John Benet's Chronicle, 1399-1462 is the first English translation of a fifteenth-century Latin chronicle which has been much used by medievalists since it was published in 1972. Lively and entertaining, it richly deserves the much wider readership that translation can now attract. The introduction argues that John Benet, vicar of Harlington, was only the - rather inefficient - copyist of a chronicle composed by an unidentified writer. Internal clues suggest that the real author was a Londoner who was exceptionally well-informed about events and people in the period of the Wars of the Roses. He was possibly a clerk to the signet, as this book investigates further.

From the start of his career as a young woolmerchant, about 1473, George Cely was a hoarder. He kept everything, from important business accounts down to the scrap of paper on which his father had once noted that the brewer and tailor hadn’t been paid yet. The result is a rich collection, which not merely documents the Cely family’s activities as staplers and ship-owners, but also gives vivid details of their intimate concerns: what they ate and wore, where they lived, how they spent their money - and where they went for loans when the cash ran short - how they amused themselves, and how they coped with trade recessions and political turmoil at home and abroad. This is the first comprehensive study to be based on the material.