It is with a great sense of satisfaction (and relief) that I write this preface to the final volume of this project. When I joined the project in 1985 and began work on the manuscript sources for the second volume (1216–1377) I kept notes of material I found of relevance to a future third volume, hoping if time and opportunity allowed to continue the work until the Henrician dissolution. The second volume, compiled in collaboration with Miss Vera London, was finally published in 2001 and it was a great joy to myself and Professor Christopher Brooke that it came out while Vera London was still alive. I remember well the celebratory lunch we had with Vera in Church Stretton and her obvious delight in seeing the volume's appearance, just a few months before her own death in 2002 in her ninety–ninth year. Not being so sanguine about my own longevity I decided to continue immediately with the third volume and have devoted the years from 2001 to what I might term the ‘chronological’ sources. As I have mentioned, in my research work for the second volume I had collected any later references in ‘non–chronological’ collections, that is to say, unique collections which had a wide date span, such as landed family archives including former monastic material, the ancient deeds series in the National Archives, and Additional and other charter collections in the British Library.