor, in the bloodiest battle ever fought on English soil, the Yorkists took their revenge when in a field of about 90,000 men some 28,000 were killed, defeating the forces of Henry VI and securing a victory for Edward Duke of York, who became Edward IV.