| Catesby: | The king enacts more wonders than a man, Daring an opposite to every danger: His horse is slain, and all on foot he fights, Seeking for Richmond in the throat of death. Rescue, fair lord, or else the day is lost! |
| King Richard: | A horse! a horse! my kingdom for a horse! |
| Catesby: | Withdraw, my lord; I’ll help you to a horse. |
| King Richard: | Slave! I have set my life upon a cast, And I will stand the hazard of the die. I think there be six Richmonds in the field; Five have I slain to-day, instead of him.— A horse! a horse! my kingdom for a horse! |
| Shakespeare, Richard III, Act V, sc. iv |
Bosworth stands alongside Naseby and Hastings as one of the three most iconic battles ever fought on English soil. This notoriety is due not simply to the dramatic way the events – particularly Richard’s death – are depicted by Shakespeare. It is true that, measured in terms of the numbers engaged, this was a quite modest affair, but judged in terms of its military and political outcomes it was of the highest importance.
22 August 1485 saw a dramatic military reversal in which the forces of Henry Tudor defeated a larger royal army. The battle left the Yorkist king, Richard III, dead on the field – the last English monarch to fall leading his troops in battle. Within hours the crown, supposedly found in a thorn bush, had been placed upon the pretender’s head, creating him Henry VII. Thus Bosworth proved a decisive battle, bringing to an end the dynastic struggle known as the Wars of the Roses. It is true that Henry had to defend his crown at the battle of Stoke Field in 1487, but it was Bosworth that heralded the Tudor dynasty, which would guide England through what is now viewed as a defining period in the nation’s history.
The Wars of the Roses, between 1455 and 1487, saw the houses of York and Lancaster competing for the crown. During these 34 years England saw a series of short military campaigns separated by long periods of relative peace, while the warfare itself was dominated, in a quite unusual way, by a series of 15 battles (Figure 0.1). Remarkably, before the work began at Bosworth, just three of these battles were securely located – Towton (1461), St Albans II (1461) and Blore Heath (1459). Of the rest, most had at least two alternative sites, while Barnet had three and Hexham, like Bosworth, had four. While for some, such as Northampton or Tewkesbury, the sites are less than a kilometre apart, with Bosworth they were scattered across 6 km of the Leicestershire landscape.
Between September 2005 and December 2010 the programme of research detailed in the present book transformed Bosworth from being our most famous lost battlefield into one of the most securely located. In so doing it has provided a dramatic vindication of the young sub-discipline of battlefield archaeology, demonstrating its potential to resolve long standing problems in the military history of medieval Europe.