Wars of the Roses · 1455–1487
The Wars of the Roses were fought at a transitional moment in English military history — the longbow still dominated the battlefield, but plate armor had reached its zenith of sophistication, gunpowder weapons were appearing in increasing numbers, and the feudal levy system was giving way to the retinue — professional soldiers under contract to noble lords. Armies were relatively small by continental standards, rarely exceeding 15,000 men per side except at Towton, but the quality of noble leadership and the professionalism of the men-at-arms made engagements intensely lethal. The conflict's English setting meant that most battles were foot actions on open ground, decided by archery, the clash of bill and poleaxe, and the performance of commanders on horseback.
The English longbow remained the dominant battlefield weapon of the Wars of the Roses, as it had been since Crécy (1346) and Agincourt (1415). Made from a single stave of yew wood, typically 6 feet long and requiring 100–150 lbs of draw weight, the longbow could loose 10–12 arrows per minute and penetrate mail armor at 200 yards and lighter plate at closer ranges. English and Welsh archers trained from childhood; the physical demands of lifelong archery left skeletal deformities visible in archaeological specimens. At Towton, a shift in the wind direction allowed Yorkist archers to outrange their Lancastrian counterparts, contributing significantly to the victory.
Significance
The longbow's dominance shaped English tactical thinking for a century. Armies were organized around archer contingents, with men-at-arms fighting dismounted in the centre while archers on the wings delivered devastating enfilading fire. This tactical system reached its maturity at Agincourt and remained standard through the Wars of the Roses, though the bow was already beginning to face competition from early firearms by the 1480s.
The English bill — derived from the agricultural billhook — was the standard infantry weapon of the Wars of the Roses. Mounted on a 6–8 foot pole, the bill combined a curved cutting blade with a top spike and a back hook, allowing a soldier to cut, thrust, and pull mounted opponents from their horses. Bills were cheap to produce, required relatively little training compared to the sword, and were devastatingly effective in the close-quarters press of medieval battle. They were particularly effective against plate armor at close range when used to find gaps at armpits, visors, and joints.
Significance
The bill's prevalence in English armies gave foot soldiers a genuine ability to threaten even fully armored knights. At battles like Barnet and Tewkesbury, dismounted men-at-arms fought alongside bill-armed infantry in dense formations where reach, leverage, and brute strength determined survival. The bill remained the standard English infantry weapon until the pike superseded it in the mid-sixteenth century.
The poleaxe — a combination of axe blade, hammer head, and top spike on a 5–6 foot pole — was the weapon of choice for dismounted men-at-arms and knights in the Wars of the Roses. Purpose-designed to defeat plate armor, it allowed the wielder to crush and dent armor with the hammer, cut exposed flesh with the axe, and thrust through visor slits with the spike. Surviving manuals of arms (including Fiore dei Liberi's earlier Italian manual and the later English 'Harleian MS 3542') describe elaborate poleaxe fighting techniques. The weapon demanded physical strength and martial training to use effectively.
Significance
The prevalence of full plate armor among the nobility made the poleaxe the elite weapon of personal combat. When great lords dismounted to fight — as Warwick famously did at Barnet, promising to share the common soldier's danger — the poleaxe was what they carried. It represented the apex of anti-armor technology before firearms made personal plate obsolete.
The mid-fifteenth century saw full articulated plate armor reach its functional peak. A complete harness covered the wearer from head to toe in carefully shaped steel plates, articulated at joints to allow mobility while presenting curved surfaces designed to deflect arrows, sword blows, and lance thrusts. A quality English or Italian suit weighed 40–60 lbs, distributed across the whole body so that a fit man could run, mount a horse unassisted, and fight for extended periods. The visor, gorget, and articulated gauntlets protected areas that earlier partial-plate harness left vulnerable. The armorer's trade had become a sophisticated engineering discipline.
Significance
Full plate armor transformed the social character of medieval warfare. An armored man-at-arms was enormously difficult to kill in open combat — which is why battles often continued long after one side was clearly losing, as individual combatants sought to capture rather than kill opponents for ransom. The shift to 'no quarter' tactics at Towton, where Edward IV ordered that no Lancastrian prisoners be taken, represented a deliberate choice to override the normal economics of armored warfare.
The bastard sword — or hand-and-a-half sword — was the typical sidearm of a mounted man-at-arms during the Wars of the Roses. With a blade 35–40 inches long and a grip long enough to use with one or two hands, it offered versatility: single-handed use on horseback, two-handed for extra force in dismounted combat. The blade was typically double-edged with a central fuller, tapering to a stiff thrusting point designed to find armor gaps. Men-at-arms were trained in sophisticated grappling and half-swording techniques — gripping the blade with an armored gauntlet to use the sword as a short thrusting weapon against armor joints.
Significance
The sword was the status weapon of the noble class, but in battles dominated by bills and poleaxes, it was secondary to the polearm for the serious business of killing. Its main use came when combat devolved into close grappling, where a dagger or short thrust with a half-sworded blade could find visor gaps or arm joints that longer weapons could not reach.
Hand cannons — simple iron or bronze tubes attached to wooden stocks — appeared in English armies during the later stages of the Wars of the Roses, particularly by the 1470s–1480s. They fired a lead ball or iron shot and were loaded by pouring black powder down the barrel, adding a ball, and igniting the charge through a touch hole with a lit match or piece of hot wire. Accuracy was poor and rate of fire was very slow — perhaps one shot per two to three minutes — but the noise, flash, and psychological impact were significant. Edward IV reportedly used firearms at various sieges and in the field campaigns of 1471.
Significance
Hand cannons during the Wars of the Roses represented the very early stages of what would eventually replace the longbow entirely. They were too slow, inaccurate, and unreliable in wet English weather to challenge the bow in field battles, but their presence on the battlefield pointed toward the future. By the early sixteenth century, handgunners would be a standard component of English armies.
By the 1460s–1480s, both sides in the Wars of the Roses were using artillery — primarily at sieges but increasingly in field battles. These were typically wrought-iron or cast-bronze breach- or muzzle-loading pieces firing stone or iron balls. They were heavy, difficult to transport, and slow to reload, but they could demolish castle walls that would otherwise have required prolonged siege. Edward IV made deliberate use of artillery in his campaigns; the Burgundian guns he brought back in 1471 may have contributed to his victories. At Barnet, the Lancastrian guns fired into the fog all night but overshot the Yorkist lines.
Significance
Field artillery in the Wars of the Roses was more important in siege operations than pitched battles — the speed of medieval cavalry and the difficulty of transporting heavy pieces across English countryside limited their battlefield impact. However, the presence of guns at Barnet, Tewkesbury, and Stoke Field showed that no English army could campaign without at least some artillery, prefiguring the central role of cannon in the Italian Wars of the late fifteenth century.
The lance remained the primary shock weapon of heavy cavalry during the Wars of the Roses, used in the initial charge before combat devolved to sword and mace. English war lances of this period were typically 10–14 feet long, made of ash or pine, and featured a hand guard (vamplate) to protect the grip. Cavalry charges were increasingly rare as the war progressed — the English tactical tradition favored dismounting men-at-arms to fight with infantry, using cavalry primarily for pursuit of broken enemies and flank screening.
Significance
The relative scarcity of decisive cavalry charges in the Wars of the Roses reflected a broader trend in late medieval English warfare toward infantry-dominated engagements. At Bosworth, Richard III's desperate cavalry charge directly at Henry Tudor was an act of personal aggression rather than coordinated tactical use of cavalry — and it nearly succeeded before the Stanleys intervened.
The misericorde — 'mercy dagger' — was a thin-bladed stabbing weapon 12–18 inches long, designed specifically for the coup de grâce in armored combat. When a knight was knocked down, captured, or had his helmet removed, the misericorde could be inserted through the visor, into the armpit, behind the knee, or into any other gap in the armor. Its name reflects its dual purpose: it could deliver mercy to a suffering opponent or death to a fallen enemy. Every man-at-arms carried one as a matter of course.
Significance
The misericorde was the weapon that made armor vulnerable at the margins. After the ferocity of battles like Towton where Edward IV ordered no quarter, wounded men on the losing side faced misericordes rather than the negotiation of ransom. The archaeological evidence from the Towton mass grave — men with multiple skull wounds suggesting deliberate killing of the fallen — is consistent with misericorde use on armored men after they had fallen.
The crossbow, while less prominent in English armies than the longbow, appeared in English forces during the Wars of the Roses, particularly in garrison roles and in contingents of continental mercenaries. A steel-bowed crossbow of the mid-fifteenth century could generate enormous power — sufficient to penetrate plate armor at close range — though its rate of fire (2–3 bolts per minute) was far slower than the longbow. Edward IV's Burgundian allies and the German and Swiss mercenaries who fought at Stoke Field in 1487 used crossbows as a standard weapon. English commanders sometimes employed Genoese or Flemish crossbowmen as specialist troops.
Significance
The crossbow's role in the Wars of the Roses was largely supplementary — English tactical tradition was built around the longbow, and English archers trained from childhood could not be easily replaced by crossbowmen. However, the appearance of continental mercenaries with crossbows and early handguns at battles like Stoke Field pointed toward the multinational character of late-medieval warfare and England's increasing integration with continental military practice.
How the weapons and tactics of Wars of the Roses changed the nature of warfare.
The Wars of the Roses were fought primarily by retinues — paid companies of soldiers contracted to individual noble lords under the 'livery and maintenance' system. Rather than the feudal levy in which lords owed military service as a condition of land tenure, retinue soldiers wore their lord's badge (livery) and received wages, maintenance, and legal protection in return for military service. This system had been building for a century but reached full maturity during the Wars of the Roses. Warwick the Kingmaker's enormous retinues, drawn from his vast estates, were the most powerful private military forces in England.
Legacy
The retinue system made the wars uniquely dangerous to royal authority — great lords could mobilize armies independently of the king. Henry VII's response was systematic: he restricted the right to retain armed men through legislation and financial bonds, breaking the connection between noble wealth and private military power that had made the wars possible. The shift from feudal levy to retinue to (eventually) professional royal army was one of the most important military-political transitions of the late medieval period.
The Wars of the Roses saw gunpowder artillery become a standard tool of siege warfare in England for the first time. Castle walls that had resisted conventional siege engines for decades could be reduced in days by concentrated cannon fire. Edward IV invested heavily in artillery, and his 1471 campaign made effective use of guns at several points. By the time of Stoke Field in 1487, artillery was present at virtually every major military engagement. The costs and complexity of maintaining artillery train also gave central governments — those who could afford to buy and transport the pieces — a decisive advantage over rebellious barons who lacked heavy guns.
Legacy
The arrival of effective artillery in England accelerated the decline of the castle as a military asset and the noble as an independent military power. Castles that were symbols of aristocratic independence could now be reduced by royal artillery — shifting the military balance decisively toward the crown. This pattern was replicated across Europe in the same period, as the so-called 'artillery revolution' transformed the political geography of the continent.
English armies of the Wars of the Roses made increasing use of mounted archers — men who rode to battle on horseback but dismounted to fight with the longbow. This gave commanders significant operational flexibility: mounted archers could move at cavalry speeds to occupy key ground, screening marches and reaching defensive positions before slower-moving infantry, then fight on foot with the devastating fire of the longbow. The distinction between mounted archers and cavalry proper was sharp — mounted archers were not expected to fight on horseback, but their mobility gave English armies an unusual ability to concentrate firepower rapidly.
Legacy
The mounted archer represented a distinctly English solution to the tension between mobility and firepower. Continental armies of the same period relied more heavily on pike blocks and crossbowmen, which were less mobile but required less individual training. The mounted archer tradition would eventually fade as the longbow itself was replaced by firearms — but during the Wars of the Roses it gave English commanders a tactical flexibility that shaped the character of their campaigns.
By the 1480s, English armies were beginning to integrate handgunners — soldiers armed with early firearms — alongside their traditional longbowmen. At Stoke Field in 1487, Henry VII's army included both English archers and continental handgunners, reflecting the hybrid character of late-fifteenth-century warfare. The handgun was slower, less accurate, and more sensitive to weather than the longbow, but it required far less training to use effectively and its noise and flash had significant psychological impact on untrained troops and horses. The German and Swiss mercenaries who fought for the Yorkist pretender at Stoke Field used handguns as standard equipment.
Legacy
The appearance of handgunners alongside bowmen in the 1480s marked the beginning of the end for the English longbow tradition. Within sixty years, Henry VIII's armies would have largely replaced the bow with firearms for infantry use. The Wars of the Roses thus bracket a crucial transitional moment — the last great age of the longbow — in English and European military history.