How a man was equipped for battle tells us much about how he fought, while surviving musters record how a soldier was recruited and what he wore in combat. Modern research into arms and armour of the period helps us to prove or disprove various theories regarding the soldier’s battlefield experience. Using a multi-disciplined approach, therefore, what emerges is that the medieval soldier’s experience in the Wars of the Roses is unique and not what we are led to believe in history books. Some town and city records also described the men who marched off to war between 14, but clearly, other evidence is needed to cut through the romantic and chivalric ideology portrayed in the chronicles. These fleeting references are contained in letters written after battles had taken place, in documents recording a soldier’s service, in musters where a recruit is named along with his weapons, and in military manuals that describe fighting methods. However, several contemporary 15th-century documents, in addition to the chronicles, provide brief glimpses of the men who fought in the wars between York and Lancaster, and this paints a picture of the medieval soldier that is not stereotyped. Indeed, because no fully corroborated accounts of these battles exist, one might conclude that so complex a subject is best left well alone. THE SCARCITY OF reliable contemporary military evidence for the 17 major battles of the Wars of the Roses provides few clues to the medieval soldiers’ battlefield experience. (Image source: WikiMedia Commons) “The medieval soldier’s experience in the Wars of the Roses is unique and not what we are led to believe in history books.” Historian Andrew Boardman seeks to reveal what this generation-spanning struggle was like for them. Yet it was the ordinary soldiers marching beneath the banners of the competing houses of York and Lancaster who did the fighting. The Wars of the Roses was a 32-year conflict waged between two rival factions of England’s Plantagenet nobility.
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