Modern historians and literary critics share a common tendency which sometimes distorts their interpretations of past societies and the texts produced by them. Both groups of scholars reflect their own societies in preferring what is new or original over what is well-established, derivative or commonplace. The very word ‘commonplace’ carries its own negative connotations in modern English, denoting a feeling or idea which is ordinary, lacking originality or individuality, and hence uninteresting. In making our own judgements about the intellectual and literary achievements of our contemporaries, such an attitude may be fair enough. But in examining cultures which by no means shared these values – fourteenth-century England, for example – they have often produced a certain kind of blind spot, a mis-assessment of priorities, in particular when it comes to understanding the role of ancient and well-established prejudices in the practice of everyday life. This article is focused on one particular area in which distaste for the hackneyed and the unoriginal has probably led astray a number of commentators on late medieval English society. It is concerned with the operation of morality, and in particular moralising literature, in the regulation of local office holders, a group and a set of functions which assumed ever greater importance with the expansion of the fiscal and judicial functions of the royal government in the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries.

‘Morality’ is almost as unappealing a word to an early 21st-century sensibility as ‘commonplace’.