The Battle of the Bastards

A cavalry envelopment, a wall of corpses, and a rescue from the Vale.

Why it came to this

The Boltons held the North by right of an atrocity and by grant of a crown a thousand miles away. That is a weak title in any country and a particularly weak one in a region that keeps its grudges in writing. Roose Bolton had understood this and had governed accordingly ÔÇö cautiously, through marriages, letting the northern houses sulk. His son did not govern at all. By the time Ramsay Bolton held Winterfell in his own name he had alienated the KarstarksÔÇÖ neighbours, hanged people who had not yet decided to oppose him, and made an enemy of the one house whose name still commanded the NorthÔÇÖs obedience by mistreating the girl he had married to borrow it.

Against him came the least likely restoration in the story. Jon Snow, no longer bound by the Watch, and Sansa Stark, who had escaped Winterfell and had every reason of her own, spent a season riding round the North asking houses for men. They got very few. The great houses had lost their sons at the Twins, the Manderlys and the Glovers would not move, and what finally marched south from Castle Black was a small force of northern hill clans, a scattering of loyal houses, the child Lady of Bear Island with sixty-two men, and several thousand free folk fighting for a country that had been shooting at them since the dawn of the Age of Heroes.

Sansa, who knew Ramsay better than anyone alive, told her brother plainly that the army was too small and that he must not fight until it was larger. She also, without telling him, wrote to Petyr Baelish, who had the Knights of the Vale ÔÇö several thousand heavy horse, uncommitted, and the finest cavalry in Westeros. Her reasons for withholding that from Jon are the sharpest character question the show ever set itself, and the honest answer is a mixture of mistrust, self-protection and the habits of somebody who has survived four courts by never showing a card early.

This battle exists only on screen. The novels are heading somewhere in the vicinity, but nothing resembling this engagement has been published, and none of it should be read back into the books.

The ground and the hosts

Ramsay chose the field, which in this battle is close to the whole story. He drew up on open, gently rolling ground south of Winterfell ÔÇö no woods to hide a flank, no marsh, no river, no defile. Bare ground favours the larger army absolutely, because it lets numbers be brought to bear everywhere at once and gives the smaller force nothing to anchor on. Jon accepted the ground because he had nowhere else to fight: he could not besiege Winterfell with two thousand men in winter, and he could not stay in the field long enough to starve it.

The numbers were roughly six thousand against a little over two. Ramsay had cavalry, archers in quantity, and disciplined foot in armour. Jon had free folk who fought as individuals, a giant, some hundreds of northern spears and a stiffening of horse. On paper it is not a battle, it is a formality.

The two commanders were opposites in a way that decided everything. Jon Snow was a genuinely capable field officer ÔÇö brave, quick in a crisis, personally formidable, and a very good judge of a defensive position, as Castle Black had shown. But he fought as a man who leads from the front, and a commander at the front cannot see his own army. Ramsay Bolton was no soldier at all in the professional sense and had no interest in becoming one. What he had was an instinct for other peopleÔÇÖs weak points and the patience to arrange a situation in which someone else destroyed themselves. He did not plan to defeat Jon SnowÔÇÖs army. He planned to make Jon Snow ruin it for him.

JonÔÇÖs dispositions were sound as far as they went: infantry in the centre, his small cavalry on the wings, orders to receive the Bolton charge rather than deliver one, and specific instructions that the line was not to advance under any provocation. RamsayÔÇÖs dispositions were sound in a different way: archers forward, cavalry held on both wings out of the initial contact, and the mass of his infantry kept back in close order behind everything with pikes and interlocking shields, which is not a formation for winning a firefight. It is a formation for closing a bag.

How it was fought

The opening was not a manoeuvre. Ramsay brought JonÔÇÖs young brother Rickon onto the field between the armies, cut him loose and told him to run, and had archers shoot at him while he ran. It was not sadism for its own sake, or not only that: it was aimed at a specific man for a specific tactical purpose. Jon rode out alone to meet the boy, at the gallop, into the open ground.

That single act destroyed the northern battle plan in about a minute. Jon was now isolated in front of his own line with the enemy cavalry to his front, and his infantry could either stand and watch their commander be ridden down or advance to save him. They advanced. The order not to move had been the one thing holding the armyÔÇÖs shape, and the man who gave it had made it impossible to obey.

The first shock was therefore a meeting engagement on ground of RamsayÔÇÖs choosing with JonÔÇÖs line already disordered from its advance and thinned by archery. It was fought to a rough standstill in the centre, in a press of men in the open with corpses accumulating underfoot, and it went on long enough for both sides to become thoroughly committed and thoroughly blind.

The turn came from the wings. RamsayÔÇÖs cavalry, which had taken no part in the opening, now came in from both flanks simultaneously ÔÇö a double envelopment, the oldest and most effective manoeuvre in the field, and one that ordinarily requires a beaten enemy or an extremely disciplined one to execute. Ramsay could execute it because his enemy had walked forward into the space between his wings of their own accord. The northern flanks were rolled in.

Then came the part that makes this battle distinctive. The Bolton infantry advanced from the rear in close order, shields locked and pikes levelled, and closed the ring ÔÇö not to break the northern army but to compress it. As the ring tightened the northmen and free folk were pressed into a space too small to swing a weapon in. Men died on their feet without a blow being struck at them, suffocated and trampled by their own side. The Boltons meanwhile were dragging their dead and the enemyÔÇÖs into a rampart around the circle, so that the survivors were penned by a wall of bodies as well as by shields. It is a battle of annihilation in the classical style, and for perhaps a quarter of an hour it worked perfectly.

RamsayÔÇÖs error was structural and it was the error of a man who had never commanded anything. In order to close the ring he had committed every soldier he possessed to its circumference. He had no reserve, no cavalry left in hand, and a formation that was facing inward. An army arranged in a circle around its enemy has its back to the whole of the rest of the world.

The Knights of the Vale came onto the field in column from the south and struck that circle in the rear at the charge. Heavy horse against unsupported infantry facing the wrong way is not a fight. The ring came apart from the outside in, and what had been the tightest encirclement in the story became several thousand men in the open with cavalry among them and nowhere to form. The pursuit ran all the way back to WinterfellÔÇÖs gates.

The castle itself was carried almost at once. Ramsay had left a token garrison because he had never expected to need one, and the gate was broken in by the giant who came up with the assault. Winterfell was in Stark hands again for the first time since the war began.

What it cost

The northern host was very nearly destroyed in the process of winning. The free folk in particular were slaughtered ÔÇö they had come south on Jon SnowÔÇÖs promise, they were in the centre of the ring, and a great many of them never got out of it. The house contingents that had answered the call lost heavily out of small numbers, which for a place like Bear Island means most of the fighting men it had.

The Bolton army ceased to exist. So did House BoltonÔÇÖs hold on the North, which had never rested on anything but that army and the fear of it.

The victory was also a debt. It had been bought with the ValeÔÇÖs cavalry, at the price of an obligation to Petyr Baelish, who did not lend armies out of family feeling.

What it changed

Winterfell returned to the Starks, and with it the NorthÔÇÖs allegiance ÔÇö the lords who had refused to march now arrived promptly to say they had always meant to. Within days the assembled northern and Vale lords were being asked to choose who should lead them, and the man they chose was not the one the law of inheritance pointed at, which stored up a problem for later.

Strategically the North was now a unified kingdom again at the exact moment the Wall was about to need one, and its army had just been reduced to a third of what it should have been in order to achieve that.

And it left two people who had retaken their home together holding entirely different views about who had actually won it ÔÇö one of whom had held a decisive card in reserve, and one of whom had nearly lost an army because she did.

What became of it ÔÇö if an ending is written, it is here. Spoilers.

Rickon Stark was shot down in the open ground between the armies, a few strides short of his brotherÔÇÖs hand. The archery was deliberately arranged to fail until the last shot, because the point was never the boy.

Wun Wun the giant broke WinterfellÔÇÖs gate and died in the courtyard immediately afterward, shot by Ramsay personally as the castle fell. He was the last giant known to be alive.

Smalljon Umber, who had delivered Rickon to the Boltons, died in the melee at TormundÔÇÖs hands. Ramsay Bolton was taken alive in the courtyard and given to Sansa, and what she did with him was to leave him in his own kennels with his own hounds, which had not been fed for a week. She did not stay to the end of it, but she stayed long enough.

House Bolton was extinguished. Its flayed man came down off WinterfellÔÇÖs walls and the direwolf went back up.

Jon Snow was proclaimed King in the North in the great hall a short time later, on the initiative of a ten-year-old girl who shamed the assembled lords into it. Sansa watched from the side of the room, and Petyr Baelish watched Sansa.