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Yep, and I ain't even into the Pennines yet.

Anyways....

My target heading north was Bosworth Battlefield, where on August 22nd, 1485 the whole course of English history turned on a dime. The last major battle of the War of the Roses and the swan song of the Middle Ages. Richard III was the last English king to die in battle, and in that battle led the last charge of mounted knights in England. He led that charge in a do-or-die effort to personally take out Henry Tudor, and came within a hair's breadth of doing so, slaying both Henry's standard bearer and the largest of his bodyguards.



On Richard's right flank his ally the Duke Norfolk had been attacked by the main Tudor force. On Richard's left flank his ally the Earl of Northumberland would not commit his forces when Richard so ordered, probably because Richard's OTHER ostensible ally William Stanley was further left again and Northumberland feared that Stanley might change sides and attack HIM.

At that point, just as the tide of battle was turning against Richard, Richard saw Henry Tudor and his retinue far across the field.

But in charging headlong across the battlefield along with just his own retinue of knights, Richard passed across the front of the Stanleys. Seeing Richard so isolated, William Stanley launched his whole force, surrounding Richard with overwhelming numbers and cutting him down.

In the press of battle Richard's armored steed became mired in a bog. Far from calling for a horse as Shakespeare had him do, the most credible accounts have Richard refusing the offer of a horse, announcing his preference for dying in battle while still a king, and then wading into "the thickest press of his foes".

In that estimation Richard was exactly right, in that era the losers could face peculiarly brutal fates beyond mere execution. One prior contender taken alive was simply starved to death in a dark castle dungeon, and after Richard's demise an unfortunate young relative and potential contender to the throne was taken into custody and held in solitary confinement to the point of permanent idiocy before being quietly, and probably mercifully, executed.



Whoops, gotta run, pics later.

Birdwatcher