Hierarchy was fundamental to landowning society but defining those above and below the line of gentility and the levels within the hierarchy has proved problematic. In 1100 the major landowners were the tenants-in-chief of the crown, so called because they held directly of the king. Underneath them there was a broad spectrum of lesser landowners, or sub-tenants, ranging from the ‘honorial baronage’, who held large estates of the tenants-in-chief, to some very minor figures indeed. Historians tend to use the term ‘knight’ for all these sub-tenants and a major issue is the status of the knights between the Conquest and c.1300. Several historians argue that the post-Conquest knights were by and large unaristocratic men, barely distinguishable from peasants if they had land, or household menials if they had none. It was only in the later twelfth century that they rose to acquire the land, wealth and status, including the sub-tenancy, or fee, held by knight service from a tenant-in-chief, with which knighthood is typically associated. Related to this is the idea, borrowed from continental historians, that at this time there began a ‘fusion’ between the greater knights and the nobility. Nobles, inspired by the new chivalric cult, began to use knighting as a rite of passage to adulthood, while the greater knights participated in the cult and, from about the 1240s, began to style themselves ‘knight’ in documents. Conversely, some historians believe that there was a ‘shake-out’ among the lesser knights, which led to the least wealthy not just abandoning knighthood but even going bankrupt. This is attributed to the inflation of c.1180-1220, mounting costs for equipment and horses, the expense of the new dubbing ceremony and a more general rise in living standards. The latter was occasioned both by the new aristocratic aspirations with which knighthood was linked and by the general rise in consumption associated with the growth of the European economy in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Thus, while the most recent estimate of numbers of landed knights in the late twelfth century has been put at 4,500-5,000, by 1224 the king, with insufficient knights to fight and to furnish juries, was having to distrain, or force, men to take up knighthood, and by the end of the century there were only about 1,250 knights. Knighthood, it is argued, had become an elite status and those families which no longer provided knights had not only failed to measure up to its new status but in some cases gone under.
This is an engaging thesis but in actuality less plausible than it seems. There is certainly no doubt now that feudal society at every level was much more inchoate in 1100 than was once assumed. Service itself, as well as the feudal incidents of relief, marriage and wardship, had yet to be regularized, and this was equally true of the tenurial position of those below the honorial baronage. Some were still household knights; some had leaseholds; some held in socage; subinfeudation, by which lords granted land to their men in return for military service, was proceeding at variable speed but it was clearly far from complete. Definition occurred during the twelfth century and it was only in Henry II’s reign that a knight’s fee, sometimes an artificial notion imposed on variegated lands for reckoning fiscal and military service, came to be recognized as the quintessential knightly holding and that its size and value were defined. Much of this definition owed less to knightly aspirations than to the uniformity of tenure and service imposed by the king’s law and by his fiscal demands levied on the lord’s honour and knight’s fee. There were however also changes from below at work. In 1100 it seems that the holders of manorial rights over their dependent peasantry were largely the great men: tenants-in-chief and the honorial baronage. By the thirteenth century, all lords of manors, however insignificant, had this lordship over men which made them part of the governing class.
However, it does not follow that we must accept the thesis that knights had risen from a previously unaristocratic position. First, the aristocracy was always a warrior elite, requiring the time that came from their privileged position to acquire the necessary skills: part-time ‘peasant’ soldiers could be for emergencies only. Secondly, a lack of definition of tenure does not amount to universally low tenurial status, while manorial rights gave only limited authority in England. This was nothing like the large-scale and lucrative jurisdiction of the ‘ban’ held by many French lords with which these rights are sometimes compared, especially as their spread coincided with the huge growth of the king’s law. The latter became both the universal forum for private pleas among landowners and the paramount agency for dealing with serious crime. It may indeed have helped cause the extension to lesser landowners of this rather limited manorialism: manorial jurisdiction gave them the status and authority which enabled them to become part of the large and growing local officer class required by the king to assist his own officers in administering the law and seeking out and punishing crime. The problem of the fortunes of the knights would be much easier if historians applied more context-conscious definitions. It is clear, first, that it is wrong to differentiate landless household knights from landed knights in postConquest England, for, at this period in European history, when there was still land to be had by colonization and conquest, many landless men joined a lord’s war band to acquire land in his service. The Norman Conquest, which turned England into a colony, was an unexampled opportunity for such men. Because of the Conquest, England had land available for immigrants for about a hundred years after 1066 and Wales and Ireland provided opportunities even after that. Secondly, the milites of Domesday Book, many of them very minor figures, appear in many cases to be members of a minor ministerial class or lightly armed troops rather than men whom we would later term knights. It looks, in sum, as if the ‘proto-knights’ of c.1100, looked at on their own terms rather than those of their successors, were mostly no more menial than their successors.
Similar care with definitions is needed in the thirteenth century, when there seem to have been three different meanings of knighthood: all holders of knight’s fees, the ‘belted’ knights (men who had been formally dubbed and were available for war) and the local elite among lesser landowners who were beginning to call themselves knights. By the end of the century knighthood was indeed confined to those who had been dubbed, and knights were customarily designated as such on documents. Consequently, the decline in the number of knights during the thirteenth century probably reflects the development of more exclusive definitions of knighthood rather than an actual decline in the number of lesser landowners. However, it was not that exclusive and never became confined to the nobles and greater gentry. Even if those with the smallest of fees were now rarely knighted, plenty of middle-ranking gentry still achieved knighthood in war, especially when enthusiasm was rekindled under warrior-kings like Edward I and III and Henry V, and the king might supply the costs of dubbing and even the weaponry. Furthermore, the arrival of the common law meant that, in contrast to continental Europe, greater knights and nobles could not fuse into a hereditary caste because the only legal distinction of persons was henceforth between the free, who included all landowners and even some peasants, and the unfree. As for the theory of a ‘shake-out’ among the lesser knights, while this period, with consumerism, price rises and expanding markets, was a time of both great potential and great danger, when some lesser landowners undoubtedly got into financial difficulties, there is no evidence that the lowlier holders of knight’s fees went under as a group. They remained gentle, part of the aristocratic world, if no longer knightly. As throughout our period and at all aristocratic levels, families came to an end most usually because they had no male heir rather than because they went under economically or socially. Undeniably, the nobles’ appropriation of knighthood gave the word miles a new honorific meaning. Equally, rising wealth and living standards encouraged sub-tenants to imitate the nobles’ tastes, not just in living more comfortably and eating more expensively but in using heraldry on houses and tombs, being buried in churches under their own patronage and reading chivalric literature. But, if this started with the greatest sub-tenants in the thirteenth century, it had reached down to the least gentleman by 1500. The change in the meaning of knighthood in the thirteenth century, and the probable acceleration then of the normal process of upward and downward social mobility, should not be confused with either a social rise for the greatest holders of knight’s fees or an economic and social crisis for the least.
The same sensitivity to contemporary terminology is required in discussing late medieval landowners, for again terminology and reality can easily be confused. In this period, one notable for the evolution of more precise terminology throughout the landowning hierarchy, such confusion is particularly dangerous. The most significant change was the emergence of the peerage from among the greater landowners. By the thirteenth century the word ‘baron’ was used for all tenants-in-chief but among them only a small handful at the top, the earls, were marked out by a special designation. During the fourteenth century the list of men who received a personal summons to parliament became standardized, and by 1400 had settled at around 100: this was the hereditary parliamentary peerage, the only group among the aristocracy to be institutionally differentiated from the rest. In the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries there was also demarcation within the peerage, which eventually produced the full range of noble titles from duke at the top to simple baron, now carrying a different meaning, at the bottom. The tenants-in-chief who did not make it to the peerage had to be content with the now honorific title of knight, but there was also differentiation below the peerage. By the fourteenth century many men of rank and wealth had no wish to be knighted, probably chiefly because they had no desire to fight, but they needed a title in a world where titles had come to matter, especially as they were performing increasingly important local duties for the king. By the fifteenth century the same could be said of the very least of the gentry, and the need for titles had grown more pressing as some peasants prospered economically after the Black Death and all those who claimed gentility wished therefore to make a clear distinction between themselves and the rest. During the fourteenth century the title of ‘esquire’ emerged for the greatest of these non-knightly men and in the fifteenth ‘gentleman’ for the least, the hierarchy of titles corresponding roughly, if not invariably, to the actual hierarchy, in terms of land, wealth and tenure of local office. The only new group to use these titles were the lawyers and other lay professionals who began to proliferate in the thirteenth century and had become numerous by the fifteenth: some rose to be esquires or even knights, but the title that was eventually routinely employed for them was ‘gentleman’. Many of them were landowners themselves but, outside the towns, it was these professionals alone, who serviced the world of power, who might be termed gentle while lacking a manorial estate. From the later thirteenth century, when ‘knights’ no longer describes the knightly class, the term ‘gentry’, another convenient anachronism, is normally used.
Looking across the whole period, it seems that the hierarchy of landowners remained much the same - a pyramid with a broad base and a very small top - while, from the top downwards, each level in turn raised its aspirations and, as this occurred, designations at every level grew more precise. That landowners became more selfconscious was in large measure due to the huge expansion in government. This eventually brought direct responsibility as officers of the crown to every level of the landowning hierarchy but also indirect responsibility, from the great noble whose lands enabled him to act as the county-wide conduit of royal authority to the least manorial lord whose authority over his tenants gave him a foothold in the world of governance. Moreover, a national government, with a national focus at Westminster, increasingly required a national hierarchy of titles, most obviously to define who might sit in the Lords but also for such things as identifying men who came before the law and defining ranks for the sumptuary laws and poll taxes. The only structural change was the slice through the ranks of the men immediately below the earls, which raised some of them to the peerage whilst leaving the rest among the gentry. The only significant change in composition was the arrival of the parvenu professional, among nobles in the twelfth century and gentry in the thirteenth. This new avenue of advancement did represent a marked change in landowning society, supplementing and eventually supplanting the career path of warfare, as English society became more settled and government and society more complex, while king and lay and clerical magnates made use of the new service industries of administration and law. The only other notable variable in aristocratic society was the rate at which social mobility occurred. This was determined almost entirely by the availability of manorial land. It was therefore at its greatest in the period up to c.1200, a period when, for various reasons, a lot of land changed hands, and perceptible if slower in the thirteenth century, when colonization from fen and forest was still possible and there was some turnover among the gentry. It was at its slowest in the fifteenth century, when no new land was becoming available to the laity and a sluggish economy reduced both opportunities and hazards. Many of the growing army of lay professionals would have to wait for the dissolutions of monasteries and chantries to achieve a satisfactory landed endowment.
Did these landowners constitute a single class? Leaving aside the earls, who were always in a special relationship to the crown, it may be unwise to distinguish magnates from lesser landowners before the emergence of the peerage. However, a case could be made for characterizing the tenants-in-chief, a group that owed military and personal service direct to the king, as the nobles of the pre-peerage period. From the fourteenth century, although the overlap between the incomes of the richest knights and esquires and the poorest peers suggests that the line drawn beneath the latter was highly artificial, there were enough differences to confirm the special position of all the peers. There were legal distinctions, like their right to a trial before other peers, but others were probably more important. First, there was military service. We have seen a growing reluctance among lesser landowners to perform this, one which not even outstanding warrior-kings could entirely overcome. By the late twelfth century many holders of fees had other preoccupations: exploiting their estates for profit and serving the king in local administration. A growing number, arriving among their ranks via professional service, had no military experience. Although gentry continued to fight for the king throughout our period, in both the British Isles and France, many chose not to and those who did fight were often opting for youthful adventure, confining their service in later life to local office. Increasingly, outside the more militarized frontier zones, the service of the gentry was indeed less in warfare than in local administration, including eventually the key local offices of sheriff and justice of the peace. By contrast, almost all the late medieval peers seem to have fought and many continued to fight as middle-aged or even elderly men. In fact, throughout the period from 1100 to 1500, even those nobles whose careers were based on professional administrative service rarely shied away from offering military service as well. Despite the widening of its preoccupations, this remained a military nobility, up to 1500 and beyond; hence its outrage when kings like Henry III, Edward II, Richard II and Henry VI failed conspicuously in war and foreign policy. Secondly, despite the gentry’s increasing preference for local administration over military service, many preferred to avoid office altogether, but the late medieval peers by contrast were almost always appointed justices of the peace in the counties where their main estates lay. Equally, at the centre, it was the nobles who offered advice and who helped take charge in a minority or political crisis. It could be said that the strong sense of service common to the entire peerage arose from the special relationship with the king that came from the personal summons to parliament.
The lesser landowners, despite the large disparities in landed wealth and official and social status between top and bottom, also had common aspirations, forged in their common experience as manorial lords, and often local officers, in local society, although the greater ones tended to be active in more than one locality. However, we should not make too great a distinction between nobles and knights/gentry at any time in this period. For example, the ethos of service was powerful right across landed society; if the lord, who might be the king, was its principal object until c.1160-1200, thereafter the king’s service predominated. The most notable contrasts between greater and lesser landowners were probably found in the period up to the loss of most of the French lands under John and they related chiefly to location, language and culture. Until the early thirteenth century, although by no means all families gave equal attention to their estates on both sides of the Channel, there was arguably an Anglo-Norman nobility. Further influxes from Normandy of men who rose to prominence, for example under Henry I, and the kings’ ownership of so much of France, ensured that noble and royal circles spoke French and may have had some difficulty with English. Although French was still the preferred language of nobles and court until the fifteenth century, the rupturing of most of the direct connections with France diminished its utility. Meanwhile, the French sub-tenants brought by the Conquest apparently became rapidly anglophone, sometimes within a generation of the Conquest, and had to acquire French as a learned language. By the thirteenth century their descendants, the gentry, may often have had very limited French. Consequently, the growing importance of the gentry in all forms of administration made English as necessary as French for the nobles and by the fifteenth century English had become the nobles’ first language. In culture as well, greater and lesser landowners became a more homogeneous group in the later middle ages. One reason for the persistence of French among the nobility was its identification from the twelfth century with the elite culture of chivalry, and in the late fourteenth century the nobility, whether habitues of the court or not, still preferred French romances to the avant-garde English works of Chaucer. If literature aimed at a gentry audience appeared later than that written for the nobility and was less sophisticated and more often in English, it still embraced chivalric norms. So did the gentry appetite for heraldry and enthusiasm for war, even among those who did not fight, as long as the king avoided outrageously expensive failure. Moreover, the rising professionals among the gentry were soon assimilated to this way of life. Although many nobles still had wider horizons, for example acting as diplomats or tourneying abroad, it could be said that it was in the fifteenth century that the culture of gentry and nobility began fully to coalesce. There was a common language, common tastes in reading (apart from the tiny number of early ‘humanist’ nobles like Humphrey of Gloucester). Standards of taste and living were set increasingly at Westminster and London. By the very end of the period, there were the beginnings of a national higher education system for the laity at the Inns of Court and Oxford and Cambridge and of a national literary culture, now being nurtured by Caxton’s press in London. This was turning out chivalrous literature like Malory’s ‘Morte Darthure’ that appealed to all levels of aristocratic taste.
World History
