This work owes its existence primarily to all those students who have sat in front of me for a Cambridge ‘supervision’ (i.e. tutorial) since 1973; it must by now be a very large number. Their agonies have not been in vain, for, even by asking the most banal questions – perhaps above all by asking the most banal questions – they have forced me to examine my most fundamental assumptions about medieval England. Indeed, the principal merit of the broad outline papers of history as still taught at Cambridge, combined with the weekly essay and the weekly hour's tuition on the essay, is that both teacher and taught have to learn to think about historical development in broad conceptual terms. Without the teaching that I began to do at Cambridge in my fourth year of research, I should never have understood where my collection of trees about fifteenth–century Warwickshire fitted within the large wood of English political, constitutional, social and economic change from before the Conquest until well into the early-modern period. It was indeed the formative moment in my development as a historian, even if at times the agony was mine rather than the students', as I struggled to keep one jump ahead of them on a week's reading on each of up to four different topics in a single week.

Others to whom I am deeply indebted are those colleagues, past and present, at Cambridge and elsewhere, who, perhaps even without knowing it, have nurtured my understanding of politics and political society in late–medieval England in the last few years.