Battle of Shrewsbury

In the same year, a letter to the King, apparently from the former heretic, Bishop Repyndon of Lincoln, declared that ‘joy has turned to bitterness…evils multiply themselves everywhere and hope of relief fades from the grieving hearts of men’. The Parliament of 1402 was the first since the deposition of Richard II to be asked to grant subsidies as well as to continue the customs duties on wool. In the following year, news reached the King of an alliance between the Percys, his erstwhile allies, and Glyn Dwr. The outcome was the first true battle to have been fought on English soil since Evesham in 1265. Outside Shrewsbury, on 21 July 1403, Henry IV met the Percys in force. The King himself was nearly killed, his standard hurled to the ground. His eldest son, the future Henry V, was seriously wounded by an arrow in the face. The younger Percy, ‘Hotspur’ was killed in the action. His uncle, the King’s cousin, Thomas Percy, Earl of Worcester, was captured and executed. His father, Henry Percy, Earl of Northumberland, was tried and convicted of trespass rather than treason, and ultimately pardoned. Hotspur’s body was carried off for burial at Whitchurch, but when rumours began to circulate that he had survived the battle, the King ordered that the body be exhumed and displayed in Shrewsbury market place, propped up between two mill stones. It was then ritually dismembered and its parts sent for display to the four corners of the realm. At the field of battle, over the common pit into which many hundreds of the slain had been thrown, the King endowed a chantry college, only the second such institution, since Battle Abbey built by William the Conqueror after Hastings, to have been founded by an English king on the site of his victory, and in this instance, as at Hastings, commemorating the victory by a King of England over an army of Englishmen.