The end of the Middle Ages?
The Battle of Bosworth Field, on Saturday, 22 August 1485, has often been taken as marking not only the end of the Wars of the Roses but also the close of the Middle Ages in England. It saw the defeat of the Yorkist King Richard III by Henry Tudor, and the beginning of the Tudor dynasty which would rule England until the death of Elizabeth I in 1603. The establishment of this “new monarchy,” it has been claimed, was associated with the start of a new era in English history, lasting for roughly the next three centuries and sometimes called the early modern period. But was this battle really as decisive a moment as some historians have argued?
Certainly, some historians have suggested that regnal years and changes of dynasty have severe limitations as markers of the transition from one historical age to another. The underlying structures of politics, government, society and economy moved too slowly, especially in the pre-modern world, for the replacement of one monarch by another to alter things decisively overnight.
In the case of Henry VII, historians have also argued that many of his alleged innovations in government – especially in controlling finances through the royal household – had already been anticipated by Edward IV and Richard III. Henry was thus less of an innovator than had often been claimed. Rather, he should be judged as a medieval monarch, and not a very good one at that because, unlike his most successful predecessors, he undervalued the importance of forging good relations with his nobility. Has the Battle of Bosworth Field correspondingly been over-rated as a turning-point? Does its fame rest largely on the drama of the battle as portrayed in Shakespeare’s Richard III, with Richard shouting “a horse, a horse; my kingdom for a horse!” and Henry finding the crown on a hawthorn bush after the battle? And has that fame only been reinforced in our own time by the discovery of Richard’s remains beneath a Leicester carpark in September 2012?
