East Stoke, Nottinghamshire
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East Stoke is a small village in Nottinghamshire nestled between the A46 Fosse Way trunk road and the River Trent. It lies about 6 miles southwest of Newark. It is thought to be the site of the Roman settlement called Ad Pontem, the 'place of the bridges,' but this is disputed. It was the scene of a very bloody Battle of Stoke Field during the War of the Roses, which is commemorated even today by a gulley in woods by the river nicknamed the 'bloody gutter.' In the battle of East Stoke on the morning of 16 June 1487, it is thought that several thousand combatants lost their lives in less than 3 hours, consisting mostly of "1500 crack German and Swiss mercenaries, under the veteran German commander, Colonel Martin Schwartz [along with] about 4,500 Irish mercenaries."[1]
What remains clear is that "the Battle of East Stoke effectively brought an end to that period of civil war known as The War of the Roses that had ravaged England since the 1450’s."[2]
