Cylchgronau Cymru

THE WARS OF THE Roses. By J. R. Lander. Secker and Warburg, 1965. Pp. 336. 50s. No adequate modern study of the conflict between Lancaster and York exists and the absence of such a book is the most serious gap in recent work on fifteenth-century England. Mr. Lander's contribution to the History in the Making series does not attempt to meet this long-felt need. Apart from a lively and stimulating introductory essay of thirty-three pages, this book consists of lengthy extracts from fifteenth- and early sixteenth-century writers, linked together by a terse thread of editorial narrative. These passages have been skilfully chosen, but the result is neither a satisfactory account of the Wars of the Roses nor a well-edited volume of documents. However, this compilation will undoubtedly entertain the general reader (for whom the book is intended) and prove useful in schools and universities which do not possess the publications of the Camden Society and other important printed sources. This series aims to present 'great events and epochs' as recorded by eye-witness accounts. Inevitably, for some of the main episodes in the Wars of the Roses such testimony is not available and the description of the battle of Bosworth in 1485 comes from the English History of the Italian Polydore Vergil of Urbino, who arrived in this country in 1502. More information about the sources used (and their authorship) would have been welcome. None of the chroniclers or historians from whose works these extracts are taken wrote dispassionately and their bias needs to be pointed out. Mr. Lander is rightly critical (p. 89) of the Yorkist propaganda contained in the English Chronicle, 1377-1461 (edited by J. S. Davies, Camden Society, 1856), but he does not warn us that Warkworth's Chronicle is just as unreliable because it embodies the prejudices of a disgruntled Lancastrian partisan, writing after the execution of the duke of Clarence in 1478. Also it might have been made clear that The Arrival! of King Edward IV (our main source for the events of 1471) is the Yorkist official history of the final overthrow of the House of Lancaster. Nor is it mentioned (p. 160) that the anonymous continuator of the Croyland. Chronicle (whose work, covering the period 1459-86, constitutes the first history of the Wars of the Roses) apparently remained a member of the king's council during Richard Ill's reign. For that reason his reminiscences are all the more valuable, and, writing in April 1486, he regards Henry Tudor's victory at Bosworth as avenging Richard Ill's murder of his nephews. In his introduction, Mr. Lander endeavours to make fifteenth-century England seem less disorderly by exaggerating the political troubles of earlier ages; it is obviously not true that 'Between 1066 and 1377 there were only two periods of more than thirty consecutive years when general peace prevailed in the land' (p. 20). His views on both the political conduct of the nobility and the consequences of the civil war have a distinctly