The interpenetration of Christian and secular values, the religious mentality of knighthood, and the need to see chivalry as a cultural and social phenomenon are among the major themes which Maurice Keen has explored in a lifetime's engagement with the military world of the later Middle Ages. He has, moreover, made historians see that noble and gentle soldiers were not merely fighting but thinking, educated men. These last qualities, affected by rising levels of literacy, undoubtedly remained long after great fighting careers had begun perforce to decline, at least in England with the ending of war with France. Yet becoming a knight was still something to be remembered in a man's life and the recording of the moment by one who never directly engaged with war brings together these themes which are central to this investigation. The reputation of Sir Edmund Rede the Younger, of Boarstall in Buckinghamshire, owes nothing to soldiering and everything to a private cartulary and his ownership of books, the latter detailed in his testament of 1487. What may one gauge about a man from his books? Two of Rede's surviving books have received considerable interest from literary scholars but a third has lain largely neglected, even though for the historian it is the one that offers the greatest insight into the man and his priorities. Taken all round, much about Edmund suggests a man who went out of his way to forge an identity for himself as a gentleman, and a chivalrous one at that.

Sir Edmund Rede's world was focused very tightly on the Thames Valley. It was the source of his wealth, through lands primarily held in Berkshire, Buckinghamshire and Oxfordshire and of his political and social connections, with his wider family and his many associates drawn from the local gentry. It was here too that he expressed his attachment in the form of religious and cultural patronage. The private cartulary, begun for him in 1444 or 1445, records the deeds relating to his principal land holdings and, as will be seen, is a very selfconscious celebration of the descent of his lands from the families of FitzNigel, Haudlo, de la Pole, Marmion and James from the late twelfth century.