I began this book at the end and came to its topic obliquely. I first read Laurence Minot's poetry in Joseph Ritson's 1795 edition in connection with another project and was perplexed at the relative neglect of the lively work of a poet active during Chaucer's youth. Thinking about this, I was led to another antiquarian work, Thomas Wright's Political Songs of England, first published in 1839, reissued by Peter Coss in facsimile in 1996 and still a valuable anthology. It furnished a great deal of the material discussed here and pointed me towards much else. Hence, although this book will appear to be a straightforward work of medieval studies, it is informed by and grew out of earlier work on antiquarian medievalist scholarship and the early shaping of the discipline. Some regard this as medievalism; this book reflects my larger contention that the study of medieval literature should go alongside considerations of how that literature and its study have been constructed.

At its simplest, the book began as an attempt to do more with the genre, or genres, of political verse in England in the period before Minot's presumed death date of 1352, stopping short of the revolution in English writing which then took place in the second half of the fourteenth century. The political verses inhabit a grey zone between historical source material and literary writing. Thomas Wright's own assumption was that they were sources for the social historian.