ABSTRACT
The high Middle Ages was a turbulent period in British history. The high Middle Ages saw a procession of monarchs belonging to the house of Plantagenet, a royal dynasty which was descended from the counts of Anjou. The year 1485 is one of the seminal dates in English history as it has been taken as the end of the Middle Ages by generations of historians. The fifteenth century has always been an awkward one for historians, largely because the documentary evidence is far less satisfactory than for the centuries on either side. In the words of Professor J. R. Lander: The waning of the Middle Ages is a mesmeric concept which has for long dominated the probes of historians so fascinated by an imagined morphology of decay that one of them has even endowed the century with a collective death wish.
