Battle of Shrewsbury - Aftermath

Aftermath

Henry Percy was initially buried by his nephew Thomas Nevill, 5th Baron Furnivall at Whitchurch, Shropshire with honours, but rumours soon spread that he was not really dead. In response the King had him disinterred. His body was salted, set up in Shrewsbury impaled on a spear between two millstones in the pillory in the marketplace, with an armed guard and was later quartered and put on show in the four corners of the country. His head was sent to York and impaled on the north gate, looking towards his own lands. His quarters were sent to Chester, London, Bristol and Newcastle upon Tyne. In November his grisly remains were returned to his widow Elizabeth. She interred them in York Minster at the right hand side of the altar.

Thomas Percy, 1st Earl of Worcester, Sir Richard Venables, Sir Richard Vernon and Sir Henry Boynton were publicly hanged, drawn and quartered in Shrewsbury on 23 July and their heads publicly displayed, Thomas Percy's on London Bridge.

Battlefield Church is said to have been erected over the site of the mass burial pit dug immediately after the battle. It was built initially as a memorial chapel, on the orders of King Henry IV and paid for by him, with prayers and masses being said continually for the dead on both sides. The chapel was replaced in 1460 by a church, which was further restored in 1862. A drain being dug in a corner of the churchyard inadvertently may have opened part of the burial pit. Workmen were surprised by the mass of bones which they thought showed the hurried nature of the burials. It is not impossible however that they had merely unearthed a charnel pit containing bones of a variety of different ages.

In 2006, the BBC show 'Two Men in a Trench' established virtually nothing at all except to prove that an area to the west of the church was not in fact a graveyard.

It is worth noting that there were two other 15th century churches associated with battles. The one at Towton no longer exists, while that at Wakefield does. Neither were built close to centre of fighting of the battles they commemorated.

The battle itself and many of the key people involved appear in Shakespeare's Henry IV, Part 1.