“The medieval soldier’s experience in the Wars of the Roses is unique and not what we are led to believe in history books.”

By Andrew Boardman

THE SCARCITY OF reliable contemporary military evidence for the 17 major battles of the Wars of the Roses provides few clues to the medieval soldiers’ battlefield experience.

Indeed, because no fully corroborated accounts of these battles exist, one might conclude that so complex a subject is best left well alone. However, several contemporary 15th-century documents, in addition to the chronicles, provide brief glimpses of the men who fought in the wars between York and Lancaster, and this paints a picture of the medieval soldier that is not stereotyped.

These fleeting references are contained in letters written after battles had taken place, in documents recording a soldier’s service, in musters where a recruit is named along with his weapons, and in military manuals that describe fighting methods. Some town and city records also described the men who marched off to war between 1455 and 1487, but clearly, other evidence is needed to cut through the romantic and chivalric ideology portrayed in the chronicles. Using a multi-disciplined approach, therefore, what emerges is that the medieval soldier’s experience in the Wars of the Roses is unique and not what we are led to believe in history books.

Modern research into arms and armour of the period helps us to prove or disprove various theories regarding the soldier’s battlefield experience. How a man was equipped for battle tells us much about how he fought, while surviving musters record how a soldier was recruited and what he wore in combat.

The English climate, especially the unseasonable and abrupt weather changes during some campaigns, also played a part in how soldiers moved around the country.

And how men were supplied, paid and billeted explains their physical, logistical and willingness to fight when armies came face to face.

So, what effect did all this have on the soldiers thrown into combat at famous battles like St. Albans, Towton, Barnet, Tewkesbury and Bosworth? Of course, there are numerous political questions about why individuals participated in the wars. Still, contemporary records, other than the chronicles, prove that civil warfare, blood feuding and provincial recruitment practices placed constraints on all those who fought in the wars.

The impact of new technology such as artillery and handguns on medieval soldiers also meant that the Wars of the Roses was a watershed for most commanders, and this led to new ways of waging war that proved ‘unchivalrous’ and contrary to experiences in the Hundred Years War with France.

It is probably no accident that many contemporary chroniclers rarely mention a soldier’s experience, except collectively or as part of an over-estimated strength or casualties after battles were over. More than likely, it was common knowledge how men pursued war, so why describe a battle in detail? However, according to some more astute contemporaries, English soldiers were not typical medieval warriors. Records also described them as ill-equipped, untrained and untrustworthy individuals. For example, soldiers in the Wars of the Roses had different reasons for taking up arms, and some gentry managed to avoid battles altogether. For others, civil war and local feuding heightened their psychology of violence and willingness to commit battlefield atrocities. Even the physical appearance of soldiers was different according to foreign visitors to England. The Italian writer Dominic Mancini made these observations about the Northern and Welsh levies that had been recruited into Yorkist ranks by Richard Duke of Gloucester and the Duke of Buckingham in 1483:

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. The range of their bows is no less than that of our arbalests [crossbows] [and] there hangs by the side of each a sword no less long than ours, but heavy and thick as well. The sword is always accompanied by an iron shield…they do not wear any metal armour on their breast nor on any other part of their body, except for the better sort who have breastplates and suits of armour. Indeed, the common soldiery have more comfortable tunics that reach down below the loins and are stuffed with tow [cotton] or some other material. They say that the softer the tunics, the better they withstand the blows of arrows and swords, and besides that, in summer they are lighter and in winter more serviceable than iron.

In the absence of any other evidence in contemporary letters or chronicles, this description of the Wars of the Roses soldier has become a well-used standard. All the footmen described by Mancini possessed a helmet, a bow and arrow, a sword and buckler and a padded jack. But according to other musters, this was not typical of all soldiers in the wars, and some recruits were deficient in arms and armour.

Most contemporary chronicles were written by monastics and members of the clergy who were, quite naturally, more interested and concerned with matters having a direct bearing on their own lives, such as the fabric and antiquities of their church, rather than in the details of medieval warfare. Other chroniclers, mainly laymen and those with battlefield experience, were intensely interested in warfare but wrote in the very best chivalric tradition of the period, applying a veneer of heroism or romance to the bloodbaths they described. Writers, like the famous and habitually imprisoned Sir Thomas Malory (1415-71), described fighting of the period in detail, and in his classic Morte D’arthur, he even explains how a soldier witnessed a battlefield littered with enormous casualties like Towton:

[He] saw and harkened by the moonlight how that pillagers and robbers were come into the field to pill and to rob many a full noble knight of his brooches and beads and of many a good ring and many a rich jewel. And those that were not dead, they slew them for their harness [armour] and their riches.

According to P.J.C. Field, Malory likely witnessed a Wars of the Roses battle and its aftermath. However, some narratives, other than romantic literature, betray the overriding influence of propaganda, which is hardly surprising given the political nature of the conflict. Foreign writers also showed bias or favouritism, chiefly to please their patrons, while later Tudor chroniclers expressed extreme prejudice towards the Yorkist regime, and it is they that are traditionally held responsible for the most detailed information about the Wars of the Roses that we rely on today.

However, by analyzing other sources, it is possible to present a much clearer picture of how the medieval soldier dealt with the civil wars. How he was recruited, what problems he faced on the march, and how he was supplied and billeted provide more down-to-earth clues about his army life. Some accounts recorded how his superiors led him, and what he wore on the march and for protection in battle can be reconstructed from surviving armour, weaponry and equipment musters. These are all crucial factors when judging his effectiveness in combat, and what emerges from all the evidence is that the medieval experience of soldiering, stripped of all its romantic imagery and propaganda, was quite unique in the Wars of the Roses.

So, what was it like to fight in a medieval battle? Thankfully, we can never know with any certainty. However, violence and an uncertain future changed some men’s lives forever, and their feelings are alluded to in contemporary records. It is tempting for modern historians to assume that, since medieval man lived in a more brutal age, he was in some way numbed by violence. But this opinion is simply not true. Various attainder documents state the seriousness of local and national rebellion, and contemporaries discussed the injuries that men suffered in battle, the danger of wounds becoming infected after the event, the loss of horses and equipment and the deprivation caused by warfare are all apparent in personal letters like those of the Pastons of Norfolk:

Mother, I recommend me to you, letting you know that, blessed be God, my brother John is alive and fareth well, and in no peril of death. Nevertheless, he is hurt with an arrow in his right arm, beneath the elbow; and I have sent him a surgeon that has dressed him, and he tells me that he trusteth that he shall be all whole within a right short time.

John Paston wrote the above note four days after the Battle of Barnet in 1471, and it shows how important it was to be on the winning side during the Wars of the Roses. But how did the threat of attainder and possible execution for treason, or previous knowledge of combat and the type of injuries suffered, affect the medieval soldier? How did some men escape attainder after a battle and later return to fight on the opposite side? Did the common soldier continue fighting indefinitely, or could he avoid participating in the carnage on the battlefield? In late April 1471, the injured John Paston was still on the run from the Yorkists, and his mental state proves that defeated soldiers had worries long after the fighting ended, especially if they were in hiding:

Mother I beseech you, send me money…and send me some in as hasty wise as is possible…for now I have neither meat, drink, clothes, leechcraft [medicine], nor money but upon borrowing; and I have tested my friends so [much] that they begin to fail me now [I am] in the greatest need that ever I was in.

Paston was at breaking point, it seems. Therefore, the subject of the Wars of the Roses soldier cannot be taken in isolation, given that the trauma of war was far-reaching. Those who fought were part of a continuously evolving process that affected man and master in more ways than we can ever imagine, and this contractual service had its roots in medieval feudalism.

‘Bastard’ feudalism, for example, was a system of recruitment and service that controlled social and military administration during the wars. Written indentures of soldiers still survive and attest to a type of servitude that had all the characteristics of modern gangsterism. The system had been present in virtually the same form for a long time before the conflict began, and it would persist, in a different guise, long after the wars ended in 1487. Therefore, we may be forgiven for thinking it was easy to wipe clean the stain of affiliation to a particular lord or faction in the wars when the consequences of non-committal were so serious and life-threatening.

As for other recruitment methods, the fact that all men between the ages of 16 and 60 owed allegiance to their rightful king by law, regardless of whom they served as a local superior, gives us reason to question the haphazard nature of recruitment. Edward I’s Statute of Winchester (1285) called for all able-bodied men to serve for 40 days a year, and commissioners were appointed to muster men from both towns and shires for military duty. The appointed commissioners, usually knights and sometimes men from the king’s household, would inspect and record the state of military readiness twice yearly in such districts to prevent fraud or deception. This continued to be the case in the Wars of the Roses with the added complication that commissions could be employed by opposing kings.

As for the weapons used in the conflict and the formations and basic tactics adopted by the armies, these were firmly rooted in the Hundred Years War with France. However, as the Wars of the Roses progressed and some methods of warfare changed, the knight or foot soldier had to adapt. Fighting on foot was one way to minimize casualties among the nobility, but this is debatable and clearly had its drawbacks when armies were defeated. The infantryman was always vulnerable to injury despite his weapons and equipment. Mancini no doubt described the men he saw in London in 1483 and that most were generally well-equipped with the warbow as their primary weapon. No plate armour was worn on their bodies, except for the head, and although most men owned the typical protective jack, the amount of protection this gave the wearer in close-quarter combat is questionable. As discussed, the plate armour of the man-at-arms and his heavier weapons gave him a marked superiority over the common footman, not to mention a longer life expectancy on the battlefield, especially when tons of war arrows were falling in their thousands.

There is no doubt that archers were, as Philippe de Commines put it, “the chiefest strength of an army in battle.” If they could shoot and achieve the required distance, they need not be great masters of their art or be veterans of other battles. Veteran archers, after all, knew that they would be receiving arrows back across the ‘no man’s land’ of the battlefield, and this explains the viewpoint of Commines on the usefulness, or otherwise, of raw troops during this testing battle of wills:

I would have them [the archers] indifferently mounted, that they may not be afraid of losing their horses, or rather that they had none at all; and for one day it is better to have raw soldiers that have never been in any action, than those that have been trained up in the wars; and in this I am of the same opinion with the English, who, without dispute, are the best archers in the world.

According to most musters, there were regional differences in armoured protection, weapons and equipment in England during the wars. For instance, where did the average billman fit into this equation, as Mancini’s description above suggests that only archers were present in Gloucester and Buckingham’s army? Were other foot soldiers recruited in 1483 who carried poll-arms such as the bill, halberd and the glaive? Certainly, the number of soldiers who used the warbow as their primary weapon varied regionally and was sometimes deficient in the Wars of the Roses.

Therefore, what type of foot soldier existed in the wars, and was his equipment limited? Who paid for his weapons and defensive equipment, and why was he sometimes unarmed? How widely was the padded jack and plate armour used in the wars? And how many ordinary soldiers wore livery coats and badges – the early form of military uniform?

The issue of identification on the battlefield, when both sides had the same equipment and wore the same clothing, is an important factor to consider for obvious reasons. But it is clear from financial accounts and some chronicles that livery coats were essential. Mistakes (and cases of mistaken identity) were made on the battlefield, and soldiers were not homogeneous in what they wore, their equipment, or how well they were trained. In fact, most men were not trained or fought together, albeit practice with the warbow was still encouraged at village butts in preference to football, tennis and other games.

What emerges from this study of the Wars of the Roses soldier is that the men who chose, or were pressured, to fight by their superiors were in no way standard and the ways they were recruited, supplied and fought on the battlefield varied. In effect, they were widely diverse individuals and sometimes badly led. The knights and men at arms had everything to lose and gain from warfare, but ordinary soldiers were the real casualties of war, as this eyewitness of men returning from the battle of Barnet recorded:

And with them [after the battle] many of their followers were wounded, mostly in the face and lower half of the body, a very pitiable sight. May God preserve them…those who set out with good horses and sound bodies returned home with sorry nags and bandaged faces, some without noses etc. and preferred to stay indoors. May God have pity at this wretched spectacle, for it is said that there had been no fiercer battle in England for the last 100 years than happened last Easter as I have described. 

Andrew Boardman is the author of the upcoming book The Medieval Soldier in the Wars of the Roses (coming in October, 2022 from the History Press.) His previous works include Towton 1461: The Anatomy of a Battle and The First Battle of St Albans. He has been a consultant on many TV documentary series for the BBC, Channel 4, Sky One and Yesterday Channel. He lives in Yorkshire.