The Wars of the Roses — a series of dynastic civil wars fought between the houses of Lancaster and York for the English throne — effectively began with the First Battle of St Albans in 1455 and continued intermittently for three decades. The conflict drew in virtually every major noble family and created a climate of political instability, sudden reversals of fortune, and violent death that shaped English culture at every level. The wars ended only with the Tudor victory at Bosworth Field in 1485.

The Wars of the Roses provided the raw material for the greatest cycle of history plays in any language: Shakespeare's tetralogy from Henry VI to Richard III, written in the 1590s but rooted in chroniclers' accounts of these very decades. The period also produced verse laments and moralising poetry that used the fall of great lords as occasions to meditate on Providence and Fortune, a tradition culminating in the Mirror for Magistrates (1559). The instability of patronage networks during the wars meant that poets such as John Lydgate and later John Skelton had to navigate competing court factions with great care.