The Morgan–Egerton duel has been almost entirely ignored by historians but hopefully this volume has demonstrated that it has much to say to wider historiographical concerns. While we cannot extrapolate too far or too promiscuously from an individual case, this episode nonetheless contributes to our understandings not only of duelling under the early Stuarts, but also to the nature of coronial investigation, the formulation of a murder prosecution and, in a modest way, patronage networks at the Jacobean Court. Considering the duel's contexts, origins and aftermaths has highlighted the prevalence and significance of litigation in the lives of the early Stuart gentry, particularly at the anxious moment of dynastic change. It has also demonstrated how litigation and violence were not necessarily the antithetical categories presented in a good deal of the current literature. This investigation has also explored how gentry honour was variously modulated and expressed over issues such as youthful masculinity, officeholding, the prosecution of lawsuits, the defence of name and family and in religious politics.

One suggestion raised by the foregoing analysis is that scholars might explore further the concept of regional honour cultures among the early modern elite. Historians have generally considered early modern honour as a ‘national’ characteristic common to gentlemen throughout the kingdom of England and Wales. To assume this, however, might be to revitalise some of Mervyn James's more problematic modernising assumptions in his original formulation of early modern honour, with national standards emanating from the centre sublimating and overriding those in the provinces. It also, of course, reproduces whiggish narratives of the rise of the nation state and the spread of ‘civilisation’ through the repression of violence and martial attitudes. While we should not in turn revive outmoded conceptions of a ‘backwards’ and isolated periphery adhering to chivalric ideals against a progressive centre, there is nonetheless room for scepticism about the homogeneity of national honour cultures as presented in much recent scholarship. The visibility of duelling in the great sessions records of Cheshire and Flintshire, the praise poetry offered to John Salusbury following his Elizabethan duel and the emergence of the duellists John Egerton and Edward Morgan themselves, suggest that the northern Welsh Marches may have constituted one such particularist region within the geographies of early modern English and Welsh elite honour.