The years between 1435 and 1485 saw extraordinary transformations in England and France which could not but affect the islands. There was the initially slow decline and then rapid collapse of the English position in France. There was civil war in England; in France the contested emergence of a more assertive monarchy under Charles VII and Louis XI. The historiography has tended to turn on the consequent closer alignment of the islands with English politics and to find any loosening of control to be a side effect of weakness and conflict, and so potentially temporary. Yet we must consider whether, while reinforcing the role of the islands in English politics, these events necessarily undermined their connections with Normandy. It is worth testing the implications of a civil war fought in significant part throughout the Crown's dominions and in some ways as a continuation of the Anglo-French conflict. The historiography has tended to see local influence during this period as simply the product of the weakness of the centre, and thus the by-product of a political process which (whether based on contention between noblemen and their allies and affinities or, in the face of a collapse in confidence in the king, between competing ideas of the appropriate response to royal insanity, caprice or choice of counsel) remained fundamentally focused on an English centre. Although such weakness was obviously apparent at this point, this interpretation can be challenged.