The Lisle coat of arms.
On a spring morning in 1470 the peace of Gloucestershire
was shattered by the sounds of battle. The Wars of the Roses had come to this
peaceful corner of southwestern England in spectacular and bloody fashion.
But the battle fought at Nibley Green had very
little to do with the dispute between the House of York and the House of
Lancaster. The fate of the throne was not at issue at Nibley Green, nor were
the underlying social tensions between the ancient landed aristocracy and newly
rich mercantile classes that lurked behind the dynastic dispute. No, the fight
at Nibley Green might have been dressed up as a principled stand over support
for the rightful king (whoever he was) but in reality it was a brutal affair
fought to settle a local dispute between local aristocrats and local magnates.
Nibley Green has, perhaps rightly, been
identified as the last of the private battles that had been such a feature of
medieval England. As such it reveals much about late medieval society, and the
ways in which men went about fighting battles in that bloody era.
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