Historians have been generally dismissive of the involvement of household knights in national politics and central government in the fourteenth century. Michael Prestwich argued that ‘their main duties were military’ and that ‘their main activity was, of course, fighting’, while Chris Given-Wilson described the body of knights and bannerets attached to the royal households of Edward I, II and III as ‘basically fighting men’. This is not to say that the household knights’ contributions to domestic affairs have been entirely overlooked. Both Given-Wilson and Prestwich accepted that household knights ‘were occasionally used by the king as commissioners, or as diplomats, and a small number of them were royal councillors’. Nevertheless, for both these scholars, the limited and inconsistent place that household knights occupied in the mid-fourteenth century English polity paled in comparison to their military exploits, and it was not until the emergence of the ‘royal affinity’ under Richard II that they truly became a political force.

For many of Edward III's household knights, the conclusions offered by Prestwich and Given-Wilson are accurate. Miles Stapleton, Thomas Ughtred and John Potenhale, for instance, were all retained for the Crécy campaign of 1346 and the Reims campaign of 1359–1360, but in no other years. This suggests that they were first and foremost military retainers. For other household knights, however, it is clear that their domestic and political service to the crown was as important as their military obligations. Knights such as Gilbert Talbot and John Darcy ‘le pere’, for example, both of whom had been key political players in the latter years of Edward II's reign and occupied influential administrative positions under Edward III for many years, served the king equally as well at home as abroad. So too did William Montagu, the king's closest political ally during the early part of his reign. To devalue the political and governmental contributions made to Edward III's reign by these men would be to misrepresent the time they spent as household knights, and provide a one-dimensional impression of their service. While it is not, therefore, the purpose of this chapter to fundamentally revise the conclusions offered by Prestwich and Given-Wilson, what follows is an attempt to substantially narrow the extent to which the military service offered by Edward III's household knights is understood to have superseded that which they offered in domestic affairs.