There are few areas of medieval studies that have flourished so much in recent years as military history. This volume represents a further flowering. The seeds of its contents were sown at a conference held at the ICMA Centre, University of Reading, in July 2009. They germinated there thanks to the energetic discussion of all participants, have subsequently been nurtured and pruned by reviewers, and are now presented in full bloom as significant contributions to the study of the individual soldier in the fourteenth century.

From the outset, our intention had been to invite contributors carrying out grass roots research in archival, as opposed to chronicle, sources, so that the conference and any publications would be genuinely new and ground-breaking. This was a natural development of our own research project under the auspices of which the conference was held – ‘The Soldier in Later Medieval England’. This project was funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) for three years from 2006, with Adrian Bell and Anne Curry as co-investigators, Andy King and David Simpkin as research assistants, and Adam Chapman as doctoral student. Our aim was to produce an on-line searchable database of all soldiers known to have served the English crown between 1369 and 1453. This information was collected from a vast array of muster and retinue rolls held in English and French archives, and from the letters of protection and attorney which some soldiers took out to protect their domestic interests during their military service.