I stumbled on John Hopton one summer in the late 1960s. At the Suffolk Record Office, Ipswich, I had out the rough account book of Hopton's Blythburgh bailiff, Nicholas Greenhagh. Later that summer or the next I looked at other fifteenth century documents in the collection from which it came, the Blois Family Deposit, and in no considered way pondered the possibility of working on the gentleman whom they concerned, John Hopton. At Christmas 1970 I sat down to discover something about him from the ordinary, published sources. I was surprised at what I found.

I had expected, had been looking for indeed, a typical figure, one of ‘those gentlemen whose aggressive self-confidence, intemperate acquisitiveness and blatant family pride set the tone of English history between the fourteenth and eighteenth centuries’. Such a man is worth studying because I happen to think the inscription of 1633 on Leominster old town hall is accurate for the later Middle Ages: ‘Like columnes do upprop the fabrik of a building, so noble gentry dos support the honor of a kingdom.’