ABSTRACT
The fourteenth and fifteenth centuries were a golden age for the English nobility. Most developments in the constitutional history of the day either came at their behest or as part of a royal reaction against the interference of these over-mighty subjects. Foreign policy was formulated in large part to suit their interests and to divert them from domestic and dynastic crises, and to give them opportunities to flex their military, economic and chivalric muscles in foreign fields. The freedom of action the king did gain between 1307 and 1485 came as much by playing different factions of the nobility off against each other as it came through the support of such non-noble sources of power. These assertions about the role of the nobles in government are hardly in dispute, and a respected short history of medieval England treats this period in chapters entitled ‘Monarchy versus Aristocracy’ and ‘The Decline and Fall of Feudalism’.
