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, becoming a partner in any kind of business from sheep transport to hansom cabs: none of this disqualified a man or woman from the gentry. Sir John Fastolf, the fifteenth-century Norfolk gentleman whose name Shakespeare borrowed for his fat, drunk, cowardly and mendacious knight, was in fact an ex-soldier who bought himself a pub in Southwark (the Boar’s Head, which may be why Shakespeare chose him) and ran a shipping line taking Norfolk pork to European markets. As the central organ of the English body politic, the gentry from its origins was flexible, founded on the principle that its members were adapting and adjusting to changing circumstances. No revolution was required for this to happen. This flexible class lay at the foundations of English culture and its long history of liberty and independence.
Younger children of the nobility sank into the gentry and younger children of the gentry sank into the urban middle class. This threat of failure, of losing the status into which you had been born, recurs in this book as one of the central motivators of the gentry class. A gentleman whose status was not guaranteed was necessarily active, engaged with the world, adaptive and open to change. Any exaggerated respect for the past and your lineage was an inflexibility that would threaten your fortunes.7
This is the mirror image of the modern English idea of a gentleman as someone to whom dignity and a ramrod morality were the foundations of his life. But the long career of the English in the world is not explicable if stiffness was their governing characteristic. One member of the gentry after another in this book recognized that openness was the key and when travelling abroad they noticed the difference in social structure. The situation in France and Italy, Thomas Fuller, the church historian, wrote in the mid-seventeenth century, was ‘like a die which hath no points between cinque and ace – nobility and peasantry’. In England, he went on, ‘the temple of honour is bolted against none who have passed through the temple of virtue’.8 England was a place which could congratulate itself on allowing high social standing to anyone who qualified for it through his achievements or education, and through his qualities as a person, not what his ancestry said he was.
This distinction became a cliché and by the nineteenth century antiquaries had begun to establish just how much better the English system was. Sir James Lawrence, writing his paper On the Nobility of the British Gentry Compared with Those on the Continent in 1824,9 told his appreciative audience that in Germany, Hungary, Russia, Sweden and Denmark the children of all members of the nobility had titles. In France, Spain and Portugal only the eldest male heir was officially titled but all descendants were nevertheless considered noble. In England, the gentry were, as everyone knew, ‘the nursery garden from which the peers are usually transplanted’10 but they were not nobles themselves. Hence the nature of English society. Lawrence computed that in 1798 9,458 families in England were entitled to bear arms, adding the aristocracy and the gentry together, compared with Russia where there were 580,000 nobles, Austria 290,000 (men only), Spain 479,000 and France (in 1789) 365,000 noble families.
The English gentry, in this light, were the great exchange medium of the culture, where high ideals could interact with the harder and more demanding pressures of a fierce and competitive world. And this turns another easy assumption on its head. The gentry are largely associated with land and landed estates, which is where they invested most of their wealth. In fact, at the gentry’s late medieval origins, it was the growing dominance of London that was the key engine in their creation. Between 1420 and 1470, it was a version of London English that became the language of cultivated people. The connectivity which London provided – a market in marriageable girls, among many other commodities – was the means of getting on. London and Westminster were the centres of power, the law and money, in whose combined gravitational fields all future wellbeing lay. Every family in this book gravitated there in the end and gentry that could not thrive in London were unlikely to thrive at all.
The American historian Ellis Wasson has analysed the source of wealth of new entrants to the English gentry, defining that elite as those families which had three members or more elected as MPs, or went on to gain a peerage.11 The pattern he has uncovered reveals that those entering the governing class from a background of land represented about 50 per cent of the new entrants in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, but they were on a dropping trend, declining to less than a fifth in Georgian and Victorian England. Very few indeed at any time entered on the proceeds of office, on money picked up around the skirts of government. A steady supply of lawyers always fed the gentry, varying between about a fifth and a quarter. Business was there from the beginning, and remained on a nearly consistent upward trend, from a quarter of all new entrants in the late Middle Ages and rising to nearly 70 per cent in Victorian England. This was a confirmation of both the original and the growing openness of the English gentry. It was never a closed landowners’ club. As Wasson says, ‘founders of parliamentary families came from almost every conceivable type of background’.
Grocers, fishmongers, merchant tailors, privateers, shipbuilders, tanners, wine merchants, drapers, goldsmiths, coal fitters, ironmasters, army victuallers, mercers, silk merchants and gunpowder manufacturers all succeeded in entering the elite.12
But there are paradoxes, arguments and irresolutions here because, despite all this talk of openness, it was also a class obsessed with blood, honour and lineage. In large parts of its mind, but not consistently, the gentry was anxious about the respectability of trade. For the early eighteenth-century etiquette specialist Geoffrey Hickes, the key distinction gentry had to learn was the ‘Difference between Prudence and Trading’.13 One was all right – gentry should attend to the management of their estates – the other certainly was not. Three hundred years earlier, in July 1433, William Packington Esquire – esquire being a gentry title, the rank just below knight, significant at least until the end of the nineteenth century – who was then Controller of the English garrison at Bayeux, was having a drink in a Bayeux pub with another Englishman he knew called Thomas Souderne. After plenty of wine, and quite a lot of chat, Souderne told Packington that he ‘was no sort of gentleman’ but had been a haberdasher in England where he had ‘porté le pennier’. Packington murdered him on the spot, lunging across the pub table with his dagger and killing Souderne with ‘un seul cop’ in the chest.14 There were limits to what one could put up with.
So was gentrydom a question of blood or of qualities? There was an everlasting blurring of these categories and the anonymous author of The Institucon of a Gentleman, published in 1555, saw around him examples of both ‘Ungentle Gentles’ – people who had the qualifications to be gentry but did not come from a gentry background – and ‘Gentle Ungentles’, the bad sons of old families. How to categorize them? The ungentle gentle of 1555 was
he
