In May 1297 William Wallace got his career as a Scottish patriot off to a good start by killing William de Heselrigg, the English sheriff of Lanark. One of the English casualties of this skirmish was Heselrigg's fellow Northumbrian, Thomas Gray, stripped and left for dead on the field. Fortunately, he had fallen between two burning houses, put to the flames by Wallace and his men, and the heat kept him alive through the night; in the morning, he was found by English forces, subsequently making a full recovery. We know all of this, because some sixty years later, in October 1355, his son, Thomas, was ambushed and captured by the Scots. To while away the hours as he was held prisoner in Edinburgh Castle, Thomas decided to write a book of ‘the chronicles of Great Britain, and the deeds of the English’. He was greatly aided in the planning of this endeavour by the classical prophetess, the Sybil, who came to him in a dream one night. Along with some supervisory guidance on its structure and source materials, she suggested a title for his work: the Scalacronica. This was partly a witty allusion to Ranulf Higden's Polychronicon, one of its main sources; but the title was also a punning reference to Gray's own surname, of the sort common in medieval heraldry, for the Old French word gree means ‘step, stair’, equivalent to the Latin scala of the chronicle's title (which might be translated into modern English as the ‘Scaling-Ladder Chronicle’). Certainly, the symbol of a ladder was used as a Gray family badge in the fifteenth century. However, gree had the additional meaning of ‘degree, station (in life)’; and in this context, a ladder is a not inappropriate symbol for the Gray family during the fourteenth century. In just four generations, the Grays rose from comparative obscurity on the Anglo-Scottish border to national prominence, with marriage links to the highest echelons of the English nobility, and a title in English-occupied Normandy. Fourteenth-century England boasts many examples of upward social mobility, such as the de la Poles, the Chaucers, the Scropes, and more pertinently (as we shall see), the Percies and the Nevilles; but the social climbing of the Grays was spectacular by any standards. So what provided the rungs for the social ladder they so successfully scaled?