Percy-Neville feud

The Percy–Neville feud was a series of skirmishes, raids and vandalism between two prominent northern English families, the House of Percy and the House of Neville, and their followers, that helped provoke the Wars of the Roses. The original reason for the long dispute is unknown, and the first outbreaks of violence were in the 1450s, prior to the Wars of the Roses. The antagonists would later meet in battle several times during the feud.

Yorkshire’s three Ridings were divided up between the crown (as duke of Lancaster), the Percy family, Richard, 3rd Duke of York, and Richard Neville, 5th Earl of Salisbury. However, the king and the duke of York do not seem to have visited Yorkshire very often, which Ralph Griffiths suggests meant that any tension would be solely between Percy and Neville. Indeed, he says, since the city of York itself was the most important, the capital-city of the north, it ‘provided a focus for their rivalries.’It is not, he said, a coincidence that ‘the two virtual battles between Percy and Neville in 1453 and 1454 were fought close to the city’s walls.’ He also suggests that Percy tenants may have been as anti-Neville as their lords, since their estates were contiguous, this could have encouraged rivalry and bred antagonism. As Professor Pollard has pointed out, Salisbury retained some of his knights from 'deep in Percy country, particularly southern Northumberland.

Griffiths has suggested that by the mid-fifteenth century, relations between Percy and Neville were 'poisoned by jealousy and resentment.’ Further, he has pointed out that Salisbury probably did not expect- and not receive- the assistance of the Raby branch of his family (by his father's first wife, Margaret Stafford), which he puts down to the previous feud between the two branches of the family over the division of Westmorland's will.Robin Storey has also pointed out how Northumberland seems to have been receiving less royal favour than Salisbury. He points out however, that when trouble came, it was to be the earls' sons, not the lords themselves, that would start it.

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