Our focus in this edition is on selected chronicles and their authors – not on the Wars of the Roses per se, not on the social or economic or political or constitutional history of the period, and not on the vast corpus of documentary evidence that supports the researches of scholars into those larger and more important subjects. While we have often cited those documents and the analyses of those scholars, we have done so with the aim of pointing back at the particularities of the chronicles and not outward at the generalities of fifteenth-century history.

This is to acknowledge that we are functioning here as literary scholars rather than as historians. We have not consciously developed or followed a particular historiographical theory, but have cited eclectically whatever commentary we have found relevant to particular passages. We have provided summaries of the course of the wars where necessary to give passages in the chronicles some context, but when a chronicler passes over an event – as Thomas Howard does with Edward's arrest in 1469 – we have passed over it lightly as well; and when one records an event without apparently understanding its background or meaning in detail – as the continuator of Gregory's Chronicle does with the “loveday” of 1458 – we have simply referred the reader to the relevant scholarship.

We are hopeful that the reader will find this edition an improvement on the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century editions that have long given scholars convenient access to these chronicles – improvements both in the accuracy of our transcriptions and in the usefulness of our emendations and notes. These range from a corrected reading in Gregory's Chronicle's description of a weapon at Second St Albans; to the omission by eyeskip of a passage in Howard's Chronicle and the inclusion in that chronicle of a passage picked up by mistake from the genealogical manuscript into which Howard's work was copied; to clues and surmises about the identity of the author of Gregory's Chronicle; and, perhaps most significant, to our inclusion of a single neuere, discovered by Lister Matheson in the source manuscript of Warkworth's Chronicle, which reverses the meaning of an often quoted passage describing the trial of John Tiptoft.