Introduction: The King from Bolingbroke
In the autumn of 1399, England held its breath. King Richard II, God’s anointed sovereign, was a prisoner, his authority crumbled to dust. In his place stood his cousin, Henry of Bolingbroke, a man whose identity was deeply woven into the fabric of Lincolnshire. Born at Bolingbroke Castle in the county’s southern wolds, his power base was the immense Duchy of Lancaster, a sprawling network of estates that made him the greatest magnate in the realm, with a formidable presence in Lincolnshire itself. When he deposed Richard and took the throne as King Henry IV, the tremors of this political earthquake were felt not just in the halls of Westminster, but in every town, village, and manor across the land.
For a place like the Barony of Brattleby, a small agricultural community nestled a few miles north of the cathedral city of Lincoln, the crowning of a new dynasty was no abstract affair. It was an event that would redraw the map of local power, elevating some families and utterly destroying others. The story of the fifteenth century—a period of usurpation, glorious foreign victory, catastrophic civil war, and profound social change—is often told through the grand chronicles of kings and battles. But as the memory of these epic conflicts faded from the centre of political life, it did not disappear. It descended into the local archives, fragmented and re-packaged into parish registers, manorial court rolls, heraldic visitations, and the dusty charters of provincial law courts.
This article seeks to uncover that submerged history. By tracing the fortunes of Lincolnshire and its gentry through the turbulent century of Lancastrian and Yorkist rule, we can reconstruct the lost bridge between national event and local experience. It is a work of historical recovery, moving from the dramatic narratives of the chroniclers to the painstaking detail of the local record, demonstrating how the story of a small Lincolnshire barony is inextricably linked to the violent, contested story of the English Crown itself.
The Lancastrian Shadow: A County Remade (c. 1399–1455)
Henry IV’s seizure of the throne was, in part, a revolution of the landed elite. To secure his rule, he needed to reward his followers and neutralise those loyal to the old regime. Nowhere was this process more immediate or visible than in Lincolnshire, a county home to some of Richard II’s most notorious councillors, dubbed his ‘evil counsellors’ or ‘creatures’ by their enemies.
Chief among them was Sir John Bussy of Hougham. As Speaker of the House of Commons, Bussy had been the articulate and ruthless enforcer of Richard’s increasingly absolutist policies. His huge influence and accumulation of land and offices had made him both feared and despised. When Henry of Bolingbroke landed at Ravenspur in July 1399, Bussy’s fate was sealed. Along with the Earl of Wiltshire and Sir Henry Green, he was captured at Bristol Castle, given a summary trial, and promptly beheaded. The chronicler Adam of Usk records their condemnation with grim satisfaction, noting they were "drawn and beheaded, and their heads were placed on London Bridge."
Bussy’s fall was a cataclysm for the Ricardian affinity in Lincolnshire. His vast estates—centred at Hougham but spread across the county—were declared forfeit and absorbed by the Crown. This act, meticulously recorded not in a narrative chronicle but in the forensic prose of the Calendar of Patent Rolls, initiated a seismic shift in local landholding. While the manor of Brattleby itself was not a Bussy possession—held at the time by a patchwork of lesser gentry and ecclesiastical bodies like the nearby Barlings Abbey—its political environment was transformed overnight. The old power was gone, and a new one, centred on the Duchy of Lancaster and its network of retainers, was ascendant.
The new king rewarded his own. Great families with Lancastrian sympathies, like the Beaumonts, the Welles, and the Cromwells, saw their influence swell. Lesser gentry who had backed Bolingbroke were granted stewardships, trusteeships of forfeited lands, and positions on commissions of the peace. A career in local administration became a pathway to prosperity, but it was a path dictated by loyalty to the new dynasty.
The instability of Henry’s reign continued to ripple through the county. When the Percy family, Henry’s erstwhile allies, rose in rebellion in 1403, Lincolnshire was once again a crucial recruiting ground. Men from the county’s towns and villages would have marched west to fight at the bloody Battle of Shrewsbury, some under the banner of the king, others secretly loyal to the charismatic Hotspur. The names of those who received pardons in the aftermath, found in the state papers, provide a ghostly roster of local involvement, a testament to the divided loyalties that fractured gentry society.
Under the martial and widely popular Henry V, these tensions were temporarily suppressed by the unifying call to war against France. The Agincourt campaign of 1415 drew heavily on the manpower of counties like Lincolnshire. Knights and esquires such as Sir Thomas Cumberworth or Sir William Tirwhit, significant local landowners, fulfilled their feudal obligations, leading companies of archers and men-at-arms. Their names and contracts are preserved in the Exchequer records, another archival layer that reveals the mechanics of national policy at a local level. The glory of Agincourt, celebrated in chronicles and song, was built upon the service of thousands of anonymous men from places like Brattleby, whose safe return—or death—would have been the most significant local event of that year.
Magnates, Wool, and Worship: The Fabric of a Fifteenth-Century County
To understand Lincolnshire’s role in the coming civil wars, one must first appreciate its immense wealth and strategic importance. In the fifteenth century, the county was one of England’s richest, its prosperity founded on three pillars: fertile soil, the lucrative wool trade, and the vast estates of the Church. The Lincoln Longwool sheep produced one of the most prized fleeces in Europe, and the port of Boston thrived on its export to the cloth towns of Flanders. This economic might translated directly into political power.
The landscape was dominated by the castles and manor houses of a few great magnate families. At the pinnacle was Ralph, Lord Cromwell, the Lord Treasurer of England under Henry VI. From the 1430s, he poured a fortune into rebuilding his ancestral home at Tattershall, transforming it into a breathtaking statement of power. The great brick tower that still stands today was a marvel of its age, a luxurious residence and a formidable fortress designed to overawe his rivals. The building accounts for Tattershall survive, detailing the thousands of bricks, the wages of masons, and the Flemish tapestries that adorned its walls—a specific, tangible record of one man’s ascendancy.
Other powerful figures included the Beaumonts, Viscounts and later Barons, based at Folkingham Castle; the powerful Welles family, Lords Welles of their seat near Alford; and the ever-present Percy affinity in the north of the county. These magnates acted as the indispensable intermediaries between the Crown and the county. They controlled parliamentary elections, recommended candidates for the shrievalty, and commanded large private retinues, their followers identified by the distinctive liveries they wore.
Below them was a complex and competitive class of gentry—knights and esquires like the Tournays of Caenby (the parish adjacent to Brattleby), the Skipwiths of South Ormsby, and the Dymokes of Scrivelsby. The Dymoke family held a uniquely intimate role through their hereditary office as the King’s Champion, obligated to ride into the coronation banquet in full armour and challenge anyone who disputed the new monarch’s right to the throne. This piece of chivalric theatre, performed by Sir Philip Dymoke at the coronation of Henry VI, was a powerful symbol of the reciprocal bond between the Crown and its provincial elite.
The manor of Brattleby existed within this intricate web of lordship. Its tenants would have paid their rents to the lord of the manor—at this time passing through the hands of families like the Thorleys—and their tithes to the Church. Their lives were governed by the agricultural calendar, but their security depended on the stability of the wider polity. When magnates feuded, as Cromwell and William de la Pole, Duke of Suffolk, did, the shockwaves disrupted local justice and administration. A dispute over land or status between two local gentlemen could easily escalate as each sought the backing of a powerful patron, drawing them into the vortex of national factionalism. The memory of this social structure is not in a single narrative, but in the scattered evidence of property deeds (Feet of Fines), marriage settlements, and litigation records in the Court of Common Pleas, which show the gentry constantly jostling for advantage.
'Losecoat Field': A Lincolnshire Rebellion in the Wars of the Roses
The simmering rivalries of the 1440s and the catastrophic loss of English territory in France finally led to the collapse of Lancastrian authority and the outbreak of the Wars of the Roses in 1455. For fifteen years, Lincolnshire was largely a recruiting ground for distant battles, its magnates and gentry choosing sides based on a complex calculus of old loyalties, new opportunities, and deep-seated local rivalries. The Beaumonts were staunchly Lancastrian—Viscount Beaumont died beside Henry VI at the Battle of Northampton in 1460. Lord Cromwell, ever the politician, navigated a more ambiguous path, while many of the gentry waited to see which way the wind would blow.
The decisive moment for Lincolnshire arrived in the spring of 1470. King Edward IV, the Yorkist monarch who had seized the throne in 1461, was facing a new threat from his own over-mighty subject, the Earl of Warwick, ‘the Kingmaker’. Warwick, in alliance with the king’s treacherous brother, George, Duke of Clarence, began fomenting unrest across the country. In Lincolnshire, he found a willing instrument in the Welles family.
The rebellion’s catalyst was a local feud. Sir Thomas Burgh of Gainsborough, a staunch Yorkist and Master of the King's Horse, was a rival of the Lancastrian-leaning Sir Robert Welles, son of Lord Welles. When a dispute between the two families erupted, Warwick and Clarence manipulated Sir Robert into raising a rebellion under the guise of protesting against Burgh. The rebels gathered a large force, reputedly numbering 30,000, and marched on Stamford, crying "A Warwick! A Clarence!"
Edward IV’s response was a model of speed and ruthlessness. He marched north at incredible pace, taking the captive Lord Welles with him. Outside Lincoln, he received intelligence that Sir Robert Welles’s army was advancing towards him near Empingham. On 12 March 1470, Edward deployed his powerful artillery. The first cannonade was enough to shatter the rebel army’s morale. As the royal vanguard charged, the Lincolnshire rebels broke and fled in panic. In their haste to escape, many cast off the liveried coats that identified them as followers of Warwick and Welles, giving the battle its enduring and memorable name: the Battle of Losecoat Field.
This name is a perfect example of how folk memory crystallises around a historical event. While the official account in the chronicles, such as the Historie of the Arrivall of Edward IV, focuses on the king's masterful victory and the traitors' defeat, the local name preserves a more visceral, human detail—the terror of the routed soldiers.
The aftermath was brutal. Sir Robert Welles and his captain, Sir Thomas de la Launde, were captured and summarily executed on the battlefield. Lord Welles had been executed just before the engagement. The king then moved to Lincoln, where more rebels were tried and put to death. The Patent Rolls and Parliamentary Rolls for 1470 are filled with the consequences: the sweeping attainders passed against the Welles family, the seizure of their lands, and the granting of those properties to loyal Yorkists like Sir Thomas Burgh. The rebellion, born of a local feud and national conspiracy, ended with a reconfiguration of the Lincolnshire gentry. Power, once again, was being redistributed by force, the process meticulously documented in the legal and financial records of the state, the true, unvarnished memory of the conflict's local cost.
The Recovery of Memory: From Parchment to Parish History
With the final Yorkist victory in 1471 and the subsequent establishment of the Tudor dynasty in 1485, the era of open civil war came to an end. The grand, violent struggles for the Crown receded from the forefront of English life. As the user's brief so astutely observes, a "silent mutation" began to occur. The memories of noble power, of rebellion and allegiance, did not vanish but were preserved in new forms, sinking from the national chronicle into the local archive.
The history of the fifteenth century in Lincolnshire was now encased in parchment. The stories of the fall of Bussy, the rise of Cromwell, and the ruin of Welles were locked away in:
1. Tenurial Records: The Inquisitions Post Mortem, legal inquiries conducted after the death of a major landowner, provide a detailed snapshot of their holdings. Following the Battle of Losecoat Field, the Inquisition for Lord Welles details his vast manors, now in the king's hands. These documents trace the precise impact of political fortune on the landscape. 2. Legal and Financial Archives: The Patent Rolls record the king's grants of land and office, showing how Edward IV rewarded his supporters. The Plea Rolls of royal courts contain the messy details of local disputes, often the precursors to wider violence. 3. Heraldic Visitations: Beginning in the Tudor period, the royal heralds conducted systematic ‘visitations’ of counties to record the pedigrees and coats of arms of the gentry. The Visitation of Lincolnshire of 1562-4 is a fascinating document. In it, families like the Tournays of Caenby or the Dymokes of Scrivelsby laid out their lineage, implicitly affirming their ancient status and survival through the turmoil. These pedigrees were a form of social memory, a way of re-asserting legitimacy in a more stable age.
It was the antiquarians of the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries who began the patient work of recovery. Men like the great William Camden, in his Britannia, and later, local historians, delved into these very archives. They walked the fields of battle, read the inscriptions on church tombs, and scrutinised the charters stored in cathedral libraries and muniment rooms. They pieced together the genealogies of the great families and traced the ownership of manors like Brattleby. They were the first to reconstruct the lost bridge between the chronicle and the charter, transforming the dry data of the archives back into a narrative of human ambition, loyalty, and loss. They recognised that the memory of the nobility had not died, but had been "repackaged" for a new era, one more concerned with property, lineage, and local standing than with the fate of kings.
Conclusion: The Mosaic of History
The journey from 1400 to the cusp of the Tudor age was, for Lincolnshire, a period of profound transformation. The county that saw its native son, Henry of Bolingbroke, seize the throne also witnessed the bloody consequences of that act play out in its own fields a generation later at Losecoat Field. The story of the Barony of Brattleby during this century is not one of a single noble family guiding its destiny, but of a community embedded in a landscape of shifting power, subject to the ambitions of distant magnates and the violent interventions of the Crown.
To understand this past is to embrace the methodology of the archive. The grand narrative of the Wars of the Roses only tells half the story. The other half lies in the details: in the record of Sir John Bussy’s forfeited lands, in the building accounts of Tattershall Castle, in the names on a pardon roll after Shrewsbury, and in the attainder that stripped the Welles family of their possessions. These are not legends or cheap mythology; they are the verifiable facts from which true history is built. It is by piecing together this mosaic of evidence—charter by charter, roll by roll—that we can hear the quieter, more fragmented, but no less dramatic, story of how England’s great dynastic struggle was lived and remembered in the parishes and manors of a county like Lincolnshire.
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Sources & Further Reading
Primary Sources:
Calendar of the Patent Rolls Preserved in the Public Record Office: Henry IV, Henry VI, Edward IV. (H.M. Stationery Office). Crucial for tracing land grants, pardons, and commissions. Calendar of Inquisitions Post Mortem and Other Analogous Documents. (H.M. Stationery Office). Details the landholdings of major individuals upon their death or attainder. Feudal Aids, A.D. 1284-1431, Vol. III. (1904). Provides snapshots of landholding in Lincolnshire at specific dates. The Crowland Chronicle Continuations: 1459-1486, edited by Nicholas Pronay and John Cox (Richard III and Yorkist History Trust, 1986). A vital contemporary narrative, likely written by someone with close knowledge of Edward IV's court. Historie of the Arrivall of Edward IV. in England and the Finall Recouerye of His Kingdomes from Henry VI. A.D. M.CCCC.LXXI, edited by John Bruce (Camden Society, 1838). The official Yorkist account of the 1470-71 campaign. Usk, Adam of. The Chronicle of Adam Usk, 1377-1421, edited and translated by C. Given-Wilson (Clarendon Press, 1997).
Secondary Sources:
Bean, J.M.W. From Lord to Patron: Lordship in Late Medieval England (University of Pennsylvania Press, 1989). Gillingham, John. The Wars of the Roses: Peace and Conflict in Fifteenth-Century England (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1981). Goodman, Anthony. The Wars of the Roses: Military Activity and English Society, 1452-97 (Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1981). Hicks, Michael. The Wars of the Roses (Yale University Press, 2010). A standard modern overview. Hicks, Michael. Who's Who in Late Medieval England, 1272-1485 (Shepheard-Walwyn, 1991). Maddison, A. R. (ed.). Lincolnshire Pedigrees, Vol. I-IV (Harleian Society, 1902-1906). Based on the Heraldic Visitations. Pollard, A.J. The Wars of the Roses (Palgrave Macmillan, 3rd ed., 2013). Ross, Charles. Edward IV (Yale University Press, 1997). The definitive biography. Victoria County History: A History of the County of Lincoln*, Vol. II (1906). While coverage for individual parishes like Brattleby is limited in older volumes, it provides essential context on the county’s religious houses and economy.