The conference at which the eleven papers included in this volume were delivered, which was organized by Dr James Bothwell and Professor Mark Ormrod, and held in July 1999 at the Centre for Medieval Studies, University of York, was a very good conference - and for no-one more so than for the man upon whom its proceedings were focused, namely, King Edward III. For, although the subjects covered by these papers vary widely, on one point at least the contributors exhibit virtual unanimity: namely, that Edward's style of kingship, whatever the epithets by which one might choose to characterize it, was successful kingship, and that the man himself, whatever quibbles or reservations might be allowed in relation to specific policies or actions, deserves the praise which, for the most part, his contemporaries heaped upon him. This is, of course, in many ways far from surprising: Edward's reputation has been rising steadily during the second half of the twentieth century, and the evidence presented here will do nothing to reverse that trend. Not that there is any lack of revisionism in this volume - indeed several of the papers included here quite explicitly challenge ideas put forward by earlier historians - but it is revisionism of the kind that results, not in our questioning of Edward's abilities, but in a readjustment of our perception of the ways in which his success was achieved. Several of the contributors, for example, emphasize the king's bent for what we now call spin-doctoring, while others stress his concern for the maintenance of law and order - an often overlooked, and sometimes frankly discountenanced, facet of his kingship. Yet there is an unmistakable impression that, above all, for Edward III, everything came back to the war, and it is war, therefore, accompanied as ever by its faithful shadow, diplomacy, which underlies many of these papers.

Of those contributors who take Edward's wars as their principal theme, the one who addresses the subject most directly is Andrew Ayton. His subject, or at any rate his starting-point, is the military career of Sir Thomas Ughtred, who fought at Bannockburn, acted as sub-marshal of the English army at Cre'cy, and, shortly before his death in 1365, was admitted to the Order of the Garter.