His men with white crosses on back and breast knelt in prayer before the battle opened, and all but reached the town before their approach was perceived.

Edward however opened the fight by a furious charge which broke the Londoners on Leicester's left.

In the bitterness of his hatred for the insult to his mother he pursued them for four miles, slaughtering three thousand men.

But he returned to find the battle lost.
Crowded in the narrow space between the heights and the river Ouse, a space broken by marshes and by the long street of the town, the royalist centre and left were crushed by Earl Simon.

The Earl of Cornwall, now King of the Romans, who, as the mocking song of the victors ran, "makede him a castel of a mulne post" ("he weened that the mill-sails were mangonels" goes on the sarcastic verse), was taken prisoner, and Henry himself captured.
Edward cut his way into the Priory only to join in his father's surrender.
[Sidenote: Simon's rule] The victory of Lewes placed Earl Simon at the head of the state.