unusual that, isn't it?

Yes, it was never developed into anything other than the original Mott & Bailey timber castle.

It was never fortified with, or extensively with stonework.

And so presumably it just wasn't significant as a location for a castle anymore.

The development of the town is probably 12th, 13th, 14th century and therefore that's when the major river crossing moves away from the ford here onto the present location of the bridge and that's when the town develops around the bridge as they quite often do.

and then of course this place is abandoned completely and there's nothing here then for a significant number of years possibly even until the English Civil War when it was re-fortified to a certain degree we know that because it was obviously fought over and then it looks like it was abandoned completely until the 18th century or the late 17th, 18th century when they built the house and then of course it turned into formal gardens And that brings up the question as to why these skeletons that were found here in the 70s, and then we subsequently found, why were these bodies buried on the top of this hill? Are they Roman? Are they Anglo-Saxon? Are they Norman? Are they post-Roman? Are they English Civil War, for example? Are they people that died during one of the sieges of Tadcaster? Or are they significantly later? And we need to know that.

Now the DNA results are in, and Tim has exciting news.

But just before we've done the research, somebody finds the DNA of the Yersinia pestis.

No one knows whether there are burials at Masteby.

Well, we, we know we've got a medieval battle.

We've got the evidence of that, so that's one thing.

We know that in a medieval battle, lots of people get killed, so somewhere there would be lots of dead, presumably.

Now, either everybody's been taken out of the landscape and there are no mass graves, or somewhere in this landscape there will be mass graves.

Therefore, you look for points of reference, and there's no [laughs] no better point of reference than this huge, big slab of limestone.

And if we want to look for a parallel for something like this cross here, there is no better example than a few miles up the road at Visby, where we know there is a very, very similar cross of the same sort of size and dimensions, and that does mark the medieval mass graves from the Battle of Visby.

From his experience at other medieval battle sites, he's identified a pattern of events.

The finds were extraordinary, more than 1,100 complete skeletons.

I think Visby, you could quite easily say it's unique.

It's an assemblage of human remains that were discovered in the early 20th century that, uh, of people that died during battle.

It's mind-blowing, really, in terms of the evidence you can acquire from a grave such as that.

I can't think of another example where people were buried in their armor.

Finding the people that died in battle in mass graves with their arms and armor is phenomenally rare.

It's, in fact, it's virtually unique.

Must have been horrible experience to, to get all those bodies in, into the pits.

The battle began with both sides unleashing thousands of arrows.

arrows.Because the wind is in the Yorkists' favor, when the Yorkists lose their arrows, they go further and actually manage to hit the Lancastrian soldiers.

[bows twanging] The Lancastrians loose their arrows, and because the wind's against them, all their arrows fall short.

[marching drums] [soldiers shouting] It's quite a major tactical achievement.

If you can get your enemy to move away from their standing position, they're almost certainly gonna lose.

[bows twanging] The Yorkists, they can stay put.

The Lancastrians can either withdraw or they can attack, and at this point they are numerically superior so they decide to attack.

It's one of the most opulent chapels still surviving from the time of the Wars of the Roses.

How did they clear up a battlefield that's had tens of thousands of combatants?

Well, Towton's unique in that it's absolutely full of human remains and also our other archeological evidence of battle.

Now, Towton lies about one mile from what most people consider the center of the battlefield, and we did some work there in 2003, and we found where the mass graves were, the big mass graves from the center of the battle.

Well, Towton Hall lies about a mile away, and in 1996, we found another mass grave when they were building the extension to the hall, and that was a minimum number of 38 individuals.

I think there's probably between 45 and 50 in there because the builders had already removed part of the grave, so we don't know how many were in the initial part.

And that mass grave we thought was isolated, and it was just a one-off.

And then a few years later, we found an individual burial slightly further up [laughs] the garden, and this individual was half buried underneath Towton Hall, and that was, uh, well, a few meters away from the mass grave.

Is that typical of a battle of the Wars of the Roses? And what, what was the outcome of the battle? Was it pivotal? Did it change history?