ABSTRACT
A recently published chapter has re-examined events in England preceding the accession of Richard III in June 1483, and has come to certain conclusions which differ from traditional opinion. The basic difficulty lies in the contradictions between sources, both narrative and documentary, and the historian’s interpretation must depend partly on the weight which he gives to the sixteenth-century accounts, in the writings of Polydore Vergil and Thomas More, and in the Great Chronicle of London. The principal documentary source for the earlier date is the inquisitions post mortem. In view of ambiguities in Stallworth’s letter, it is best to defer consideration of it until after the narrative sources. The most cogent argument for the ‘revisionist’ case lies more in its inherent logic than in the evidence of sources which are vulnerable to close criticism, although by no means totally disproved by it.
