If you think the War of the Roses was just a bunch of guys in shiny tin suits poking each other with sticks because they liked different colored flowers, you're kinda missing the point. It was messier. Way messier. We're talking about a multi-generational family feud that basically gutted the English aristocracy, leaving the ground soaked in blood from Yorkshire down to the South Coast. People obsess over the "Red Rose" and "White Rose" thing, but that’s mostly Tudor PR work from years later. At the time, it was about power, land, and survival.
The war of the roses battles weren't just simple skirmishes; they were chaotic, weather-beaten disasters where the wind or a single betrayal changed history.
The Messy Reality of First St Albans
Forget what you’ve seen in movies. The first actual fight in 1455 at St Albans wasn't a sprawling epic across a field. It was a street brawl. Imagine a quiet market town suddenly swarming with armored men hacking at each other in narrow alleys.
King Henry VI—who was, honestly, not built for this kind of thing—was forced into a corner. Richard, Duke of York, wasn't trying to kill the King yet; he just wanted to murder the King's "bad advisors," specifically the Duke of Somerset. It was surgical, in a brutal way. They found Somerset outside an inn called the Castle and literally hacked him to death. The whole thing lasted maybe an hour. But that hour broke the seal. Once you've killed the high nobility in the street, there's no going back to polite conversation in Parliament.
Towton: The Day England Tried to Kill Itself
If you want to understand the sheer scale of the war of the roses battles, you have to look at Towton (1461). It is arguably the bloodiest day ever on English soil.
The conditions were nightmare fuel. It was Palm Sunday. A blizzard was howling. You couldn't see ten feet in front of you. Because the wind was blowing from the south, the Yorkist archers could shoot much further than the Lancastrians, who were firing blindly into a face-full of snow. The arrows from the Lancastrian side were falling short, so the Yorkists just walked forward, picked up the enemy's arrows, and shot them back.
The River of Blood
The sheer volume of bodies at Towton was so high that contemporary chroniclers claimed the Cock Beck—a small stream nearby—ran red for days. Modern archaeology at the site has found mass graves where the skeletons show terrifying "overkill." These weren't clean deaths. We're talking about men who were struck in the head eight or nine times with poleaxes. It was personal. It was fueled by a decade of grudges. Estimates vary, but some historians like Christopher Gravett suggest up to 28,000 men died that day. In a country with a population of only about 2 or 3 million, that's a staggering percentage of the male workforce just gone in an afternoon.
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Why the Tech Mattered (And Why It Failed)
We tend to think of these wars as "medieval," but they were actually right on the cusp of the early modern era. Hand cannons were a thing. Massive, clunky artillery was starting to show up. But honestly? They were mostly useless when it actually mattered.
At the Battle of Northampton, the Lancastrians had a great defensive position and plenty of guns. Then it rained. Hard. The gunpowder got wet, the cannons wouldn't fire, and the Yorkists basically just walked over the barricades while the Lancastrian gunners were frantically trying to dry their equipment. It's a reminder that for all the "great man" theories of history, sometimes a rainstorm decides who gets to wear the crown.
The Kingmaker’s Last Stand at Barnet
Richard Neville, Earl of Warwick, is the guy everyone calls "The Kingmaker." He’s the ultimate "frenemy." He helped Edward IV get the throne, then got annoyed and tried to put Henry VI back on it. This led to the Battle of Barnet in 1471, which played out like a tragic comedy of errors.
Fog. Thick, pea-soup fog.
The lines were skewed. Because nobody could see, the Lancastrian wings overlapped the Yorkist ones. One Lancastrian commander, the Earl of Oxford, actually succeeded in smashing the Yorkist flank. He chased them off the field, but when he brought his men back to the main fight, his own side mistook his "Star with Streams" banner for the Yorkist "Sun in Splendour."
His own allies opened fire on him.
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Oxford’s men shouted "Treason!" and the whole Lancastrian line collapsed in a panic. Warwick, the great Kingmaker himself, tried to flee but was caught and killed before he could reach his horse. It’s a weirdly anti-climactic end for the most powerful man in England, but that’s how these battles went. They weren't decided by brilliant strategy; they were decided by who panicked first in the dark.
The Finality of Tewkesbury
Just weeks after Barnet, the Lancastrian cause was effectively executed at Tewkesbury. This is where the teenage Prince of Wales, Edward of Westminster, was killed. There’s a lot of debate about whether he died in the field or was murdered afterward in cold blood, but the result was the same: the Lancastrian line was dead.
When you visit Tewkesbury Abbey today, you can still see the "Sun in Splendour" bosses on the ceiling, a permanent mark left by the victorious Yorkists. It felt like the end. But, as history lovers know, there’s always a stray cousin lurking in the wings. In this case, it was a guy named Henry Tudor hiding out in Brittany.
Bosworth: The Battle That Shouldn't Have Been Won
By 1485, everyone was tired. Richard III was on the throne, but he was haunted by the rumors of his nephews—the Princes in the Tower. Henry Tudor landed in Wales with a ragtag army of French mercenaries and exiles.
The Battle of Bosworth is the one everyone remembers because of Shakespeare, but the reality is more interesting. Richard III actually had the better position and likely the bigger army. But he didn't have the loyalty.
The Stanley Factor
The Stanley family—Lord Stanley and his brother William—stood on a hill with several thousand men and just... watched. They were waiting to see who would win. Imagine being the King, looking up at a massive force of your own "allies," and realizing they might actually charge you.
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Richard, in a moment of either pure bravery or pure desperation, saw Henry Tudor’s standard in the distance and decided to end it in one go. He led a cavalry charge directly at Henry. He actually killed Henry’s standard-bearer and was within a sword’s length of Henry himself. Then, the Stanleys finally made their move. They didn't join the King. They crushed him.
Richard III died in the mud, the last English king to die in battle. They found his crown in a thorn bush—or so the legend goes—and Henry Tudor became Henry VII.
What Most People Get Wrong
People often think these wars were a constant state of combat for thirty years. They weren't. If you lived in a village in Cornwall or Cumbria, you might have barely noticed. The total time spent actually fighting across those three decades was maybe a few months. Most of it was waiting, posturing, and taxing people to pay for the next fight.
Also, the "Roses" branding? Total myth. The white rose was a Yorkist symbol, sure, but the red rose wasn't really a thing for the Lancastrians until Henry Tudor needed a logo that looked good next to the white one. He created the "Tudor Rose" to symbolize unity, effectively backdating the "War of the Roses" concept to make his victory look like a divine resolution to a decades-long struggle.
How to Explore the Battlefields Today
If you’re a history nerd wanting to see where the war of the roses battles actually went down, you have to be prepared for some walking. Many of these sites are now just quiet farmer's fields, but the atmosphere is still there.
- Towton: Start at the Crooked Billet pub. There's a battlefield trail that takes you through the "Bloody Meadow." Standing there in the winter gives you a terrifying sense of how miserable that 1461 fight must have been.
- Bosworth: The visitor center is great, but remember that for years they had the location wrong. It wasn't on Ambion Hill; it was actually about two miles away in the lower fields near Fen Hole.
- Tewkesbury: The town still holds a massive Medieval Festival every July. It’s the closest you’ll get to seeing the scale of the armor and the noise of the combat without actually getting hit with a billhook.
Take Action: Deepening Your Knowledge
If you want to move beyond the basic history books, look into the Paston Letters. They are a collection of private letters from a family living through this era. They don't talk about "Great Battles" as much as they talk about the price of grain, the fear of their neighbors, and the annoyance of the local lord being an idiot. It’s the most human way to understand the period.
Your Next Steps:
- Check out the Richard III Society or the Battlefields Trust. They do incredible work preserving these sites from being turned into housing estates.
- Read 'The Wars of the Roses' by Dan Jones for a fast-paced, modern narrative, or 'The Hollow Crown' by Dan Jones if you want the broader context of the Plantagenet downfall.
- Visit the Royal Armouries in Leeds. They have the actual suits of armor from this period, and you can see the specialized "poleaxes" designed specifically to punch through plate mail. It puts the "noble knight" myth to bed pretty quickly when you see a weapon designed for the sole purpose of being a can opener for humans.
The wars weren't just about who sat on a wooden chair in Westminster. They were the birth pains of modern England, shifting the country from a feudal system where lords were mini-kings to a centralized state under the Tudors. Every time you see a Tudor house or a Shakespeare play, you're looking at the ripple effects of the blood spilled at Towton and Bosworth.