The goal of this chapter is to establish an overview of the patterns of conflict in the border counties. The purpose here is, as far as possible, to make a quantitative analysis of conflict derived from court evidence. The first section below presents the records which underpin the analysis that follows. The archives of the court of king’s bench are useful for establishing a chronology of affairs at law. Private litigation among landowners features predominantly on the coram rege side this court, and on the rex side it heard most crown and private charges against gentry and nobility. It also heard quite a lot of crown charges of felony or trespass against perpetrators from the lower social orders, but even so such cases were frequently associated with disputes among landed antagonists. Thus, litigation in king’s bench should be an important indicator of tensions in political society. The itinerant gaol delivery court records focus, by contrast, much more on crown prosecutions of felonies perpetrated by culprits of yeoman status or lower; accordingly, they point towards more local social tensions and concerns of a much less politically significant flavour. There are no surviving records of the warden courts to examine by way of comparison. By tracing a chronology of conflict derived from legal records and matching this with major events, especially political upheavals, the second section below examines the extent to which the border counties were affected by the wider national context, including what local effects were caused by greater disputes among magnates. King’s bench records provide the main pool of evidence used in this section. Third, the chapter considers the effect of Anglo-Scottish war and truce on patterns of conflict and litigation in order to continue to address the question of whether the military aspect of the frontier had the effect of making the marches more prone to conflict, especially violent conflict, than elsewhere. This will be done with the king’s bench data and the gaol delivery data separately, and here the gaol delivery evidence will be more fully discussed. Fourth, the chapter will assess, where possible, the level and nature of violence. Finally, it will consider the role of the border liberties in local conflict. In these final two sections the evidence from both king’s bench and gaol delivery will be employed. Further supplementary evidence will be used throughout this chapter where relevant. Of course, where we are concerned with ‘violence’ it should be recalled that this is a broad heading under which can be grouped a number of aggressive actions involving the use of force, both against the person (including physical assault, rape, abduction, detention and killing) and against property (including plundering of goods and livestock and burning or destroying buildings, boundary-markers, crops or the like). Yet no objective measure of such behaviour exists; historians must rely upon the subjective accounts of those who bothered to record it; and it should be taken as read that legal records complicate analysis considerably. As will be noted below, cases begun with the general-purpose writs of trespass vi et armis are not treated on their own as encompassing genuine violence unless they feature more specific allegations. It should also be observed that, although they have not been excluded from the comprehensive figures enumerated in this chapter, those cases with specifically cross-border dimensions (which are more often to be found in gaol delivery than in king’s bench records) will be a focus of Chapter 8.