On the night of 23 October 1455 a leading apprentice-at-law, Nicholas Radford, was murdered outside his manor-house at Upcott in Devon by the sons and servants of his former patron, Thomas Courtenay, earl of Devon. One context for this crime, notable for the status and wealth of its victim and infamous for its duplicity and brutality, was a purely local one: it was an episode in an orgy of violence unleashed by the Courtenays in their escalating rivalry for local hegemony with the lawyer's new patron, the recently ennobled William, Lord Bonville. Yet the murder had a broader context. Radford was one of the most senior lawyers to meet a violent end in the fifteenth century, but he was by no means the only one. Although there is no record of any judge or sergeant-at-law suffering a similar death, there are grounds for thinking that members of the legal profession, of the rank of apprentice and below, were significantly more likely to fall victim to fatal violence, if deaths in battle are excluded, than other members of the county gentry. Such a belief is necessarily impressionistic; nonetheless, it is striking how high a percentage of known gentry murder victims in this period were lawyers. For example, 23 of the 2,844 Members of Parliament of the period 1422–61 are known to have been murdered, and ten of them, Radford among them, were lawyers. Since no more than a fifth of the MPs were men of law, this is about twice the number one would have expected from an unbiased distribution of victims. Several qualitative considerations can be adduced to explain this apparent vulnerability, for lawyers attracted hostility both on their own account and as the agents of others. Their routine resort to the restricted land market, by which they converted the profits of their profession into social promotion, meant that they were more frequently involved in disputes than more established landowners. Equally significantly, their understanding of, and ready access to, the mechanism of royal justice made them difficult opponents, an advantage that might drive rivals to the sort of violent and vengeful extra-legal measures that society both overtly condemned and covertly condoned. They also routinely exposed themselves to danger in the physical and functional spaces they habitually inhabited.

Soon after the death of her husband, John Talbot, second earl of Shrewsbury, at the battle of Northampton on 10 July 1460, his widow, Elizabeth, sister of James Butler, earl of Ormond and Wiltshire, presented a petition to Pope Pius II. She recalled how her vulnerability in the wake of her husband's death had led her to make undertakings that she was now anxious to repudiate. Her husband had fallen on the defeated Lancastrian side, and so, fearing the loss of her lands and goods, she had pretended a readiness to marry one of the victors, Walter Blount of Barton Blount in Derbyshire. Blount was, as she rightly insisted to the pope, ‘unequal and inferior to her in nobility and wealth’. Yet she felt her situation was desperate, and Blount's influence offered protection ‘from the attacks of her enemies and the perils which threatened’. Now that the danger had passed, she asked the pope to release her from her promise. Her plea illustrates an obvious point: the normal hazards facing the wealthy widow were amplified in times of acute political dislocation, particularly if, like Elizabeth Butler, they found themselves alone in the world, with neither parents nor adult children to support them. Such widows had one obvious recourse, namely to marry into the new political establishment. Elizabeth contemplated that solution but found unpalatable the social derogation that, in her case, it entailed. Other widows were offered what were, at least in appearance, better options, none more so than Elizabeth Wydeville, widow of Sir John Grey of Groby (Leicestershire), a Lancastrian who fell at the second battle of St. Albans on 17 February 1461. Her marriage to Edward IV in May 1464 is the ultimate example of a Lancastrian widow finding a Yorkist protector. This paper concerns one of two women who may, as Michael Hicks has suggested in his Edward V, have unsuccessfully taken the path Elizabeth later followed. One of these is well known. Eleanor, daughter of John Talbot, first earl of Shrewsbury (d.1453), and sister-in-law of Elizabeth Butler, was the widow of another Lancastrian, Sir Thomas Butler, son and heir-apparent of Ralph, Lord Butler of Sudeley. It was to her that, according to the Titulus Regius of 1483, Edward IV had been pre-contracted, to the invalidation of his subsequent marriage to Elizabeth Wydeville.

Few fifteenth-century barons had more remarkable lives than Ralph, Lord Cromwell (d.1456). His long career has three distinct aspects. The first is that of the long-serving royal administrator, who devoted himself to the service of the house of Lancaster from the bright optimism of Henry V’s reign to the failure and alienation of the strife-torn 1450s. Then, beset by his enemies, he turned for protection to those who would later bring down the dynasty he had served so long. The second is that of a great builder, who, in his lifetime, created three great edifices – the castle at Tattershall with its striking brick donjon and the manorhouses at South Wingfield in Derbyshire and Collyweston in Northamptonshire, the last now lost – and who, in death, provided for the creation of a fourth, the massive collegiate church at Tattershall. Even in an age notable for the activity of its aristocratic builders, none of his contemporaries could match such a record of creation. The third aspect of his career is less admirable. Great buildings require great resources, and Cromwell was less than scrupulous in the means by which he augmented his wealth: he ruthlessly exploited the profits and influence attendant upon royal service to extend a baronial estate of fairly modest proportions into one of the greatest inheritances in England. In so doing he employed tactics in the acquisition of property that, according to contemporary complaints against him, went far beyond the generous prevailing norms of acceptable practice. All three of these themes came together in the execution of his will: the compromises he had made to win political support in his last years brought difficulties to his executors; his passion for building found a posthumous expression in the rebuilding of the churches at Tattershall and at his ancestral home of Lambley in Nottinghamshire; and his desire to make redress for past wrongs diminished the resources available to the executors and delayed the implementation of their ambitious charge.