Wars of the Roses
Chris Skidmore praises Colin Richmond’s 1985 article, which offered a new theory, later confirmed, about the true location of one of the most famous battles in English history.
Albert Makinson assesses the rival party claims of Lancaster and York, which afforded the pretext for a blaze of plebeian discontent and patrician lawlessness that filled England for the next one hundred and fifty years with a profound horror of civil war genealogy of the ruling family, and fewer still in the principles of parliamentary democracy.
The ‘biggest, bloodiest and longest battle on English soil’ was fought at Towton in Yorkshire on Palm Sunday 1461. Its brutality was a consequence of deep geographical and cultural divisions which persist to this day.
Maurice Keen chronicles a set of 15th century letters - the product of everyday communication between English gentry and officialdom - and suggests how their contents may change the reader's views of the late middle ages. Helen Castor offered her own contemporary historiographical account in 2010.