Very gradually, during a period of more than thirty years of investigation of fourteenth-century labour laws and of the justices of the peace and the king's bench, my attention has been called to Sir William Shareshull. But it was only recently that I became fully aware that I had been meeting him at every turn and that, concerned as he was with business of the most varied kinds, he was in great part responsible for judicial records I had printed long ago, as well as for some I was just sending to the Press. I soon learned that although many of his activities had been mentioned by scholars in connexion with their own particular fields, his life as a whole had never been studied; and that actually very little was known about him and that what was known was often wrong.

With a growing realization that Shareshull was a dynamic force in the government of Edward III during a large part of the reign, I have felt it was well worth while to attempt a detailed study of his career and of his theories and practice of law, in order to determine his place in legal history (if I may borrow Tout's phrase) and to illustrate the judicial and administrative methods of a distinguished public servant in the fourteenth century.

To this study of Shareshull additional zest has been afforded by the baffling problems arising at every stage—problems both of facts and of their interpretation. Who was his father? When was he himself born? What was the surname of his first wife, the mother of his children? Why did he leave his Staffordshire home and become a resident in Oxfordshire? How was he brought to the favourable attention of the king and the Black Prince? Why has it been believed that he retired from the king's bench four years before the actual date? What motives led him to withdraw to a Franciscan convent in the last months of his life? Why did his contemporaries have such divergent opinions about him, labourers and unruly knights hating him, the king and his son utilizing and eulogizing him?