You can't make up history like this

[Tamerlane]

@DrDeth

Unlikely. Much more likely that Henry Tudor had them offed.

RIII didn’t have much of a motive- he’d already had them declared illegitimate (and they really were, it seems).

But Henry had a huge motive- if he was legit, then they were, and they had a better claim.

So I was searching for an old post, where I could have sworn that I had argued in the opposite of this - that Richard III had very good and pressing reasons for taking them out. I’m pretty sure I based this on Charles Ross’ biography of Richard III - Ross being in the “rather more likely than not” category.

Instead I found this thread from 2006 where Mississippienne and I were discussing death rates of extinction among nobility. Which tickled me, because I remember the cite I couldn’t recall then :p.

@Tamerlane

However bad luck probably plays a roll and was nothing unusual. Dynasties, great and small, died out all the time from a lack of legitimate male heirs. I forget the exact number, but tornover was high in the medieval world among noble houses ( I want to say about a third of them went extinct in the male line every generation, but I’d need to look for a cite ).

@Mississippienne

I don’t know about a third of the noble houses going extinct every generation, that number seems excessively high.

You’re right - it was more like a quarter ( ~24-30% ) of the English peerage per 25 year generation in the 14th century :D. Per K.B. MacFarlane, The Nobility of Later Medieval England ( 1973 Clarendon Press, Oxford ). Poking around apparently the numbers were much the same for the 15th and 16th century and E. Perroy ( for France ) and A. Grant ( for Scotland ) have turned up roughly similar numbers. So noble houses in western Europe seemed to have gone extinct ( or were very occasionally dispossed ) in the male line, on average, after four generations, at least in the High Middle Ages/Renaissance.

Err…sorry for the hijack, but it IS rather mundane and pointless ;).