Edward III's household knights occupied an important place in English warfare, politics and government in the fourteenth century. In part, this was because they permeated so many aspects of Edward's reign. When the king went to war, they assisted in the financing and equipping of his armies, not least during the final years of the 1330s when Edward's efforts to form an alliance in the Low Counties brought England to the brink of financial collapse. They also provided the king with a core of experienced military retinues around which royal armies could be built. In the 1340s, this often accounted for over half the men-at-arms serving in royal armies. Once on campaign, they offered a force of experienced and reliable commanders, capable of leading specific military ventures such as sacking towns, crossing rivers and fighting off local resistance. They were also utilised extensively to garrison a great many castles on England's northern border with Scotland and on the south coast, and featured regularly as diplomats, commissioned to negotiate alliances, truces and treaties across Europe. In terms of their political utility, a household banneret was far more likely to receive an individual summons to parliament than any other man below the baronage, and clearly enjoyed some unspoken right to sit among the peerage. This was especially the case during the 1330s as part of Edward's bid to create a ‘new nobility’, who offered him important support in his desire to go to war with France. Likewise, household knights dominated the royal court throughout Edward's reign, largely as a result of their participation at royal tournaments, though, interestingly, never to such an extent as to elicit direct criticism. Even the chamber knights’ place in the fractured court politics of Edward's last years was almost entirely unremarked upon by the Good Parliament of 1376. Both the household bannerets and the simple household knights, meanwhile, acted as valuable royal agents in the localities, tasked with protecting royal interests in England's shires, often as constables of royal castles and keepers of royal forests and manors.

Important though the men who served as household knights clearly were to Edward's rule, a central question posed at the outset of this book was whether this was the explicit result of the household membership of these men, or whether it was simply that Edward was retaining the type of person who would naturally have fulfilled these roles.