Fourteenth Century England, now in its third volume, exists to publish, biennially, a representative sample of recent and innovative work on the history of the fourteenth century, with particular emphasis on the politics and political culture of England. It is organised under the co-editorship of Nigel Saul (Royal Holloway, University of London), Chris Given-Wilson (University of St Andrews) and Mark Ormrod (University of York); J. S. Hamilton (Baylor University) has recently joined the editorial group.

Fourteenth Century England does not publish the proceedings of a conference, although some of the contributions naturally arise from conference papers. In particular, a number of the articles published here were first aired in 2002 in sessions sponsored by the Society of the White Hart at the International Congress on Medieval Studies, Western Michigan University, and at sessions organised by the Society for Fourteenth-Century Studies at the International Medieval Congress, University of Leeds. Between them, these two conferences now provide the main regular venue for the presentation and discussion of new research in the field. The editors of Fourteenth Century England, who organise the Society for Fourteenth-Century Studies, are especially grateful to the Society of the White Hart for its continued patronage of international research on later medieval English history.

Rather than following a single theme, then, the contributions to this volume represent a cross-section of recent research in fourteenth-century studies and reflect the concerns and trends of current scholarship on the field. The articles by Andy King, Christian D. Liddy, Kris Towson and Kelly DeVries indicate the considerable potential that still exists for close work on the problems of evidence and interpretation relating to discrete episodes in the political history of the period: such revisionism itself reflects the complexity and breadth of the primary sources relating to the fourteenth century. It might be pointed out in particular that a number of those and other studies in this volume demonstrate the ‘return to the chronicles’ that has been a feature of political history over the last decade or so: no longer merely a last refuge when the documentary sources dry up, the chronicles – as Andy King, Jane Beal, Kelly DeVries and Craig Taylor remind us – can provide compelling evidence of political motivations and cultural phenomena alike.