A HISTORY OF SURREY 



which had supported him, Surrey included, were mainly Yorkist in the 

 coming Wars of the Roses. The Arundel interest was Yorkist. The 

 de Clare lands had long been broken up, and the part of them which 

 had fallen to the Staffords, Dukes of Buckingham, was the only impor- 

 tant Lancastrian strength in Surrey. There was no fighting of any 

 consequence south of the Thames in those wars till 1471. In 1452 

 the Duke of York, coming from the west and being refused entry into 

 London, had crossed by the bridge at Kingston and marched through 

 Surrey to Blackheath. In 1460 the Earls of Salisbury, Warwick and 

 March the last was the future Edward IV. came the other way 

 through Surrey .on their road from Calais, to London, which they 

 entered without fighting. In 1470, when Warwick and Clarence 

 declared for King Henry, the men of Kent rose ' consueta necquicia ' 

 apparently in this same cause, and plundered Southwark but shortly 

 withdrew. 1 In 1471 however, when Edward IV. was away winning 

 Tewkesbury, the Bastard of Falconbridge had come from Calais with 

 supporters of the Warwick-Lancaster alliance, had landed in Kent, and 

 came by land to the foot of London Bridge, while his ships came up 

 the Thames so far as the batteries of the Tower allowed. Falcon- 

 bridge would have had a party in London for him if he had not 

 alienated the citizens by assaulting Aldgate with a force from his ships 

 and the bridge also from the south, burning some houses and firing on 

 the city. His ships lay at RedclifF, Ratcliffe we now call it, out of 

 reach of the Tower guns. Had they been able to face the batteries, he 

 might have succeeded and got the captive Henry VI. into his hands. 

 He was repulsed, but the attack seems to have been the most serious 

 made upon the city since Cnut's siege, and was singular in being delivered 

 from both sides of the river. Falconbridge then marched all his forces 

 to Kingston with the intention of meeting Edward on his return from 

 the west. But he allowed himself to be overpersuaded into retreating 

 again to Blackheath, where his followers dispersed. The news of the 

 battle of Tewkesbury had no doubt become generally known. The im- 

 pregnable position of London to attacks from Surrey evidently depended 

 upon the narrow pass of the fortified bridge, supported to some extent 

 by the Tower batteries on one side. It defied mediaeval assailants, as 

 Orleans defied Salisbury and Suffolk from across the Loire. It was 

 perhaps the jealousy of London, always striving to acquire rule over 

 Southwark, which prevented the Surrey side from being walled and 

 erected into a separate city in the Middle Ages. The various suburbs 

 spread along the Thames from Bermondsey to Lambeth made up a more 

 populous and important place than many corporate towns. But a fortified 

 Southwark would not have made London at all more secure. 



The reign of Henry VI. added a borough, a rotten borough, to 

 Surrey. In 1449 Henry granted to John Tymperley certain rights of 

 free warren and so on in his manor of Gatton, and in 1450 called up two 



1 This rising is recorded in the Brief Latin Chronicle, edited by Mr. Gairdner for the Camden 

 Society, 1880, and is briefly mentioned by Polydore Vergil. 



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