IN his inaugural lecture at Cambridge as Regius Professor of Modern History, Professor Knowles remarked that ‘academic historians are notably less concerned with men and women, their personalities and their characters, than they were a century ago. If Charles Kingsley's saying, that “History is the history of men and women, and nothing else”, seemed paradoxical in his own day, it would seem scandalous now’. But what may seem ‘scandalous’ in the eyes of a professional historian may yet have its attractions for that large body of readers with historical curiosity, to whom the spectacle of men and women ‘doing things’ can never be without interest, and it is for them that this book is written. It sets out to give an account of the lives of a few men and women of the fifteenth century, hoping that it will enable the modern reader to understand something of what it meant to be a soldier or a civil servant, or the wife of a country landowner at that time. In the background are the wars in France and the unrest at home, but these are considered only in so far as they are necessary for an understanding of the narrative.

This volume incorporates the substance of the Gregynog Lectures delivered at the University College of Wales, Aberystwyth, during the Session 1952–3, and I gratefully record the honour done me, and the gracious hospitality shown to me while I was there. Since then I have revised and enlarged the lectures extensively, and some of them have been given on the Alexander White foundation at the University of Chicago in the Spring Quarter of 1955. Here again I can only express my obligation for the many kindnesses I received on my fourth visit to this great university of the Middle West.