Wars of the Roses

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, writes George Goodwin.

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.

The Wars of the Roses were no clear-cut dynastic conflict, but rather a series of struggles between the magnates of the age and the retinues they maintained by Alan Rogers. Anthony Pollard offered his own separate historiographical analysis in 2010.

Anthony Pollard visits the History Today archive to examine Alan Rogers’ claim that a lack of principle among rival lords resulted in the great conflagration of 15th-century England.

Robin Evans puts Henry Tudor's victory into Welsh historical perspective.

Anthony Pollard explains how the rivalry of two great Northern families contributed to civil war in fifteenth-century England.

Colin Richmond analyses the part played by the written (and spoken) word in shoring up popular allegiances to the rival dynasties

Henry Tudor defeated and killed Richard III in battle in August 1485. That much is certain. Colin Richmond, however, wonders how the battle was fought; what prompted Yorkists to defect to the Lancastrian side; and above all, where exactly did the battle take place?