This comprehensive study makes a unique source accessible to historians of the later medieval nobility. Household accounts contain invaluable evidence on daily life, diet, hospitality, etiquette, travel, the arts, politics, as well as on medieval finance generally. In Part 1, Woolgar's detailed introduction discusses these documents as a coherent body of records, and places them in the context of the administrative systems for which they were created. Their diplomatic forms and development are analyzed and compared with those on the Continent, and an extensive glossary is provided to assist scholars in the study of these sources. Woolgar has also carefully selected and edited the accounts of 28 households, to illustrate the full variety of texts that have survived. Diet accounts of 14 households are printed in Part 1, ranging from those of knights and earls to those of the higher clergy.