A discussion of the position and properties of the Despensers before their emergence in 1318 as the king's most influential councillors requires a study of topics that may at first sight seem relatively unimportant. But without such an enquiry their subsequent careers would be much less intelligible. By failing to consider in sufficient detail this phase of their lives before 1318 historians have created myths that must be dispelled once and for all. The reconstruction of the slow, tenacious building up of a magnate fortune may seem a dull, technical subject. But this formed the very core of the interests of the men who mattered most in medieval England, something about which they incessantly schemed and gossiped. When their schemes conflicted too violently, local faction or even general civil war might erupt, as it did in 1321 because the Despensers finally overreached themselves.

Attempts to explain the power of the Despensers in the later years of the reign of Edward II have usually concentrated on the emergence of the younger Hugh Despenser as Edward's last favourite. But this underestimates the importance of his father, the elder Hugh, from the beginning of the reign. Only private correspondence and other personal records of a kind that we lack would explain why the elder Hugh was one of the very few magnates who remained consistently friendly to Edward II. As far back as 1301 the young Edward, then still only prince of Wales, had been describing him as ‘one of our friends’.