I put in works- if you want to catch up on the gruesome detail of the Towton pit just put Towton and either "grave pit" or "blood red roses" into Google and you'll get a fair number of useful hits. "Blood Red Roses" is the title of the book of the archaeological dig and a rather ropey TV documentary about it made for Channel 4 in the UK in 1999. The programme was badly flawed by its makers' obsession with arguing that the men in the pit had been killed *after* surrendering (there was some tenuous evidence which seemed to point that way but turned out to be a misinterpretation of the physical data). Basically the schtick was that that was a civil war, prisoners are always massacred in civil wars (the whole interpretation was totally dominated by the then-recent events in the Balkans, especially Srebrenitza) so these men must have been massacred after surrender. I assume the archaeologists must finally have put their collective foot down and refused to play when the evidence began pointing firmly away from that interpretation because a slighly shame faced admission that the whole thrust of the programme had been a nonsense was sneaked into the final five minutes but you had to be alert to spot it.

Which was a pity, because what was really there was fascinating enough, including one man who had clearly suffered a massive facial wound years before Towton and had been the subject of a form of medieval facial reconstructive surgery. His very survival ten years and more after such a massive wound suggested that medieval surgery was a lot more competent than it's often given credit for- it also implied that a very skilled archer (which he also seemed to have been judging from various characteristic skeletal deformations typical of archers) was regarded as worth the effort of keeping alive. He probably was not typical, though- most ordinary soldiers would have been left to die.