England is covered with these deeply symbolic gentry places and they form the counterpart to the privacy of the manuscripts. Landscape was the gentry face; archives the gentry heart. Many houses do survive, often with the parish churches next to them, with the gentry tombs in their own chapels at the east end, often beautiful and highly articulate memorials to a forgotten ideology. But gentry existence was less well funded and more vulnerable to change and failure than that of the great aristocrats and so their houses and the surrounding skirts of landscape do not always survive intact. I have walked the lands of all the families in this book4 and it is a poignant pleasure to beat your way through an overgrown wood, or to walk across the stubble of a just-harvested wheatfield to find nothing but a soggy hollow, or a single ivy-bearded wall, while knowing in the most intimate detail from their papers the events that occurred there three, four or five centuries before. Whole destinies unfolded where now there are only a few crabbed trees or the lingering aftersmell of fox.
Reality is intimate and rather than attempt a heroic and Olympian survey of the whole gentry world, I have taken a sequence of twelve individual gentry families, each at a particular crisis in their lives. I have chosen them only if they were richly articulate about themselves, and if their archives have somehow survived. Although there are oceans of ordinariness here, each family is not quite ordinary; each throws a slightly different sidelight on to the gentry phenomenon. Their lives are highly individual but I have lined them up, like a series of organ pipes, to make a history of England over the last six hundred years, variations on the same tune played across six centuries.
Each family has fifty-odd years in the spotlight, usually an arc of three generations: parents, the protagonists and their children. Some of the histories overlap with others, some cover longer time-spans, but nearly all are lessons in survival: how to keep going when the world wants to do you down; how to make the best of the opportunities that are on offer; how to manipulate others; how to make government and the law work in your favour; how to resist or destroy your enemies. One or two are lessons in defeat: how to get it wrong, what happens when resolution fails, or more importantly, when a family loses its grip on the nature of reality. Together, they are, in effect, a self-portrait of England, or at least of its central and culture-forming class. The people in this book are neither the poor nor the great grandees of the country, but the responsive and continuous middle of Englishness.
I have often thought that the twelve leading gents described here could have sat down to dinner together and not felt they were in alien company. Some would have been charming or gawky, some a little graceless and domineering, one or two quite garrulous, but none would have felt that the other people around the table would not have understood them. The gentry as they first appear in their letters in the late Middle Ages are astonishingly like the gentry as they slide on into the twenty-first century. Each would have known the same places and have been able to discuss the ever-reliable standbys of hunting, shooting, fishing, farming, cattle, politics, money, God and dogs. All of these run through this book as the background music, the noise you hear in gentry life when nothing else is going on. And although I did not choose them for this reason, but gathered them as a set of emblematic figures, it turns out, needless to say, that through family connections they would all have known each other, even if a little remotely.
I have scattered them quite deliberately all over England and parts of the English-speaking world, and so this connectedness is not about a local cousinage or a county community. Every one of these families had important London – or usually Westminster – connections. And although their own local countries mattered to them, none from the very beginning was constrained by the boundaries of the places they owned. Even as they emerged in the late Middle Ages, this was a class with local roots but a national perspective. And if this all sounds like the introductory chat at an upper-middle-class dinner party – how did you get here, who do you know, how is Aletheia? – that is probably a true impression. At one level, this book is about networking.
But who were they? The gentry net spreads across space and time but what defined them as gentry? That is an unavoidable question but definition and the gentry have stalked each other a little warily for at least six hundred years. What was the frame in which these families were trying to make their way in the world? What was their role in the making of England? And what made them what they were?
Those questions interlock but at the core of the gentry story is a subtle and particular ripple in the status of the English nobility which from the fourteenth century onwards distinguished England from the rest of Europe. The idea of gentility, of a particular class of propertied and cultivated people, distinct from what the unashamed Richard Brathwait in the seventeenth century would call ‘the bleere-ey’d Vulgar’, was not exclusively English. It was common to most parts of western and southern Europe in the Middle Ages. France and Burgundy were the heart of it and the arbiters of its standards of behaviour. Elegance, courtliness, poetry and architecture all came from there.
Gentleness, in that sense, was French and England was part of this French culture-province, but an English difference emerged towards the end of the fourteenth century, when a powerful English crown established the ability to appoint peers by writ or summons to Parliament. The peers were part of the government of England not by right but by royal invitation or instruction. Those barons and other peers constituted the tiniest possible minority, about sixty men out of a total of about three million in the late fourteenth century. This crown-imposed distinction between the noble and non-noble had profound effects on those people whose social and economic standing came just below them. Those ‘gentry’ – the word is related to ‘gene’ and means essentially ‘people of good breeding’ – were not considered noble. They were gentlemen and gentlewomen, were often related to and intermarried with the nobility, but were not noble themselves. They were members of the Commons.
The House of Commons was where they gathered, openly distinct from their cousins, uncles and fathers who were in the House of Lords next door. And so the gentry occupied a richly ambivalent position, as members of the governing class but with no visible boundary between them and the people immediately below them, socially and economically. They were continuous with both the yeomen – independent, freeholding farmers – and the merchants and traders of the late medieval cities. Neither merchant nor yeoman had claim to much education, lineage, a coat of arms or a part in government, local or national, but they were not in any way distinct from the gentry in terms of the law.
This deep structure meant that the English gentry were open at both ends: sharing a French culture of courtesy, chivalry and knightliness with the nobility above them; entirely accessible to the English world of the yeomen and the growing urban middle class below them. Both the upper and lower boundaries of the gentry were, as the modern historians Felicity Heal and Clive Holmes have said, ‘permeable membranes’.5
The openness was surprisingly radical. The English gentry did not, for example, need to own land. From the fourteenth century onwards, merchants from the City of London were given knighthoods, the ultimate signal of high gentry status. Medieval lawyers were considered gentry, as were the upper clergy. High royal officials were gentry by virtue of their office. You could marry into the gentry and become a member, become a city alderman and be considered gentry, thrive in the law, inherit money, become a university don or medical doctor: all qualified the individual to be considered a member of this class. In 1434, the military theorist Nicholas Upton calmly accepted that ‘in thys days openly we se how many poor men by theyr grace, favour, labour or deserving’ had become gentlemen.6 Engaging in business or in entrepreneurial developments of docks, harbours, roads, canals and markets, opening mines and quarries, developing land, investing in overseas trade,