About this episode

The episode explores the dark reality of the Wars of the Roses and its impact on the English aristocracy.

History tells us the Wars of the Roses was a chivalric struggle between two great houses that ended with Henry Tudor's victory at Bosworth and the dawn of the Tudor age. That's the cover story. What actually happened across 30 years — between 1455 and 1487 — was something much darker. Two cousin lineages of the same royal family, Lancaster and York, fought a sequence of battles that didn't just transfer the crown. They systematically destroyed the English aristocracy. In 1450, England had roughly 200 noble houses with the wealth and military power to shape the kingdom. By 1490, half of them were extinct. At Towton on Palm Sunday, 1461, an estimated 28,000 men died in a single afternoon in a blizzard — the bloodiest day in English military history before or since. Henry Tudor didn't found the Tudor dynasty by defeating Richard III at Bosworth. He inherited a country where the class that could have stopped him had already killed itself. This is the pattern when an aristocracy turns its weapons on itself. It doesn't get replaced by reform or restoration. It gets replaced by something more centralized than what it tried to defend. Today I'm joined by The Medieval Scholar…

People in this episode

Host: Jeremy Ryan Slate

Guest: The Medieval Scholar

Topics covered

• Wars of the Roses
• English history
• aristocracy
• political struggle
• military history
• historical analysis

Keywords

• Wars of the Roses
• Henry Tudor
• aristocracy
• military history
• political landscape
• historical events
• noble houses
• self-destruction

Mentioned in this episode

Places: England

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