3 - The governance of England in the fifteenth century II: nobility, gentry and local governance

Summary

The outlines of local government and local society have already been delineated, but we have yet to see which aspects of local government were of vital concern to landowners or how they worked in practice. In this chapter we shall look at local government and society and then, having looked at governance and politics both at the centre and in the localities in these two chapters, we shall summarise the qualities required by a king for successful rule.

In so far as there was broad agreement amongst the ruling classes that the lower orders should be kept in their place and that taxes should be collected once they had been agreed to, the routine tasks of government were to a large extent uncontentious. Unsurprisingly, in view of what we have already seen, conflicting interests appeared most often in relation to litigation amongst landowners. These were usually disputes over land or matters associated with land, such as marriages, which often involved the movement of property between families, or wardship of underage heirs. We should remember that land is a very tangible commodity. Leaving aside the complexities of inheritance, it is likely to give rise to dispute, most obviously in the sort of conflict between neighbours over boundaries and nuisances which still keep solicitors employed and, even in the late twentieth century, have occasionally led to assault or murder. In the middle ages there was additionally a host of sources of tension related to agriculture.