History of Hertfordshire Kings Langley. He gave the alm of a groat to the poor. Henry Chichele, the Archbishop of Canterbury, visited Barnet in 1423. No bells rang, and the archbishop took offence at his poor welcome. When he returned in 1426, the church doors were sealed against him. Three important battles of the Wars of the Roses took place in Hertfordshire. At the First Battle of St Albans on 22 May 1455, which was the first major battle of the Wars of the Roses, Richard of York and Neville the Kingmaker defeated the Lancastrians, killed their leader, Edmund Beaufort and captured King
Wars of the Roses line, as descendants of Edward III's second son Lionel of Antwerp. Edmund's second son, Richard, Earl of Cambridge, who was executed by Henry V, had married Anne de Mortimer, daughter of Roger Mortimer and sister of Edmund Mortimer. Anne's grandmother, Philippa of Clarence, was the daughter of Lionel of Antwerp. The Mortimers were the most powerful marcher family of the fourteenth century. G.M. Trevelyan has written that "the Wars of the Roses were to a large extent a quarrel between Welsh Marcher Lords, who were also great English nobles, closely related to the English throne." Anne de Mortimer had died