Andrew Boardman - The Medieval Soldier: In the Wars of the Roses

The grim reality of medieval combat in the Wars of the Roses is validated by the injuries inflicted on the soldiers found in the Towton grave, North Yorkshire. (Bradford University)

Cover image: A fifteenth-century European poll-axe and an armet of the type worn by some soldiers during the Wars of the Roses. (Royal Armouries)

First published 1998 by Sutton Publishing Limited

This paperback edition published 2022

The History Press

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A.W. Boardman, 1998, 2022

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ISBN 978 1 80399 142 9

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For Sheree

There is hardly any without a helmet and none without bows and arrows. Their bows and arrows are thicker and longer than those used by other nations, just as their bodies are stronger than other peoples, for they seem to have hands and arms of iron.

Dominic Mancini
1483

The scarcity of reliable contemporary military evidence for the seventeen major battles of the Wars of the Roses provides few clues to the medieval soldiers battlefield experience. Indeed, because no fully corroborated accounts of such battles exist, one might conclude that so complex a subject is best left well alone. However, some historians have taken the opposite approach, and many books have been written to explain why and how battles were fought during the period. Similarly, such famous battles as Bosworth, fought in 1485, have been constantly revisited by historians to reconstruct what occurred there. But what was the experience of Bosworth like for a medieval soldier in the Wars of the Roses?

When I first wrote this book in 1996, my curiosity was fuelled by several contemporary fifteenth-century documents, in addition to the chronicles, that provided brief glimpses of the individuals who fought in the wars between York and Lancaster. These fleeting references were mainly contained in letters written after battles had taken place, in documents recording an individuals military service, in musters where a soldier is named along with his weapons, and in manuals that describe the fighting methods of the time. Some town and city records also described the soldiers who marched off to war between 1455 and 1487, but clearly, other evidence is needed to make sense of the romantic and chivalric ideology portrayed in some of the chronicles.

As regards the bloodiest battle of the wars at Towton, fought on Palm Sunday 1461, the medieval soldiers experience of warfare is shown to be unique. This experience can be grouped into two main categories that are both physical and mental. The apparent long duration of the fighting in atrocious weather conditions would no doubt have caused acute mental stress and fatigue aggravated, for some men, by continuous campaigning for at least two months. So, what effect did this have on the soldiers thrown into combat? What was the shocking one-sided archery duel like at the battle of Towton? What did soldiers endure in the long no-quarter hand-to-hand fighting and how did they survive the large-scale slaughter after the Lancastrian army broke ranks? These are just a few of the questions analysed in this book, all of which aim to illustrate the human interest beneath the Wars of the Roses and some of its battles.

Of course, there are many more related questions, such as why individuals participated in the conflict, what impact did artillery and handguns have on the medieval battlefield, and what factors influenced recruitment and training in the wars.