This chapter considers the ways that kingship was conceptualised in late medieval England. It used to be said that England had no tradition of ‘mirrors for princes’ (manuals of advice for kings and others in positions of authority) between the thirteenth and the early fifteenth century. More recently, historians have observed that ‘mirrors’ composed elsewhere, especially the De regimine principum of Giles of Rome, circulated widely in England in a French vernacular suited for the lay nobility. At the same time, a rich tradition of ‘political poetry’ can be traced from the thirteenth to the fifteenth century, which although at first it might seem emptily moralising, is now recognised to have taken part in a broader Aristotelian world view, in which the essential key to right action lay in the opposition between individual and common goods. In England, this view had to be accommodated with a view of the king as himself a lord like other lords, with his own rights and interests, at the price of fudging the distinction between the profit of the king and the common profit. Although Englishmen were not yet citizens disguised as subjects, as they have been described in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the tension between the res publica and the duty of obedience to the lord of all lords obliged writers to find oblique strategies to adapt Aristotelian home truths to a still absolutist monarchical system. This chapter traces the multiple ways this tension was worked out, from their background in ‘mirrors to princes’, through the scattered ‘political poetry’ of this period, to the ‘advice for princes’ works of the alliterative revival, Geoffrey Chaucer, John Gower and Thomas Hoccleve.