Whether publicly decapitated or mysteriously murdered, political figures such as Thomas Earl of Lancaster, Archbishop Richard Scrope or King Henry VI became after their deaths the centre of cults which celebrated their memory. This book, a tour d'horizon for its field, explores the late medieval English devotional phenomenon of cults of political martyrs. Despite never gaining formal canonization they played important roles in the lives of their adherents, enabling them to construct individual and communal identities, crystallize ideas on knighthood or justice, or find succour in difficult times. By examining these cults through various types of sources - hagiography and liturgy, artefacts and chronicles, accounts and poems - the richness of political culture in the period is revealed, and insights offered into fourteenth and fifteenth century English society, and the ways in which belief, worship and political language and practice were continuously constructed and re-constructed in the period.