When John Burrow defined the poetry of the late fourteenth century as ‘Ricardian’, he linked it to the King in a way even he admitted was ‘not perfectly apt’. The period was an unstable one for England, as Richard II's rule took the country from one political crisis to another. The writers who lived through it reflect the shifting nature of their world in the range of styles they use and the attitudes they portray.

Though these styles are very different, the challenges that their works present actually allow for a more focused pursuit of specific themes. Studies in medieval literature, characterised at the beginning of the twentieth century by a mainly philological emphasis, have now become more historicist, with scholars pushing for more integration and co-operation with historians to show how interdependent literary and non-literary texts were during this period.