This is a project by British archaelogists that documents some of the buried, well preserved bodies of soldiers from the 15th century. Those soldiers fought in a civil war battle that saw 70,000+ soldiers on the field and nearly 30,000 dead afterwards. To understand what a huge loss that is, know that the Iraq War only saw 4000 dead soldiers across an entire decade. Go back to a slightly more primitive Crimean War, and a single gunpowder battle saw roughly 8,000-10,000 dead Frenchmen, Englishmen, Turks, and Russians. Furthermore, there could be an estimated 700,000 healthy young men in the entire England in the 15th century and a large percentage of them fought in war.
Some interesting details I have gathered from various places about this project:
The soldiers have been wounded with severe, critical injuries several times over. Meaning that they continued fighting even after they received blows that would have instantly killed an ordinary human today.
The soldiers had bodies of the best professional athletes today, with strong muscles and bones to throw javelins, and hardened spines from pushing large heavy boulders.
Unlike 8th to 12th century knights, chivalry was long dead by the 15th century. The soldiers did not play nice and did not respect their enemies. They wanted to see them chopped up into pieces. These were not feudal nobles or aristocrats trained in manners, but militia recruited from villages.
The heights of soldiers went up to 5"10 to 5"11.
The people didn’t specialize in just one weapon and were trained to use axes, spiked balls, hammers, daggers, and other weapons
Those are most of the interesting details. On one hand, I had no idea that food production back then was relatively good enough to support so many giant athletic young men in the era of raw feudalism. On the other hand, the fact that physically less healthy people still exist today shows that food production today is high enough to support even them. Capitalism is not a winner-take-all zero-sum game.
Some of these men, when not butchering each other in wars, would have been farmers and we have to wonder how before industrial division of labour, a man can have the time to train his body so well even in the midst of harvesting crops, feeding cows, and smashing grains.
“The general size and robusticity of the individuals from Towton is unusual when compared with other medieval populations. Among these are numerous Schmorl’s nodes in the vertebral column (from pressure exerted on the intervertebral discs in heavy lifting), os acromiale of the scapular spine, a condition that is often accompanied by rotator cuff (muscles that stabilise the shoulder) tears, and an avulsion fracture of the humeral medial epicondyle, a condition that develops from throwing (e.g. in projectile use) in more recent juvenile individuals. One hypothesis to explain this pattern is that these individuals were selected as participants in the battle because of previous experience and training in armed combat from a young age.”
First off, the mass grave contained only 43 individuals - the grave might have contained the equivalent of a special forces unit. It was theorized that some of the injuries may also come from mutilation; but man can survive horrific injuries through sheer force of will (and luck, of course).
Any king worth his salt would prefer to recruit solidly built inviduals as soldiers in the first place (farming is hard labor, some handle it better then others), and supply his armies with food as well as possible. And some units - archers, for example - simply had to have great physical power and were well cared for. And if the soldiers are recruited at a young age, as is likely, a few years of constant warfare can make the surviving ones into true athletes - or cripples.
In the middle ages there was low technology and low levels of accumulated capital. People were poor. The government sucked, as usual,but was better than our present one overall.
Modern medicine is highly overrated. Extended lifespan has more to do with availabiliy of basic medical procedures and pre-natal and early life nutrition. All these corrective laser surgeries and coronary bypasses might be good for a handful of people, but for the vast majority they make no difference.
The vast bulk of the armies of the War of the Roses was made up of professional soldiers who had fought in France during the Hundred Years War. The bowmen trained from the youth (the Welsh longbow is a very tricky weapon to handle) and noblemen had no other occupation than war since childhood. English professional soldiers were usually well paid and fed and only the fittest were taken: Shakespeare’s Falstaff refers to the state of decay of the English armies under the Tudor, not during the XIV and XV century when the French noblesse learned to fear them and their bowmen were in high demand all over Europe.
Towton was an unusual battle in the War of Roses, as it was marked by immense carnage: the two sides clashed during a blinding snowstorm with bow and lance in ancient fashion and large masses of archers caused immense casualties. In other battles (Tewkesbury etc) the carnage was much less pronunced, for no other reason that Edward IV gave his men the order to let the common people go and give the gentlemen no quarter.