The completion of this sourcebook would have been impossible without the assistance and generosity of many people. A number of publishers, authors, and website creators have allowed excerpts of their materials without requiring to pay permission fees. These include the Anglo-Norman Text Society; A. Cynfael Lake, who is the creator of the website on Dafydd ap Gwilym; and the Cistercian Society. I am also indebted to the organization that maintains the Internet Archive (archive.org), which has provided a tremendous service in scanning public-domain books that would have been unavailable without its efforts. Many medieval documents and chronicles would be completely inaccessible without this service. The National Archives of the United Kingdom and the British Library maintain vast collections of documents in manuscript that I have used repeatedly over the last three decades and I am fortunate to have been able to utilize this research in some of the materials I translated for this collection.
The process of creating this sourcebook would have been difficult, indeed, without the hard work of two of my graduate research assistants, Kimberly Fogarty Palmer and Rachael Hazell; they labored long and hard, transcribing sources for me to edit and translate. In addition, Kimberly Fogarty Palmer practiced her skills in translating texts from Middle to Modern English: she is the official translator of several sources in this collection. She also contributed to the timelines I have used to compile the historical trajectory of medieval England, Ireland, Scotland, and Wales.
Finally, my family has had to endure my absence—mental and physical—as I worked on the completion of this book. This project required a significant amount of time, energy, and thought, which I had to squeeze in-between teaching, research, writing, editing, and administrative duties. Their patience, especially that of my spouse, Neal Lewis, has been—as always—infinite, and I am very grateful for their—his—forbearance.