2 - The gentry in the fifteenth century

Summary

Who or what were the gentry is a question which has vexed many historians of the medieval and early modern periods. A few, whose concern is with the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries where debate about the gentry is almost unavoidable, obviously consider that the term, ‘gentry’, has passed sufficiently into the lingua franca of the discipline for it to require neither definition nor explanation. More tentative scholars, while admitting that the term defies simple definition, are rarely more forthcoming. Still others are content in the knowledge that the gentry filled the social and economic gap between the barons and the yeomen. The latter view has the twin advantages of being disarmingly simple while at the same time being stamped with the authority of bishop William Stubbs.

For historians of the sixteenth century, the gentry is seen to consist of landowners bearing the title, knight, at the group's uppermost level, followed in status by the esquire and, finally, the gentleman at the lowest stratum. In the seventeenth century, this trio of status groups was joined by a fourth, the artificial Jacobean creation, the baronets, whose ostensible purpose was to fill that wide gap perceived to exist between the knights and the parliamentary peerage. Baronets, therefore, ousted the knights proper from their elevated position within the hierarchy of the gentry.