IMC 2017: Sessions

Paper -a considers how contemporaries viewed Edward IV's accession. In reading about or recounting the turbulent years after 1455, it is all too easy to be swept away by the 'Garden verse' with which one of the London chroniclers marked Edward IV's accession: 'Let us walk in a new vineyard, and let us make a gay garden in the month of March, with this fair white rose and herb, the earl of March', and the pomp and pageantry of the young King's coronation and first parliament that followed in the months after Towton. There is, nevertheless, good reason to suggest that to many contemporaries the year 1461 was far from gay, and that the prevailing atmosphere in the land was less that of a new beginning, and more that of the stunned aftermath of a cataclysmic shock, comparable not merely to England in the post Brexit summer of 2016, but possibly even to Germany in 1945. Paper -b examines the perceptions of soldiers in third quarter of the 15th century and the effect of the Hundred Years War on the professionalization of the English soldier. Paper -c focuses on the nature of the wars themselves. Many argue that the late 15th century witnessed a fundamental shift in the nature of chivalry, yet many of those who fought in the Wars of the Rose either fought in the Hundred Years War themselves or were the sons of those fighters. The paper considers the extent to which the chivalric values held by those who fought the French in the Hundred Years War were shared by those fighting fellow Englishmen in the Wars of the Roses.