The horsemen are slowed only by the number of dead on the ground. The northerners’ footmen have taken fresh wind from the spears too, and they’re pushing through the wall of bodies and clambering over it to press Warwick’s men everywhere and Warwick’s men step back, back down the slope up which they came.

Where are the archers?

Everywhere the northerners are gaining the upper hand and what had seemed like the crisis point earlier that morning now reveals itself to have been the first in a succession. Everywhere they are knocking Warwick’s men back, stabbing them as they fall, hooking them forward and killing them with hammer blows. Men on horseback are forcing their mounts forward, battering men from above.

Thomas is drawn back into the fray and all he can do is try to defend himself, breaking their spear thrusts and turning aside their blades with now a bill. But for every point he beats aside another swings across, jabbing always jabbing. A blade flashes at his eyes. He ducks. It strikes his helmet. He seizes the shaft and pulls. Another point wavers across his vision, a sharp side-to-side chopping motion. He lets go of the first shaft and sways back, battering the second point away with the back of his arm. Then another point, straight into his jack. He edges sideways, but his linen is laid open to the skin, his hip scorched by the passing blade. He lashes out, catches someone with his bill.

He takes a step back. And then another.

They are losing the fight, and soon they will not be able to hold the line.

And then suddenly the air is thickened with arrow shafts. A horseman lurches in his saddle and throws himself back while another horse screams and claws the air with an arrow deep in his mouth. More horses go down. The riders turn their horses. Some dismount. Others are knocked to the ground.

A cry goes up to suggest King Edward is coming.

‘Hold fast! The King! The King!’

‘Thanks be to sweet St John!’ a man yells. ‘The King!’

And now it is the northerners’ turn to waver.

For there is the King’s standard and under it perhaps twenty men, in best plate armour, almost impenetrable to sword thrust or hammer blow, swinging their pollaxes and driving the northerners back.

But where the King goes, so does the fiercest fight. Everyone wants to be the man to kill him, and soon ranged on the other side of the new wall of corpses are the enemies’ noblest lords. Men with plumes on their helmets, fighting with their own household men under their own banners. These are the proper soldiers. These are men who’ve trained to fight all their lives, and there is none of the clumsiness of the billmen.