The King and the Gentry In Fourteenth-Century England: The Alexander Prize Essay

Abstract

Late medieval English historians have recently become quite interested in the gentry, and particularly in magnate-gentry relationships. The ubiquity of indentures of retainer in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries is evidence that the outward form of these relationships was changing; the question is, do they also indicate a change in the nature and purpose of such relationships? And if so, then why? G. L. Harriss, for example, has argued that the fifteenth-century bastard feudal affinity wasan attempt by the traditional leaders of society—crown and nobility—to contain the increasingly diversifying armigerous class within the old traditions of lordship and chivalry… (This) solution disintegrated not under any attack from the crown but as cumulative wealth and access to political authority gave the broad class of landowners independence from the nobility as mediators of patronage and power.This theme of gentry ‘independence’ from the nobility was also taken up by Christine Carpenter, who suggested that forceful monarchical government in the shires could only be achieved once ‘the gentry who administered the shires could be separated from the nobility’—and this, she speculated, may have occurred as a result of the wars of the roses.

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