The eight chronicles edited here are the principal surviving historical narratives of the Wars of the Roses written in English by men who lived during those wars. They are complemented by a number of other important chronicles – some written in English or Latin by Englishmen with a broader or longer view of history extending to matters (often civic or ecclesiastical) somewhat to the side of the Yorkist-Lancastrian conflict or to events that preceded or followed it; some written in Latin or French by foreign observers for foreign readers; and some written retrospectively from a sixteenth-century perspective. And there are, of course, thousands of other texts – letters, charters, acts of parliament, registers, treaties, household accounts, and memoranda – that continue to flesh out historians’ understanding of the period. But these chronicles are the best accounts by commoners (and one duke) written for their fellow Englishmen with a usually narrow, often exclusive, focus on the battles and politics of the Wars of the Roses.

Five of these chronicles recount in detail particular events of limited duration: battles, in The First Battle of St Albans (21–23 May 1455) and The Siege of Bamburgh Castle (June–July 1464); campaigns, in The Chronicle of the Rebellion in Lincolnshire (March 1470) and The History of the Arrival of King Edward IV (March–May 1471); and negotiations in The Manner and Guiding of the Earl of Warwick (22–30 July 1470). The remaining three describe the development of the larger conflict over extended periods: The Continuation of Gregory's Chronicle (1450–69), Howard's Chronicle (1461–70), and Warkworth's Chronicle (1461–74).

It is obvious from this list that only the first half of the Wars of the Roses period, traditionally 1455–85, is covered by these chronicles. That may perhaps be explained by the period of relative peace that followed Edward's crushing victories at Barnet and Tewkesbury and the consequent deaths of Henry VI and his son, Edward of Westminster. By the end of May 1471, it must have looked to these mainly Yorkist chroniclers as if the conflict was permanently resolved. What followed was more than a decade of dynastic calm, punctuated by the adventures of the die-hard Lancastrian John de Vere and by a few months of phony war in France.

Our focus in this edition is on selected chronicles and their authors – not on the Wars of the Roses per se, not on the social or economic or political or constitutional history of the period, and not on the vast corpus of documentary evidence that supports the researches of scholars into those larger and more important subjects. While we have often cited those documents and the analyses of those scholars, we have done so with the aim of pointing back at the particularities of the chronicles and not outward at the generalities of fifteenth-century history.

This is to acknowledge that we are functioning here as literary scholars rather than as historians. We have not consciously developed or followed a particular historiographical theory, but have cited eclectically whatever commentary we have found relevant to particular passages. We have provided summaries of the course of the wars where necessary to give passages in the chronicles some context, but when a chronicler passes over an event – as Thomas Howard does with Edward's arrest in 1469 – we have passed over it lightly as well; and when one records an event without apparently understanding its background or meaning in detail – as the continuator of Gregory's Chronicle does with the “loveday” of 1458 – we have simply referred the reader to the relevant scholarship.

We are hopeful that the reader will find this edition an improvement on the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century editions that have long given scholars convenient access to these chronicles – improvements both in the accuracy of our transcriptions and in the usefulness of our emendations and notes. These range from a corrected reading in Gregory's Chronicle's description of a weapon at Second St Albans; to the omission by eyeskip of a passage in Howard's Chronicle and the inclusion in that chronicle of a passage picked up by mistake from the genealogical manuscript into which Howard's work was copied; to clues and surmises about the identity of the author of Gregory's Chronicle; and, perhaps most significant, to our inclusion of a single neuere, discovered by Lister Matheson in the source manuscript of Warkworth's Chronicle, which reverses the meaning of an often quoted passage describing the trial of John Tiptoft.