The present volume, a festschrift for Professor A.J. (Tony) Pollard, owes its existence to an initiative by one of his former postgraduate students, Professor Anne Curry. The essays collected here, offered by three generations of his friends and pupils, celebrate Tony's outstanding career and pay tribute to his scholarship and enduring influence in furthering our understanding of late medieval England and France. Drawing inspiration from his own research interests and writing, which illuminate the military, political and social interactions of the period, they focus on three main themes: the contrasting styles of governance adopted by English monarchs from Richard II to Henry VII; the differing responses to civil conflict revealed in a variety of localities; and the lives of men recruited to fight overseas during the Hundred Years’ War and beyond the border with Scotland. These topics take us across England from the far north to the Channel, to London, the south-west and the Welsh lordship of Gower, while on the way also examining how townsmen resisted taxation, the gentry administered their estates and the western marches were ruled.

We are grateful to all the contributors for their help in the volume's production, and we owe particular thanks to Anne Curry for her staunch support and guidance, and to Tony's wife Sandra, whose excavations in files and bookshelves enabled the compilation of a comprehensive bibliography of his published works.