The gentry or lower aristocracy of later-medieval and early-modern England has been studied more than most because of the class's crucial role in the development of the English constitution, which the English are not alone in admiring. Anglophonic scholars have asked when the class first appeared in its historic quality, what the essential traits of that quality were, and what diverse elements made up the class. Such questions notoriously create their object by presupposing its basic definition; as Coss observes, "The plain truth is that 'gentry' as employed by historians is a construct ... [comparable to] 'aristocracy.'" But our historical knowledge is anyway a tissue of constructs and Coss duly bites the bullet, giving his own set of "defining characteristics of the gentry":
A gentry is a type of lesser nobility ... based on land and landownership.... It is a territorial elite, [which] transcends status derived from service ... and ... mere landlordship.... It relates to a public authority which is both active and relatively distant, ... which requires the services of a local elite but which is unable to support a paid bureaucracy.... It seeks to exercise collective social control ... reinforcing individual status and power. It has a collective identity, and collective interests which necessitate the existence of some forum ... for their articulation.
He goes on: "The argument of this book is that the English gentry was formed in an accelerating process from the middle decades of the thirteenth century to the mid-fourteenth. By the middle decades of the fourteenth century a recognisable gentry was in existence," comprising both knights and the lower grade of esquire. The Commons, emerging as a political force from the 1320s on, became the mouthpiece of this newly crystallized gentry (15). Thus defined, Coss's gentry obviously could not have existed in Anglo-Saxon or even Angevin England, and Coss carefully refutes the claims for both (even while carefully defining the "Angevin legacy" [Ch. 3] as the "seed-bed" out of which the gentry grew). Nor could a gentry thus "constructed" in close relationship to the political organism constituted by the monarchy and the shires it have existed elsewhere in Europe, in countries that did not have shire communities.
By this point the distinction between gentry as thing and gentry as construct threatens to slip away. All to the good an old-fashioned historian might say, but the problematic itself has a cognitive value. The book's dedication to the memory of Rodney Hilton (1916-2002), the preeminent Marxist among British medieval scholars, may remind us that alongside the constitutional components of Coss's definition of the gentry, there are social elements reflecting the reality of the gentry as a subdivision of the aristocracy whose exploitation of subject peasants constituted the infrastructure of English society. One can then ask what difference in understanding comes from defining a section of that aristocracy in the context of political action. Not too long ago Michael Jones edited a set of essays on Gentry and Lesser Nobility in Late Medieval Europe (Gloucester, 1986), whose implicit and sometimes explicit question was whether the lower nobility or aristocracy of the various continental countries had the peculiar traits of a "gentry." As exploiters they certainly did, in relation to their respective sociopolitical wholes they did not, and one can only wonder how the English-constitutional model fits into a more general "construction" of medieval history.
Coss has been studying this subject for a number of years; the present book reproduces three of his earlier essays [[1]] and digests others, but adds a good deal of new thought in order to make a comprehensive statement. Some of the essays here focus on particular points ("Knights in politics: minor landowners and the state in the reign of Henry III"; "Knighthood, justice and the early Edwardian polity"; "The explosion of commissions and its consequences"); others are profoundly structural: "The crisis of the knightly class revisited"; "Identity and the gentry"; "Knights, esquires and the origins of social gradation in England." A final essay, "Crystallization: the emergence of the gentry," brief but spectacular, sums up the complex historical construction and points to new dimensions of meaning yet to be explored. To the present non-expert but interested reviewer this brilliant but solid set of studies seems to be as definitive as any such study can possibly be, which is to predict that all scholarship in the field, for the foreseeable future, will take Coss's work as its point of departure.
Among the chapters of more general interest, the one re-examining the idea of a crisis of the knightly class casts the widest net. What Coss revisits, concretely, is his earlier essay, "Sir Geoffrey de Langley and the Crisis of the Knightly Class in Thirteenth-Century England" (Past and Present 68 (1975): 3-37). After a masterful review of the reception of this essay, along with other contributions to the subject, he concludes that--as with most other constructions of medieval economic crises--the allegedly critical indebtedness and shrinkage of knightly estates were far from general. Rather, contrary trends were at least as important, "continuity and stability within the gentry class were at least as marked a feature of their collective thirteenth-century experience as mobility," scholarly research "has failed to find an economic decline of the knightly class," and "the Postan thesis of a general economic decline of the knightly class is dead in the water." On the other hand, the knightly class was indeed transformed in this period: it achieved full chivalric recognition, became more exclusive (compare the 4,500-5,000 knights in England ca. 1200 with the 1,250 ca. 1325) and hence more definitely noble, all of which marked the way to the crystallization of that class as "the gentry." The key changes came in and around the reign of Henry III, and a striking sign thereof is the proliferation of knights' effigies in the period 1275-1350--"the veritable colonization of England's churches by the knightly effigy, both in wood and in stone," as well as full-figure brasses.
The involvement of knights in justice was another cornerstone of their consolidation as lesser nobility, a gentry; for courts were at the heart of seigneurial life and "in the last analysis control over the tenantry was the real guarantor of seigneurial income." A parallel development was the heavy employment of knights on commissions leading to "a real partnership between local landowners and the state." At the same time--by the 1320s--the territorial gentry was thinking of itself as part of the community of the shire, as reflected in the many fourteenth-century petitions addressed to the royal government by "the community of the county" of Bedford, etc. The final step "vital to the realisation of the gentry" lay in its activity in the "full-blown political forum" of parliament. Meanwhile the class was developing its own divisions--a "graded gentry" consisting of esquires as well as knights. In sum: "by the middle of the fourteenth century all of the major ingredients which constituted the English gentry were in place. There was a central forum for the articulation of its interests.... There was a powerful elite culture. There was a strong measure of control over local justice.... And ... there was a system of social gradation which allowed for significant differences while at the same time expressing a collective identity." Q.E.D., and it would be hard to imagine a clearer, more useful, or indeed more powerful substantiation of Coss's "construct."
NOTES
[[1]] "The Formation of the English Gentry,"Past & Present 147 (May 1995):38-64; "Identity and the Gentry c.1200-c.1340," in Thirteenth Century England II, edited by P. R. Coss and S. D. Lloyd (Woodbridge, 1988); "Knights, Esquires and the Origins of Social Gradation in England," TRHS, 6th ser.,5 (1995): 155-78.