The six hundred years separating Chaucer's model Oxford clerk from the scholar celebrated in this volume emphasises a constant in university life, the importance of teaching, and particularly teaching by example.

In The Practice of History, Geoffrey Elton wrote

The collection of essays which follows is, above all else, a tribute to Geoffrey Elton's supreme skill and success as a supervisor of research, and a measure of the extent to which he has consistently followed his own precept. All the thirteen contributors studied for, and obtained, the degree of Ph.D under his guidance between 1956 and 1978. They do not constitute a majority of such successful students, and certainly not a complete list of those who have subsequently pursued academic careers. These essays are rather the work of a coherent group of scholars, linked together not only by a common supervisor, but also by a common interest in the politics and administration of Tudor England. They are also linked together by nationality. This is a British tribute. Geoffrey's American friends and pupils presented him with Tudor Rule and Revolution in 1983, and a similar offering with a European orientation is in hand. So the editors of this volume make no apology for having confined their scope to scholars living and working in Britain, a country which Geoffrey Elton has made peculiarly his own since adopting it from his native Germany in 1935.