For over two hundred years the town and marches of Calais had been the most tangible symbol of the bellicose aspirations of the English kings and their subjects. Their military and symbolic importance were further heightened during the last century of English rule by the loss of Normandy and Gascony between 1450 and 1453. As well as its symbolic importance, Calais's economic significance, as the staple for the export of English wool, continued throughout this period. Calais, then, was for more than two centuries at the heart of the late medieval and Tudor polities. The dynamics of the relationship between the crown and the garrison of the town and marches reveal much about the wider importance of war in England, and the changing relationship between the crown and its subjects as negotiated through military service.

In 1436 Calais was just one theatre in a wider European war between the kings of England and France and their feudal vassals, the dukes of Burgundy and Brittany. The failed Burgundian siege of that year revealed the importance attached to Calais by late medieval Englishmen. Calais was portrayed by the crown, and accepted in the popular imagination, as part of the realm of England; the siege generated a response in terms of money, men and patriotic fervour unrivalled in the fifteenth century. Significantly, when the English military position in Normandy collapsed in 1449–50 the domestic response was different.