This is a study of the life of the rulers of late-medieval England. England in the middle ages, and well beyond, was ruled by the landowning classes, because wealth and, more importantly, political power, were founded in land. Although the focus is local, this close analysis of a relatively small number of families is offered as a contribution to the study of the ruling aristocracy as a whole, itself an indispensable prerequisite for the analysis of the political life of the time. The emphasis will be on the public lives of these families, on the way in which their actions affected local and national politics, but many aspects of their more private lives – marriage, land settlements, estate management and religious beliefs – must be seen as inseparable from their public concerns. As politics had an inevitable bearing on the conduct of private matters, so private concerns could not fail to influence political viewpoints and, indeed, must to a large extent have determined political responses. Equally, landowners, like all people at all times, required an atmosphere of peace and security in which to carry on those parts of their lives as divorced from the public domain as relations with spouses and young children. As with any other group of politically active people, the political attitudes of these families were made up of a confused amalgam of personal experiences and prejudices, political ideas and public and private loyalties. This study is aimed at reconstructing the totality of experiences that went into the making of fifteenth-century political man.