Note 42 — Chapter II

In Ricart’s Calendar in Bristol he enters duly the fact that a battle had been fought and that one side or other was victorious without further comment. He misplaces the date of the murder of Suffolk three years, though he might well have remembered it; and he writes as a sort of after-thought in the margin of his record, “and this year the two sons of King Edward were put to silence in the Tower of London.” (Ricart, 40-46.) In 1460 Norwich had its captain and 120 soldiers with King Henry in the north, and all the rest of its available forces had to hurry off to Edward at his accession. (Blomefield iii. 162-163.) The city raised £160 for the coming of Richard the Third to the city, and £140 for the coming of Henry the Seventh. (Ibid. 173-174.) For Nottingham, see vol. ii. There is no mention of Bosworth in Canterbury, and Henry the Seventh was received with the same pomp as former kings. (Hist. MSS. Com. ix. 145.) For Bosworth, where men stood afar off waiting to join the victorious side, see Fabyan, 672-673. The policy of the burghers was the same in this respect as that of the great Churchmen, who were entirely passive in the real crises of the civil war, and so ready to serve every king, that not one of them suffered loss from fidelity to any side. (Rogers’ Agricul. and Prices, iv. 9, 10.) The people in general were equally indifferent. “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.” (Ibid., 19.) An interesting parallel to the indifference of the trading communities of the fifteenth century during the Wars of the Roses may be seen in the action of the Merchants’ Company in the civil wars of the seventeenth century. (Lambert’s Gild Life, 177-178.)