The Wars of the Roses

The series of rebellions against royal authority and the violent clashes between aristocratic families that occurred in England between 1455 and 1487 have long been characterized as the 'Wars of the Roses'. Yet, far from being a continuous period of civil war, the Wars of the Roses were in fact an intermittent series of minor clashes, pitched battles, and sieges. These occurred against the backdrop of a demilitarization of the English aristocracy in the final years of the Hundred Years War. Drawing on extensive archival research and a wide-ranging synthesis of the secondary literature, David Grummitt here reconsiders the nature of war and the martial culture of the English in the second half of the fifteenth century. He places these experiences within the peculiar legal, constitutional, and political culture of late Lancastrian and Yorkist England, to reexamine in depth the motivation for fighting, the raising and equipping of armies, the experience of battle and its aftermath, and the ways in which civil conflict was rationalized and memorialized. These experiences are compared and contrasted to that in its continental neighbours in an age of expanding royal authority, gunpowder weapons, and emergence of standing, professional armies. The book's conclusions offer a new interpretation of the evidence for the size of armies and scale of conflict during these years, the weaponry and tactics employed, and the wider importance of war, chivalry, and martial culture in late medieval England. In so doing, and by drawing on a range of new conceptual approaches in the fields of the history of emotions, material culture, and conflict archaeology, alongside other more traditional disciplinary approaches to military history, the book offers a thorough and fulsome history of the Wars of the Roses, one that properly integrates war and marital culture into our understanding of the political and cultural history of fifteenth-century England, and late medieval European military history more generally.