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Introduction
I've put together this database to address one of history's mysteries.
It is well known that during the War of the Roses great Lords maintained their own troops or retinues. They would identify one another by wearing their Lord's livery colours, one of their badges or both. So far so good. The mystery arises because reliable information about the livery colours used is scarce.
There's always Pat McGill's book "Standards, Badges & Livery Colours of the Wars of the Roses" and the sets of livery flags, both from Freezywater, but there's not that much more. In contrast there's a lot of information about heraldic flags from the period.
Online Database
As a wargamer liveries are important. They are a ready way of identifying units on the tabletop via flags or jackets in the livery colours. So to tackle the mystery I have created a database and, out of necessity, I have been fairly relaxed as to the source of the information.
So far I've combined two sources resulting in a database of 88 livery colours as a simple web page. It is searchable using Ctrl-F on most browsers.
There's also a war record for each person taken from the data used to create the Poleaxed Wars of the Roses Sourcebooks. This should help if you are researching a particular battle or looking for people who changed sides.
Advanced Searches
In addition to the online version I also wrote a version searchable by loyalty, battle honours and both livery colours.
Sadly, it doesn't work as a publicly shared resource. However, I'll happily run searches for you and sent the results in a pdf. To request a search fill in this online form.
Data Sources
Most of the data came from the Freezywater database and the remainder was identified in November 2020 as coming from a Hobilar article written by Barry Slemmings.
After contacting Barry to confirm this, he identified a few errors in the linked page and the database has been corrected: the sons of York were listed as "Murrey & Azure" this has been corrected to "Azure & Murrey".
If you know of any other reliable sources please get in touch via the contact form in the page footer.
Related pages
Document history
- Created: Fri 28 September 2018
- Updated: Mon 29 March 2021
- Updated: Sun 27 August, 2023
- Updated: Wed 07 January, 2026
