Over 500 documents concern the truly miscellaneous range of public complaints and disorders into which the king's government enquired: treason, murder, robbery and piracy, matters of inheritance and landholding, the decay of towns, buildings, roads and waterways, ecclesiastical negligence, even distinguishing levels of insanity. The Calendar necessarily reflects the collapse of the Lancastrian regime, the upheavals of the Wars of the Roses, a new start under Edward IV, and the drama of Richard III's assumption of the throne. It provides evidence of lawlessness of all types in all levels of society. Yet it also demonstrates the grinding continuity of England's legal and administrative agencies through these turbulent years.
