We know quite a lot about the aristocracy who fought in the Wars of the Roses, but who were the largely unknown soldiers caught up in the struggle between York and Lancaster?
Various contemporary sources provide glimpses of the kind of men that marched off to war during the period 1455-1487, but I’m convinced that armies were far from united. Some contingents were contracted by feuding nobles and gentry; others fought as part of official commissions of array. Many tradesmen and artisans joined town or city militias, and a smaller proportion of soldiers were paid thugs, mercenaries or garrison troops, well versed in arms from other countries.
The depth of research into this subject is problematical; the sources minimal. However, the Battle of Towton does provide the best glimpse of armies during this period, but then I am a little biased. I will leave the look and composition of these contingents for another time and instead use this brief overview to summarise how an army of the Wars of the Roses was recruited, why certain men decided to fight on one side or the other, and what soldiers hoped to gain from risking their lives on the battlefield.
Firstly, it was the nobles and knights with their retinues that formed the backbone of a typical Wars of the Roses army in an age when loyalty in the field was a matter of payment or allegiance. It was loyalty in this form that made or broke a battle line when, in some instances, treachery and double-dealing could be bought or sold without warning. Commanders could do very little to alter the inevitable when battle was joined, except lead their contingents by example or personal prowess. Therefore, contrary to modern popular opinion, it was primarily those men in the lower echelons of medieval feudal society who dictated the outcome of battles, even if their captains were well versed in warfare.
In 1341 Edward III reorganised the structure of medieval armies that left England to fight in France. He instituted a system of written indentured contracts between the crown and the prominent nobles of the land. These nobles would then subcontract with knights and men at arms who were their friends, tenants and neighbours and so on. Some of these captains were, even in 1461, ‘of the war of France’, that is to say, experienced professional fighters who were valued leaders not only as veterans of other battles but also as military tacticians.
The above system of recruitment was called Livery and Maintenance which also involved, by the time of the Wars of the Roses, a contract clause stating that, in return for a noble’s protection, his retainer in gratitude had to take the field under his banner and wear his livery. Some of these adherents were paid, others served out of personal loyalty and some were in it for the loot. In short, there was no standing army to rely on in the Late Middle Ages, the Wars of the Roses were civil wars, therefore skill with weaponry was limited (apart from the longbow). In short, it was only the aristocrats whose lives were filled with professional violence, or the practice of it, while the commoner was largely regarded as ‘arrow fodder.’
So, who were the ordinary soldiers and part-timers that fell victim to the Towton slaughterhouse?
The ‘Rose of Rouen’, a Yorkist political poem of the era, alludes to which nobles, towns, cities and shires made up Edward IV’s army once united later at the Battle of Towton. English nobles are identified by their livery badges in the opening verses, but later in the rhyme, virtually every flourishing municipality that sent a contingent to Edward's aid at Towton is mentioned.
The Wolf came from Worcester, full sore he thought to bite, The Dragon came from Gloucester, he bent his tail to smite, The Griffen came from Leicester, flying in as tight, The George came from Nottingham, with spear for to fight, Blessed be the time, that ever God spread that flower.1
When the Earl of Warwick left London in early March for the north, he was given the authority by the king to raise levies from Northamptonshire, Warwickshire, Leicestershire, Staffordshire, Worcestershire, Gloucestershire, Shropshire, Nottinghamshire, Derbyshire and Yorkshire, thereby corroborating some of the details in the above poem.
These commissions of array gave the Earl of Warwick, and other Yorkist captains, the power to recruit all men between the ages of sixteen and sixty years from the shires in defence of the realm. This method of raising troops was Anglo-Saxon in origin and involved every man’s promised allegiance to his king. Failure to respond in some instances, and in times of great need, meant forfeiture and death. In fact, such large armies were engaged at the Battle of Towton because two kings (Henry VI and Edward IV) used their equal powers of array to supplement nobles’ retinues. If we take a Lancastrian array, for instance when the City of York sent a thousand men to ‘the lamentable battle of Towton’, we may be able to get a feel for just how large both armies were. Indeed, the Yorkist army was huge by the standards of the day, and it is recorded that Edward raised more men than any English king had ever put in the field before. The Lancastrian force was even greater aside from Yorkist tales of propaganda.
Men from the Yorkshire town of Beverley also fought at Towton on the Lancastrian side. Flagons of wine were given to the town's armed men as they rode towards Towton states civic records. The charters of Canterbury mention that their contingent under the banner of ‘The Harrow’ was also present. On August 2, 1461, Edward IV mentioned, ‘the faithfulness and laudable services of the citizens to the King, and the costs, expenses, labours, jeopardies, and hurts of our said mayor and citizens’ given at the battle of Towton.
Soldiers from Coventry fought on both sides under the standard of the ‘Black Ram.’ Eighty pounds was collected throughout the wards for the hundred men ‘which went with our sovereign liege lord King Edward to the field in the north.’ And so the list of town and city militias goes on, with little or no political dividing line between York and Lancaster even in the same town or parish. Confusing isn’t it?
The City of York also contained adherents of both York and Lancaster. York is said to have been the centre of a strong party formed in the north under the Earl of Westmoreland and Lord’s Dacre, Clifford, and Egremont. Here Henry VI and his queen, Margaret of Anjou, assembled their forces commanded by the Duke of Somerset. The north and parts of Scotland responded dutifully to the royal call to arms. But the Battle of Towton must have been an anxious time for some, especially the citizens of York, for no doubt, many of their townsmen who fought on Palm Sunday must have wondered whose side they were really on.
So, what did these ordinary Lancastrians feel when they lost the battle and were on the run? Collective fear obviously, exhaustion, shock, but also we can glimpse in certain documents the threat of social collapse. The Yorkists were hungry for revenge after Towton, there were orders of no quarter in the air, and this wider fear of local anarchy can be recalled in York Civic Records, even several years after the battle was a memory:
…many were slain and put in exile; the said King, Queen, and noble prince, their son, resident within the said city, where they to the utter jeopardy would have suffered them to have been during their pleasure; and then after the coming of King Edward into your said city, the inhabitants of the said city for their truth unto their said sovereign lord, such as abode was robbed, spoiled, and ransomed, and the other so extremely impoverished that few of them was ever after of power to defend themself living in the said city, but utterly constrained to depart out of the same by reason whereof the two parties of the said city was within a few years after the said battle utterly prostrated, decayed and wasted.2
One thing is certain. During the Wars of the Roses, towns and cities did not remain immune from the dangers of national disorder.
Another great interest area of the Wars is the ‘professional’ soldiers who realised that a fast buck could be made from joining in with the carnage. Many foreign mercenaries were equipped with specialist weapons on English battlefields. A contingent of Burgundians is said to have been present at Towton, captained by a Flemish mercenary called Seigneur de la Barde. But, judging by the dismal weather conditions on Palm Sunday 1461, we must assume that they had difficulties. Their primitive handguns would have been useless in the snow. Some may have exploded in their faces, leaving only fragments to be unearthed by modern archaeology.
However, the most detailed account of these mercenaries (and particularly Burgundian gunners) comes from Gregory’s Chronicle; a contemporary source whose writer may have been present at the second Battle of St Albans a month before Towton:
And before the gunners and Burgundians could level their guns they were busily fighting, and many a gun of war was provided that was of little avail or none at all, for the Burgundians had such instruments that would shoot both pellets of lead and arrows of an ell in length with six feathers, three in the middle, and three at one end, with a very large head of iron at the other end, and wild fire, all together. But in time of need they could not shoot one of them, for the fire turned back on them…and men betake themselves to mallets of lead, bows, swords, glaives and axes.3
With the addition of the standing Calais garrison and other outlying border strongholds, these were the available troops in the Wars of the Roses. As discussed, the reasons behind why they became part of one contingent or another are varied. Status, loyalties, the effect of medieval press-ganging, plunder, or just downright hatred for the opposition are the many factors associated with why and how they fought. Much like all human experience of warfare, in some respects, it is not just the commander who influences his soldiers’ feelings and reactions at the maximum point of danger. A more direct effect on a soldier is his questioning why he is there in the first place, what peer pressure he is subjected to, and who fights beside him ‘in the trenches’. More than any other, these factors made him stand and fight or flee when the tide of battle turns. Local kinship was the heart and soul of Wars of the Roses armies, and if we have to make a comparison about battlefield cohesion, we need to look no further than the recruitment and fighting abilities of the long-suffering ‘Pals’ regiments of World War I.
But more about this in another newsletter.
‘The Rose of Rouen’, Archaeologia XXIX, pp. 343–347.
York Civic Records, ed. A. Raine, Yorkshire Archaeological Society, Record Series, 98, 1939, pp.135-136
‘Gregory’s Chronicle’ in The Historical Collections of a Citizen of London, ed. J. Gairdner, 1876, pp. 213-214.