ABSTRACT
Historians disagree about fifteenth-century provincial society. The sources are particularly inadequate and interpretations are strongly influenced by the preconceptions that each historian brings to them. The significance of witnessing a deed, for instance, depends on the stance of the particular historian.1 New techniques in applying old evidence and in discerning patterns rest ultimately on acts of faith to which non-believers may not subscribe. Historians have created a score of generalisations about aristocratic society in the English provinces that may well be wrong. Current historians agree that magnates had essential interests to be protected at all costs and that these included their lands and local spheres of influence, which stemmed ultimately from manpower derived from that land.2 However reasonable and unexceptional those starting points, subsequent chains of reasoning diverge.
