Conflicts over treason are at their root conflicts over how constitutional structures and relationships are conceptualised and made manifest. By describing the traitor's offences and identifying the entities against which they offend, treason laws inscribe the limits of legitimate authority in the polity and delineate the nature and sources of that authority. As a corollary, when the law strips traitors of their subjecthood – a punishment that in medieval England usually meant the loss of life itself – processes of trial and punishment determine how political subjects are constituted in relation to sovereign authority and the individuals and entities that embody it. Any history of treason is therefore also inherently an inquiry into political thought and practice, and the limits of the politically possible at any particular historical juncture. To date, legal scholars and constitutional historians have developed interpretations of treason law in medieval England largely without regard to gender. This has rendered invisible the pivotal role of masculine performance in negotiating constitutional conflicts over where sovereign power lay and how it could be wielded. That the medieval body politic was envisaged by default as a male body, functioning primarily through relationships between men, has perhaps seemed so obvious as to require no critical analysis. Outside a handful of pioneering studies on kingship and masculinity, the gendered nature of the polity and its implications for the ways power was claimed, performed and resisted are still too often overlooked in political and legal histories of medieval England.

Viewing treason through the lens of gender, this study has laid bare the male body as the discursive, conceptual and material nexus of conflicts over royal legitimacy, sovereign authority and loyal political subjecthood. This has profound implications for the ways we understand treason as a legal construct, a political weapon, a tool for constitutional thinking and as a cultural category that helped to construct and mediate masculine identity in medieval England. As I have shown, while the technical parameters of treason in any particular case were uncertain and subject to debate, shifting legal definitions were nevertheless constructed upon and negotiated through a shared political imaginary in which the traitor stood as the opposite of the true man.