One of Andrew Ayton's many contributions to his field is the way he helped both his own and the next generation of historians appreciate that, as Nigel Saul puts it in his foreword to this volume, an Edwardian army ‘was held together by the social authority and resources of its principal commander’, and that ‘in the field, the force's effectiveness would depend largely on the individual commander's authority and on the day-to-day relations between his immediate lieutenants’. As Richard Barber has emphasised, Edward III consciously used his immense social and chivalric authority to foster powerful bonds of affection and mutual understanding with and among his principal military captains, and one of the most important means he employed to that end was the creation of a new chivalric order in 1348.

Britain's ‘Most Noble Order of the Garter’ is the oldest, most famous, and most prestigious of all the monarchical orders of knighthood. The buckled blue band with its gold motto of honi soit qui mal y pense (‘shamed be he who thinks ill of it’) has become part of the royal arms of the United Kingdom, and can be seen in countless places in Britain and the Commonwealth as a result. Knights and Ladies of the Order are entitled to display their own heraldic arms encircled by the Garter, and for this reason also, many garter-emblems can be found in churches, colleges, hospitals and other public structures throughout Britain and across the world.

When they first encounter the garter symbol and motto, students and tourists often react with some puzzlement. To twenty-first-century sensibilities, a garter seems a strange choice for a chivalric emblem, while the motto naturally provokes the question ‘who thinks ill of what?’ Efforts to satisfy the curiosity aroused by the heraldry of the Order have not been lacking. According to an oft-told story, of which there are several variations, King Edward retrieved a garter that slipped from a lady's leg at a ball, and pronounced the motto as a gentlemanly effort to shield her from embarrassment. The earliest version of this tale, however, was first published in the 1460s, and has no foundation whatsoever in any source even close to contemporary with the Order's establishment.