The weak kingship of England’s Henry VI let slip the curs of chaos:  private local wars that could bring mayhem and death to one’s door.

In the fifteenth century, England had no standing army, let alone any standing police force. A strong king could win the allegiance, if not the affection, of enough powerful nobles throughout the realm to maintain civil peace and administer justice as it was so often called for. Henry VI’s father, the hero of Agincourt, had won the hearts of his countrymen in a way that his decent but incompetent son never could.

Home-grown violence, unchecked by royal authority, became rampant as private squabbles were settled by force and private greed became the prime mover of so many men. The Paston Letters, consisting largely of documents and correspondence between members of the Norwich-based Paston family and their associates, give us great insight into the troubles of the Wars of the Roses. The Pastons were landed gentry, although not of the wealthiest sort.  Their letters and private papers are now housed primarily in the British Library and at Oxford’s Bodleian Library.

As early as 1423, with Henry V dead but a year and his royal son a mere infant, it had become apparent that the new reign would be anything but peaceful. Greed manifested itself in disputes over property rights and other issues, with events frequently careening into violence. One document has the landowning William Paston giving testimony (recounted with modernized spelling and phraseology in The Pastons: A Family in the Wars of the Roses, edited by Richard Barber for the Folio Society 1981) that on the night of December 31^st

       “certain unknown malefactors, felons and breakers of the king’s peace, estimated at 80 or more in number, with  malice and imagination aforethought,  feloniously broke into the dwelling place of John Grys of Wighton in the shire of Norfolk, and hewed down the gates and doors of the said place with carpenters’ axes.  They took John Grys, his son, and a serving-man  of theirs, and led them to a pair of gallows a mile from the said  dwelling place, in order to hang them there.

       “But because they had no rope to hand for their felonious purpose, they slew and murdered the said John Grys, his son, and his man in the most horrible fashion ever heard of in that country…….”

Horrific acts such as this instilled fear, always a weapon in itself. Even churches were not always regarded as sacrosanct. Margaret Paston writes of a property dispute involving the Duke of Norfolk in which his men

       “ransacked the church and carried off all the goods that were left there, both ours and the tenants, and left little behind; they stood on the high altar and ransacked the images……..they shut the parson out of the church until they had finished, and ransacked everyone’s house in the town five or six times……and what they could not carry they hacked up in the most spiteful fashion….”

Students of human behavior might not be surprised to learn that when disputes developed into mayhem, all manner of people at times got in on the act; mention is made in the Paston documents of one courtier, Thomas Denys, who had run afoul of an earl over a range of disputes and, according to editor Barber, “in early July 1461 was back in Norfolk, and was abducted from his house by a gang led by the parson of Snoring, who murdered him. In troubled times it was a matter of life and death to win a great lord’s favor.”

In the reign of a strong king, it is less likely that such felonious acts would have gone unpunished; but the pious and weak Henry VI, even grown to manhood and assuming royal power in 1437 after 16 years of rule by a regency council,  did not command the power or respect to  prevent such lawlessness.

As if to lend an insightful touch to the pattern of shifting local alliances and sporadic disturbances, The Duke of Norfolk had taken Caister castle from the Pastons but returned it in 1470, when Henry VI was briefly restored to the throne in the stead of the Yorkist Edward IV. The Duke of Norfolk evidently didn’t want to run afoul of the people who had managed to put Henry back on the throne, and that meant putting a gloss over some of his earlier years’ most rapacious behavior.

Not that he didn’t have plenty of company; more than a few other nobles had simply taken what they could get, when they could get it.

The wicket gate at Agecroft Hall might be looked upon as a reminder that life on an English manor, during the worst of times, was not nearly as bucolic as we might like to imagine. The Paston letters lend much credence to the argument that the civil unrest collectively known as the Wars of the Roses involved a wide variety of motivations that cannot be so neatly attributed to  Yorkist or Lancastrian  allegiances.  There were times when personal scores to settle, greed and vindictiveness carried the day.

The Wars of the Roses were ended with the ascension of Henry Tudor as King Henry VII, who has generally been regarded as a strong king and an almost excessively thorough administrator of his realm. The English people must have breathed a collective sigh of relief.