The Wars of the Roses

The Wars of the Roses: The Soldiers' Experience, by Anthony Goodman (Stroud: Tempus, 2005; pp. 288. £25). This, as the author acknowledges, is his second entry into the fray; Anthony Goodman published The Wars of the Roses: Military Activity and English Society, 1452–1497 in 1981. One strand of that book was an attempt to get at the realities of the wars, to see how they were actually experienced ‘on the ground’. That becomes ostensibly the theme of the present book. Paucity of direct evidence is, of course, the problem. Professor Goodman rightly makes much of the remarkable investigation of skeletons from the battlefield of Towton, published as Blood Red Roses, ed. V. Fiorato and others (2000) to make his point (a reversion to the traditional view, generally discounted in recent literature) about the availability of a pool of ‘professional’ soldiers, battle-hardened veterans. But a good deal of the discussion is actually about the experiences of the gentle classes, ‘officers’ rather than ‘rankers’, and evidence is not plentiful even there. (He suggests there was some reluctance to compile biographical writings, itself an interesting comment on the perceived difficulty of winning ‘honour’ in a civil war.) He ranges back and fore to set the wars in context, to the French wars, but also back to Stephen's reign, and forward to Tudor rebellions. Compared to the French wars he discovers a reluctance to engage in pillage, at least as far as civilian targets were concerned; corpses on the battlefield, however, were fair game. The chance of adventure (not least sexual), of escape from the everyday for a brief period, was, he suggests, a powerful recruiting agent; but this, though plausible, can only be speculation. The book seems rather bland, lacking discussion of evidential problems. The Lancastrian Prince of Wales is said to have been killed ‘in the battle’ or ‘in the rout’ at Tewkesbury; so much for the evidence that he may have been killed in cold blood after capture. The so-called ‘confession’ by Sir Hugh Conway of having been present at a discussion when assorted magnates discussed the succession to Henry VII, ‘but none of them spake of my lord prince’ (whether Arthur or Henry), is quoted at face value, without reference to the problems about its reliability pointed out by Dominic Luckett (‘Crown, Patronage and Political Morality’, ante, cx (1995), 578–95), and David Grummitt (‘“For the Surety of the Towne and Marches”’, Nottingham Medieval Studies, xliv (2000), 184–203). There are good illustrations, but the index is defective (no ‘Conway’, no ‘Calais’). The earlier book was less readable, but much meatier

Ancient history · Battle · Battlefield · Context (archaeology · Honour · Political science · Politics · Reign · Spanish Civil War · Theme (computing · Classics · Computer Science · Historical Studies of British Isles · History · Irish and British Studies · Law · Scottish History and National Identity