On St Lambert’s Day, 17 September 1397, King Richard II pitched his tents on open ground outside the town of Coventry and prepared to witness a fight to the death between two of his closest associates.
The king had ordered this trial by combat to settle a bitter feud between his cousin Henry Bolingbroke, Duke of Hereford, and Thomas Mowbray, Duke of Norfolk, a close adviser. At its heart lay accusations of treason against the king and Richard, it was claimed, had brought an army of ten thousand knights with him, just in case.
It was to be a fateful moment in an already teetering reign. As the two men took up their positions on horseback at either end of the lists, ready to charge, Richard called a halt and exiled both of them. Within two years Bolingbroke had returned to defeat the king’s armies and seize the crown as Henry IV, imprisoning the hapless Richard and almost certainly having him murdered.
A pivotal moment in the long build-up to the Wars of the Roses, or the Cousins’ War, as the conflict was known at the time, the ‘duel that never was’ on Gosford Green is now no more than a footnote in a story that changed the course of English history.
And so is Coventry, one of the biggest and wealthiest towns in England at the time, but now regarded as a twentieth-century industrial town hammered to pieces by the Luftwaffe and re-built in a style reminiscent of Communist East Germany.
It wasn’t always so. William Shakespeare, in childhood almost certainly a spectator at Coventry’s famous mystery plays, gave the place nearly a dozen name-checks in his histories. Every monarch until the Hanoverians made it a compulsory port-of-call on their royal perambulations and as late as 1919 a journalist writing for the Illustrated London News could describe the place as ‘arguably the best-preserved medieval city in Europe’.
Yet while its rivals at the top of the fourteenth century rich list – York, Bristol and Norwich – are justly celebrated for their history, Coventry has slipped out of the public imagination as a place of any age at all, its relevance now confined to the proximity of the two great Midlands castles of Kenilworth and Warwick.
It is time to alter that perception. The city still possesses, in the Guildhall of St Mary, an extraordinary living reminder of a turbulent but colourful fifteenth century, in which Coventry was for a long time the crucible of the Lancastrian cause, a place so important to Henry VI’s wife Margaret of Anjou that it was known as ‘the Queen’s bower.’
In that guildhall, in stained glass and tapestry, can be seen two of the most important works of art to come out of that century. And across a narrow lane stands the parish church of St Michael, better known to us now as the cathedral the Luftwaffe destroyed in 1940. It was that church that Henry VI unofficially consecrated in 1451, when, acknowledging Coventry’s importance, he granted the place the right to call itself city and county.
Coventry has the buildings, the record archive and most importantly the story, to be a key focus for the study of what came before 1485, a date still viewed as the birth of modern England.
But this is not just about the Wars of the Roses. The ‘history’ for which Coventry is best known, Lady Godiva’s naked ride, may be myth. But the town was a key centre for religious dissent in the fourteenth century, home to many Lollards. It played a significant role in the Civil Wars of the seventeenth century, losing its nationally famous stone wall for its defiance to Charles I, and it was the place that the novelist George Eliot immortalised in Middlemarch, an old weaving town struggling to come to terms with the modern age of railways and hospitals.
The story of Coventry over a thousand years is one of seismic change and a series of Year Zero moments, which is probably why it has slipped out of sight to many historians, a species that values continuity, surely, above much else.
Now considering a City of Culture Bid, the city itself is discovering a new interest in its eventful and colourful past. It’s time the rest of the world did too.
Peter Walters is the author of The Story of Coventry which traces the evolution of the city, from the myths of Godiva, through to the issues, challenges and opportunities facing it in the twenty-first century. Exploring Coventry's heritage through records, architectural developments and anecdotes, it reveals a fascinating and much misunderstood city, whose history is often overshadowed by its bombing during the Second World War.