In addition to the formal acknowledgements made separately I am enormously grateful to Peter Sowden, Commissioning Editor for Boydell & Brewer, who not only accepted this book for publication but also was tremendously understanding as personal circumstances beyond my control created untold delays, and for supporting me throughout with his enthusiasm. I thank Rebecca Cribb for guiding the book through the press.

In preparing the book I realized the need both for genealogical information and for illustrations demonstrating the types of sources used and the problems involved. Because of the cost of artwork, I could not include as many family trees as I would have wished. In preparing the genealogies and related information I have been bound by the limitations of the software I used. For instance, although I was able to use terms such as ‘about’, ‘circa’, fl., and ‘after’ in the database of individuals such uncertainties do not appear in the resulting trees and reports. I have tried to be as accurate as possible but the reader is advised to treat the ancestry trees as provisional. I have included several family trees and other genealogical information for the reader's reference. There were similar constraints on the presentation of illustrative material. I am so grateful to Martin Fiennes of Broughton Castle, SHPT/Stowe School and Henry E. Huntington Library not only for permission to publish images of items in their possession but also for waiving fees. The illustrations I have chosen demonstrate important points made in the text. I could have presented more images of documents but some of the candidates for inclusion were too illegible or faded for successful reproduction. The reader may require a magnifying glass to read some of the documents, just as I did when I read them! I decided also to reproduce the direct quotations from documents with the original spellings, making minimal changes such as extension of common contractions and abbreviations in the interests of readability. I am forever in debt to Sian Lewis who designed the artwork for the family trees, and to Tony Carr who helped to prepare the index.

As I write this preface I am come directly from another lengthy research trip to the Huntington.