Chivalric manhood provided a cluster of shared values that men could invoke to defend themselves as true men and loyal political subjects, but masculine truth could equally be embodied through the performance of civic manhood. Civic manhood was inflected by the norms and values of the urban middling classes, including the literate professionals who staffed an expanding civil service and royal administration, and the members of urban craft and merchant guilds. The performance of civic manhood embraced universal masculine virtues of honour, homosocial loyalty, good lordship and service, but men of middling status were more likely to serve with the purse and the inkpot rather than the sword. In the civic sphere, a man's worship and his reputation in the eyes of other men was paramount and this was gauged through his contributions to the common good and his upholding of right order, whether at the level of his household, guild, town government or the community of the realm. In a series of treason trials beginning in 1407, those accused drew on this model of civic manhood to justify their resistance to the Lancastrian regime as the actions of loyal subjects and true men. Although they were charged with trying to kill the king and his sons, careful reading of indictments and other evidence reveals they were not bent on murder; rather they sought to restore right order by removing an illegitimate usurper and reinstating the true king, Richard, to his throne. In public speeches and handbills posted in London and other urban centres, and in petitions sent to foreign courts, they drew on legitimate modes of political complaint to appeal to higher authorities to restore good governance to the realm.

The strategies of these political dissenters bore similarities to another group who were causing problems for the Lancastrian regime by the early 1400s: those identified as lollards. Lollardy was a form of religious heterodoxy chiefly concerned with church reform but it had an overtly political cast. Lollard doctrine asserted the superiority of secular over ecclesiastical authorities in temporal affairs, arguing that in certain circumstances and to benefit the common good, the government could disendow the church of its property and wealth.