Despite the obvious interest aroused by battle, murder and sudden death, the Wars of the Roses have been astonishingly neglected by modern historians, and even by the more recent historical novelists. Medieval History ebbs with the Hundred Years War, and Modern History begins with the Tudors, while, between the two, the tide of interest leaves the wars of Lancaster and York high and rather dry.
The growing concern with social history has merely accentuated this neglect: the Wars of the Roses may be mentioned incidentally in a chapter dealing with the general lawlessness of the times, but they are regarded principally as a matter for the political or military historian, to whom, on the other hand, they often seem little more than a “glorified tournament.”
The reason for this unfortunate state of affairs probably lies in the kind of material available to the historian, and in this respect a comparison with the English Civil War of the seventeenth century is useful: the great attraction there springs from the comparative ease with which one may analyse the motives of combatant and non-combatant alike, from the King and Cromwell downward.
