Michael K. Jones, Bosworth 1485: psychology of a battle (Tempus: Stroud, 2002) ISBN: 0 7524 2334 7

Bosworth is one of the best known and most written-about medieval battles. The traditional narrative of the battle is well-established: the confusion surrounding King Richard III’s camp on the eve of the battle; the inactivity of key parts of his host, notably the earl of Northumberland; Richard’s impetuous charge down Ambion Hill; and the final, decisive intervention of the Stanleys leading to Henry Tudor’s improbable victory. It is this orthodoxy that Dr. Jones seeks to overturn.

            The accepted account of Bosworth, so Jones argues, is overshadowed by Shakespeare’s dramatic account of the battle in Richard III. The sense of foreboding, the idea that Bosworth was Richard’s reckoning for the murder of the Princes in the Tower, is merely a dramatic device. Some key features of the campaign (the loss of the Host before Richard’s pre-battle mass and the solitary king pleading ‘my kingdom for a horse’), first described by Tudor writers on the battle and incorporated into modern accounts of Bosworth, were merely literary topos. The image of Richard horseless at the end of a lost battle, for instance, would have been a commonplace to a Tudor audience familiar with stories of the defeat of the Count of Artois at Courtrai in 1302. Our perception of Bosworth, then, is largely a product of dramatic licence and Tudor propaganda. Even the accepted site for the battlefield, Jones asserts, is a fiction: the first mention of Ambion Hill as the focus of the fighting was by the eighteenth-century antiquarian William Hutton, eager to find a suitably dramatic location for visitors to experience where the great Shakespearean actor Richard Burbage ‘fought his last battle’!

            In place of the Tudor myth of Bosworth Dr. Jones places the battle firmly within the context of medieval chivalry, society and battle culture. Jones’s Richard III is a very different character to the scheming villain portrayed by Shakespeare. Richard is instead cast as the legitimate heir of his father, Richard duke of York, both in terms of blood and political heritage. The argument that Edward IV was illegitimate is not a new one but, although the evidence is at best circumstantial, it provides a challenging reinterpretation of the Yorkist polity. Whatever the veracity of those stories, it is surely significant that Richard was identified more clearly than his elder brother with his father’s military and political legacy by the late 1470s, advocating a more aggressive policy towards France and acting as chief mourner at his father’s reburial at Fotheringay in 1476.

            Jones’s Richard is portrayed not as the hapless victim of events at Bosworth but as a pro-active king, seeking vindication for his rule through battle. His boldness as a leader was reminiscent of his father’s 1441 campaign in Pontoise (the significance and duration of which has been previously underestimated) and was characteristic of an individual aware of chivalric expectation and seeking to assert himself as a knightly exemplar. Richard’s deliberate approach to the battle can be seen in his pre-battle crown-wearing ritual; not merely with any crown but with the sacred crown of Edward the Confessor, transforming the ritual into a second coronation. Jones’s insistence on the importance of ritual in imparting cohesion and unity to a medieval host is an important step towards a new way of interpreting battle history. Given the emphasis on ritual by historians of other military cultures (for instance, Rhoades Murphey’s work on the Ottoman armies of the fifteenth to eighteenth century), Jones’s insistence upon its importance in a  medieval western European context is a welcome conceptual shift. Moreover, Jones transforms our understanding of the pivotal moment of the battle: Richard’s mass cavalry charge towards Henry Tudor’s standard. This was not the act of a desperate man but a well-planned stratagem influenced by his Spanish captain, Juan Salaçar, and Richard’s own knowledge of Castilian affairs and the battle of Toro in 1476, where a cavalry charge by the forces of Ferdinand and Isabella had proved decisive. Richard’s defeat was the not the product of providence nor of the failure of Richard’s host to support an unpopular monarch but had more to do with luck. Jones has rediscovered evidence of the presence of well-trained French mercenaries in Tudor’s army. It was these pikemen, fighting in the Swiss fashion, that thwarted Richard’s charge and the discovery of a letter, written the day after the battle by one of those soldiers, is a remarkable document that sheds new light on this climactic event.

            Jones’s relocation of the site of the battle is also evidence of the author’s insistence upon using contemporary sources to establish a new narrative of the battle. Historians who have followed Hutton and placed Richard on Ambion Hill have ignored a key piece of evidence: Polydore Vergil’s statement that Tudor manoeuvred to a position that gave him the advantage of having the sun at his back. This renders the usual placing of Tudor’s army to the south-west of Ambion Hill impossible. Sound military reasons also lead Jones to doubt the traditional siting of the battle. Richard saw the coming battle as an opportunity to vindicate his kingship and thus would not have taken up a defensive position; moreover, Ambion Hill is simply not large enough for the king to have deployed his host and marshalled his cavalry charge effectively. Jones relocates the battle westwards to the open fields around the Warwickshire villages of Atherstone, Atterton and Fenny Drayton. As well as making more tactical sense, manuscript evidence of compensation given to men whose fields were trampled by Tudor’s host on their way to and, crucially, ‘at our late field’ makes Jones’s argument a convincing one. As the author points out, medieval battles were usually located by the burial of the dead, where annual acts of commemoration would take place, rather than where the fighting actually took place. Bosworth and Dadlington (a location also advanced as the site of the battle and where Tudor’s dead were laid to rest) became associated with the battle because they afforded convenient locations for the commemoration of those who had fallen in the battle.

            This is an important book that should be read not only by those interested in late fifteenth century English history but by all students of medieval warfare. Turning his back on the Alfred Burnes school of military history (an approach the author discusses at length in his recent article on the battle of Verneuil: War in History 9: 2002, 375-411), Jones seeks to understand the mentality of the antagonists, drawing on his wide knowledge of medieval society and culture, to present a more sympathetic account of medieval battles. By understanding why men fought and why they acted as they did on the battlefield, we can obtain a much more rounded understanding of the dynamics of war in the late middle ages. Bosworth 1485 is an important step along that road.

History of Parliament, London                                                DAVID GRUMMITT