Forgotten Women of the Wars of the Roses: Women’s Strength in Fifteenth Century England

The Wars of the Roses were fought in England between around 1450 and 1490, triggered by the weak rule of the child-king Henry VI. He succeeded to the throne as a baby in 1422, but even his adult reign was characterised by fragility, inconsistency and gross mismanagement of his nobles. Power struggles between aristocrats followed and in the 1450s the family of the House of York would mount their own claim to the throne, along with their intention to unseat the Lancastrian Henry. 

Battles were fought by soldiers swinging swords and axes, clashing on muddy battlefields. Thousands of sons, husbands, fathers and grandfathers lost their lives in the conflict. Entering a period of sudden grief, many women had no time to reflect or deal emotionally with the loss of family members and loved ones. Some, like Elizabeth Paston, had to legally defend their lands from opportunists pushing claims of their own, now her husband was dead and no longer around to defend her. Medieval ballads describe tearful women flocking to frosty battlefields the following day to identify and claim their loved ones’ bodies for burial. Others retreated into a religious life in local abbeys, exhausted from the political torment waged beyond their stone walls.

Ellen Gethin

All these women displayed an amazing sense of resilience. They set their minds towards survival and the future of their children. For those who embarked on a new religious life, they carved out roles in communities of women who prayed for the end of conflict and spiritually supported their local villages and towns. Women also worked as servants, merchants, tradeswomen and even prison wardens. We talk of the ‘keep calm and carry on’ mentality of World War Two, but our fifteenth-century ancestors seem to have uttered a similar mantra of their own. 

Although medieval women were not allowed by society to fight in battle, many witnessed the fizz of arrows and the boom of cannon for themselves. Elizabeth Blount, Margaret Paston and Elizabeth Treffrey all defended homes placed under military siege by their enemies. Alice Knyvet stood at the drawbridge of Buckenham Castle and told Edward IV’s men to retreat, while Margaret Paston wrote asking for fresh supplies of armour, arrows and crossbows when their family home in Norfolk was under threat. Bystanders were also exposed to the brutality of the era. Following battle, public executions of high-status captives on the losing side were hastily carried out in marketplaces around the country. A woman in Hereford was so moved by the execution of the Lancastrian nobleman Owen Tudor that she lifted up his head in her arms and placed it on the top of the market cross, lighting over a hundred candles around it. She was dismissed as ‘mad’ by a chronicler.

Anne Neville

Characters like Margaret Talbot Countess of Shrewsbury, Alice Montacute Countess of Salisbury and Margaret de Vere Countess of Oxford plotted, conspired and raised local armies to bolster their families’ cause. Another woman of the wars, the Welsh Ellen Gethin, was thought to have avenged the death of her brother by killing his murderer. Ellen’s role as a vengeful, covert archer has slipped into the haze of historical legend, but she was a real woman who lost her husband during the Battle of Edgecote in 1469. Royal women too, have deserved re-evaluation. Anne Neville was Richard III’s queen, often considered by earlier Victorian historians as depressed, tragic and uninvolved. However she is now being recognised by modern historians as an active consort queen, simply overshadowed by her father the Earl of Warwick and later, her husband. 

Evidence demonstrates that women not only played a number of roles during the Wars of the Roses, but that through them they displayed bravery, strength and political intelligence. They were resilient, defending their livelihoods both legally and physically and organising military and household supplies. They experienced the brutality of medieval war and its aftermath on the cold battlefield and took huge risks to support their family’s side in the wars and effect change. It is vital that we acknowledge them so that their stories can help us gain a fuller understanding of the wider context of the Wars of the Roses and England’s wider military history.

Find out more in Forgotten Women of the Wars of the Roses by Jo Romero, published by Pen and Sword Books. You can find more of Jo’s work at Love British History.

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Jo Romero is a freelance writer who reads way too many books and is fascinated by women’s history. She also works as a watercolour artist and Urban Sketcher and lives in Berkshire.