The Battle of Blore Heath: Sources, Historiography and Implications for the Outbreak of Conflict, 1459-60

ABSTRACT

Discussion of the battle of Blore Heath (23 September 1459) has focused on the role of Cheshire gentry. This reflects a historiographical tradition that began early in the sixteenth century with Edward Hall. Attempts to reframe analysis of the battle, and in particular to understand dispositions and manoeuvres on the battlefield itself, have placed weight on the evidence of Jehan de Waurin’s chronicle of Great Britain. Compiled from his vantage point at the duke of Burgundy’s court using newsletters and similar materials, Waurin’s account has significant limitations. These are assessed here, alongside further evidence in other narrative sources. This allows for a clearer understanding of the participation of men from across the north-west midlands in the king’s forces, as also of the small group of core followers who accompanied the earl of Salisbury on his journey to rendezvous with the duke of York and other opponents of the court party.

KEYWORDS:

• Wars of the Roses
• Blore Heath (1459)
• King Henry VI
• Richard Neville, 5^th earl of Salisbury (d. 1460)
• Richard Neville, earl of Warwick (‘the Kingmaker’
• d. 1471)

Recent accounts of the battle of Blore Heath are limited: it continues to be, as A. H. Burne wrote in the 1950s, ‘the most neglected of all the major battles of the Wars of the Roses’.¹ Based on a very narrow range of evidence, recent accounts primarily respond to the distortion arising from a historiographical tradition which began with Edward Hall almost a century after the battle was fought. Hall represented Blore Heath as a microcosm of the divided world he described as ultimately resolved by The Union of the Two Noble and Illustre Families of Lancastre and Yorke: focusing on the community of Cheshire, Hall distinctively indicated that ‘[i]n this battail wer slain, xxiiij. C. persons, but the greatest plague lighted on the Chesshire men, because one half of the shire, was one the one part, and the other on the other part’.² This was taken up by Michael Drayton early in the following century in the continuation of his poem ‘Poly-Olbion’ to create one of the archetypal pictures of a fratricidal civil War of the Roses:

There Dutton, Dutton kills; A Done doth kill a Done …

O Cheshire, wert thou mad, of thine of owne natiue gore

So much vntill this day thou neuer shedst before!³

In response, Dorothy Clayton and James Gillespie have debunked the idea of a county split across party lines and have identified only a small group of Cheshiremen who were all killed fighting for the court.⁴ There have also been recent attempts to challenge simplistic readings of the characterization of the court forces as the ‘Quenys galentys’, in the words of ‘Gregory’s Chronicle’.⁵ The dismissive or propagandistically alarmist presentation of the army an ostentatiously, foppishly, violently, vainly ineffective band serving an unpopular foreign queen has been identified as part of the gendered or regionally based propaganda attacks honed by the Yorkist side. It is, however, possible to go further, and to use sources other than those which have dominated recent discussion to challenge attempts to reconstruct the precise course of events on the battlefield and to consider the wider implications of the conflict. This develops the recent focus on the campaigns of 1459 as indicative of the willingness of Richard, duke of York and his Neville allies to challenge the position of the regime around Henry VI, even to the extent of clearly treasonable action against royal forces closely linked to the court and from more than just one shire.⁶ Because of the forces involved and the way it was fought, it was the battle of Blore Heath which represented the irreversible breach between the parties and the initiation of full-blown civil war.

Consideration of how the fighting developed has been rendered problematic by the equivocal value of one of the main sources used by recent authorities, Jehan de Waurin. This vulnerability arises from the limits to other sources for the battle. In the nineteenth century, William Beamont and Richard Brooke stretched the few sentences on Blore Heath in the rolls of parliament and Hall’s Chronicle as far as they could to recover a sense of how the battle unfolded in the landscape. These nineteenth-century historians developed the idea they took from Hall of a battlefield divided by a stream, strongly defended by James Lord Audley, John Lord Dudley, and their Lancastrian followers, but across which they were drawn by a feigned retreat on the part of Richard Neville, earl of Salisbury, who was marching from Yorkshire to rendezvous with the duke of York at Ludlow. Based on the topographical names ‘Audley Hill’ and ‘Salisbury Hill’, Beamont had Salisbury, who had approached from the north east, camped to the south of the Lancastrian army and falling back in order to draw Audley and his men into a trap.⁷ Just a few years later, in 1857 Brooke used these same sources, with a personal response to the landscape, to attempt an identification of the role of the stream on the battlefield.⁸

F. R. Twemlow in 1912 produced the longest specific account of the battle to date and added an even more minute sense of the local topography and its implications for the way the struggle unfolded. Twemlow was highly critical of Beamont’s account, suggesting it was improbable that Salisbury started to the south of his opponents and made a convoluted manoeuvre to entrap them. Instead, he has Audley’s forces positioned alongside the then path of the road. Twemlow was the first writer on the battle to use Waurin, following the publication of his Recueil in 1891, although in practice he drew from him only names and figures for casualties.⁹ It was A. H. Burne’s 1952 account which introduced Waurin to consideration of the course of the battle, alongside his own soldier’s perspective, responding to the landscape and using what he called Inherent Military Probability. As he put it in his Battlefields of England, this required him to ‘start with what appear to be undisputed facts, then to place myself in the shoes of each commander in turn, and to ask myself in each case what I would have done’.¹⁰ In his account of Blore Heath, provided in the follow-up volume More Battlefields of England, he challenged Beamont’s account and suggested a more straightforward narrative of two armies advancing towards each other on the Market Drayton to Newcastle-under-Lyme road. In this he simplified even the position suggested by Twemlow, disagreeing with him partly on the basis of his interpretation of Waurin’s evidence, for example his reference to the Yorkists spotting the tops of the pennons of the Lancastrians over trees.¹¹

Ian Rowney made an extensive attempt at reconstruction in the context of the politics of Staffordshire in his Keele University thesis of 1981 and was very sceptical of Twemlow and of Burne’s reliance on Waurin. He suggests that Salisbury was informed of Audley’s forces’ presence, and therefore chose to make camp in Rowney Wood on the night before the battle. He has Audley shadow Salisbury, before swinging round in front of him. He then relies on Waurin’s comment about pennons being sighted to support the idea that Audley’s men did not lie in wait, but moved into position facing Salisbury’s; and he takes up the idea from Hall of Salisbury’s calculated retreat to draw Audley’s men into a vulnerable position, albeit allocating this to a further stretch of stream and ford, extending the Lancastrian front. Two Lancastrian cavalry attacks were in vain, and in the second Audley was killed. At this point Dudley took over command and ordered his men to dismount and advance. Again, relying on Waurin, Rowney argues this was the trigger for 500 of the Lancastrian force to desert, turning the battle against the Lancastrians.¹²

Yet Jehan de Waurin is highly problematic as a source. Writing from his perspective in the circle of the Burgundian court and from Lille, Waurin provides two separate and contrasting accounts of the battle, which stand in sharp contrast on some points. Recent research on Waurin has highlighted the degree to which he was dependent on newsletters, which he integrated into his chronicles without necessarily understanding their interrelationship or at least without feeling the need to try to reconcile them.¹³ The scepticism which has in the past arisen because of the confused and derivative nature of Waurin’s work should therefore be qualified at least to the extent that Waurin is providing some indication of the ways news of English events was arriving in Burgundy. The first probable appearance of the battle in Waurin’s Recueil des croniques et anchiennes istories, though it does not name the encounter, mentions the deaths of the lords of ‘Charinten’ and ‘Kindreton’, and capture of the lord of Duclay and messire Thomas Fiderne.¹⁴ The first of these was plausibly identified as ‘Harrington’ by Waurin’s editors William and Edward Hardy,¹⁵ and the second and third names here seem straightforwardly identifiable with Sir Hugh Venables of Kinderton (Ches.), a known casualty of the battle, and Lord Dudley. If the identification of Harrington is correct, this would reflect the presence at the battle, with Salisbury, of Thomas Harrington and his second son James, both of whom were captured by their Lancastrian opponents as they travelled north in the immediate aftermath of the fighting, being imprisoned in Chester Castle until the return of the Yorkists in triumph the following year allowed for their release.¹⁶ Thomas and James Harrington were examples of the inner circle of Neville associates who rode to Blore Heath with Salisbury – Thomas and his eldest son John died with Salisbury at Wakefield in 1460, after which James was generously maintained by the earl of Warwick.¹⁷ ‘Fiderne’ may add a further perspective to the make-up of the court forces at Blore Heath.¹⁸ Thomas Findern of Carlton (Cambs.) was a king’s knight and captain of Guisnes between 1452 and 1458. Waurin was particularly interested in the affairs of Calais, and so it is likely that he would be more inclined to record this detail if he identified the reported capture with the office-holder from Calais and its Pale. Findern does indeed appear elsewhere in Waurin’s account of events in the 1450s and 1460s, more or less accurately.¹⁹ In England, Findern’s main activity was in Cambridgeshire, where he was on commissions from 1449 to 1460, acting as JP in the county from late 1456 to 1458. His commitment to the Lancastrian cause was strong, leading him to fight at Wakefield, and probably Towton; he was attainted and went into exile, returning to fight in the north, eventually being captured and executed after the battle of Hexham.²⁰ Nonetheless, the survival of Dudley, Harrington and Findern in spite of Waurin’s report of their deaths adds to an impression of the compiler’s unreliability.

Later in his text, Waurin provides what is apparently a second account of Blore Heath, this time specifically identified as ‘Blouher’. This second narrative does not provide any further indication of casualties but does suggest more about leadership and the course of the battle. Much of this is, however, immediately problematic.²¹ Waurin’s apparent dating of the battle to 1457, locating it ‘prez dune forest’ on the Derbyshire-Yorkshire border, and making the royalist commanders Lords Welles and Beaumont and the duke of Exeter, along with indicating that Warwick was a leader on the opposing side, are all demonstrably wrong. This more detailed account of the battle includes probably the only specific indication of how the day unfolded, referring to the pennons of the Lancastrian forces being visible over a forest,²² and to the change of allegiance of 500 men from Audley’s army. As has been seen, these elements are featured prominently in attempts to reconstruct the battle, notably by A. H. Burne and Ian Rowney. Waurin’s confusion over geographies and the leadership of the armies is evident, but it has not previously been pointed out that Waurin’s reference to the betrayal of the Lancastrian cause by 500 men bears obvious similarities to a later incident, in the rout at Ludford Bridge, when Andrew Trollope is recorded as having abandoned the earl of Warwick and with 500 men of the Calais garrison joined the royal forces.²³ It is most likely, therefore, that this is not a record of events at Blore Heath, but a further confusion of what happened there with other conflicts of the period. If that is the case, this leaves unchallenged only one aspect of the second narrative (relating to the sighting of the Lancastrian pennons), and there is no corroboration for this even indirectly in other sources. Most probably, therefore, the detail provided in Waurin’s second account is simply a more than usually confused amalgam of reports about other battles, and it is not credible as a report of participation or of the course of the battle of Blore Heath in the landscape.

If much of the evidence in Waurin’s Recueil is therefore to be discounted, it is important to revisit other foundations of the historiography of Blore Heath. The emphasis on the fratricidal nature of the battle was something Edward Hall was responsible for, as his most immediate significant predecessors, Polydore Vergil and Robert Fabyan, in the first years of the sixteenth century had not provided this gloss, and neither mention Cheshire.²⁴ Writing in the period up to his death early in 1547 and probably drawing on local sources accessible because of his marcher connections, Edward Hall like his predecessors suggested that Salisbury’s route from Middleham lay towards London, and also suggested that York’s gathering of supporters at Ludlow was initiated after Blore Heath.²⁵ Otherwise, however, his account of the battle itself is the most detailed to date and added an emphasis on the role of Cheshire, including specifically naming three Cheshire casualties, as well suggesting for the first time that Salisbury was threatened with encirclement, and that he used the ruse of a feigned retreat to to outwit the more numerous court forces and to draw them into an advance across a stream, disrupting their formation:

The erle [of Salisbury] perceiuing by the liuery of the souldiors, that he was circumuented and likely to be trapped with the quenes power, determined rather there to abide the aduenture, with fame and honor, then farther to flie, with losse & reproche: & so encamped hymself all the night, on the side of a litle broke not very brode, but somewhat depe. In the mornyng earely, beyng the daie of. s. Tecle, he caused his souldiors to shote their flightes, towarde the Lorde Awdeleys company, whiche laie on the otherside of the saied water, and then he and all his company, made a signe of retraite. The lorde Awdeley, remembryng not onely the trust that he was put in, but also the Quenes terrible commaundement, (whiche was to bryng to her presence, therle of Salisbury, quicke or ded) blewe vp his trumpet, and did set furth his voward, & sodainly passed the water. Therle of Salisbury, whiche knewe the slaightes, stratagemes, and the pollecies of warlike affaires, sodainly returned, and shortly encountred with the Lorde Awdeley and his chief Capitaines, or the residewe of his armie could passe the water. The fight was sore and dreadfull. Therle desiryng the sauyng of his life, and his aduersaries couetyng his destruction, fought sore for the obteinyng of their purpose, but in conclusion, the erles army as men desperate of aide and succor, so egerly fought, that thei slewe the lorde Awdeley, and all his capitaines, and discomfited all the remnaunt of his people.²⁶

Raphael Holinshed and John Stow picked up on Hall’s account, using very similar wording. Holinshed made Audley’s force one of ‘Chesshire and Salopshire’, drawing on a reference in John Whethamstede’s closely contemporary writing, and followed Hall almost precisely in indicating that Cheshire was divided in the battle (suffering ‘the greatest losse’, because ‘one halfe of the shire was on the one part, and the other halfe on the other’). Stow was more independent of Hall as a source, and in his Chronicles of 1580 simply stated that ‘many other of Chestershire, that had receyued the Princes liuerie of Swannes’ (referring to the prince of Wales’s role, with his mother) were slain, before in his Annales of 1600 increasing the emphasis on the impact on Cheshire by indicating that the ‘greatest losse’ ‘fell to them of Chestershire, that had receiued the Princes liuery of Swans’.²⁷

This historiography continues to have implications for recent interpretation of the battle. There is a predominant tendency still to see the battle as a confrontation between a largely Cheshire-based army led by Lord Audley, on the one hand, and a relatively small but militarily experienced and confident group of retainers of the earl of Salisbury on the other, enacted as a series of manoeuvres around a stream. Much of the focus has been on the degree to which Cheshire forces were divided against themselves, and the extent of the casualties they suffered. In its own terms, this has been a productive exchange, resulting in the clarification provided by Dorothy Clayton and James Gillespie of the fact that the Cheshire gentry who died at the battle all fell on the side of the court, and that they were no more than nine in number: Sir John Done of Utkinton (Eddisbury hundred), Richard Done of Crowton (Eddisbury), Sir Thomas Dutton of Dutton (Bucklow), Sir Hugh Venables of Kinderton (Northwich), Sir William Troutbeck (Eddisbury), Sir John Egerton (Broxton) (died of wounds soon afterwards), and probably Peter and John, Sir Thomas Dutton’s son and brother, and Sir John Legh (of Booths – Northwich).²⁸ For evidence, Clayton and Gillespie rely on inquisitions post mortem, with the exception of the cases of Peter and John Dutton, and Sir John Legh. These nine identifications suggest the reliability of some aspects of the accounts of Edward Hall and his immediate successors. Hall was probably drawing on local sources, given his connections to Shropshire and the marches, when he correctly provided the names of three Cheshire victims of the battle: Sir John Done, Sir Thomas Dutton and Sir Hugh Venables.²⁹ Raphael Holinshed, who had Cheshire origins and marcher connections, indicates that the battle also saw the deaths of Sir John Egerton, Sir John Legh of Booths, Sir William Troutbeck, and John Dutton of Dutton, and John Done esquires, as well as Richard Molyneux of Sefton (Lancashire). All but two of Holinshed’s additional names are also either definitely or probably correct. The exceptions are John Done, who is simply described as esquire, and whom Clayton identifies as John Done of Crowton, and Molyneux, who survived until 1462.³⁰ Stow in his Chronicles and Annales mentioned the same names, with the exception of John Done esquire, correcting the name to Richard Done of Crowton, esquire, an instance of Stow’s greater accuracy.³¹

Other sources give a wider context to the extent and impact of the Cheshire participation. Sir William Troutbeck’s widow after the battle petitioned the king in April 1460 explaining that a hundred others had died with her late husband, and that he had been spoilt of horses, harness and other goods to the value of £400 and more.³² And a pardon to Sir Thomas Fitton for offences related to his pursuit of a claim to the manor of Gawsworth (Macclesfield hundred) in the same month indicated he had served the king at Blore Heath. There has been debate about the other 67 men named on the pardon, and it is now clear that the list gives no indication of casualties at the battle, but the reference to Fitton and his adherents at the battle makes it very likely that at least some of them were there.³³

By contrast, historians have not over the past century and more assessed systematically the evidence for those beyond the Cheshire gentry community who fought, and were in some cases killed or captured, and on this basis considered the composition of the competing forces and its implications. It is possible, nonetheless, to recover more evidence than recent authorities have done on particular individuals involved in the battle, and to argue from them that this was not simply a confrontation between a force of northerners under the earl of Salisbury on the one hand and a group of Cheshiremen under Lord Audley and Lord Dudley on the other. The battle drew in men from the circle of the court in the Midlands, accentuating the provocation represented by Salisbury’s actions and triggering a very powerful response from the regime. On the other hand, the small scope of Salisbury’s force suggests the limitations affecting the Yorkist lords in 1459.

Waurin is not the only near contemporary writer who provides additional detail of participation and casualties at Blore Heath. Several observers, from the time of the battle itself, commented on the make-up of the forces. Some do confirm the presence predominantly of Cheshiremen. ‘Davies’ English Chronicle’ (soon after 1461),³⁴ the Brut (in c. 1464),³⁵ and Vitellius A XVI (probably soon after 1496)³⁶ state that Audley fought alongside Cheshiremen. But John Whethamstede, probably writing late in 1459 or in 1460 and therefore an immediately contemporary source, indicated that the royalist army was made up of men from Cheshire and Shropshire.³⁷ The listing of important casualties in the wars found in Vitellius A XVI, covering 1447–89 (and compiled probably not too long after that), says the royalist army was composed of Cheshire and Lancashire men.³⁸ One of the London chronicles expanded this further, to Cheshire, Lancashire and Derbyshire.³⁹ This range of references in the sources suggests that the royalist army may not have been so straightforwardly one from Cheshire.

The account of the battle in ‘Gregory’s’ Chronicle also includes a list of participants and casualties which is usually ignored by commentators on the battle.⁴⁰ This Chronicle is one of a group of London chronicles, but it is notable for the extent of its statements about some of the events of 1459–60. Clearly closely identified with the city, the author is otherwise unidentified, and suggestions have been made that he was either a mayor (although not necessarily William Gregory as was suggested by James Gairdner) or a poet or an ecclesiastic. The reliability of his testimony is far from absolute, and it has been strongly argued that the work is primarily an indication of the contemporary and near contemporary perceptions of Londoners.⁴¹ While that is undoubtedly the case, however, the testimony of the chronicle should be taken seriously and tested against other less direct evidence for involvement in the battle.

‘Gregory’ indicates that:

That day the kynge made vij knyghtys, fyrste, Syr Robert Molyners, Syr John Daune, Syr Thomas Uttyng, Syr John Brembly, Syr Jon Stanley, Syr John Grysly, and Syr Rychard Hardon; and v of thes knyghtys were slayne fulle manly in the fylde

Identification of these individuals is problematic in some cases, but others are evidently accurate and suggest serious consideration of the list, with the potential to add substantially to an understanding of how the battle was fought. The precise detail of the king’s involvement in the dubbing of knights on the day of the battle may owe much to a conventional trope of such actions and runs counter to the evidence that during this period he was at the closest ‘with yn x myle’ of the field, as he moved from Market Harborough, through Nottingham and Walsall, to Coleshill and eventually to Worcester, but the names of those allegedly honoured may be a helpful guide to other participants on the royalist side.⁴² The second listed individual is evidently Sir John Done, already noted as one of those killed on the field. We can also easily identify Sir John Stanley, of Pipe Elford and Clifton (Staffs.), and Aldford, Etchells, and Alderley (Chesh); as well as regularly serving as a knight of the shire for Staffordshire in parliaments from 1447 to 1472–5, Sir John was sheriff there on several occasions including in 1459–60. He was the son and heir of Sir Thomas Stanley, who was to live on until May 1463.⁴³ Stanley’s example helps to extend the range of those engaged, given his Staffordshire connections alongside his Cheshire ones. Sir John Grysly or Gresley (of Drakelow Derbys. and Colton Staffs.) is again easily identifiable, and also fought with the court at the battle. He was closely related to Sir John Stanley (whose brother-in-law he was, following Gresley’s marriage to Anne, Stanley’s sister, in or before 1455) and others in the Derbyshire and Staffordshire gentry communities, some of whom, however, were in the group around Walter Blount which had begun to side with York, Salisbury, Warwick and their allies during the 1450s.⁴⁴ This may account for what can seem a fluctuating pattern of allegiance on the part of Gresley. After service in parliament for Staffordshire in 1450–1 and 1453–4, he did not serve again for several years. Gresley had been part of the force led by York to Blackheath in 1452, for which he was pardoned on 29 June that year. He appears to have been knighted in 1452/3 (contrary to what ‘Gregory’ asserted) and was sheriff of Nottinghamshire and Derbyshire in 1453–4. Although Simon Payling points to this as an example of the cursus honorum by which service as MP often precedes pricking as sheriff, it also highlights questions about the consistency of his political alliances.⁴⁵ The 1453–4 parliament is generally seen as a loyalist gathering, and Griffiths suggests Gresley was one of a very few exceptions to this pattern;⁴⁶ but his pricking as sheriff came in October 1453, at a time when the court was thoroughly in control of appointments and this suggests an alignment with the court party. He began feuding with the Vernons of Haddon in 1455, however, and this may have contributed to the process whereby they became aligned with the court, while Gresley became increasingly associated with York.⁴⁷ He and Roger Vernon were summoned to appear before the king in July 1455, after the first battle of St Albans. But the feud continued for eight years, during which time he was pardoned in 1456. The Lancastrians removed him from the local bench in 1458, but he appears to have fought with the court at Blore Heath and was put on the commission of array for Derbyshire in December 1459. That said, he was elected to the parliament of 1460–1, when he sat for Derbyshire. This parliament, summoned on 30 July, and assembled on 7 October 1460, was responsible amongst other things for the Act of Accord passing the crown to York and his heirs. Gresley was returned again to the next parliament, the first of Edward IV’s reign, for Staffordshire. And under Edward IV there is little question but that Gresley and the Blounts ruled Derbyshire, and Sir John went north with the new king in December 1462. Gresley highlights the presence of Derbyshire men at the battle as well as those from Staffordshire.

The remaining four knighted participants, and those who were allegedly killed there with Sir John Done, are harder to identify but provide further evidence of the geographical range of those involved. In one case, which is far from certain, ‘Gregory’ may be in ‘Sir Thomas Uttyng’ referring to Sir Thomas Dutton, another prominent Cheshire gentleman who we know was killed at Blore Heath. Robert ‘Molyners’ is likely to be a member of the Molyneux family of Lancashire, possibly a mistake in referring to Richard Molyneux, son of Sir Richard Molyneux, who is otherwise first recorded as recorded as having allegedly died at Blore Heath by Holinshed (although in practice he survived until 1462). He had been noted in December 1457 as a member of the commission to raise archers in Lancashire, and after the death of his father-in-law, Thomas Lord Stanley, he became escheator of Lancashire in February 1459.⁴⁸ Richard junior is, however, also noted as having a brother Robert, who is not shown as having any progeny in the pedigree in Dugdale’s visitation of 1664–5, so there is a chance that the name is correctly given by ‘Gregory’, and this Robert’s death may be the origin of the tradition that it was Richard who died there.⁴⁹ ‘Syr John Brembly’ may be the Cheshire gentleman Sir John Bromley, who succeeded his father in 1431 and survived until c. 1485/6.⁵⁰ If so, he was already knighted by the year of the battle.⁵¹ ‘Syr Rychard Hardon’ is particularly hard to identify. It does not seem likely that the name represents one of the Ardern family of Cheshire in its several branches.⁵² Further candidates who can be ruled out include Robert Ardern of The Lodge and Castle Bromwich esq, MP for Warwickshire in 1449–50, a controversial figure in local society who threw in his lot with York and was attainted and executed,⁵³ and Sir Peter Arderne, Chief Baron of the Exchequer and later a Justice of Common Pleas. That said, ‘Gregory’ seems in this list to be corroborating and hence confirming some of the Cheshire casualties in the battle, and adding some further plausible Lancastrian participants, in Stanley and Gresley. In doing so he adds to the sense that the royal forces were not exclusively from Cheshire, but came also from Staffordshire and Derbyshire.

‘Gregory’ makes a further identification of an important participant in the battle: ‘Syr Thomas Hamdon, knyght, was the getynge of the fylde’. Thomas is also not straightforward to identify, and the reference poses problems as it would suggest a supporter of the court was responsible for success at a battle generally viewed as inconclusive or a Yorkist victory, but may be either Sir Edmund Hampton or John Hampton, the latter of whom was a king’s esquire, the former a king’s carver. Both were on the list compiled in the November – December 1450 parliament of men to be removed from king’s presence because of their connections to the court, and in the latter case especially with the queen. Edmund represented the interest of William de la Pole, first marquess and then duke of Suffolk, in Berkshire and Oxfordshire, was among the Lancastrians defending the Tower in July 1460, visited Bordeaux in March 1462 and preferred exile to attempting to make his peace with Yorkist England.⁵⁴ John Hampden had been an early addition to the royal household in the 1420s, as usher of the chamber from 1427/8, and soon one of the king’s most constant companions, acting as purveyor for educational patronage. In the 1430s and 1440s, the young king seems to have enjoyed games indoors, especially with John. And John travelled with the new queen Margaret, as master of the horse, on her journey into England.⁵⁵

These indications from the personnel named by Waurin and ‘Gregory’ that the royal forces at the battle were made up of more than just Cheshiremen are confirmed by other sources. For example, one Dudley retainer from Staffordshire was left for dead on battlefield: Nicholas Leveson, esq, was a member of the wealthy and influential Wolverhampton family of merchants of that name, had been in the company of John, Lord Dudley, and like William Troutbeck was also spoilt of horses, goods and harness.⁵⁶ Servants of the King’s household were also active in the area if not at the battle, as it was the king’s sergeant Thomas Harper (a man with a long track-record of handling confrontations for the crown) who captured retreating Yorkists at Acton Bridge in Cheshire.⁵⁷

In this connection, it is also worth restating the significance of Lord Audley’s leadership role for the force that he commanded. Audley did not hold office in Cheshire, and although he did have significant property in the south of the county, his holdings stretched across Shropshire, Staffordshire, Derbyshire and much further afield, including the South West of England and Wales.⁵⁸ This, combined with the recognition that authority in Cheshire was in flux following the death of Thomas Stanley, first Lord Stanley of Lathom, in February 1459, further confirms the likelihood that forces from a wider geography were involved. In Cheshire itself, Thomas Stanley’s successor in the role of justice of the county palatine of Chester was not his son Thomas but John Talbot, second earl of Shrewsbury. And in 1457, the leading local gentleman-administrator Sir John Troutbeck had been succeeded as chamberlain of the county palatine not by his son William or a Stanley but by Sir Richard Tunstall.⁵⁹ Further, the other Lancastrian commander at Blore Heath, Lord Dudley, had lands mainly in Staffordshire, and although he was also lord of Malpas in the south west of Cheshire he was primarily associated with the Midland counties.⁶⁰

The Lancastrian force was therefore much more broadly based than accounts descending from Hall and Holinshed would suggest – the men engaged at Blore Heath came from a significant part of the midlands and further afield. This helps to explain and contextualize the evident outrage felt by supporters of the court party at the heavy casualties inflicted by the Yorkists in the battle. It meant Salisbury and his most important followers would be targeted with particular venom in the process of attainder in the parliament of 1459, and that it would no longer be acceptable to excuse Salisbury’s actions in order to restore an uneasy peace, as had repeatedly happened with the enemies of the court in the previous decade. All attempts to include the earl in a pardon after the battle were rebuffed. And with the earl of Warwick and the duke of York refusing to accept an offer of pardon if Salisbury was not included, the trio’s move into outright opposition meant a fundamental breakdown of any remaining cohesion among the aristocracy became unavoidable.⁶¹

Salisbury’s intentions and reactions in September 1459 are also clarified if we re-examine his supporters present at the battle. The identities of the men who were present with the earl at Blore Heath suggest both the lack of readiness for full-blown military confrontation on the part of the Yorkist lords and the limitations to Salisbury’s ability to lead men into a situation where charges of treason were not improbable. Those accompanying Salisbury who were taken prisoner by the royal army most notably included Sir John and Sir Thomas Neville, two sons of the earl, and Sir Thomas Harrington and his second son James, all of whom were imprisoned in Chester. There is also evidence that Ralph Rokeby, Thomas Ashton, and Robert ‘Evereus’ esquires were among the group of Salisbury’s followers who were captured and held.⁶² This begins to demonstrate the make-up of Salisbury’s force, and also the extent to which a number of key individuals in his party were captured by royalist forces, if not on the field of battle itself then somewhere in its hinterland (perhaps all in the action in which Salisbury’s sons were taken, near the town of Tarporley (Chesh.)). Ralph Rokeby, one of Salisbury’s retainers, was from Rokeby and Mortham, very close to the northern boundary of the North Riding of Yorkshire and importantly to the heart of the Neville lordship of Barnard Castle.⁶³ Thomas Ashton esquire was the son of Sir William Ashton. The Ashton family had Yorkshire connections, although it was the Lancashire property centred on Ashton-under-Lyne which was left to Thomas, with his half-brother Ralph choosing in his early years to live in Yorkshire, at Fryton in the North Riding. Sir William was closely associated with the duke of York, and Ralph developed connections with Richard Neville, earl of Salisbury, receiving office in the honour of Pickering. Thomas, who may be identified with the man who witnessed a grant involving the Dalton family in 1451, is usually considered to have avoided political involvement, preferring to concentrate on his interests in alchemy, but participation at Blore Heath is a well-evidenced exception to this.⁶⁴ Identification of Robert ‘Evereus’ is much more problematic, but there is a plausible candidate in the person of Robert Eure or Evers, son of Sir Ralph Eure and younger brother of Sir William Eure of Witton-le-Wear (Durh.) and Old Malton (Yorks.). Robert was retained by Salisbury and his mother, Countess Joan, and appointed steward of the palatinate of Durham by Bishop Robert Neville, Salisbury’s brother. His nephew, Henry Fitzhugh 5^th Baron Fitzhugh (d. 1472) married Alice Neville, Salisbury’s daughter.⁶⁵

Parliamentary attainder provides further names of those who are likely to have been with Salisbury at Blore Heath. Along with his sons Sir John and Sir Thomas Neville, and Sir Thomas Harrington, the act passed in the Coventry parliament of 1459 also covered Sir John Conyers and Sir Thomas Parr, and Thomas Meryng of Tong and William Stanley, both esquires.⁶⁶ Conyers was the son of a servant of the Nevilles, Christopher, who had acted as one of the feoffees to the use of Salisbury’s will in 1436, and who had obtained the marriage of the younger coheir of Philip, Lord Darcy for his eldest son. John joined his father as bailiff of Richmondshire in 1442 and began a first term as sheriff of Yorkshire in 1448. Sir John survived the difficulties of 1459–61 to become, in Rosemary Horrox’s words, the ‘linchpin of the Middleham retinue’.⁶⁷ The Parr family had been established at Kendal since the end of the fourteenth century and became a dominant influence in Westmorland and leading adherents of the earl of Salisbury and his son. Sir Thomas, who came into his inheritance in 1429, served in parliament for either Westmorland or Cumberland on six occasions. Sir Thomas was another of those Neville followers who also fought at Wakefield and, contrary to some reports, survived.⁶⁸ Thomas Meryng of Tong (Yorks.) esquire is the lowest-ranking individual to be condemned for treason in the aftermath of Blore Heath. The younger son of Sir William Meryng, of Thornhaugh (Notts.), he had married Margaret, the daughter and heiress of Hugh Tong of Tong.⁶⁹ Thomas had entered the royal household in 1444.⁷⁰ Late in the following decade, it appears that there was tension involving Thomas Meryng, and also William Meryng, with the result that the two of them, with a group of yeomen and others, were imprisoned in 1458 until they gave security for their conduct towards Thomas Neville. In this light, the appearance of William Meryng on the commission of the peace in Nottinghamshire in 1457, but then not again in Henry VI’s reign, appears to reflect the impact of this dispute and disorder.⁷¹

By contrast, William Stanley’s role in the battle is relatively well known, for unlike his brother Thomas, since February 1459 the new Lord Stanley, who stood aside and sent communications offering support to Salisbury while taking no action, he committed his forces and fought with Salisbury. As Dorothy Clayton has noted, those who make William Stanley a Cheshireman in 1459 anticipate too keenly his later prominence in the shire. At the time of the battle, he had recently acquired the manor of Ridley in Cheshire, but otherwise was essentially a Lancashire gentleman. Probably about 2 years younger than Thomas, Lord Stanley, he was in his mid-20s at the time of Blore Heath. He may well have fled overseas with the Yorkists after the rout of Ludford, and was immediately placed in positions of trust in the north west and North Wales once Edward IV emerged victorious in the spring of 1461.⁷²

There are also indications that it was intended to include John Savile esquire, son of Sir John Savile of Thornhill (Yorks.), in the attainder process, but this was not followed through. A commission issued from Ludlow on 14 October, the day after the rout of the Yorkists, listed those men who were eventually included in the attainder, along with Savile.⁷³ Arnold has suggested that Sir John Savile’s loss of the three main offices in the lordship of Wakefield was the price he paid to protect his son from attainder; the reliable service Sir John had shown to York was recognized when he was appointed sheriff of Yorkshire 2 days after the accession of Edward IV.⁷⁴

Local legal action regarding support for Salisbury was taken against John, George and William Birnand of Knaresborough (Yorks.), who led a group of local men to muster with the earl’s followers at Boroughbridge on 18 September en route to Blore Heath. The accusation refers not only to Salisbury’s leadership but to Robert Percy of Scotton (Yorks.), esquire, and adds several gentry names to the list of those who may have followed Salisbury on his march south: William Wakefield of Great Ouseburn (Yorks.), esquire, senior, along with John Wakefield and William Wakefield junior, and James Wilsthorp.⁷⁵

Beyond these men who were imprisoned, prosecuted or attainted for their role at Blore Heath, there is strong evidence for the role of Roger Kynaston of Middle and Hordley (both now in Shropshire) as the man who allegedly killed Lord Audley. As a consequence, Kynaston added the Audley arms to his own, according to later accounts.⁷⁶ He rose to prominence as a follower of the duke of York and was York’s constable of Denbigh Castle in the 1450s. His home was only about 20 miles from the battlefield, and he appears to represent a group of followers of York who joined Salisbury as he marched towards Ludlow. Remarkably, given his alleged responsibility for the death of Audley, Kynaston was one of a group pardoned by the king, if only to the extent of saving their lives; the group was then supported by the Commons in a petition requesting that their forfeitures be commuted to fines.⁷⁷ The others in this group were Walter Hopton of Hopton Castle (Shrops.), Fulk Stafford (Worcs.),⁷⁸ William Hastings of Kirby Muxloe (Leics.),⁷⁹ and William Bowes of Streatlam (Durh.). Given Bowes’ origins and connections in the North,⁸⁰ and given the report of Kynaston’s involvement, both were likely at Blore Heath, but that seems less certain for Hopton and especially Stafford and Hastings, and the latter is usually assumed to have been at Ludford because of his connection with York.⁸¹

There is a further indication of the extent of possible participation at Blore Heath alongside Salisbury and of an understanding of the likelihood of serious consequences arising from support for York, Salisbury and Warwick to be found in the list of men securing pardons in the months from November 1459. In the days and weeks after the battle, and after the collapse of the lords’ position at Ludford, many men were granted pardons for offences including insurrection and rebellion. Some of the largest groups among these men originated in the marches of Wales, many being clearly identifiable as followers of Richard, duke of York, and implicated in his forces’ assembly at Ludford and not at Blore Heath.⁸² There is another group among those who received pardons, however, with origins in Yorkshire and elsewhere in the North. Either through direct evidence or by implication these are almost certainly men who followed Salisbury on his march from Middleham, via Blore Heath. As we have just seen, William Bowes of Streatlam (Durh.) had a pardon confirmed in the Coventry parliament of 1459.⁸³ The other individuals from the region who had their pardons enrolled on the Patent Rolls included some known from other sources to have been at Blore Heath, such as Ralph Rokeby, Thomas Ashton son of Sir William Ashton, James Harrington, and most likely Christopher Conyers of Hornby (Yorks.) gentleman given the well-established presence at Blore Heath of Sir John Conyers.⁸⁴ There was also a group of gentry associated with the Nevilles and their estates in the North. These included John Acclum of Kingston on Hull (Yorks.); Laurence Berwyk of Skelton (Yorks.) gentleman; William Burgh senior esquire, and William Burgh junior esquire, both of ‘Burgh’ [Brough] (Yorks.); Richard Conyers of Newton Morker (Yorks.) and Newton le Willows (Yorks.) esquire; John Huddleston of Millom (Cumb.) esquire; Sir John Middleton, along with his son John, and Richard Middleton, both esquires; Sir Thomas Mountford of Hackforth (Yorks.) and Thomas Mountford of Danby upon Yore (Yorks.) senior esquire; William Pudsay of Selaby (Durh.) esquire; Richard Scrope esquire, brother of John, Lord Scrope of Bolton; Thomas Wytham of ‘Corneburgh’ [Cornborough, in Sheriff Hutton] (Yorks.) esquire alias gentleman; and John Wodde alias Wodd of Middleham (Yorks.) gentleman, alias late of Sheriff Hutton (Yorks.) yeoman.⁸⁵ Some of these men were very prominent servants of the Nevilles, and there is a chance that their obtaining a pardon reflected this more general service rather than specifically involvement at Blore Heath and Ludford. This might apply to Wytham, an executor and beneficiary of Salisbury’s will, especially given his profession as a lawyer and man of business for Salisbury who had served as Chancellor of the Exchequer in 1454–5 while Salisbury was Lord Chancellor, and again in the second York protectorate in 1455–6.⁸⁶ It was likely an association with Richard, duke of York and his properties in the North that caused John Pilkington of Pilkington (Lancs.), esquire, to take advantage of a pardon. After his marriage, John lived at Wakefield; his father Robert Pilkington was listed third amongst those accused of extortions, oppressions and the like by the parliament of 1459.⁸⁷ Indications of his service to York and his Neville allies are to be found in his appointment on 30 June 1461 as constable of Chester castle, and then on 7 July as constable of Berkhamsted castle and keeper of the park there, followed by creation as a squire of the body on 17 July, all shortly after the battle of Northampton, the latter with a fee of 50 marks.⁸⁸ Others who took pardons may have been associated with the Nevilles, but a range of evidence suggests they were not part of the campaign of the autumn of 1459: Sir Thomas Mountford, for example, was one of the commissioners of array for the regime in the North Riding in December 1459, specifically to resist York, Salisbury and Warwick. Others are more likely to have fought: John Middleton was another executor of the earl of Salisbury’s will, and a member of a family drawn increasingly closely into his circle in the 1450s.⁸⁹ He and others on this list, to the probable number of about a dozen, therefore seem likely to have fought at Blore Heath. Pardons were also obtained by a group of yeomen with similar connections in Yorkshire and elsewhere in the North: Thomas Bone alias Boon of Penrith (Cumb.) yeoman; Thomas Sclater of Kendal (Westm.) yeoman; John Withes of Aismunderby (in Ripon parish, Yorks.) yeoman; and a merchant, John Robinson of Scarborough (Yorks.).⁹⁰ Some at least of these men of lower status may also have been at Blore Heath.

A. J. Pollard argued that 13 of Salisbury’s followers were at Blore Heath.⁹¹ This is a small number: men prominent in the earl’s service very likely chose to stay at home, perhaps because of the threat from local rivals, especially supporters of the Percies, but perhaps also because through lack of enthusiasm for the mission. The range of evidence examined here indicates that about 20 significant northern gentlemen, representing about 11 leading families, can with reasonable confidence be placed with Salisbury at Blore Heath. This includes only one-third of the men recorded as retained or receiving an annuity in the list of retainers found in the Clervaux Cartulary (of whom there are 21): Sir John Conyers, Sir Thomas Harrington, Sir Thomas Mountford, Sir John Middleton, Christopher Conyers esq, William Pudsey esq, and Ralph Rokeby esq.

What then remains of efforts to interpret tactics and deployment of forces or to understand the course of the battle? As we have seen, there are two accounts of the battle in Waurin, placed in different parts of the narrative, and we should not assume they are of equal value, or that both should be dismissed for the weaknesses of either. The first, shorter, and most reliable of the two accounts provided by Waurin essentially locates a battle to the point when the earls, supporters of York, left him to head for Calais, and in doing so encountered an army of the queen’s men, led by Audley, which they defeated, killing Audley and the lords of Charinten and Kindreton, and taking prisoner the baron of Duclay and Messire Thomas Fiderne. This was done in spite of the earls’ force being only 400 strong while the royal force was 6000 or 8000. The second, describing the battle of ‘Blouher’, is far less accurate and potentially very misleading. The desertion of troops and the sighting of cavalry pennons are best disregarded as points around which to speculate on the course of the fight. The later evidence of Edward Hall is, by contrast, more likely to be helpful in explaining the course of the battle, and the relevance of the stream crossing the battlefield is hard to question as the main point around which reconstructions of events can hang.

We are on firmer ground in reassessing participation in the battle and its implications. For Salisbury, this was evidently a mission for which he was able to draw on only a minority of his following, albeit still a large enough one to show that he knew he needed to be ready for confrontation with his enemies. Although his men were almost certainly outnumbered, they gave a good account of themselves on the battlefield and, critically, inflicted high-profile casualties on the forces of the court. The events of 23 September made it difficult for their opponents to consider any further accommodation and compromise. On the court’s side, the evidence suggests a wider mobilization than simply Cheshiremen, albeit with the evidence continuing to suggest that they took the most substantial casualties. Audley drew on supporters from Shropshire, Staffordshire, and Derbyshire, as well as Cheshire: the experience of bloody confrontation with the supporters of York was shared widely. The battle was far from decisive, as suggested by the account in ‘Gregory’ of a confused aftermath in which Salisbury’s men were only able to move on from the field thanks to an Augustinian friar who ‘schot gonnys alle that nyght in a parke that was at the backe syde of the fylde, and by thys mene the erle come to Duke of Yorke’.⁹² This evidence might not resolve recent questions as to the extent of the political breakdown observable from c. 1458, in particular as it is not fully clear that Salisbury’s intentions on leaving the north in September 1459 were fixed on violent confrontation.⁹³ But the battle itself undoubtedly crystallized the breakdown of political relationships and made civil war inevitable.

This picture is well represented by the experience of Cheshire, from which so many of those involved came. As we have seen, in the immediate aftermath of the battle supporters of Salisbury were rounded up and imprisoned in the castle at Chester. But this success in Cheshire was short-lived and not apparent in other places in the region. Across the Dee in the marcher lordships of north Wales, the duke of York’s lordship of Denbigh resisted confiscation. Although Jasper Tudor drew on his followers from south and west Wales in efforts to take control there, only in the spring of 1460 did Denbigh surrender.⁹⁴ The impact of the arrival of Warwick and March in the South East of England in June 1460 and their victory at Northampton the following month was evident. In Cheshire, a group comprised of Abbot Richard Oldham of Chester, Sir John Botiller, William Mynors and Thomas Seyntbarbe had attempted to hold together the loyalist cause, communicating (ineffectively, as it soon appeared) with Lord Stanley⁹⁵ and, with Robert Fouleshurst, Ranulph Brereton, John Delves, and Peter Dutton, holding prisoner in Chester Castle the captives taken at or in the aftermath of Blore Heath.⁹⁶ Although Edward Hall later suggested that these prisoners were soon freed out of fear of York’s supporters in the marches, it seems that some at least were imprisoned for several months.⁹⁷ After the battle of Northampton, Sir John Mainwaring was ordered to surrender the remaining prisoners in Chester castle and hand them over to Lord Stanley.⁹⁸ Then, it was through Cheshire that the duke of York returned to England from Ireland in September 1460, and it appears that it was there that the duke took the momentous step of renouncing his allegiance to Henry VI.⁹⁹ By the end of 1460, it was being reported that Chester was being held for the duke by the Stanley and Savage families.¹⁰⁰ It may not be that Cheshire was divided against itself on the field of Blore Heath, as the historiography of Hall, Holinshed, and Drayton soon asserted; but there and elsewhere across England and Wales the battle opened up acute divisions, with brutal consequences in the following 18 months.

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Notes on contributors

Tim Thornton

Tim Thornton completed undergraduate and postgraduate degrees at Oxford, the latter a DPhil on Cheshire, 1480-1560, under the supervision of Chris Haigh. Author of a number of books and articles on late medieval and early modern political history, he is a Royal Historical Society prize winner (David Berry prize, Alexander prize proxime accessit). He is currently Professor of History and Deputy Vice-Chancellor at the University of Huddersfield.

Notes

¹ A. H. Burne, More Battlefields of England (London: Methuen, 1952), p. 140. Some modern historians almost completely dismiss Blore Heath. The ‘bloody skirmish’ commands only a few lines in J. Watts, Henry VI and the Politics of Kingship (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. 351–2, not a single mention, in spite of the role usually attributed to Queen Margaret, in J. L. Laynesmyth, The Last Medieval Queens: English Queenship 1445–1503 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), and just 2 footnotes in C. Carpenter, Locality and Polity: A Study of Warwickshire Landed Society, 1401–1499 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), pp. 471, 620. Similarly: R. L. Storey, The End of the House of Lancaster (new edn, Gloucester: Alan Sutton, 1986), pp. 121, 187; E. F. Jacob, The Fifteenth Century 1399–1485 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1969), p. 515; C. Ross, The Wars of the Roses: A Concise History (London: Thames and Hudson, 1976), p. 37; J. R. Lander, The Wars of the Roses (London: Secker & Warburg, 1965), p. 91; idem, Government and Community: England 1450–1509 (London: Edward Arnold, 1980), p. 201; idem, Crown and Nobility, 1450–1509 (London: Edward Arnold, 1976), pp. 20, 99; A. J. Pollard, Late Medieval England 1399–1509 (Harlow: Longman, 2000), p. 154. Coverage is slightly more extensive in A. J. Pollard, The Wars of the Roses (2^nd edn, Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2001), pp. 22, 78, 80; D. Grummitt, A Short History of the Wars of the Roses (London: I. B. Tauris, 2013), p. 57; A. Goodman, The Wars of the Roses: Military Activity and English Society, new edn (London: Routledge, 1990), pp. 26–9; ‘English Heritage Battlefield Report: Blore Heath 1459’ <https://historicengland.org.uk/content/docs/listing/battlefields/blore-heath/# >.

² E. Hall, Chronicle: Containing the History of England, during the Reign of Henry the Fourth, and the Succeeding Monarchs, to the end of the Reign of Henry VIII, ed. Henry Ellis (London: J. Johnson, F. C. and J. Rivington, T. Payne, et al., 1809), pp. 239–40.

³ M. Drayton, The Second Part, or a Continuance of Poly-Olbion (London: printed by Augustine Mathewes for Iohn Marriott, Iohn Grismand, and Thomas Dewe, 1622), pp. 40–1.

⁴ J. L. Gillespie, ‘Cheshiremen at Blore Heath: A Swan Dive’, in People, Politics and Community in the Later Middle Ages, ed. by J. Rosenthal and C. Richmond (Gloucester: Sutton, 1987), pp. 77–89, esp. pp. 82–3; D. J. Clayton, The Administration of the County Palatine of Chester, 1442–1485, Chetham Society, 3rd series, 35 (1990), pp. 79–90.

⁵ The Historical Collections of a Citizen of London in the Fifteenth Century, ed. James Gairdner, Camden Society, n.s., 17 (1876), p. 204; see also the references in ‘Davies’ English Chronicle’ to how the queen ‘allyed vn to her alle the knyghtes and squyers of Chestreshyre for to haue theyre benyuolence, and helde open householde among theym; and made her sone called the Prince yeue a lyuery of Swannys to alle the gentilmenne of the contre, and to many other thorought the lande; trustyng thorough thayre streynghte to make her sone kyng’: An English Chronicle 1377–1461: A New Edition. Aberystwyth, National Library of Wales MS 21,608, and Oxford, Bodleian Library MS Lyell 34, ed. C. William Marx (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2002), p. 79. H. E. Maurer, Margaret of Anjou: Queenship and Power in Late Medieval England (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2003), pp. 175–85, 211; eadem, ‘Delegitimizing Lancaster: The Yorkist Use of Gendered Propaganda during the Wars of the Roses’, in Reputation and Representation in Fifteenth-century Europe, ed. by Douglas Biggs, Sharon D. Michalove and Compton Reeves, The Northern World, 8 (Leiden: Brill, 2004), pp. 169–86; A. Raw, ‘Margaret of Anjou and the Language of Praise and Censure’, in Finding Individuality, ed. by Linda Clark, The Fifteenth Century, XVII (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2020), pp. 81–98; T. Thornton, ‘Lancastrian Rule and the Resources of the Prince of Wales, 1456–61’, Journal of Medieval History, 42 (2016), 387–88.

⁶ M. Hicks, The Wars of the Roses (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010), pp. 142–7; idem, Warwick the Kingmaker (Oxford: Blackwell, 1998), pp. 163–6; A. J. Pollard, Warwick the Kingmaker: Politics, Power and Fame (London: Hambledon, 2007), pp. 39–41; Maurer, pp. 165–8; R. A. Griffiths, The Reign of Henry VI (new edn, Stroud: Sutton Publishing, 1998), pp. 819–21; G. Harriss, Shaping the Nation: England 1360–1461 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2005), pp. 639–40.

⁷ W. Beamont, ‘The Battle of Blore Heath’, Journal of the Chester Archaeological Society, 1 (1850–1), 81–100; C. W. Sutton, revised H. C. G. Matthew, ‘Beamont, William John (1828–1868), Church of England Clergyman and Author’, in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography ed. by H. C. G. Matthew and Brian Harrison (60 vols, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004) [hereafter ODNB], IV. 531.

⁸ R. Brooke, Visits to Fields of Battle, in England, of the Fifteenth Century (London: John Russell Smith; Liverpool: J. Mawdsley & Son, 1857), pp. 21–37, esp. 24–37; C. W. Sutton, revised Simon Harrison, ‘Brooke, Richard (1791–1861), Antiquary’, ODNB, VII, 910. Brooke’s family estate was in Handforth (Chesh.) so he had a particular interest in Cheshire and, having practised as a solicitor and notary there, in Liverpool and Lancashire.

⁹ F. R. Twemlow, The Battle of Bloreheath, 1459 (Wolverhampton: Whitehead Brothers, 1912), pp. 11–28, at p. 27. He prints extracts from Waurin at his Appendix B, pp. xii–xiv (from Jehan de Waurin, Recueil des croniques et anchiennes istories de la Grant Bretaigne: a present nomme Engleterre, ed. William Hardy and Edward L. C. P. Hardy, Rolls Ser., 39 (5 vols, London: Longman, Green, Longman, Roberts, and Green, 1864–91), V, pp. 69, 319). The road network, still based on Roman infrastructure, would have led Salisbury’s men from Manchester via Middlewich into Staffordshire at Newcastle-under-Lyme, and from there the route lay to Market Drayton and further to Shrewsbury and then Ludlow: I. D. Margary, Roman Roads in Britain (revised edn, London: John Baker Publishers, 1967), pp. 278–322; B. P. Hindle, ‘The Road Network of Medieval England and Wales’, Journal of Historical Geography, 2 (1976), 207–21.

¹⁰ A. H. Burne, The Battlefields of England (London: Methuen & Co., 1950), p. xiv.

¹¹ Burne, More Battlefields of England, pp. 140–9. Remarkably, like Beamont and Twemlow, Burne also had a personal connection to the battlefield, having grown up nearby: p. 149.

¹² I. D. Rowney, ‘The Staffordshire Political Community 1440–1500’ (PhD diss., University of Keele, 1981), pp. 75–87, largely reproduced in his ‘Medieval Chroniclers and the Battle of Blore Heath’, North Staffordshire Journal of Field Studies, 20 (1984 for 1980), 9–17. P. A. Haigh, The Military Campaigns of the Wars of the Roses (Godalming: Bramley Books, 1995), p. 15–20, indicates ‘[d]etailed accounts of the battle itself are virtually non-existent’ and provides a brief account, with Salisbury’s men approaching from the East and Audley’s from the West, referring again e.g. to the sighting of Lancastrian pennons.

¹³ L. Visser-Fuchs, History as Pastime: Jean de Wavrin and his Collection of Chronicles of England (Donington: Shaun Tyas, 2018), chapter 6, esp. pp. 408–9, 418, and 474–6. Further, there is wide recognition of his bias in favour of Warwick: e.g. P. A. Johnson, Duke Richard of York 1411–1460 (corrected paperback reprint, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991), pp. 211–13.

¹⁴ Waurin, V, p. 269.

¹⁵ Waurin, V, p. 705.

¹⁶ A. J. Pollard, ‘The Northern Retainers of Richard Neville, Earl of Salisbury’, Northern History, 11 (1975), 52–69, at 52, 57, 62–3, 67; idem, North-Eastern England during the Wars of the Roses: Lay Society, War, and Politics, 1450–1500 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990), p. 276; T. Dunham Whitaker, A History of Richmondshire (2 vols, London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, and Brown, 1823), II, pp. 261–2; R. Horrox, ‘Harrington Family (per. c. 1300–1512)’, ODNB, xxv. pp. 383–5..

¹⁷ Horrox, ‘Harrington Family’, p. 384; Johnson, p. 222; Pollard, Warwick, p. 112; Hicks, Warwick, pp. 224–5.

¹⁸ Some previous attempts at an identification are not convincing: Twemlow and Gillespie suggested this was the Cheshireman Sir Thomas Fitton (Twemlow, Appendix B; Gillespie, pp. 77–89, esp. pp. 83–4; and see below pp. 9–10, n. 33); Visser-Fuchs suggested Thomas Criel (p. 475). Clayton, p. 86, correctly identifies Findern.

¹⁹ Waurin refers in similar terms to Findern as a casualty of the battle of Northampton, and one of the Lancastrians active in Northumberland in 1464: V. 300, 441.

²⁰ The House of Commons, 1422–1461, ed. by Linda Clark (7 vols, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press for the History of Parliament Trust, 2020), IV, pp. 498–501. Findern was on commissions from Dec 1459, when he headed the commission of array in Cambridgeshire (C[alendar of] P[atent] R[olls], 1452–1461, pp. 559, 560–1, 604–5), so if captured at Blore Heath he must have been released soon afterwards.

²¹ Waurin, V, pp. 319–21.

²² When Salisbury, Warwick [sic] and their men ‘aparcheurent’ the court forces ‘derriere une grant forest haye, dont on ne veoit que les boutz des penons, ilz se misrent a pie a larriere dune forest qui leur faisoit cloture a ung coste, et de lautre avoient mis leur charroy et leurs chevaulz lyes les ungz auz autres, et par derriere eulz avoient fait ung bon trenchis pour sceurete, et devant eulz avoient fichie leurs peux a la fachon dAngleterre’ [behind a large hedged forest, only the tips of the pennons being visible, they dismounted behind a forest which enclosed them on one side, and on the other had placed their wagon-train and their horses tied together, and behind them they had made a good trench for safety, and in front they drove in their stakes in the English fashion].

²³ The accounts of the betrayal at Ludford are more probable (the Calais garrison was associated with Warwick, not Salisbury), more extensive and appear in a variety of sources: ‘Bale’s Chronicle’, in Six Town Chronicles of England, ed. Ralph Flenley (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1911), p. 148; Vitellius A XVI, in The Chronicles of London, ed. Charles Lethbridge Kingsford (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1905), pp. 169–70; The Brut, or, the Chronicles of England, ed. Friedrich W. D. Brie, Early English Text Society, original series, 131 (2 vols, 1908), p. 527; The Great Chronicle of London, ed. A. H. Thomas and I. D. Thornley (London: printed by G.W. Jones at the sign of the Dolphin, 1938), p. 191. ‘Gregory’ also describes Trollope’s betrayal, but while still associating it with the lords after their meeting places it a few days earlier: Historical Collections, pp. 204–5. See also Griffiths, Reign of Henry VI, p. 822; Goodman, Wars of the Roses, pp. 30–1.

²⁴ Three Books of Polydore Vergil’s English History, ed. Henry Ellis, Camden Society, 29 (1844), pp. 102–3. Robert Fabyan, The New Chronicles of England and France, ed. by Henry Ellis (London: F. C. & J. Rivington, 1844), p. 634; Great Chronicle, p. 191.

²⁵ Hall, pp. 240–1. For Hall’s local connections, see n. 29 below.

²⁶ Hall, p. 240.

²⁷ Raphael Holinshed: Chronicles of England, Scotland and Ireland, ed. by Henry Ellis (6 vols, London: J. Johnson, 1807–8), III, p. 251 (following Hall closely in many places, but rendering ‘Gayles’ as ‘goales’); J. Stow, The Chronicles of England (London: printed by Raph Newberye at the assignment of Henry Bynneman, 1580), p. 688; idem, The Annales of England (London: printed by Ralphe Newbery, 1600), pp. 670–1.

²⁸ Gillespie, pp. 82–3; Clayton, pp. 79–90.

²⁹ Hall, p. 240; The House of Commons, 1509–1547, ed. by S. T. Bindoff (London: Secker & Warburg for the History of Parliament Trust, 1982), II, pp. 279–82, at p. 280. John Speed, on his map of Staffordshire (The Theatre of the Empire of Great Britaine (London: printed by William Hall, and to be sold by Iohn Sudbury & Georg Humble, 1612), unnumbered page following p. 69), listed Venables, Thomas Dutton, Sir Richard Molineux, Troutbeck, Legh, Done and Egerton.

³⁰ Holinshed, III, p. 251 (refers to Molyneux as Sir Richard); Ralph Griffiths, ‘Holinshed and Wales’, in The Oxford Handbook of Holinshed’s Chronicles, ed. by Paulina Kewes, Ian W. Archer and Felicity Heal (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), pp. 679–94, at p. 691; C. S. Clegg, ‘Holinshed [Hollingshead], Raphael (c. 1525–1580?), Historian’, ODNB, XXVII, pp. 644–7, at pp. 644–5; Clayton, pp. 84–5.

³¹ Stow, Chronicles (1580), p. 688; idem, Annales (1592), p. 662.

³² CPR 1452–61, p. 582; Clayton, p. 89.

³³ The National Archives of the U.K. [hereafter T.N.A.], CHES 2/133, rot. 10 r(2)–10d; Clayton, pp. 87–8; Gillespie, pp. 83–6.

³⁴ English Chronicle 1377–1461, pp. xiv, 79.

³⁵ Brut, p. 526.

³⁶ Chronicles of London, p. 169.

³⁷ ‘totam quasi militiam Comitatuum Cestriæ et Salopiæ’: Registra quorundam abbatum monasterii S. Albani, qui saeculo XVmo floruere; vol. 2: Registra Johannis Whethamstede, Wilhelmi Albon, et Wilhelmi Wallingforde, ed. by Henry Thomas Riley, Rolls Ser., 28vi (2 vols, London: Longman & Co., 1872–3), I, p. 338; M. Kekewich, ‘The Attainder of the Yorkists in 1459: Two Contemporary Accounts’, Bulletin of the Institute of Historical Research, 55 (1982), 25–34, at 31, 33.

³⁸ Chronicles of London, p. 276.

³⁹ A Chronicle of London, from 1089 to 1483, ed. by Harris Nicolas (London: Longman, Rees, Orme, Brown, & Green, 1827), p. 140. It should be noted that two other important accounts (Gregory and Waurin) of the battle did not mention county contingents as involved; this is also true of the less detailed account in ‘John Benet’s Chronicle for the Years 1400 to 1462’, ed. by G. A. Harriss and M. A. Harriss, in Camden Miscellany XXIV, Camden Society, 4th ser., 9 (1972), pp. 151–233, at p. 224, translated in A. Hanham, John Benet’s Chronicle, 1399–1462: An English Translation with a New Introduction (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016).

⁴⁰ Historical Collections, p. 204.

⁴¹ M-R. McLaren, The London Chronicles of the Fifteenth Century: A Revolution in English Writing (With an annotated edition of Bradford, West Yorkshire Archives MS 32D86/42) (Woodbridge: D. S. Brewer, 2002), pp. 29–33.

⁴² Historical Collections, p. 204; B. Wolffe, Henry VI (London: Methuen, 1981), p. 371.

⁴³ Stanley’s role is acknowledged by, for example, J. C. Wedgwood, History of Parliament: Biographies of Members of the House of Commons, 1439–1509 (London: HMSO, 1936–8), p. 799; but not in House of Commons, 1422–1461, VI, pp. 712–17.

⁴⁴ Rowney, ‘Staffordshire Political Community’, p. 73; S. M. Wright, The Derbyshire Gentry in the Fifteenth Century, Derbyshire Record Society, 8 (1983), 99–102, 126–7, 134–8.

⁴⁵ S. J. Payling, Political Society in Lancastrian England: The Greater Gentry of Nottinghamshire (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991), p. 114.

⁴⁶ Griffiths, Reign of Henry VI, p. 712: returned in 1450 and 1453, connected with York: citing Wedgwood, History of Parliament, pp. 395–6. This appears as one of at most two exceptions to the otherwise loyalist parliamentary gathering in 1453 (p. 699). See also now House of Commons, 1422–1461, IV, pp. 672–5.

⁴⁷ Johnson refers to ‘local score settling’ as lying behind the engagement at Blore Heath, citing evidence for conflict in the 1440s between the Cokaynes of Ashbourne (Derbys.) and Vernons of Haddon (Derbys.) on one side and Ralph Basset of Blore (Staffs.) on the other: Johnson, p. 187; T.N.A., KB 9/263/21,/22. For these conflicts, see Rowney, ‘Staffordshire Political Community’, pp. 315–21, 352–3 (describing how Basset moved from the duke of Buckingham’s orbit to become a Yorkist); it is not clear from Johnson’s account which participants at Blore Heath he believes were particularly affected by this feuding.

⁴⁸ CPR 1452–61, p. 410; E. L. O’Brien, ‘Molyneux, Richard (d. 1459), Landowner’, ODNB, XXXVIII, p. 557. For his date of death, see Clayton, pp. 85, 124, the error first appearing in Holinshed (see above p. 9, n. 30) and reappearing in e.g. ODNB.

⁴⁹ William Dugdale, The Visitation of the County Palatine of Lancaster, Made in the Year 1664–5, ed. by F. R. Raines, Chetham Society, 84–5, 88 (1872–3), p. 204.

⁵⁰ George Ormerod, The History of the County Palatine and City of Chester, ed. by Thomas Helsby (3 vols, 2^nd edn; London: George Routledge and Sons, 1882), III, p. 370, shows him granting Cholmondeston, Baddington, Broomhall, Over Austerson, and Nether Austerson to John de Nedeham and others as feoffees to his and his wife Joan’s use in 1452–3.

⁵¹ Chester, Cheshire Archives and Local Studies, DCH C/146; DWN 2/44: both show him as already Sir John Bromley in 1456.

⁵² Ormerod, II, p. 86, III, p. 345.

⁵³ Robert Ardern: House of Commons, 1422–1461, III, pp. 74–9; Griffiths, Reign of Henry VI, pp. 698, 711; T.N.A., KB 9/103/1, m. 15; A. E. M. Marshall, ‘The Rôle of English War Captains in England and Normandy’ (MA diss., University College of Swansea, 1974); Johnson, p. 115. Sir Peter Arderne: Reports from the Lords Committees … touching the Dignity of a Peer of the Realm (5 vols, [London: House of Commons, 1819), IV, p. 942.

⁵⁴ Griffiths, Reign of Henry VI, pp. 309, 337, 364, 877, 887, 889; J. S. Roskell, L. Clarke, and C. Rawcliffe, eds. The House of Commons, 1386–1421 (Stroud: Alan Sutton for the History of Parliament Trust, 1993), III, p. 279.

⁵⁵ Griffiths, Reign of Henry VI, pp. 55, 246, 250, 309, 360, 593; House of Commons, 1386–1421, III, p. 279; Rowney, ‘Staffordshire Political Community’, pp. 64–6; T.N.A., SC 8/117/5836; Stafford, Stafford County Record Office, 3764/46.

⁵⁶ Thomas Rymer, Foedera (2^nd edn, London: J. Tonson, 1726–35), XI, p. 456 (CPR 1452–61, p. 595): 26 June 1460 Coventry, grant to Nicholas Leveson, esq, of £20 from lordship of ‘Walshale’, Staffs. Leveson was escheator of Staffordshire in 1443–4 and 1453–4, and served as deputy sheriff in 1445–6: Rowney, ‘Staffordshire Political Community’, pp. 68, 77, 294, 391, 400, 419, 420; A. C. Wood, List of Escheators for England and Wales, List and Index Society, 72 (1971), p. 157; J. C. Wedgwood, ‘The Staffordshire Sheriffs (1086–1912), Escheators (1247–1619), and Keepers or Justices of the Peace (1263–1702)’, Collections for a History of Staffordshire, 3^rd ser. (1912), pp. 271–344, at p. 281 (deputy to Sir John Griffith of Wichnor); T.N.A., C 1/15/132,133.

⁵⁷ CPR 1452–61, p. 536–21 1459, Coventry. Harper had been one of those paid to watch Sir William Oldhall in St Martin’s sanctuary, 22 Mar 1452: Johnson, p. 116.

⁵⁸ E. A. Thomas, ‘The Lords Audley, 1391–1459’ (MA diss., University College of Swansea, 1976), ch. 3; also see gentry associates discussed at pp. 89–92.

⁵⁹ Clayton, pp. 77–8, 144–9, 163–7.

⁶⁰ H. Collins, ‘Sutton, John (VI) [John Dudley], First Baron Dudley (1400–1487)’, ODNB, LIII, pp. 389–91, at p. 389.

⁶¹ Offer of pardon: [The] P[arliament] R[olls] O[f] M[edieval] E[ngland, 1275–1504], ed. by Chris Given-Wilson et al. (16 vols, Woodbridge: Boydell Press, National Archives), XIII, p. 459. For discussion of the motivation of the parties in 1459, see Griffiths, Reign of Henry VI, pp. 817–26; Hicks, Warwick, pp. 154–67; Wolffe, pp. 320–1; Pollard, Warwick, pp. 37–9 (neither Wolffe nor Pollard recognize that the offer of pardon to the Yorkists in return for humble submission excluded Salisbury); J. Watts, Henry VI and the Politics of Kingship (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), pp. 348–52; Maurer, pp. 164–8; P. A. Johnson, Duke Richard of York 1411–1460 (corrected paperback edn, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991), pp. 185–9. The unusual animosity towards Salisbury’s wife is also significant here: she was, exceptionally, included in the attainders, accused of having ‘ymagyned and compassed’ the king’s death at Middleham on 1 Aug 1459; her flight to Ireland in the aftermath of Ludford, sharing this destination with the duke of York and his son Edmund, rather than to Calais with her husband (and the earls of Warwick and March), suggests she may have been at Blore Heath and was certainly identified closely with the crimes of her husband, resulting in this unusually severe treatment of a noblewoman: PROME, XII, p. 461.

⁶² English Chronicle 1377–1461, p. 79; Historical Collections, p. 204; T.N.A., SC 6/779/7, m. 12 (noted by Joseph Hemingway, History of the City of Chester, From its Foundation to the Present Time (2 vols, Chester: printed by J. Fletcher, 1831), I, p. 140.

⁶³ Pollard, ‘Northern Retainers’, pp. 59, 63, 68; G. M. Coles, ‘The Lordship of Middleham, especially in Yorkist and Early Tudor Times’ (MA thesis, University of Liverpool, 1961), p. 278; W. Page, ed. The Victoria History of the County of York: North Riding (3 vols, London: Constable, St. Catherine Press 1914–25), I, p. 112, relying on T.N.A., C 139/173/31, for a transaction recently involving Henry le Scrope, recorded in his inquisition post mortem of 1459.

⁶⁴ A. Gross, ‘Ashton, Sir Thomas (c. 1403–c. 1460), Alchemist’, ODNB, II, p. 684; Johnson, p. 82; Manchester, John Rylands University Library, CRU/614 (Nov 1442); Preston, Lancashire Archives, DDB 13/9. Thomas is still described as the son & heir of Sir William in T.N.A., C 1/83/34 [1486–93]. Like others involved in the campaign, Ashton and Rokeby were soon pardoned, at Coventry on 20 Dec 1459 and Farnham on 2 Jan 1460 respectively: CPR 1452–61, pp. 537, 545.

⁶⁵ 34^th Report of the Deputy Keeper of the Public Records (London: HMSO, 1873), p. 167; R. L. Storey, Thomas Langley and the Bishopric of Durham, 1406–1437 (London: S.P.C.K. for the Church Historical Society, 1961), p. 61; J. W. Armstrong, England’s Northern Frontier: Conflict and Local Society in the Fifteenth-Century Scottish Marches. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020), p. 123n; Michael Jones and Simon Walker, ‘Private Indentures for Life Service in Peace and War 1278–1476’, in Camden Miscellany, XXXII, 5th Ser., 2 (1994), pp. 1–190, no. 121, at p. 151; J. S. Roskell, The Commons in the Parliament of 1422: English Society and Parliamentary Representation Under the Lancastrians (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1954), p. 178. Sir William: House of Commons, 1422–1461, IV, pp. 270–7.

⁶⁶ PROME, XII, pp. 458–61; Pollard, North-Eastern England, pp. 271–2, 276–7.

⁶⁷ Pollard, ‘Northern Retainers’, pp. 63, 67–8; R. Horrox, ‘Conyers family (per. c. 1375–1525)’, ODNB, XIII, pp. 72–4, at p.73; Coles, pp. 95, 113, 116, 121–34, 276–8.

⁶⁸ R. Horrox, ‘Parr family (per. c. 1370–1517)’, ODNB, XLII, pp. 838–9; R. L. Storey, The End of the House of Lancaster (Stroud: Alan Sutton, 1986), pp. 120–1; P. Jalland, ‘The Influence of the Aristocracy on Shire Elections in the North of England, 1450–70’, Speculum, 47 (1972), 483–508, at 496, 499. Hicks, Warwick, p. 214, is an example of one of those led by ‘Annales rerum Anglicarum’, in Letters and Papers Illustrative of the Wars of the English in France during the Reign of Henry the Sixth, King of England, ed. Joseph Stevenson, Rolls Ser., 22 (2 vols in 3, London: Longmans, 1861–4), II/2, 775, to refer to his death at Wakefield.

⁶⁹ Calendar of Inquisitions, Miscellaneous (Chancery), Preserved in the Public Record Office, viii: 1422–1485 (Woodbridge: Boydell Press; London: Public Record Office, 2003), p. 159 (no. 253: inquisition on traitors’ property in Yorkshire, 1459) demonstrates that Thomas Meryng was seized of the manor of Tong, worth £20 pa. He was also named as of Tong in Yorkshire in the proclamations against the traitors issued in 1460: Rymer, Foedera, XI, 454; Calendar of Close Rolls, 1454–61, p. 416. Wedgwood, History of Parliament, p. 586; Calendar of Close Rolls, 1441–7, p. 434; C. E. Arnold, ’A Political Study of the West Riding of Yorkshire, 1437–1509’ (PhD diss., University of Manchester, 1984). For the family’s prominence in Yorkshire, and the way they connected its politics with Nottinghamshire’s, see The Plumpton Letters and Papers, ed. Joan Kirby, Camden Society, 5^th ser., 8 (1996), nos. 146, 171. They were not part of the elite gentry group identified by S. Payling, Political Society in Lancastrian England: The Greater Gentry of Nottinghamshire (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991), pp. 148–9, 153, but see comments by Carpenter, p. 147; also A. Cameron, ‘A Nottinghamshire Quarrel in the Reign of Henry VII’, Bulletin of the Institute of Historical Research, 45 (1972), 27–37; idem, ‘Sir Henry Willoughby of Wollaton’, Transactions of the Thoroton Society, 74 (1970), 10–21, at 17. Confusion on his identity: Pollard, North-Eastern England, p. 272 (Meryng as being from Tong (Shrops.) and hence joining Salisbury later with William Stanley, after the earl’s departure from Yorkshire).

⁷⁰ M. C. Punshon, ‘Government and Political Society in the West Riding of Yorkshire, 1399–1461’ (DPhil diss., University of York, 2002), p. 168.

⁷¹ CPR 1452–61, pp. 440, 674.

⁷² PROME, XII, pp. 504–5; M. J. Bennett, ‘Stanley, Sir William (c. 1435–1495), Administrator and Landowner’, ODNB, LII, pp. 244–6, at p. 244; Clayton, pp. 80–1, commenting on Twemlow, p. 36, and Gillespie, p. 78. Thomas Stanley was married to Eleanor Neville, daughter of the earl of Salisbury and sister of Warwick; his loss of the offices in Cheshire held by his father has already been noted above: Michael J. Bennett, ‘Stanley, Thomas, first earl of Derby (c. 1433–1504)’, ODNB; B. Coward, The Stanleys, Lords Stanley and Earls of Derby, 1385–1672: The Origins, Wealth and Power of a Landowning Family, Chetham Society, 3rd ser., 30 (1983), pp. 9–10; Clayton, pp. 77–8; House of Commons, 1422–1461, VI, pp. 728–30.

⁷³ CPR 1452–61, p. 451.

⁷⁴ Arnold, I, pp. 142, 263–4.

⁷⁵ Pollard, North-Eastern England, p. 271; Punshon, p. 201; T. Lawson-Tancred, Records of a Yorkshire Manor (London: E. Arnold, 1937), p. 67; W. Wheater, Knaresburgh and its Rulers (Leeds: R. Jackson, 1907), pp. 160, 187, 189. We cannot be sure all those named rode with Salisbury to Blore Heath and Ludford: one of Birnand’s group, Ralph Pullen allegedly occupied Knaresborough for the earl on 26 Sept. After Ludford, Percy took action in Chancery against Sir William Plumpton for house-breaking and theft: Arnold, I, p. 144; T.N.A., C 1/31/485.

⁷⁶ Thomas, ‘Lords Audley’, p. 18; The Visitation of Shropshire, Taken in the Year 1623, ed. by George Glazebrook and John Paul Rylands, Harleian Soc., 29 (1889), p. 295; W. Burson, ‘The Kynaston Family’, Transactions of the Shropshire Archaeological and Natural History Society, 2^nd ser., 6 (1894), 209–22, at 211; House of Commons, 1509–1558, II, pp. 486–7; H. T. Evans, Wales and the Wars of the Roses (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1915), pp. 103–4; ‘Moliant i Syr Rosier Cinast ap Gruffudd o’r Cnwcin’ <http://www.gutorglyn.net/gutorglyn/poem/?poem-selection=79 > [accessed 27 Apr 2022].

⁷⁷ T.N.A., C 49/52/2; PROME, XII, pp. 502–3.

⁷⁸ Sheriff 1455–6, 1460–1 (List of Sheriffs for England and Wales, from the Earliest Times to A.D. 1831, Public Record Office, Lists and Indexes, 9 (1898), p. 158), Fulk was involved in recognisances for Salisbury’s son John Neville regarding his marriage to Isabel Ingoldesthorpe in 1457: T.N.A., SC 8/28/1399; PROME, XII, pp. 542–4.

⁷⁹ William followed his father Leonard into York’s service, and succeeded him in Oct 1455: R. Horrox, ‘Hastings, William, First Baron Hastings (c. 1430–1483), Courtier and Administrator’, ODNB, XXV, pp. 792–5, at p. 792 (which refers to his presence at Ludford and does not mention Blore Heath).

⁸⁰ PROME, XII, pp. 502–3; R. K. Rose, ‘Bowes, Sir William (c. 1389–1465), Soldier’, ODNB, VI, pp. 945–6 at p. 946. Pollard, North-Eastern England, pp. 272, 275, says the pardon was for involvement at Ludford, but the record indicates it was for Ludford ‘or other places’, and therefore potentially in Bowes’ case for Blore Heath.

⁸¹ He became an important figure in the Yorkist regime in Shropshire from the summer of 1460, including as escheator from Nov 1460, and sheriff for two years from Nov 1461, again from Nov 1469, and then a further time on the victorious return of Edward IV in 1471: CPR 1452–61, pp. 608, 676; Calendar of Fine Rolls, 1452–1461, p. 292; CPR 1461–7, pp. 98, 518, 570; Calendar of Fine Rolls, 1461–1471, pp. 10, 48, 254, 268; List of Sheriffs, p. 118.

⁸² e.g. York’s receiver general John Mylewater of Stoke Edith (Herefs.) and Walter Mymme of Fairford (Gloucs.), who had been auditor of York’s lordship of Denbigh in Nov 1458: CPR 1452–61, pp. 531, 538; Johnson, pp. 17, 64, 118, 235.

⁸³ Above, p. 22 and nn. 80.

⁸⁴ CPR 1452–61, pp. 537 (19 Dec, Conyers; 20 Dec, Ashton), 545 (2 Jan 1460, Rokeby), 581 (25 Mar 1460, Haryngton).

⁸⁵ CPR 1452–61, pp. 537, 527, 530, 540, 549, 570, 575, 577, 591 (Mountford, who had the usual scope of pardon but with the additional coverage of all gifts of liveries before 20 Nov last), 592. Pollard, ‘Retainers’, pp. 59, 61, 63, 67, 68; idem, North-Eastern England, pp. 130, 137, 270, 289; idem, ‘The Burghs of Brough Hall, c. 1270–1574’, North Yorkshire County Record Office Journal, 6 (1978), 5–33, at 13–14; Johnson, p. 150; Jalland, pp. 491–2; Coles, p. 278.

⁸⁶ Testamenta Eboracensia: A Selection of Wills from the Registry at York, ed. by James Raine, James Raine jr, and J. W. Clay, Surtees Society, 4, 30, 45, 53, 79, 106 (6 vols, 1836–1902), II, pp. 239–46, at pp. 244–5, 246; III, pp. 264–8; Pollard, North-Eastern England, pp. 137–8; Hicks, Warwick, p. 22.

⁸⁷ PROME, XII, p. 501.

⁸⁸ CPR 1461–7, pp. 17, 19; 37^th Report of the Deputy Keeper of the Public Records (London: HMSO, 1876), app. ii, p. 589. For his rewards after Towton, see Pollard, North-Eastern England, p. 291.

⁸⁹ Testamenta Eboracensia, II, p. 246; Pollard, North-Eastern England, p. 254.

⁹⁰ CPR 1452–61, pp. 527, 530, 532, 539.

⁹¹ Pollard, North-Eastern England, p. 277.

⁹² Historical Collections, p. 204.

⁹³ See the differences of opinion between Hicks, Warwick, pp. 147–59, and Pollard, Warwick, pp. 37–9, 203–6.

⁹⁴ CPR 1452–61, pp. 534, 564–5, 574, 578, 604; T.N.A., C 49/32/12A; C 81/1376/9; Rymer, Foedera, XI, pp. 444–5; Griffiths, Reign of Henry VI, pp. 828, 851 n332, 852 n352; Johnson, p. 194; R. S. Thomas, ‘The Political Career, Estates and Connection of Jasper Tudor, Earl of Pembroke and Duke of Bedford d. 1495’ (PhD diss., University College of Swansea, 1971), pp. 117–33, 180–7; T.N.A., SC 6/779/10, m. 7 v.

⁹⁵ T.N.A., SC 6/779/9, mm. 2 v–4 v.

⁹⁶ Ormerod, I, p. 481; T.N.A., SC 6/779/7, m. 12 (not Butler or Oldham).

⁹⁷ In Nov 1460, Thomas Harrington was recorded as having been subject to a long imprisonment from early Oct 1459, preventing his appearance in Chancery that month and some time after: CPR 1452–61, p. 636. Hall, p. 240.

⁹⁸ T.N.A., CHES 2/133, r. 7 r(4) (37^th Report of the Deputy Keeper of the Public Records, app. ii, p. 499); Clayton, p. 92. Of the prisoners recorded as being held, Thomas Ashton was pardoned 20 Dec 1459, Ralph Rokeby on 2 Jan 1460: CPR 1452–61, pp. 537, 545. That left only the obscurely named ‘Robert Evereus’ esq. (probably Robert Eure; see above pp. 17–18, n. 62) from among the wider group being held. The calendar in 37^th Report of the Deputy Keeper of the Public Records renders the name ‘Robert Laurens’.

⁹⁹ Griffiths, Reign of Henry VI, pp. 855, 867; Johnson, p. 211: although we only have indentures of 2 Oct at Gloucester to prove the renunciation (K. B. McFarlane, ‘The Wars of the Roses’, Proceedings of the British Academy, 50 (1964), pp. 87–119, at pp. 92–3), the surviving text of an indenture made at Chester on 13 Sept, appointing Robert Bold constable of Denbigh Castle, appears to confirm in its anno domini dating that York had taken that step: CPR 1461–7, p. 60.

¹⁰⁰ Johnson, p. 211, relying on Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, MS Fr 20,136, f. 75 r.