Who won the Battle of Shrewsbury?
King Henry IV won. On 21 July 1403, north of Shrewsbury, his army defeated the rebels of Sir Henry Percy, called Hotspur, after a fierce archery duel and a hand to hand struggle that lasted until dusk. Hotspur was killed, his uncle Worcester was beheaded two days later, and Prince Henry, aged about sixteen, survived an arrow in the face.1
In the summer of 1403 one of the most famous soldiers in England turned on the king he had helped to the throne. Sir Henry Percy, called Hotspur, raised Cheshire against Henry IV, and on 21 July the two armies met in the pea fields north of Shrewsbury. It was the first major battle in which English longbowmen shot at each other on English soil, and it nearly ended the House of Lancaster four years after it began. This is the story of why the Percys rebelled, how the King won the race to Shrewsbury, how the fight was decided, and how a future king of England, the prince whom Shakespeare made Prince Hal, came to carry an arrowhead in his face. It belongs to our history of Britain at war and to the age of the Welsh rising told in our military history of Wales.2
Why was the Battle of Shrewsbury fought?
Henry IV owed his crown partly to the Percys. When Henry Bolingbroke took the throne from his cousin Richard II in 1399, Henry Percy, Earl of Northumberland, and his son Hotspur stood with him, and they were rewarded with power in the north and in north Wales, where Hotspur fought the rising of Owain Glyndŵr in 1401 and 1402. On 14 September 1402 Hotspur beat a Scottish army at Homildon Hill and took the Earl of Douglas prisoner. Within a year he was in arms against the King.3
Three quarrels drove the break. The first was money: the Percys had paid for the defense of the Scottish border and the Welsh war largely from their own resources, and a Percy letter of 26 June 1403 complained that more than £20,000 was still owed. The King's side saw it differently: Henry answered that most of the money had in fact been paid, Ramsay's count of the Exchequer records puts the payments to the three Percys since 1399 at about £41,750, and the Battlefields Trust judges that Henry was not withholding payment but simply lacked the resources. The second was the Scottish prisoners of Homildon, whom Henry forbade the Percys to ransom for themselves. The third was Sir Edmund Mortimer, Hotspur's brother-in-law, captured by Glyndŵr at Bryn Glas in June 1402. Henry refused to let him be ransomed and called him a traitor; Mortimer then married Glyndŵr's daughter and joined the Welsh.4
Behind the money lay a larger fear. Ramsay points out that Sir Edmund Mortimer, through his mother Philippa of Clarence, could show a better claim to the throne by descent than Henry himself, which may explain why the King would not see him ransomed, and Mortimer's young nephew, Edmund, Earl of March, was the heir the rebels would put forward. In the winter of 1402 the Percys began to talk with Glyndŵr and Mortimer, and by the summer of 1403 they were ready to name the Earl of March as the rightful king.5
What did the Percys want?
The rebels put their case in a formal defiance, which the chronicler John Hardyng, a member of Hotspur's household, later had in his hands. In it Northumberland, Hotspur and Hotspur's uncle Thomas Percy, Earl of Worcester, renounced their allegiance to Henry, whom they styled Duke of Lancaster. They charged that at Doncaster in 1399 he had sworn to claim only his own inheritance, that he had starved Richard II to death at Pontefract, that he had raised taxes against his promise and packed Parliament with his own men, and that he had kept the Earl of March from his right.6
To other audiences they spoke more softly, as reformers rather than rebels. Their letters said they meant no treason, only to remove evil counselors and see that taxes were spent on the realm. Wylie found that many lords and clergy, including Archbishop Richard Scrope of York, quietly sympathized. The plan, as the chroniclers and later historians reconstruct it, was to join Hotspur's northern following and Cheshire archers to Glyndŵr's Welsh army near the Severn.7
Not every historian accepts the Percy case. Simon Payling of the History of Parliament calls the rising the product of the Percys' overweening ambition, with no meaningful justification, and argues that Henry had every right to refuse them the Homildon ransoms. Ramsay, writing in the 1890s, was no kinder to the rising: he added up some £41,750 paid to the three Percys since 1399 and concluded that they had lost their heads. Yet he called Hotspur himself certainly the most chivalrous, and presumably the most popular, Englishman of his time.8
How did Henry IV reach Shrewsbury first?
Hotspur rode south in early July with only about 160 horsemen and the Scottish prisoners he had freed, among them the Earl of Douglas. He entered Cheshire about 9 July, a county still attached to the memory of Richard II. Men came in wearing Richard's badge of the white hart, and the rumor was spread that Richard was still alive. Thomas Percy, the King's steward and the guardian of the Prince of Wales, slipped away with his men to join his nephew.9
Henry IV was marching north, ironically to help the Percys against the Scots, when he learned of the revolt around 12 July. On the advice of George Dunbar, the Scottish Earl of March, then in his service, he turned west at once rather than fall back on London. His son held Shrewsbury as royal lieutenant in Wales with a small force unlikely to hold out against the combined rebels. The King won the race and entered the town shortly before Hotspur arrived, on 19 or 20 July.10
Glyndŵr never came. He was campaigning around Carmarthen, far to the southwest, where Ramsay and Payling both record his defeat by the Pembrokeshire forces of Sir Thomas Carew. Payling sees the timing as the rebels' great mistake: had Hotspur waited until the King was far in the north, he could have seized Shrewsbury and the prince. Instead he found the royal standard on the walls and fell back to the village of Berwick, three miles to the northwest.11
How big were the armies at Shrewsbury?
Nobody counted them. Wylie lists the chroniclers' extremes: a French writer gave the Percys 24,000 archers and 2,000 lances, a Scottish chronicle 20,000 men, and the soberest English chronicler 14,000, with archers from Cheshire, Derby and Flint. No contemporary gave the King's numbers, and Wylie dismissed Waurin's 60,000 as fabulous. Historic England's register entry follows the 14,000 for Hotspur, while the Battlefields Trust gives the King around 14,000 and the rebels about 10,000.12
Ramsay refused to quote the figures at all. He thought the front was probably not 300 yards wide, and pointed out that in this battle a charge by about thirty men counted as a signal event. Historic England's review reaches a similar verdict: there is no firm evidence for the size of either army, though Hotspur is assumed to have been outnumbered. Oman, writing in 1906, went lower than any chronicle: when Hotspur raised Cheshire he had, Oman thought, probably not more than 3,000 or 4,000 men in hand.13
How was the Battle of Shrewsbury fought?
On the morning of 21 July Hotspur drew up his army on a slope north of the town, near the hamlet of Albright Hussey, with a field of peas and vetches in front of it. The King formed below it in a field later called King's Croft. Henry still hoped to avoid a battle. He sent Thomas Prestbury, Abbot of Shrewsbury, to offer pardon and a hearing of grievances, and Hotspur sent his uncle Worcester to the royal lines. Historic England follows the chronicle account that Worcester reported the King's terms falsely and inflamed his nephew; Ramsay thought the balance of evidence pointed instead to Dunbar, who would not let Henry give the rebels another day.14
The talks failed around midday. Sources differ on the hour the fighting began: Wylie says shortly after noon, Ramsay late in the afternoon, and Historic England about two hours before dusk. They agree on how it opened. The royal vanguard under the young Edmund, Earl of Stafford, advanced into a storm of arrows from the Cheshire archers, the best in the county by the chronicler's account, and was driven back. The Battlefields Trust and Historic England both call this the first time massed longbowmen fought each other on English soil, in the formations the English would use against the French in the decades that followed.15
As the King brought up his own battle, Hotspur and Douglas led a band of about thirty men straight at him, determined to fight no one but the King. They cut their way to the royal standard and threw it down. Stafford fell there, and so did the standard bearer Sir Walter Blount and other knights dressed in the King's arms; Dunbar had drawn Henry himself out of the line before the charge struck.16
Meanwhile Prince Henry's division, on the royal left by Ramsay's reconstruction, pushed up the slope against the rebel flank. According to the chronicle that Ramsay and Historic England follow, the prince's men broke through the line facing them, wheeled about, and trapped the rebels between their own division and the King's. The fight dissolved into a desperate melee in which men could hardly tell friend from foe.17
How did Hotspur die at Shrewsbury?
In that confusion Hotspur was killed. The chroniclers say only that he fell by an unknown hand; a tradition repeated by Historic England says an arrow struck him in the face when he raised his visor. His men, not knowing he was dead, took up the cry “Henry Percy king!” The King answered with his own voice: “Henry Percy is dead!” When no answer came, the rebel army broke and fled, and Douglas and Worcester were taken.18
Prince Henry had been hit too. An arrow struck the prince, then about sixteen, in the face, and its head lodged about six inches deep. Ramsay writes that he refused to leave the field, and Historic England that his division still broke into the enemy line. The royal surgeon John Bradmore later designed a tool that fitted into the open socket of the arrowhead, expanded to grip it, and drew it out, and the prince recovered. Wylie found that he was still too badly hurt on 23 July to go on into Wales.19
How many died at the Battle of Shrewsbury?
The killing went on until nightfall. Victorian historians repeat an estimate of about 1,600 dead on the field and 3,000 wounded, many of whom died later; Fletcher counts these as the King's losses and adds about 5,000 rebel dead in the battle and the pursuit, including some 200 knights and gentlemen of Cheshire. Historic England puts the dead and wounded together at well over 5,000.20
Payling notes that the losses among leading men fell hardest on the royal side, where Stafford fell; Ramsay and Fletcher add Blount and several other knights. As Wylie and Payling both quote from Gregory's Chronicle, the battle was remembered as “one of the wyrste bataylys that ever came to Inglonde, and unkyndyst,” the worst and most unnatural, Englishmen against Englishmen.21
What happened after the Battle of Shrewsbury?
Henry showed little mercy to the leaders. On Monday 23 July the Earl of Worcester, Sir Richard Venables and Sir Richard Vernon were tried and beheaded at Shrewsbury. Hotspur's body had been buried at Whitchurch by his kinsman Lord Furnival, but when rumors spread that he was alive the King had it dug up, propped between two millstones in Shrewsbury for all to see, then beheaded and quartered. The head went to York and the quarters to London, Bristol, Newcastle and Chester.22
Douglas was a prisoner of the English for the second time in a year. Northumberland, who had stayed in the north, marched south too late, was turned back by the Earl of Westmorland, and submitted to the King at York in August. The Battlefields Trust notes that Henry was lenient with the grieving father. The Percy cause did not die: in 1405 Northumberland, Mortimer and Glyndŵr sealed the Tripartite Indenture to divide England and Wales between them, and in 1408 the old earl was killed on Bramham Moor.23
Who won the Battle of Shrewsbury, and why did it matter?
Henry IV won, and the victory decided more than a summer campaign. Historic England's register entry gives three reasons the battle matters: politically, because Hotspur's death crushed the Percy challenge; for the military career of Prince Henry, the future victor of Agincourt; and militarily, because it showed in brutal fashion what massed longbows could do when they faced each other. Fletcher put it more simply: had Percy won, the House of Lancaster would probably never have held the throne for the next sixty years.24
Payling calls the rising an existential threat to the infant Lancastrian regime and the battle a close-run thing. If chance had killed the King rather than Hotspur, he argues, the civil war between the Lancastrian title and the Mortimer claim, the struggle later known as the Wars of the Roses, would have begun in 1403 rather than 1459. Ramsay called Shrewsbury the most serious battle of its kind since Evesham in 1265, and a sad prelude to many more.25
The victory had a price for Henry too. Within days of the battle he was paying messengers to warn people not to speak ill of his government, and Ramsay reads that as a sign of how much sympathy Hotspur still had. For the prince, Shrewsbury was the first battle of a soldier's life that would end as Henry V.26
Did Prince Hal really kill Hotspur?
Not in the sources. In Shakespeare's Henry IV, Part 1, written long after the event, the battle of Shrewsbury is the climax: Prince Hal saves his father from Douglas, then meets Hotspur and kills him in single combat, while Falstaff fakes his own death and later claims the kill. The chronicles name no killer, and Historic England's account has Hotspur shot in the face.27
Shakespeare also made the two Harrys rivals of one age. In fact Hotspur belonged to the King's generation: Ramsay notes that he and Henry Bolingbroke were invested with the Garter on the same day, and Payling traces Hotspur's military career back to the late 1370s, years before the prince was born. The play turned a war between a usurper and his former allies into a story about a prince growing up, and that is how most people still meet Shrewsbury.28
The battlefield kept its own memorial. In 1406 the King licensed Richard Hussey of Albright Hussey to give two acres of the field to two chaplains, one of them Roger Ive, rector of Albright Hussey, to build a chapel and pray for the King and for the souls of those killed and buried there. The chapel of St Mary Magdalene was built over the mass grave, was in use by 1409, and became a college of chaplains that lasted until it was dissolved under Edward VI. A statue of Henry IV, crowned and holding a sword, still stands in a niche above the east window.29
Where was the Battle of Shrewsbury fought?
The battle was fought about three miles north of Shrewsbury, in the open fields of the manor of Albright Hussey, now the village of Battlefield beside the A49 and the A5124 link road. Hotspur's army most likely stood on the ridge north of the church, and the royal army formed to the southeast of it. The open fields of 1403 are now hedged, but the ridge where Hotspur stood still lets a visitor follow the course of the fight.30
The site is on Historic England's Register of Historic Battlefields. Footpaths lead round the battlefield and to the church, which is cared for by the Churches Conservation Trust, while the church and its moated enclosure are a scheduled monument. Fletcher recorded that only a few pieces of armor and weapons had been dug up by 1889, and Historic England notes that the field has never been surveyed in depth and may still hold arrowheads, weapons and personal effects.31
