Relations between the English and German realms have received very limited attention thus far among historians, in marked contrast with the traditional historiography of Anglo-French and German—Italian relations. Of course, these traditional constellations obviously exist with good reason. The Norman Conquest and the subsequent English involvement in French continental holdings on the one hand, or the preoccupation of the German emperors in Italy and their resultant conflicts with the papacy on the other, explain why the history of the Central and Later Middle Ages has been written along these two main geopolitical axes. Nevertheless, activity between England and Germany represented a vital and at times no less influential interregional relationship, which has not received its due attention under such a primarily geopolitical framework.

Previous research on Anglo-German relations has emphasized either political alliances or commercial exchange. These two spheres of research have been almost wholly the domain of German-speaking scholars, who have viewed England rather narrowly in the context of either its political involvement in papal—imperial conflicts and its cultivation of anti-French allies among the German princes, or its place in the development of the German Hansa. Since political history has been eclipsed by social history in the past thirty years, little new scholarship has appeared to revise older studies that present Anglo-German relations as a series of alliance schemes more akin to the late nineteenth and early twentieth-century Europe than to political conditions of the Middle Ages.