ABSTRACT
The aristocracy and gentry of the fifteenth century were always inclined to use force when they could have gone to law: after Cade’s revolt they had less hesitation than ever about putting their private quarrels to the issue of arms. The early 1450s witnessed recourse to violence in a whole host of disputes. Summonses of the offenders before the council, which was usually the only effective authority when the great were involved, now simply went unheeded. Lord Cobham’s men clashed with those of Lord Wiltshire, those of Lord Cromwell with the men of the Duke of Exeter. In the west September 1451 saw the Earl of Devon formally besieging his old enemy Lord Bonville in Taunton castle. The worst troubles were in the north, where the long-standing feud of Nevilles and Percies threatened to achieve the stature of a full-scale private war. The Percies viewed with understandable dismay the rising fortune of their rivals. Richard Neville had married the heiress of Salisbury and had acquired important estates in Yorkshire and elsewhere from his mother, Joan Beaufort; his son Richard had married Anne Beauchamp, and in 1449 succeeded in her right to the earldom of Warwick and its magnificent inheritance. The younger Percies, in particular the Earl of Northumberland’s tempestuous third son, Baron Egremont, saw no means of checking an influence which threatened to swamp their power in their traditional homeland, short of force. Many historians have regarded the battle at Heworth in 1453 between the followers of Nevilles and Percies as the first battle of the Wars of the Roses, ‘the beginning of the sorrows of England’.1
