It is clear from the previous chapter that household knights were not only military retainers, but that they also contributed a great deal to national politics and central government. How, then, were Edward III's household knights used to govern England's localities? And to what extent did they represent a valuable means of extending royal influence into local political society? These are important questions to ask for, since the seminal work of K. B. McFarlane in the 1940s and 1950s called for a localised approach to the political history of later medieval England, a wealth of county-bycounty case studies have established the centrality of local political society to our understanding of English history in this period. Previous attempts to gauge the place of royal knights within this have, however, been heavily polarised. As discussed in the Introduction, Chris Given-Wilson first suggested in 1986 that the royal affinity was a useful mechanism through which royal influence could be extended into the far reaches of England under Richard II and Henry IV. This has, however, been heavily criticised by Helen Castor and Alison Gundy, who instead contend that the king's knights and king's esquires of Richard II, Henry IV, Henry V and Henry VI destabilised local political society by riding roughshod over the dominance that each magnate expected to enjoy in their home county. More recently, Given-Wilson has responded to this criticism, arguing that though a ‘doubled-edged sword’, so long as the maintenance of a royal affinity was not extended so far as to encourage criticism of factionalism against the king, it was essential in providing ‘the arteries by which governmental authority was explained, distributed and enforced’, a position that has found support from Gwilym Dodd.

This chapter will examine the place of Edward III's household knights in local politics during the mid-fourteenth century – an earlier period than has yet received attention – to establish the extent to which they were involved in local affairs, the impact this had on Edward's ability to govern England's shires, and whether or not their involvement in this area was palatable to broader political community.