The First Battle of St Albans, fought on 22nd May 1455, is traditionally cited as the bloody overture to the Wars of the Roses. On that spring day, the armed retinues of Richard, Duke of York, and his Neville allies clashed with the king’s men in the streets of a Hertfordshire town. The fighting was brief but brutal, resulting in the deaths of prominent Lancastrian nobles, including the Duke of Somerset, and the capture of King Henry VI himself. To the contemporary observer, stunned by the spectacle of Englishmen butchering one another in the shadow-sm of their sovereign, the event may have seemed a shocking and unprecedented collapse of political order.
Yet, for the historian, the confrontation at St Albans was not a beginning but a culmination. The Wars of the Roses were not a sudden eruption of violence but the latest, and perhaps most destructive, manifestation of deeply entrenched patterns of conflict that had defined English political life for centuries. The fundamental questions at stake in 1455—the limits of royal authority, the rights and responsibilities of the great magnates, the consequences of a weak or failed king, and the ever-present threat of a disputed succession—were the very same questions that had echoed through the halls of power since the Norman Conquest. From the fields of Lincolnshire to the signing of charters at Runnymede, the deposition of kings, and the rise of "over-mighty subjects," the path to St Albans was paved with historical precedent. Examining these earlier conflicts reveals that the Wars of the Roses were less a new phenomenon than a tragic repetition of history, a violent re-enactment of dramas played out by previous generations of kings and barons.
The Norman Settlement: Land, Loyalty, and Latent Rebellion
The foundational pattern of Anglo-Norman political life was forged in the aftermath of the Battle of Hastings in 1066. William the Conqueror’s victory was not merely a change of dynasty but a revolutionary upheaval in land tenure and power. The old Anglo-Saxon aristocracy was systematically dispossessed, its lands parcelled out among William’s continental followers. This new reality is starkly recorded in the Domesday Book of 1086, a monumental survey of a conquered kingdom.
In Lincolnshire, the transformation was absolute. The entry for Brattleby ("Broclenebi") reveals this shift in microcosm. Before the Conquest, the manor was held by an Anglo-Scandinavian thegn, Ulf Fenman. By 1086, its primary lord was the powerful Abbot of Peterborough, a key Norman ecclesiastical magnate, holding it directly from the king. The Domesday entry details a working estate—ploughlands, meadow, a mill—but its true significance lies in its political context. This land was not owned outright; it was held in fee from the king in exchange for loyalty and, crucially, military service.
This feudal contract created a new class of tenants-in-chief, the barons, whose power and status were derived directly from the Crown. Yet, this very system planted the seeds of future conflict. A king who granted vast estates to his followers to ensure their loyalty also armed them with the resources to defy him. The baronage was at once the primary support of the monarchy and its most potent potential threat. The great magnates of the Norman era, endowed with sprawling honours and numerous knightly retainers, possessed a quasi-regal power in their own localities. When the central authority of the Crown faltered, these men were positioned to fill the vacuum, pursuing their own interests with the military force the king himself had enabled them to command. This inherent tension between royal authority and baronial power became the central dynamic of medieval English politics, a legacy the magnates of the 15th century inherited.
The Anarchy: A Prelude in Succession and Civil War
The first catastrophic breakdown of the Anglo-Norman settlement occurred during the period known as the Anarchy (1135–1154). The conflict arose from a classic succession crisis, a direct precursor to the dynastic struggle between Lancaster and York. King Henry I, William the Conqueror’s ruthlessly efficient son, had lost his only legitimate male heir, William Adelin, in the White Ship disaster of 1120. In an unprecedented move, Henry compelled his barons to swear an oath to accept his daughter, the Empress Matilda, as his successor.
Upon Henry’s death in 1135, however, the barons’ oaths proved worthless. Citing the unsuitability of a female ruler and manipulated by political expediency, many transferred their allegiance to Henry’s nephew, Stephen of Blois, who swiftly seized the throne. What followed was nearly two decades of devastating civil war, as Matilda and her partisans fought to reclaim her inheritance.
Lincolnshire became a central theatre of this war. The county was contested between the powerful half-brothers Ranulf de Gernon, Earl of Chester (supporting Matilda), and William de Roumare, Earl of Lincoln (initially supporting Stephen). The conflict reached its apex at the First Battle of Lincoln on 2nd February 1141. In a dramatic reversal of fortune, the Angevin forces led by Ranulf of Chester and Robert, Earl of Gloucester (Matilda’s illegitimate half-brother), defeated and captured King Stephen himself. The Gesta Stephani, a contemporary chronicle, vividly describes the king fighting "like a lion" on foot with his sword and then a Danish axe after his horse was killed, before finally being overwhelmed and taken.
For nine months, Matilda was "Lady of the English," but her arrogance alienated her potential allies, and she was soon driven from London. The war descended into a stalemate, characterized by the chroniclers’ laments of a land where "Christ and his saints slept." Barons built unlicensed "adulterine" castles, terrorised the local populace, and switched allegiances as it suited them. The Anarchy provided a terrifying lesson in what happened when the Crown was contested and royal authority collapsed. It demonstrated that a disputed succession could plunge the entire kingdom into chaos, empowering nobles to wage private wars and carve out regional fiefdoms. The memory of this period, when England had two rival monarchs, powerfully informed the fears and ambitions of the 15th-century nobility. Richard of York’s claim against the enfeebled Henry VI was, in essence, a re-run of the Matilda-Stephen dynamic: a powerful claimant with a plausible (if debatable) hereditary right challenging a consecrated but ineffective king.
King John, Magna Carta, and the Legitimisation of Baronial Resistance
If the Anarchy demonstrated the dangers of a weak Crown, the reign of King John (1199–1216) showed the perils of an overbearing one. John, the youngest son of Henry II, inherited his father’s administrative genius but none of his political acumen. His reign was a catalogue of disasters: the loss of the duchy of Normandy in 1204, a protracted and costly dispute with the papacy, and, above all, a fiscal policy that squeezed his barons with unprecedented and arbitrary financial demands. John used his feudal rights not as tools of governance but as instruments of extortion, and his justice was seen as capricious and vindictive.
By 1215, a significant portion of the baronage was in open rebellion. This was not merely a power grab but a movement grounded in a specific political ideology: the belief that the king himself was subject to the law and custom of the realm. This principle was enshrined in the document they forced John to seal at Runnymede on 15th June 1215: Magna Carta, the Great Charter.
Lincolnshire was at the heart of this constitutional drama. The intellectual architect of the charter, Stephen Langton, Archbishop of Canterbury, was a Lincolnshire native. When the charter was issued, original copies were dispatched to the shires, and the city of Lincoln was one of the few recipients whose copy has survived to this day, still preserved in its cathedral. The charter’s most famous clauses, such as Clause 39 promising that "No free man shall be seized or imprisoned...except by the lawful judgment of his equals or by the law of the land," were a direct rebuke to John’s arbitrary rule.
Most radical, however, was the infamous "security clause," Clause 61. It established a council of twenty-five barons with the authority to "distrain and distress" the king by seizing his castles and lands if he failed to adhere to the charter. This clause effectively legalised rebellion, providing a constitutional framework for armed resistance against a tyrannical monarch. Although it was repudiated almost immediately, the precedent it set was seismic. It provided a theoretical justification for future generations of barons who sought to "correct" or control a wayward king. The First Barons’ War that followed Magna Carta saw another major battle at Lincoln. On 20th May 1217, royalist forces led by the venerable William Marshal, regent for the young Henry III, decisively defeated the rebel barons and their French allies in the aptly named Second Battle of Lincoln, fought in the city's narrow, winding streets. This victory secured the Plantagenet throne, but the principles of 1215 endured.
The Ultimate Sanction: The Depositions of Edward II and Richard II
The 14th century escalated the pattern of conflict to its logical and most extreme conclusion: the deposition of an anointed king. The precedent set by Magna Carta’s security clause—that a king could be constrained by his subjects—was taken a step further in the reigns of two deeply flawed monarchs.
Edward II (r. 1307–1327) proved incapable of ruling effectively. His disastrous favouritism, first for Piers Gaveston and later for the Despenser family, alienated the entire political community. He was militarily inept, suffering a humiliating defeat to the Scots at Bannockburn in 1314. The barons, led by his cousin Thomas of Lancaster, repeatedly attempted to impose councils and ordinances upon him, echoing the spirit of 1215. Ultimately, the crisis was resolved by an internal coup. In 1326, Edward’s estranged wife, Isabella of France, and her lover, Roger Mortimer, invaded England. The king’s regime collapsed without support. In January 1327, Parliament was convened and formally deposed Edward II, declaring him unfit to rule and proclaiming his young son king as Edward III. The deposed king was later brutally murdered at Berkeley Castle.
A similar drama unfolded at the end of the century. Richard II (r. 1377–1399) began his reign as a boy-king who bravely faced down the Peasants’ Revolt, but he matured into an autocrat with a lofty conception of his own divine authority. His tyrannical behaviour and vendetta against the nobles who had opposed him (the Lords Appellant) culminated in 1399 when he disinherited his exiled cousin, Henry Bolingbroke, Duke of Lancaster. This was a fatal error. Bolingbroke, a man with vast estates and influence, particularly in Lincolnshire where the Duchy of Lancaster was the dominant landowner, returned to England to reclaim his inheritance. His cause quickly morphed into a bid for the throne itself. With Richard II isolated and friendless, Bolingbroke forced his abdication and had himself crowned King Henry IV.
These two depositions shattered the mystique of indefeasible kingship. They established the terrifying precedent that an anointed monarch who failed in his duties or alienated the magnates could be forcibly removed and replaced. Crucially, the deposition of Richard II created the very dynastic schism that would ignite the Wars of the Roses. While Henry IV claimed the throne, the legitimate line of succession, by strict primogeniture, arguably lay with the Mortimer family, descendants of Edward III’s second surviving son. This was the claim that would eventually pass to Richard, Duke of York, legitimising his challenge to Henry IV’s grandson, the hapless Henry VI.
The Wars of the Roses: An Old Conflict in New Guise
Viewed against this long backdrop of recurring conflict, the events of 1455–1487 lose their sense of novelty. The Wars of the Roses emerge as a perfect storm, where all the historical patterns of discord converged at once.
A Weak King and Disputed Succession: Henry VI was a pious but mentally fragile ruler, prone to catatonic stupors. His incapacity created a power vacuum reminiscent of the Anarchy. Like Stephen, he was a consecrated king, but his weakness invited challenge from a powerful nobleman with a strong rival claim—Richard of York, heir to the Mortimer line established by Richard II’s deposition. Failed Governance and Over-Mighty Subjects: The English government under Henry VI was corrupt, faction-ridden, and bankrupt. Its authority was fatally undermined by the humiliating loss of English possessions in France, an echo of King John’s failures. With the king unable to impose order, "over-mighty subjects" like York and the Earl of Warwick engaged in private wars and political maneuvering, just as the barons had done during the Anarchy. The Percy-Neville feud in the north was a private war that became a national one. The Baronial Impulse to 'Correct' the King: Richard of York’s initial actions were not those of a usurper, but of a traditional baronial reformer. He presented himself as the chief counselor of the realm, seeking to purge the court of "evil advisors" (primarily the Duke of Somerset) and restore good governance, much as the authors of Magna Carta or the Lords Appellant had done. He sought the office of Lord Protector, a position that gave him legal authority to rule in the king’s name. It was only when this constitutional path was blocked that he, like his predecessors, resorted to force at St Albans. Local Loyalties and National Conflict: The war was fought by the great magnates and their affinities—the networks of gentry, retainers, and tenants who owed them loyalty. A man’s allegiance was often determined not by abstract loyalty to Lancaster or York, but by his relationship to his local lord. In Lincolnshire, powerful families like the Beaumonts and the Welles were staunch Lancastrians, while others gravitated towards the Yorkist sphere of influence. This dynamic played out violently in the county at the Battle of Losecoat Field near Stamford in 1470. A local uprising led by Sir Robert Welles against Edward IV was ruthlessly crushed, with the fleeing rebels supposedly shedding their coats of livery to avoid identification, giving the battle its name. For the tenants of a manor like Brattleby, held for centuries by great lords, the call to arms by their master would have been almost impossible to refuse, pulling them into a national conflict whether they wished it or not.
Conclusion: The Unlearned Lesson
The Wars of the Roses were, therefore, the final, agonising spasm of a political system riddled with structural weaknesses that had been exposed time and again for four hundred years. The fundamental tension between a centralised monarchy and a powerful, landed aristocracy had never been resolved. Each crisis—the Anarchy, the Barons' Wars, the depositions of Edward II and Richard II—served not as a final resolution, but as another precedent for the next generation to follow. The nobles who took up arms in 1455 were acting within a well-established political grammar of resistance, reform, and, if necessary, rebellion.
They fought over the same issues—control of the king’s council, justice, patronage, and land—that had animated Simon de Montfort and the Lords Appellant. They justified their actions with arguments about good governance and the commonweal that echoed the language of Magna Carta. And when politics failed, they resorted to the ultimate sanction of dynastic change, a path cleared by the depositions of 1327 and 1399. The tragedy of the Wars of the Roses was not its novelty, but its predictability. It was the catastrophic consequence of a political community that had failed to learn the lessons of its own violent history, doomed to repeat a devastating pattern of conflict until the Tudor dynasty that emerged from the wreckage forged a new kind of monarchy, determined, at last, to break the cycle.
Sources & Further Reading
Primary Sources:
Domesday Book: A Complete Translation. (London: Penguin, 2003). (See Lincolnshire, 12, 1 for the Brattleby entry under Peterborough Abbey). Holt, J. C., ed. Magna Carta. 3rd Edition. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015). Gesta Stephani (The Deeds of Stephen), ed. and trans. by K. R. Potter. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976). Chronicles of the Reigns of Stephen, Henry II, and Richard I, ed. by Richard Howlett. Rolls Series. (London, 1884–89). * The National Archives, Kew. Documents such as the Patent Rolls and Close Rolls for the relevant reigns offer specific grants and orders.
Secondary Sources:
Carpenter, David. The Struggle for Mastery: Britain, 1066-1284. (London: Penguin, 2004). Castor, Helen. She-Wolves: The Women Who Ruled England Before Elizabeth. (London: Faber & Faber, 2010). [Excellent on the Anarchy and Isabella of France]. Goodman, Anthony. The Wars of the Roses: Military Activity and English Society, 1452-97. (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1981). Hicks, Michael. The Wars of the Roses. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010). Hill, Sir Francis. Medieval Lincoln. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1948). [Invaluable for the local Lincolnshire context, including the battles]. Holt, J.C. The Northerners: A Study in the Reign of King John. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1961). Jones, Dan. The Plantagenets: The Kings Who Made England. (London: William Collins, 2012). Jones, Dan. The Hollow Crown: The Wars of the Roses and the Rise of the Tudors. (London: Faber & Faber, 2014). Morris, Marc. The Norman Conquest. (London: Windmill Books, 2013). Morris, Marc. King John: Treachery, Tyranny and the Road to Magna Carta. (London: Hutchinson, 2015). Pollard, A. J. The Wars of the Roses. 3rd Edition. (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013). Ross, Charles. The Wars of the Roses: A Concise History. (London: Thames & Hudson, 1976). Victoria County History: A History of the County of Lincoln*, Vol. 2, ed. by William Page. (London, 1906).