The main Lancastrian force under the Constable, the Duke of Buckingham, was held in the town centre and had not donned their armour due either to a lack of time or being ordered to so as not to appear provocative. The Duke of Somerset, the Earl of Northumberland and Lord Clifford, however, had armed and taken their retainers to occupy forward positions blocking any entry into the town from the east.  Their troops were deployed across Sweetbriar Lane (now Victoria Street) and Sopwell Lane facing the Yorkists in Keyfield.

York attacked Somerset in Sweetbriar Lane and Salisbury attacked Northumberland and Clifford in Sopwell Lane, while Warwick was held in reserve in Keyfield.  Both attacks stalled because of the ease with which the narrow lanes could be defended and so few soldiers could actually engage with each other.  

Warwick saw the stalemate and sent a scout to reconnoitre the town rampart (still identifiable along the east side of the city centre).  The scout reported no Lancastrian defenders and no obstacles to an attack.  Warwick ordered his men to scale the rampart, run through the long back gardens behind it and hack through a building to emerge in the town centre behind the Lancastrian forward positions and between their three divisions. This building was then the Cross Keys tavern and the site (at this time of compiling this submission) is now occupied by “Bill’s Restaurant” in Chequer Street – the successor to an Elizabethan town house called “Battlefield House”.  This outflanking attack took place at about 10.30am.

Warwick’s main force was composed of 600 Northumbrian men led by the Neville retainer Sir Robert Ogle.  After the barricades had been pulled down by Warwick’s men, the Northumbrians were able to attack the main royal army still putting on their armour in the market place nearby where the Museum + Gallery now stands.  Dozens of Lancastrians, were killed and wounded and another chronicler, possibly repeating a trope used to describe other battles, reported that the arrows fired and dust kicked up by the horses blotted out the sun.  One of the casualties was Henry VI himself, wounded in the neck by an arrow.  

Armstrong’s 1960 work, based on contemporary newsletters, suggested that the King was subsequently taken under York’s protection and the Yorkists then set about finding and killing the Lancastrian lords. An alternative interpretation involves Somerset, Northumberland and Clifford with their troops running back into the town centre trying to reach and defend the king.  There was a melee there in which all three were killed – most famously Somerset outside the “Castle Inn” (now either the Skipton Building Society or Connell’s Estate Agents, depending on how old maps are interpreted) in fulfilment of a supposed prophecy about how he would die in the entrance to a castle.  All this was dramatized for the stage by Shakespeare.