At the heart of this book is the most fully documented duel in early modern England. This was the fatal confrontation which occurred on the morning of 21 April 1610 between John Egerton, younger son of a prominent Cheshire family, and Edward Morgan, heir of a substantial estate in Flintshire, north east Wales. Their fight took place a short distance outside Highgate, a hamlet situated north of London. In this encounter John Egerton was killed, run-through (although how many times becomes a point of contention) with a sword. Egerton's opponent, Edward Morgan, was pursued by the Middlesex authorities, apprehended and subsequently brought to trial before King's Bench on a charge of murder. Despite irregularities in the investigation and prosecution of the case, Morgan was convicted and would have been executed by hanging but for his powerful contacts at the Jacobean Court. Able to pull the strings of patronage, Morgan was instead pardoned by King James I and set at liberty, leaving John Egerton's father to lament the ‘hard mesure which hathe ben and is offred me dely; I thynk the lyke was never offred to any so far contray [sic] to law and justes’.

This book uses the wealth of evidence surrounding the Morgan–Egerton encounter to explore in unparalleled detail the experience of duelling and judicial investigation in Jacobean England. By examining the duel's origins, investigation and prosecution, the book also considers issues such as the nature of honour among provincial elites; contemporary understandings of elite violence and the connection of duelling to the feud; the dynamics of family politics and inheritance; the procedures of a Jacobean murder trial; the pervasiveness of litigation in gentry life, and much else besides. This duel also offers an opportunity to reflect on the nature of the historian's task in telling a tale that is partial, fractured and derived largely from a single kind of partisan evidence: legal records. The narrative around which this book is built is full of intrigue, corruption, violence and drama, but it also comes freighted with problems of evidence and its interpretation. The Morgan–Egerton duel, then, provides an opportunity to consider the narrative which can be told about this event as well as to highlight the gaps and omissions in the story which remain beyond our recovery.