ABSTRACT
Among todays historians few have written with more intuitive understanding of the post-plague English nobility than the late Bruce McFarlane. Rich old ladies, frequently surviving the natural heirs, have brought misery to every generation. But what made the problem worse for England's late-medieval nobility was a combination of demographic factors a young bride, an older husband and a premature or flawed succession with the emergence of legal processes which, for those centuries at least, were especially favourable to the protection of women rights. Where noble ladies usually married early and their husbands late, the lot of the Stafford dukes was not uncommon. From the Black Death until 1500, at this excessive rate of loss, the higher ranks of the nobility rarely deserved the epithet old. The turnover was always rapid, the eminence short-lived, the survivors invariably few. Although the Black Death undoubtedly had a role in this collapse, plague was never the most potent killer of England's late-medieval nobility.
