In my analysis of Hoccleve's ‘Address to Sir John Oldcastle’ with which I began this study, I argued that Hoccleve fashioned a connection between writing, reading and the prosecution of war. This study has demonstrated how vital that connection is to fifteenth-century literary culture and the range of ways in which it manifested itself: in the proliferation of military treatises and ordinances, the annotations made by scribes and readers, and in the ways that writers – from the anonymous translator to Thomas Malory – rewrote their texts. England's wars in France and at home, and the wider rhetoric and military thinking that those wars generated, shaped the ways that readers read their texts, gave rise to the production of one of the most sophisticated poems of the fifteenth century in the form of Knyghthode and Bataile, and influenced – in structure, language, and meaning – some of the most important canonical texts of that century from Lydgate's Troy Book to Malory's Morte Darthur.

Of particular interest to the readers considered here were the related issues of military discipline, the control of pillage, and the payment of wages. Traces of such issues can be found in, for example, Lydgate's specification in the Siege of Thebes that Adrastus ensured that his soldiers received wages and were paid on time (lines 2682–4), that, as manuscript glosses put it, they were paid ‘trewly her sowde’.