Hilton, Lordship and the Culture of the Gentry

Abstract

The history of the gentry was not one of Rodney Hilton's central concerns. In much of what he wrote—on the structure of society, on the constitution of estates, on lord-peasant relations, on towns in feudal society—the gentry tended to be subsumed within the broader, secular landowning class. This was so, partly because lesser families have left comparatively little in terms of private records compared to great landowners, both secular and ecclesiastical, but also because the structure and role of the gentry per se were not his prime interests. He was very much aware, however, of problems surrounding status: of the changing nature of knighthood, for example, of the issue of gentility, and of the question of social gradation, and he had things to say on the blurring of distinctions in the decades after the Black Death and on the specific problem of the franklin. On one occasion he spoke of 'an old problem in English social history—the identification of the "gentry"'.¹

Although he was very much aware of the directions in which the study of the gentry might go, these issues were less important to him than the ones he chose to follow centrally in his own research. Gentility was seen primarily as part of the system of oppression under which the medieval majority lived. He highlighted not only famous statements like 'When Adam delved and Eve span, who was then the Gentleman?', but also figures like the leading character among the shepherds in the Towneley Plays who is in reality a landholding husbandman and who complains of being harassed by 'gentlery men'.²

Hilton noted that 'the members of the landowning class with whom the peasants came most into contact were the gentry', not least in their capacity as agents of the state.³ At the same time, however, he was well aware that social relations between gentry and peasants were not necessarily antagonistic. They could be involved together in rebellion and disturbances of one sort and another, as his discussion of Cade's Rebellion in the Ford Lectures shows. Moreover, as he points out 'there was nothing new [in the fifteenth century] about the presence of husbandmen in the retinues of the country gentry'.⁴

Although the gentry was not a specific focus of Hilton's work his programme was such that it helped to inspire the study of the medieval gentry which took off in the 1970s and which has been a feature of medieval studies in England ever since. Of course he supervised theses on the gentry, as did others, but that is not primarily what I mean. He played a major part in determining the agenda. For one thing he brought contemporary French scholarship—pre-eminently that of Georges Duby—into the British arena. The study of knighthood from this perspective gave rise to Sally Harvey's famous essay on the knight and the knight's fee,⁵ while the debate on the crisis of the knightly class, jointly inspired, as was often the case, by Hilton and Michael Postan, developed—for good or ill—not long after.⁶ Hilton was agnostic at best, I think, when it came to E.A. Kosminsky's view that the small manors—predominantly those of lesser lords—were by their nature proto-capitalist, at least as regards the period before the Black Death.⁷ However, Richard Britnell, drawing inspiration from Hilton's famous essay on rent and capital formation and from a parallel essay by Postan, used the rare survival of lesser landowners' manorial accounts from Essex to show that Kosminsky was wrong and to illuminate the actual workings of gentry estates.⁸ Christopher Dyer, pre-eminently, has looked at gentry estates in the later fourteenth and fifteenth centuries.⁹ In a recent study he has identified some fifteenth-century landlords as among the proto-capitalists of the era, a development determined not so much by the specifics of estate structure as by the radically changed nature of the fifteenth-century economy.¹⁰ In my own recent work I have endeavoured to bring some...