According to K. B. McFarlane, ‘the real politics’ of the reign of Edward III ‘were inherent in Edward's daily personal relations with his magnates. The king’s service was profitable; his favour the only sure road to honour and success; men went to court and to the royal camp … for what they could get. Under a ruler who knew his job they were amply rewarded.’ Today McFarlane's perspective on noble motivation remains fundamental to our understanding of Edward III’s rule. Equally critical is May McKisack's game-changing 1960 article ‘Edward III and the Historians’. Inspired by McFarlane, McKisack dismissed the Whig historians’ vainglorious and irresponsible Edward III and gave us a king who brought kingship back from the brink: a man whose straightforwardness and determination to make common purpose with his magnates against an external foe ended the internal political conflict that had sunk his dynasty to the ‘depths of degradation’. She took Edward's supposed weaknesses – his inclination to foreign adventure, his chivalry and his closeness to his nobles – and transformed them into political strengths. McFarlane's nobility – chivalrous, culturally sophisticated, but out for what they could get nevertheless – sat easily with this. While historians agree that chivalry was an important factor binding nobles into royal enterprise, and one that Edward exploited with particular imagination and panache, they have followed McKisack in arguing that those who entered royal service were also substantially motivated by financial self-interest; this was most obvious in wartime. War was, after all, a martial and chivalric enterprise; and the prospect of significant financial gain on the part of noble war-captains – and the implication this had for their acquiring or developing landed property and thereby enhancing their lordship and inheritance – stands out for historians as the key motivator for those who served the king.

It is undeniable that defending and extending one's interests was fundamental to late-medieval landed society. Nor was this incompatible with the common good: Christine Carpenter's essay ‘The Beauchamp Affinity’ showed us, with characteristic vision and bell-like clarity, the interplay between private and public interest by which the localities of fifteenth-century England were governed. But the complexity of the world she described nonetheless coexists somewhat uneasily with historians’ uncomplicated account of the interplay between Edwardian political success and noble motivation.