The aim of this chapter is to demonstrate the fallibility of two previously central arguments in the dating and interpretation of W&W: first, that the poem explicitly references the Statute of Treasons of 1352; and secondly that it commemorates the Black Prince's eyre (judicial visitation) of Cheshire in 1353. More generally, the chapter calls into question the degree to which the poet was concerned with more general issues of public order, and instead emphasises the particular challenges created by the desire of landed society to take matters into its own hands and resolve disputes through armed force. Seeing the ‘trial’ of Wynnere and Wastoure not as a formal judicial process with a plaintiff and a defendant, but rather as a form of royal arbitration between two equally matched (and equally implicated) protagonists, allows a more general discussion of Edward III's record and achievement in provid¬ing informal dispute resolution between his high-status subjects. As in the previous chapter, so in this: a reading of W&W that assumes a composition in the later 1350s or the 1360s allows us to move away from the sometimes reductive nature of previous historicist scholarship on the poem and to offer a new range of possible allusions to contemporary events and controversies surrounding the rule of law.

Early in the poem, we are told that the great assembly gathered before the king includes the forces of two rivals who have already technically bro¬ken the king's peace by unfurling their banners in a state of private war: