My defence for the inadequacy of these lectures, of which I am acutely aware, is twofold. The letter conveying the invitation of the Wiles Trustees made it clear that the work should be ‘broad in character and of a pioneering nature’. I have availed myself of that loophole without mercy. Second, the preparations were not assisted by being undertaken while parts of the university world were falling about my ears. If it is true that medieval cartographers eked out their want of knowledge with ‘Here be demons’, I offer, as substitute, ‘Here be the School of Modern Languages’ and ‘Here be the Department of Music saved’.

In this study I wished to attempt three things. First, to practise a little structural analysis. It has sometimes seemed to me that while the methodological debate on the virtues and defects of that technique has been hotly, indeed passionately, pursued, the technique itself has been relatively little employed: it is as though the energy devoted to the theoretical battle was enough to exhaust the combatants. Second, to help to rescue English historiography from its isolation from the continent and to look at some English developments against a continental background. To that ambition, I must offer two qualifications. First, some excellent work has already been done, most particularly by Derek Jarrett. Second, the differences in composition, size and structure of nobilities is so great that, in any comparisons, great caution is to be exercised.