In recent studies of the political history of late medieval England, much attention has focused on the contemporary political culture, to which notions of kingship, of the nature and function of royal authority and the royal will, were for obvious reasons central. In order to build up a picture of what people of the political class – nobles, knights and gentlemen – would have regarded as the defining qualities of sound kingship and which therefore dictated what they would expect of their king in the exercise of his royal role, historians have been giving newly careful attention to what is said in the advice literature of ‘mirrors for princes’, a genre previously much neglected. For the purpose in hand, works such as Hoccleve's Regement of Princes, the English translations of the pseudo-Aristotelian Secreta Secretorum and the Dicts and Sayings of the Philosophers are indeed excellent sources, since it is clear that they had a wide readership among nobles and gentry. There are numerous surviving manuscripts: their texts were copied into composite collections commissioned by knights and gentlemen, such as Sir John Paston's Grete Boke and Vale's Book, and excerpts from them were a frequent inclusion in gentry commonplace books. They were not just advice books for rulers; they served as guides to the principles of royal government for the ruled.