Murders of members of the gentry committed by peers, or on the orders of peers, were not common in the later middle ages. The few that did occur tended to generate much contemporary comment, such as the notorious murder of the westcountry lawyer Nicholas Radford by Sir Thomas Courtenay, son and heir of the earl of Devon, in 1455. The murder of Henry Howard, esquire, by servants of John, Lord Scrope of Masham, in 1446, however, is almost unknown to historians, not least because there is no reference to it in any chronicle, or in the early Paston letters; this is compounded by the obscurity of Henry Howard himself. Yet there are several surviving records of the king's bench that allow the events of 11 June 1446 to be unravelled. Perhaps more importantly they illuminate the effective legal manoeuvres mounted by the experienced Scrope in defence of himself and his men, and the problems encountered by the magnate most closely identified with the judicial response to the murder, John Mowbray, third duke of Norfolk. Finally, they demonstrate one facet of the problems caused by the inadequacy of Henry VI and the regime of William de la Pole, marquess of Suffolk.

By the first quarter of the fifteenth century, the Howard family was one of the wealthiest and most prestigious gentry lines in England. However, Henry Howard was the youngest son, by his second wife, of Sir John Howard the elder (died 1437), and little of the wealth of the Howard family found its way to him.