The challenges exchanged in 1608 show Edward Morgan and John Egerton to have been among the growing number of gentlemen drawn to the culture of the duel. Formal challenges and duels were not exclusive to the gentry and nobility, but the culture of the duel as it developed in England and Wales during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries was modelled primarily on elite interactions. The governors of Jacobean England and Wales were particularly exercised about the issue of duelling which was seen as becoming dangerously prevalent among elites. They argued that gentlemen and nobles were spilling their precious blood, which should be esteemed as of greater value than that of ‘ordinary’ persons, on trifling matters of small moment. The Morgan– Egerton challenges and the duel which followed in 1610, then, occurred at a moment of particular interest in and concern about this practice in England and Wales. This was also a time when the homicide rate was climbing; the 1610 duel was part of a crisis of violence which affected England and Wales during the early seventeenth century. This chapter considers the growing popularity of duelling among youthful elites such as John Egerton and Edward Morgan in Elizabethan and Jacobean England and Wales. It reviews some of the historiography on the subject and suggests how the Morgan–Egerton duel, examined in detail in the next chapter, fits in to this picture. The chapter also suggests that a culture of aggressive honour which encouraged duelling may have been prevalent in the northern Welsh Marches in the late Elizabethan and early Jacobean periods. It considers in some detail the example of another duel emerging from the Cheshire–Wales border area in 1593 between members of the Salusbury family which has echoes of the confrontation between the Morgans and Egertons. The chapter also considers the potential relationship between Catholicism and duelling in these episodes and reviews duelling's complex and contested relationship with contemporary ideas of elite honour.

Duelling became increasingly popular in Britain from the last third of the sixteenth century, particularly among elite young men. As we have discussed, there has been a debate over its nature, origins and contemporary significance, although most scholars now acknowledge that duelling was a Renaissance import rather than some recrudescence of medieval chivalric culture.