That the campaigns surrounding the battles of Mortimer's Cross and Second St. Albans of February 1461 were crucial to the accession of Edward, earl of March and newly-minted duke of York, as King Edward IV the following month hardly needs emphasising. With his father, Richard, duke of York, killed at Wakefield at the end of December 1460, had Edward not won the first battle, then the earl of Warwick's defeat at the second might well have led to a Lancastrian occupation of London and, quite possibly, the decisive collapse of the Yorkist challenge. As it turned out, of course, London refused entry to the whole Lancastrian army and Margaret of Anjou and her other commanders decided to head north, allowing Edward to be proclaimed king in the capital on 4 March and then to inflict a bloody defeat on them at Towton twenty-five days later. Also obvious is the importance of London in these manoeuvres. Both sides were attempting to secure London and Westminster, and thereby their symbolic and very real bureaucratic and financial power. The Lancastrians’ refusal to attempt to force their way into London, and their retreat northwards, can easily be seen, in hindsight, not only as an admission of defeat in the south, but also as a move that rendered their defeat a virtual inevitability.

Less obvious is the reason for the Lancastrian surrender of the south of England to the Yorkists in February–March 1461. Clearly, they had more support in the north than the Yorkists, but given that until very recently the west Midlands – or, at least, the area around Coventry, Tutbury and Kenilworth – had played host to the Lancastrian ‘court’, it might be thought that a retreat to this area would have made more sense. From here, they could draw upon their reserves of support in the Midlands and Wales, and be able to threaten Yorkist control of London. Another question, which is linked to this one, concerns the support that Edward was able to garner in the Welsh marches, and that enabled him to win at Mortimer's Cross. How, and why, had he been able to draw upon these reserves, and to what extent was the army that followed him to London – and beyond – composed of men from the march and the west Midlands?