Because of a lack of political talent among its leaders, the English Church took little part in the WARS OF THE ROSES, and few bishops were strong or consistent advocates for either the house of LANCASTER or the house of YORK. Thus, the various changes in dynasty brought the church neither great harm nor great benefit. Also, the brief and intermittent nature of civil war campaigns caused the church to suffer little material damage during the conflict.

Because HENRY VI made bishops of the pious and scholarly men who served him as confessors and spiritual advisors, the outbreak of civil war in 1459 found his government deficient in the practical, politically experienced bishops who had formed the core of previous royal administrations. Thomas BOURCHIER, the archbishop of Canterbury, had been appointed during the FIRST PROTECTORATE of Richard PLANTAGENET, duke of York, and supported the Yorkists in 1460 after having accommodated both sides during the 1450s.William Booth, archbishop of York, and his brother Lawrence BOOTH, bishop of Durham, were Lancastrians, but neither gave sufficient support to Henry's cause to suffer any consequences when EDWARD IV won the throne in 1461, although Lawrence was suspended briefly from office in 1462 for his Lancastrian sympathies. The most vigorous ecclesiastical involvement in the conflict in 1459-1461 was by a foreign bishop, Francesco Coppini, bishop of Terni, who used his position as papal legate to actively promote the Yorkist cause. Although some historians have argued that the church demanded redress of its grievances in return for sanctioning the Yorkist usurpation in 1461, the bishops made few complaints, Edward IV granted few concessions, and the house of York based its claim to the Crown on hereditary right, thus avoiding any need for the church to legitimize the family's position.

In 1470-1471, the most political bishop was George NEVILLE, archbishop of York, who abandoned Edward IV (whom he had served as chancellor) to actively support his brother, Richard NEVILLE, earl of Warwick, the head of the Lancastrian READEPTION government. After Warwick's death and the Yorkist restoration, Edward IV imprisoned the archbishop in the TOWER OF LONDON. In 1472, after being pardoned and released, Neville was re-arrested and confined at CALAIS until 1475. Besides Neville, no other bishops were so harshly treated, and politically talented Lancastrian clerics, such as John MORTON, the future archbishop of Canterbury, were pardoned and admitted to Edward's COUNCIL. Unlike those of Henry VI, most of Edward's ecclesiastical appointees tended to be men of humble origins who displayed a talent for secular government, such as Thomas ROTHERHAM as archbishop of York, John RUSSELL as bishop of Lincoln, and Morton as bishop of Ely.

In 1483, Morton was one of the few bishops to oppose RICHARD III's usurpation of the throne. Arrested at the infamous COUNCIL MEETING OF 13 JUNE 1483, Morton later participated in BUCKINGHAM'S REBELLION and, after the failure of that uprising, fled to BURGUNDY to support Henry Tudor, earl of Richmond, the future HENRY VII. Meanwhile, Richard III employed various ecclesiastical servants to successfully complete his seizure of the throne. He sent aging Archbishop Bourchier to persuade Queen Elizabeth WOODVILLE, then in SANCTUARY at Westminster, to surrender her younger son, Richard PLANTAGENET, duke of York, into Richard's custody. To justify his usurpation, Richard commissioned the respected preacher Ralph Shaw to deliver a sermon extolling Richard's merits as king to the citizens of LONDON. Richard also used Bishop Robert STILLINGTON's revelation of the BUTLER PRECONTRACT to declare EDWARD V illegitimate and unfit for the Crown. While the English Church largely acquiesced in Richard's reign, both the papacy and the English bishops readily accepted Henry VII and the house of TUDOR after the Battle of BOSWORTH FIELD in 1485. The new dynasty, like its Lancastrian and Yorkist predecessors, faced few demands from the bishops and in return largely left the English Church as it found it.

Further Reading: Davies, Richard G., "The Church and the Wars of the Roses," in A. J. Pollard, ed., The Wars of the Roses (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1995), pp. 143-161; Dunning, Robert W., "Patronage and Promotion in the Late-Medieval Church," in Ralph A. Griffiths, ed., Patronage, the Crown and the Provinces in Later Medieval England (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1981); Harvey, Margaret, England, Rome and the Papacy, 1417-1464 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1993).

Although the WARS OF THE ROSES caused political instability and, at least among the governing classes, some social disruption, the conflict had little direct effect on the English economy. Military campaigns were brief, and incidents of plunder and deliberate destruction of property were few and localized. Except for members of the PEERAGE and GENTRY whose involvement in the wars led to confiscation of their estates through acts of ATTAINDER, the livelihoods of most English people were unaffected by the civil wars.

Because it reduced the overall wealth of the kingdom and alienated the people the contending houses of LANCASTER and YORK sought to rule, military action that damaged or destroyed the resources or economic wellbeing of any area of the country was rarely in the best interest of either party. Most such destruction occurred during the first phase of the civil wars, during the years 1460 and 1461. In the north in 1460, supporters of the family of Henry PERCY, third earl of Northumberland, looted estates owned by the rival NEVILLE FAMILY and by the Nevilles' ally, Richard PLANTAGENET, duke of York. In the first weeks of 1461, the army of Queen MARGARET OF ANJOU, marching southward after the Battle of WAKEFIELD, plundered property and towns belonging to or associated with York or his ally Richard NEVILLE, earl of Salisbury. Although fear and Yorkist PROPAGANDA likely exaggerated the destructiveness of the advancing Lancastrians in the minds of southern residents and LONDON citizens, such unrestrained pillaging was rarely seen again during the conflict. Even areas that saw numerous campaigns and battles, such as northeastern England in the early 1460s, suffered little material damage. Despite frequent Lancastrian incursions from SCOTLAND; sustained campaigning around ALNWICK, BAMBURGH, and DUNSTANBURGH castles; and the pitched battles of HEDGELEY MOOR and HEXHAM, surviving monastic and estate accounts for northeastern England between 1461 and 1464 indicate little economic disruption and give only slight evidence that the area was an ongoing war zone.

One cause of economic distress during the Wars of the Roses was the lingering demographic effect of epidemic disease, both the devastating depopulation caused by visitations of the Black Death in the fourteenth century and the more localized depopulations caused by smaller disease outbreaks in the fifteenth century. The resulting labor shortages undermined the unfree status of rural peasants (villeins), who by manorial custom were to remain on the land on which they were born, paying customary dues in labor or produce to their customary landlords. Competition for scare labor often meant better terms for peasants but declining rents for landlords. Another cause of economic hardship arose from fluctuations in foreign trade. Many English people were involved in some aspect of the wool and cloth trades-noble or gentle landowners raised sheep and town or peasant families produced woolen cloth, either for the domestic market or for export to the cloth-making towns of BURGUNDY. Foreign wars; trade embargoes, such as those undertaken by the HANSEATIC LEAGUE; shrinking demand in foreign markets; or the restrictive or retaliatory trade policies of the English or Burgundian governments could affect the health of the English export trade in wool, cloth, or grain, the three major English exports. A recession in continental markets in the early 1460s spread to England by 1465, forcing EDWARD IV to devalue the coinage and causing more economic distress in the country than was ever caused by the civil wars themselves. By the 1480s, improvement in European markets helped the English market rebound, even though RICHARD III's 1483 usurpation of his nephew's throne revived the Wars of the Roses at about the same time.

Further Reading: Bolton, J. L., The Medieval English Economy, 1150-1500 (London: J. M. Dent and Sons, 1980); Britnell, R. H., "The Economic Context," in A. J. Pollard, ed., The Wars of the Roses (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1995), pp. 41-64; Hatcher, John, Plague, Population and the English Economy, 1348-1530 (London: Macmillan, 1994); Munro, J. H., Wool, Cloth and Gold (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1972).

King Henry VI

It was, however, an experiment of a singularly unscientific kind. Henry IV (1399-1413) never mastered the factions which had tolerated his claim to the throne. The deposed Richard was murdered; the revolt of the Welsh under Owen Glyn Dwr (1400-9) was slowly put down; the Percy earls of Northumberland and Worcester were defeated but not entirely subdued at Shrewsbury (21 July 1403); [1] for long the king's opponents saw in the Mortimer earl of March, great-grandson of Edward Ill's second surviving son the duke of Clarence, an alternative claimant who might be more sympathetic to them, and at the end of the reign the deposition of Henry in favour of his heir was being canvassed. In these troubles parliament was no more successful than the king in either promoting good government or securing the old aim of a council and ministers responsible to itself. Even if the baronial discontents declined after Henry V's accession in 1413, the prominence of the council in the ensuing decades was due not to parliamentary pressure but to the absence of Henry V abroad and, on his death in 1422, to the long minority of his heir; Henry VI came to the throne at the age of eight months. Until the late 1430s and early 1440s there was no one outstanding power behind the throne. Henry V's brothers, John duke of Bedford and Humphrey duke of Gloucester, his uncle Henry Beaufort, bishop of Winchester, [2] each had horizons wider than the council where they uneasily collaborated. Gloucester was given some titular precedence at home as Protector and had ambitious schemes abroad; Beaufort, uncommonly wealthy, became richer in manipulating loans to the government and got a cardinal's hat in 1427; there was growing tension between him and Gloucester but this was regularly balanced by the intervention of Bedford, regent in France till his death in 1435. After that the French war began to go steadily against England; Beaufort, more and more the master of the weak and young king, realized the necessity of peace; Gloucester, excluded from influence, could pose as the champion of a war which still commanded popular support. At this point (1447) Gloucester and Beaufort died.

The vacuum at the centre thus created was hardly filled by William de la Pole, earl, marquis (1444) and duke (1448) of Suffolk, who had risen to influence with Beaufort's support and who was convinced of the need for peace. Gloucester's place as opponent of this policy was now taken by Richard, duke of York. York united in his person great landed wealth and ancient hostilities to the Lancastrian kings: his mother was a Mortimer, his father's father had been Edmund, son of Edward III; were Henry VI to die without heirs, York would become king. This situation made for crisis round the king and encouraged local disorder. Nevertheless a complete breakdown in government did not immediately follow the loss of Normandy and Suffolk's destruction in 1450, though it precipitated Cade's rebellion in Kent and the home counties, a protest mainly by peasants at taxation and maladministration, which was relatively easily suppressed. The Beaufort duke of Somerset maintained an uneasy ascendancy at court.

In 1453, however, three events occurred which proved fatal to domestic peace: on 17 July Talbot was defeated at Castillon and Guienne was lost, so that only Calais remained of recent conquests and the old Angevin inheritance; on 10 August Henry VI for the first time lost his wits; and on 13 October his queen, Margaret of Anjou, gave birth to a son, Edward. Weak government had already encouraged magnates to ignore the law in the provinces. For the next seventeen years such regional rivalries were subsumed under the 'Wars of the Roses', which saw the duke of York killed in 1460, his son proclaimed Edward IV in 1461 and expelled at Henry VI's 'readeption' in 1470, but once again victorious in 1471 when Edward Prince of Wales was killed and his father Henry VI murdered.

The violence of these years used to be attributed to 'bastard feudalism'. By this was meant the substitution of money for land in the support of the entourage (indentured retainers) of the great and the growth of local influence in ways which contemporaries stigmatized as 'livery and maintenance' - the processes by which a rising magnate acquired locally an irregular and often unreliable clientage. But the formal contracts of indenture probably made for stability; the looser client-'good lord' relationship was not new, nor was it to disappear for centuries. Local disorder was endemic in the Middle Ages and later. In the mid-fifteenth century it was exacerbated by the failure of the war in France, which embittered nobles and gentry who had become used to enjoying the pickings of service overseas.

In all this confusion parliament and council had no independent initiative. Parliament obediently reflected the policy of the triumphant party; its legislation against 'livery and maintenance', its demands that the king should resume crown lands and live off his own were worthless in the divided state of the monarchy. The 'Lancastrian experiment' falls into perspective when we observe paralysis overtaking government in the absence of a strong king. Under Edward IV and Henry VII we do at length witness some at any rate of these lessons being learned: and not least the lesson that only peace could assure the monarch of a means of keeping within his income.

The savagery of the civil war was not quite over in 1471. Edward had provoked his defeat in 1470 by alienating Richard Neville earl of Warwick who had been his ally, almost his patron, in the early '60s. Warwick negotiated a French marriage for the king in 1464 only to find that Edward was secretly married to Lady Grey, widowed daughter of Bedford's steward Sir Richard Woodville, whom Henry VI had made Lord Rivers in 1448. After Warwick's death and Edward's unchallenged rule in 1471 the Woodville family quickly feathered their nests through the king's influence and it was this which precipitated the troubles of 1483-85. On Edward's death his brother, Richard duke of Gloucester, able and ambitious, was faced with a court where the queen's family looked all powerful: from this came his rapid grasping of power, his isolation of the queen, left in sanctuary in Westminster abbey, and her relatives, his coronation as Richard III and the murder of the royal children, Edward V and the duke of York. That his real resources were pretty slender was soon shown when, in a country apathetic and disinclined for royal adventures, he was defeated by the Lancastrian Henry Tudor whose claim to the throne was even flimsier than Richard's, but who had the luck and the energy to survive long enough to resume the solid policies, unwarlike and economical, of Edward IV.

[1] The moving spirit was Northumberland's son Henry, 'Hotspur', killed in the battle.

[2] The Beauforts were John of Gaunt's children by his mistress Katharine Swynford, whom he married in 1396; they were legitimized by act of parliament in 1397, though expressly debarred from the succession.

Aside from the fantastically large estimates of contemporary chroniclers and commentators, little evidence survives to support the realistic calculation of the size of WARS OF THE ROSES armies. However, the pay records for English armies sent to FRANCE in the fifteenth century are more plentiful and do permit historians to make educated guesses as to the sizes of most civil war forces.

English claims for the numbers engaged were disbelieved even in the fifteenth century. In 1461, the Milanese ambassador in BURGUNDY confessed to his master, Francesco Sforza, duke of Milan, that he was ashamed to speak of the huge numbers of men (about 300,000) who were reported to have participated in the recent campaign and Battle of ST. ALBANS. Such numbers, observed the ambassador, resembled "the figures of bakers" (Gillingham, p. 43). For the Battle of TOWTON in March 1461, the bishop of Salisbury, writing one week after the battle, and the LONDON merchant who likely wrote Gregory's Chronicle both claimed that EDWARD IV's army numbered 200,000. Because all accounts of Towton agree that the Lancastrian force was larger than Edward's, accepting the chronicle figures means accepting that almost a half million men fought at Towton. For these numbers to be accurate, almost every adult fighting man in mid-fifteenth-century England-perhaps 600,000 out of an estimated total population of less than 3 million-must have been present at the battle. Given the size and extent of contemporary problems of supply and transport, such figures are clearly incredible.

Although few such documents exist for Wars of the Roses armies, the surviving pay records of various other fifteenth-century military forces allow for more believable size estimates. For instance, the accounts of the Exchequer, the ancient royal financial office, show that Edward IV transported 11,500 fighting men to France in 1475. In 1415, when Henry V crossed the Channel to launch the Agincourt campaign, he took with him an army of about 9,000. The largest English army of the century was the force of 20,000 men with which Richard, duke of Gloucester, invaded SCOTLAND in 1482. Because no English king or commander had the full military resources of the realm at his disposal during the civil wars, the armies of the Wars of the Roses are unlikely to have exceeded the 1482 force in size. A reasonable estimate is that the largest armies at the largest battles, such as the Battles of St. Albans (1461), BARNET, and TEWKESBURY, did not number more than 10,000 to 15,000 men. At most other battles, and especially later in the wars, when enthusiasm for actively taking sides waned among the PEERAGE and GENTRY, the armies may have been half or less this size. The one possible exception is the Battle of Towton, for which exact figures are elusive, but which clearly was the largest, longest, and bloodiest battle of the conflict.

One possible way to explain chronicle figures is to make a distinction between fighting men and the large numbers of noncombatants who supported them. Besides its ARCHERS and MEN-AT-ARMS, a fifteenth-century army might include chaplains, grooms, bakers, carpenters, physicians, fletchers, and servants and hangers-on (both male and female) of all kinds. If such noncombatants were counted as part of the army, an actual fighting force of 10,000 could be a much larger aggregation of human beings. The counting of noncombatants may explain why, for instance, the force with which Edward IV left Burgundy in March 1471 was given as 2,000 in the HISTORY OF THE ARRIVAL OF EDWARD IV, the official Yorkist account of the invasion, but was recorded as 1,200 in Jean de Waurin's RECUEIL DES CRONIQUES ET ANCHIENNES ISTORIES DE LA GRANT BRETAIGNE.

Further Reading: Boardman, Andrew W., The Medieval Soldier in the Wars of the Roses (Stroud, Gloucestershire, UK: Sutton Publishing, 1998); Gillingham, John, The Wars of the Roses (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1981); Goodman, Anthony, The Wars of the Roses (New York: Dorset Press, 1981); Ross, Charles, The Wars of the Roses (New York: Thames and Hudson, 1987).

Supplying a fifteenth-century army with food, clothing, and other necessary items was a difficult task that often limited the size of the force, affected its mobility, and influenced the strategy of its leaders. Three different methods were employed, usually in combination, to supply WARS OF THE ROSES armies-the troops carried their own supplies, purchased supplies from merchants accompanying the army, or lived off the land.

Records for the armies EDWARD IV raised in the early 1480s to invade SCOTLAND indicate that huge quantities of mutton, bacon, beef (on the hoof), fish, grain, beans, and salt were collected at Newcastle, the army's base. Large numbers of carts and horses were gathered to carry the food and such cooking supplies as kettles, ladles, and dishes, as well as such other necessary tools and equipment as axes, shovels, and sickles. Although most civil war armies were half or less the size of the 20,000-man force that Richard, duke of Gloucester, led northward in 1482, they still required lengthy wagon trains even to carry only a few days' worth of supplies. Thus, even for brief campaigns-and most during the Wars of the Roses lasted for only days or weeks-troops quickly exhausted their food reserve and had to turn for supplies to merchants following the army or to foraging in their area of operations. Merchants and their vital supply trains could limit movement, especially when their numbers were added to the already large number of noncombatants who accompanied an army-servants (male and female), fletchers, carpenters, grooms, physicians, chaplains, cooks and bakers, and general laborers. The presence of merchants also required that a troop of soldiers-a contemporary military manual suggests no less than 400-be deployed to protect them and their wares.

In a civil war, the practice of living off the country posed serious political risks. Taking supplies from the people of the countryside, even upon promise of payment, could easily degenerate into looting and turn friendly or neutral towns or regions into hostile territories disposed to favor the other side. The plundering that characterized the southward march of MARGARET OF ANJOU's army in 1461 cost the Lancastrians much support in LONDON and southern England and gave a boost to Yorkist PROPAGANDA. Because only London, with perhaps 40,000 inhabitants, was larger than an army of 10,000, living off the land also limited movement into sparsely populated areas and encouraged operations near a larger town or in a richer agricultural area. Speed of movement was also affected by the problem of supply. In March 1470, Edward IV marched quickly northward to quell the uprisings instigated by Richard NEVILLE, earl of Warwick. However, before engaging the rebels, Edward had to spend four days in York collecting supplies; the food his troops carried with them had been exhausted on the march, and Warwick's men, through their own foraging, had exhausted the supplies available in the countryside. The problem of supplying a large army in the field may have been the main reason civil war commanders tended to seek rather than avoid battle, so as to quickly end campaigns and disband armies.

Further Reading: Boardman, Andrew W., The Medieval Soldier in the Wars of the Roses (Stroud, Gloucestershire, UK: Sutton Publishing, 1998); Gillingham, John, The Wars of the Roses (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1981); Goodman, Anthony, The Wars of the Roses (New York: Dorset Press, 1981); Ross, Charles, The Wars of the Roses (New York: Thames and Hudson, 1987).