The Hundred Years' War was a period when boundaries, particularly in France, were more malleable than we now think of them as being. Warfare, moreover, was accompanied by cross-cultural exchange that transcended geographic or national identity. Cities like Paris, Rouen and Calais were held for long periods by the English, and their wealthier English inhabitants commissioned books from local scribes and artists, some of whom later travelled to England to continue their careers writing and illuminating manuscripts. The manuscripts of the period were quite often copied by multilingual scribes and illuminated by peripatetic artists for patrons of different nationalities: in this milieu, the question of what it might mean to say that a manuscript is ‘English’ or ‘French’ is a complicated one. Catherine Reynolds, for instance, has distinguished several types of manuscript patron living in English-held areas of France during the Hundred Years' War, including ‘English’, ‘English French’ (by whom she means French people living under English rule), and ‘French French’ patrons all of whom ‘turned to the same artists’ in the fifteenth century to decorate and paint their books. So too the careers and affiliations of scribes and artists are mobile and various.

The scribe Ricardus Franciscus and the illuminator called the ‘Fastolf Master’ appear together and separately in the creation of de luxe manuscripts during the Hundred Years’ War. One of the best-known manuscripts on which they both worked is Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Laud Misc. 570.