ABSTRACT
Late medieval people were like ourselves. We have not evolved. Mankind has undergone no discernible biological change since written history began, let alone over the past five centuries. It follows that we can empathise with our fifteenth-century predecessors, imagine ourselves in their situation, and understand why they acted as they did. We appreciate that the past differs from the present: the circumstances, the context, have changed. It seems much more than a century ago that ‘great household was still a most potent force in every aspect of the English life’.1 If the rural Gloucestershire of his youth in the 1920s had become a lost world to Laurie Lee thirty years on,2 how much more striking (if gradual) have been the transformations from medieval to modern. Researching past circumstances is what historians and archaeologists are for. Once the facts are established, as they generally are, we can place ourselves in our fifteenth-century predecessors’ shoes, we can locate ourselves in their England, we can reconstruct and understand what they were going through, and why they behaved as they did. Professor Richmond’s twenty-year immersion in the Paston Letters revealed that ‘the parameters of the political culture’ were ‘much the same, resemble closely [and were] more or less synonymous with those of our political culture’.3 We too can be late medieval magnates. Clad in appropriate armour, bearing bows and arrows, on the correct site and briefed precisely on events, we can reenact the Wars of the Roses and even improve on the results. Some of us do.
