In the mid 14th century, the Black Death ravaged Europe and killed one third of the population. By 1353 it burned itself out but in many areas severely degraded the power of the absolute monarchs. This vacuum empowered the Hanseatic League, a commercial and defensive confederation of merchant cities that dominated trade on the Baltic Sea (“hansa” is Old German for “convoy”).

For decades, in order to maintain power in Denmark, the Danish kings mortgaged Danish land, and in 1356, King Waldemar IV reconquered and reoccupied that Danish land after being depopulated by the Black Death. On the island of Gotland, the merchants of the Free City of Wisby, a member of the Hanseatic League, mocked Waldemar for being dishonest and unable to manage his finances.

So Waldemar invaded.

In July 1361, King Waldemar landed on the west coast of the island of Gotland with 2800 Danish infantry and German mercenaries. Outside the city walls on 27 July, they were met by the 2000 Gutnish yeomen, burghers, and dismounted knights. Both sides were armed and armoured roughly the same: the knights had plates covering the vitals and joints over mail hauberks, and the yeomen and burghers had “Wisby Plate Armor”, which consisted of metal plates sewn into a leather of fabric hauberk. Both sides were armed with swords, hammers and axes with round or long shields, and an eclectic variety of polearms. Neither side had cavalry. And both sides considered bowmen a waste of precious bodies on the long shield line. As expected, there were no real tactics, and Waldemar’s greater numbers carried the day. Once the line broke, individual Gutnish bands fell in upon themselves, and were isolated and overrun. 1800 Gutnish were killed. The Battle of Wisby was the largest longbowless, pre-swiss pike, purely infantry field battle of the Middle Ages.

Despite the objections of his men, Waldemar decided not to sack the town, but extort it. He decreed that the citizens of Wisby had three days to fill three giant beer barrels with gold and silver (or booze and rattan), or he would massacre them and raze the city. The rich citizens paid Ransom of Wisby within a day, and Waldemar went home.

Waldemar won the first round against the Hanseatic League, but none of the subsequent ones, as the Battle, and more importantly the Ransom, united the loosely organized Baltic merchants against him.

When Charlemagne, the “Heir to the Roman Empire”, died in 814 CE he divided the Frankish Empire among his three sons. The eastern third went to Louis the German. Louis and his descendants formed the Holy Roman Empire from parts of modern day Germany, Austria, Poland, Czech, and Northern Italy (which was probably not “Holy”, “Roman”, nor an “Empire”… all are debatable though). 350 years later, in 1176, at the height of the Investiture Controversy, Holy Roman Emperor Frederick Barbarossa invaded Italy to force the Italians to respect his authoritay and force the Pope to stick to spiritual and moral matters, and get out of his secular business. He did this by first sacking Rome.

On his way back, he needed to deal with the Pope’s staunchest allies, the Lombard League of Northern Italian city-states, which supported the Pope because they wanted to appoint their own city magistrates (madness!) something Barbarossa vehemently opposed. After burning down a few towns, his 3000 strong Imperial army of German knights and men at arms approached Milan. Marching to meet them was a mixed force of 3500 Milanese knights, pike armed militia, crossbowmen, professional companies of armsmen, and the Carrocio. The Carrocio was the sacred war wagon of Milan. It was a giant cross and alter draped in the red and white for Milan’s patron St. George, filled with trumpeters, and drawn by three sets of oxen. The Carrocio was guarded by the elite Company of Death, charged by the city to die protecting it.

On 29 May 1176, the knights of the Imperial army scattered the Milanese knights at the first clash outside of the town of Legnano. They then impetuously charged the Carrocio, and were stopped cold by the large shields and long spears of the Company of Death. They attempted to shift their attack to the pike militia but the example set by the Company and the presence of the Carrocio inspired them to hold fast. Fixed by the Company, the phalanx of pikes and the crossbowmen methodically murdered the knights. The arrival of the reformed Milanese knights broke the Imperial Army.

Frederick Barbarossa was presumed dead (he was seen falling from his horse), but surprisingly, he appeared alone at one of his Italian vassal’s castles three days later bloody and bruised. In the end, the Lombard League got their magistrates, the Pope agreed to stay out of temporal affairs and got the Papal States so he could still build his shining city on a hill, and Barbarossa would shift his energies to the Holy Land and the Third Crusade. Finally, pike formations would slowly grow in popularity until they dominated the battlefields of the Renaissance.

For thirty years in the late 15th century, the War of the Roses raged across England and Wales (The War of the Roses was the real Game of Thrones). By 1483, the House of York, whose symbol was a white rose, had forced the remaining members declared for the House of Lancaster, the red rose, to flee to France. But internal politics had forced the regency council to declare the 12 year old Yorkist King Edward V illegitimate, and Henry, of the small House of Tudor and the last remaining Lancastrian lord, took the opportunity to invade.

Henry Tudor landed in Wales in early August 1485. Henry gathered troops from former Lancastrian allies, and met the forces of the House of York under King Richard III outside of the village of Bosworth. (Richard took the throne after Edward V and is the guy whose remains they discovered underneath a parking lot in Leicester in 2015) Richard III vastly outnumbered Henry Tudor and he divided his army into three “battles”: one commanded by himself, one under the Duke of Norfolk, one under Earl of Northumbria. A fourth force was on the field under Lord Thomas Stanley, Earl of Derby, ostensibly fighting for Richard. Henry kept his small army together under the Earl of Oxford.

Richard III ordered all of the battles to attack, but only his and Norfolk’s actually did. The Earl of Oxford held off the attacks and even forced some of Richard’s forces to retreat. Richard asked Northumbria for assistance but the Earl’s battle did not move. Henry, seeing the two immobile battles of Stanley and Northumbria, correctly surmised that they were waiting to see who won in the center before throwing in their support.

Henry saw an opportunity to win the battle and moved off to directly appeal to Stanley. Richard III saw Henry move toward Stanley and realized that the only way to win the battle was to kill Henry. So he personally charged. The bodyguards of the two commanders fought and Henry was almost killed. But when Sir William Stanley (the Earl of Derby’s nephew?) saw that Richard was isolated from the rest of his army, he and his men charged. Richard III slighted William Stanley years before and chose this moment for revenge. The combined weight of Henry’s bodyguard and Stanley’s knights overwhelmed Richard and his retinue, whom were slaughtered to a man. Unhorsed, Richard III fought to the death.

Henry Tudor was crowned on the field and the War of the Roses was over. The House of Tudor claimed prominence in England and King Henry VII would reign for 25 years. He was succeeded by his son Henry VIII (I am I am; the one with the wives), and his granddaughters Queen “Bloody” Mary I and Queen Elizabeth I.

During the Second Baronial War in 13th Century England, Simon De Montfort, the Earl of Leicster, and several prominent barons rose in revolt against King Henry III and his son, Prince Edward (the future King Edward I “Longshanks”, the bad guy from Braveheart). Henry III had violated the letter and spirit of the Magna Carta signed fifty years before by demanding more money to purchase the title of King of Sicily (long story). In 1263, England had a famine and they couldn’t pay the extra money, so the barons revolted just as they had against Henry’s father, King John (the Sheriff of Nottingham’s boss from Robin Hood). Simon De Montfort won the Battle of Lewes in 1264 and captured Henry and imprisoned Edward.

In 1265, the 26 year old Edward escaped, rallied the King’s supporters, and convinced several of Montfort’s allies to defect. On 4 August, Edward outmaneuvered Montfort and trapped his small army in a bend of the Avon River (not far from Stratford-upon-Avon, Shakespeare’s hometown) near the village of Evesham. Edward’s troops outnumbered the Barons’ nearly 2-1 and despite a gallant charge by the Baronial knights, it was not enough to keep them from being surrounded. Bad blood existed between barons’ men and the king’s, and eventually the battle turned into a massacre. Instead of capture and ransom which was the custom for knights and lords, the King’s men outright killed them all, thus breaking the power of the barons for the foreseeable future. King Henry, present at the battle as Montfort’s captive, was only saved from the massacre when one of Montfort’s knights identified him in exchange for his life.

Despite the loss, the barons eventually got what they demanded though it took decades. King Henry III died ten years later and the talent, raw competence, and foresight Prince Edward displayed during the war showed when he became King Edward I. Although despised in Scotland, (Longshanks was nicknamed “Hammer of the Scots”) and Wales (which he conquered and colonized in the 1280s), King Edward I maintained the spirit of the Magna Carta, if not the letter, and reformed England’s administration and Common Law. He was not particularly loved by his subjects but they respected him and he was thought of as the ideal medieval king. He recognized the need for his subjects’ input into the governance of state, if only so they would pay more taxes. i.e. taxation WITH representation. King Edward I formed England’s first permanent Parliament, essentially giving in to the demands of the barons that he slaughtered at Evesham ten years before his reign.

England’s loss of Normandy after their defeat at the Battle of Formigny against France in April 1450 during the Hundred Years War crushed the morale of the English people. England’s impending loss in the war unleashed French and Norman raiders on English coasts. However to the people of Kent and Sussex, their enemies across the English Channel were the least of their worries.

Corruption in Lancastrian King Henry VI’s court was already legendary, but the loss at Formigny exposed the corruption and incompetence for all to see. There was no longer a war to hide behind. Nobles long used to abusing their Norman and French charges, returned to England and thought they could do the same with their own countrymen. The actions of the soldiers sent by the King to protect the coastal communities from the Norman raiders greatly exacerbated the situation. The cure was worse than the disease. The soldiers looted, raped, and devastated the towns and farms they were sent to defend. Sheriffs and magistrates, King’s men who held their offices through fraudulent elections, sided with the soldiers against the people. The final straw was the death of the Duke of Suffolk.

The Duke of Suffolk was the King’s best friend and closest advisor. Some say he ruled England while the mentally infirm Henry was just a puppet. The Duke was the most corrupt of king’s privy council, all of whom were the most corrupt men in England. His murder was part of the vicious, bitter, and petty internecine squabbles that wracked Henry VI’s court. The Duke of Suffolk’s body washed up on the shore of Kent and the people immediately assumed the King would blame them. Rumors abounded that the Royal Army would march across the countryside with fire and sword expelling the people and turning the entirety of Kent into the King’s personal hunting preserve.

On 8 May 1450, a man named Jack Cade proclaimed himself “Captain of Kent” and vowed to make the people’s demands heard by the king. He declared himself a “Mortimer”, which was the name of Henry VI’s Yorkist rivals. He wrote up a list of complaints and demands, “The Complaint of the Poor Commons of Kent”, outlining the King’s transgressions against the people of Kent. The first point was a declaration of innocence for the Duke of Suffolk’s murder. The remainder of the Complaint detailed the rampant corruption of the King’s men, including unfair taxation, extortion, “perversion of justice”, ruination of the economy, and election fraud. Cade called for an army to give the demands the force of arms. 5000 beggars, shopkeepers, artisans, peasants, destitute soldiers, and outlawed knights and nobles responded.

Initially, the King didn’t take the uprising seriously. He dispatched a small force of knights and men at arms to put it down, but they were ambushed and destroyed in June. Shortly thereafter, the King’s attitude changed when his personal confessor, the Bishop of Salisbury, was tortured and killed by a Kentish mob, as Jack Cade and his army marched on London. The Bishop of Salisbury was the second most powerful man in England, since he knew all of the King’s dirty secrets, and there was no telling what he told rebels. King Henry VI and his court fled London.

Jack Cade struck the London Stone, declared himself the mayor, and set about finding King’s men to try and punish. Cade’s rebels and the people of London existed harmoniously for but a few days. Cade couldn’t keep control of his men. Despite assurances that the rebel army would respect the people of London and their property, Cade’s men began to get drunk and loot. The Londoners understood the behavior of the king’s men better than most, but lost their sympathy for the rebels quickly. On 8 July 1450, the Londoners marched across the London Bridge determined to storm the White Hart Inn where Cade lived and oversaw his tribunals. Cade’s men met them half way. The bloody Battle of London Bridge saw the defeat of Cade’s rebels, and they retreated from London.

Despite the rebel loss, the next day the Lord Chancellor convinced the King to issue pardons and accede to the rebel’s demands in The Complaint of the Poor Commons of Kent. The King did so and the remainder of Cade’s army dispersed. King Henry VI revoked the pardons almost immediately. His men hunted down Cade and the rebels now that they were no longer an army. The King’s men were largely successful. On 12 July, Cade was wounded fighting his pursuers, and died before he could be brought to trial. Henry didn’t care though: he gave the body a mock trial in which Cade was found guilty. Cade’s body was then hung, drawn, quartered, and beheaded, with the parts displayed publically all over Kent until they fully decomposed.

Cade’s Rebellion was unsuccessful but the king’s duplicitous behavior inspired numerous smaller uprisings across England. Worse, the king’s double cross confirmed to his rivals that there was no negotiating with him. If there was any justice in England, it was not going to come from king and his lackeys. Support for the king evaporated in the countryside. The wronged people of England began looking for a new monarch to support, and they found one in the Lancaster’s bitterest rival, the banished House of York. A few weeks after Cade’s Rebellion, Richard of York returned from his exile in Ireland. In 1455, Richard’s White Rose of York was in open rebellion against the Red Rose of Henry VI’s House of Lancaster, in what later became known as The War of the Roses.