INTRODUCTORY. 19 



coming next, and after a considerable interval the great shire 

 of York. Next to these come Kent, Wilts, the county of the 

 elder Nevile, and subsequently of his son, and Suffolk. The 

 civil war does not penetrate into Eastern England, the principal 

 battle-fields being on the line which divided the partisans of 

 the rival houses. Norfolk was specially unfriendly to the House 

 of Lancaster. There is no more enduring feud in the later 

 middle ages than that between the Mowbrays and Howards 

 and the Lancastrian house, from the banishment of Norfolk 

 in the days of Richard the Second, till the death of the first 

 duke of the House of Howard on the field of Bosworth. It is 

 remarkable that the line which separated the England of the 

 fifteenth .century into the Yorkists and Lancastrians, was nearly 

 the same as that which divided it, in the seventeenth, between 

 the Cavaliers and the Roundheads. 



A singular feature in the great war of succession is that it is 

 a war of pitched battles, not of sieges. The partisans on either 

 side seem to have made their way to some open heath and 

 there to have fought out this quarrel. Still more singular is 

 the silence of contemporary accounts about the struggle which 

 was going on. I have read thousands of documents penned 

 during the heat of the strife, and have found only one allusion 

 to the character of the times in the earlier, and one about the 

 later war of 1470-1. On the first occasion, the foundation 

 of King's College, Cambridge, evinces, by the numerous mes- 

 sages they send/;-0 novis andiendis in the summer of 1460, how 

 keen was their anxiety about the fortunes of their founder. On 

 the second, I have found in the archives of the corporation of 

 Norwich an account of the charges which that city incurred in 

 sending forty archers to Tewkesbury field. But for the rest, 

 there is no sign of any interest in the combat. The mass of 

 the English people was, I believe, indifferent during the war. 

 It was a rancorous feud between the nobles and their retainers. 



The English hierarchy had obtained a statute from Henry 

 the Fourth, under which an offender, convicted of heresy in the 

 bishop's court, was handed over to the secular arm. The sheriff 



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