ABSTRACT
About many of these procedures which the authors have been considering in the past there is an abundance of evidence, much of it repetitive and some of it conflicting; and the historian, like the sixteenth-century petitioner before him, must walk warily through the labyrinths. Of this embarrassment of riches the historian would gladly sacrifice a portion, if in return he might obtain evidence in one field for which the material is tantalisingly scarce: private wardship or, as contemporaries called it, wardship of a mesne lord. A systematic search through family archives might one day reveal that private wardship had a wider significance than we at present believe. In theory, wardship of the queen was not fundamentally different from the feudal wardship of any other person. It had about as much historic justification: no more and no less. It was a feudal right torn out of its context for a fiscal end.
