The Wars of the Roses

The Wars of the Roses still stand in the popular imagination as a time of extreme anarchy. Recent academic work has played down the level of strife, but this study suggests that revision has gone too far. This series aims to cover the most important topics of British political history and offer new insights to the subject. This study discusses the historiography, character, causes, scale and international context of the wars. The author argues that the wars formed a period of intense political instability involving lengthy periods of campaigning in which most of the political nation participated. With similar civil wars in neighbouring kingdoms, they amounted to a crisis in the late-medieval political order.