This book, by the historian Edward Hall, contains an account of the history of the Houses of Lancaster and York from the accession of Henry IV in 1399 to the reign of Henry VIII. It describes the Wars of the Roses and may have been one of the sources Shakespeare used to inform his six history plays covering the reigns of Henry IV, Henry V and Henry VI. This is the first edition, printed in 1548 by Richard Grafton. Hall’s original text only went down to 1532, so Grafton added a continuation to the end of the reign of Henry VIII prior to the book’s publication.