This is a book about the textual representation of fatherhood that takes place in the specific milieu of late medieval England, and so before discussing fathers we need to understand that social and cultural context. During a time of social transformation, England has been described as changing from ‘a country of knights … [to] a nation of shopkeepers’. This rather damning statement about the death of chivalry obscures the dynamic developments in the society of what has come to be known as ‘the long fifteenth century’. Beginning with the deposition of Richard II and closing with the beginning of the English Reformation, this is a period of English history characterised by cultural, social and political developments that were scrutinised, welcomed, resisted and feared by medieval contemporaries. These developments have in our own time met with similarly emotive responses from historians and literary scholars, from J. Huizinga's beguiling presentation of late medieval England as a society of blood and roses, swinging constantly between agony and ecstasy, to the many academics who have earnestly tried to rescue this period from its reputation for venality, cruelty and cultural decline. This book focuses on the groups whose changing demographic structures, social and intellectual preoccupations and socio-political power reflect particularly distinctly the social and cultural shifts within late medieval England: the gentry and mercantile classes.