ABSTRACT
The Wars of the Roses were the longest military and political upheaval between King Stephen and Charles I. Did the Wars result from fundamental weaknesses in the social and political systems? Or did they mark merely the lowest point in two centuries of under-performance? In actuality they were a wholly exceptional epoch. A deep economic recession (‘The Great Slump 1440-1480’)1 and consequent royal impoverishment coincided with unprecedented foreign intervention and popular unrest, which would have strained any political system, however strong and healthy it was. The crisis headlines in the textbooks overlook the underlying harmony and stability. Central government, local government, the judicial system and the economy operated throughout uninterrupted and indeed almost unimpaired. It was not that fifteenth-century England was in turmoil bar a few brief interludes of peace, but that only occasionally and only briefly was normal life disrupted by political crises. It is the systems rather than the events that are the subject of this book.
