Gentry Culture in Late Medieval England (review)

This collection of ten essays brings together an impressive array of leading and newer scholars’ reflections on the somewhat thorny issue of “gentry culture.” Studies of the gentry have proliferated since the mid-1980s, but have tended to concentrate on the socio-economic factors which determined membership of this group; this collection seeks to focus attention instead on the “lifestyles and attitudes” (p. 1) of the gentry, interrogating the degree to which its members saw themselves as belonging to a distinct sector of society and how they sought to demonstrate their social standing.

The first three essays of the volume concentrate on the various routes into gentility. Philippa Maddern’s contribution, the first essay of the volume, tackles the central question of how to define the terms “gentleman/woman.” As she states, “No other late medieval descriptor displayed such variance in its potential meanings” (p. 18). Her analysis deftly examines those potential meanings and the fluidity of late medieval concepts of gentility. She stresses the performative nature of gentility and the importance of peer-recognition, as demonstrated by John Paston I’s comment that it was the important that whoever married his sister was “countyd a jantylmanly man” (p. 26). Maurice Keen provides a clear and useful evaluation of the importance of service, particularly martial service, as a route to social advancement, neatly exemplified by the case of Sir Robert Knollys, who began his career as an archer and became a major captain in Brittany. Peter Fleming’s contribution will similarly be of considerable use to undergraduates as he surveys the structures of local administration and assesses the factors which influenced the political choices of the gentry, concluding that “self-interest” was their “overriding motivation” (pp. 59–60).

The remainder of the chapters in the collection gets to grips more fully with the cultural aspects of gentry identity and experience. Nicholas Orme provides a valuable survey of the possibilities for education among the late medieval gentry, discussing in turn households, schools, universities and the Inns of Court as forums in which education might be acquired. Education here encompasses a range of different skills from language acquisition to music, dancing, and hunting. Interestingly, he suggests that despite the prominence of Latin in the grammar school curriculum, “there is little sign that the fifteenth-century gentry were highly latinate . . . fifteenth-century gentlemen seem to have preferred to read and write in English or French” (p. 73). He also discusses how it became more common for the sons of members of the gentry to receive a university education as preparation for a lay career, particularly in law, as opposed to a career in the Church, and how a period studying at the Inns of Court was seen as desirable even among those not intending to pursue a career in law.

Thomas Tolley and Tim Shaw tackle respectively the themes of visual culture and music. Tolley surveys late medieval visual culture and concludes that the gentry’s use of the visual arts was not substantially different from that of the nobility and that such differences as there are were due more to the constraints of limited resources than to different tastes or ideologies. Shaw discusses the role of music in constructing gentry identity. Tackling a subject that has received little scholarly attention, due in part to the nature of the surviving evidence, Shaw outlines the gentry’s varied involvement with music: at church or through civic drama, education or service, acknowledging that the evidence tends to obscure the less-institutionalized occasions in which the gentry would have encountered music.

While Shaw finds that the gentry showed a particular interest in the music of the liturgy, Christine Carpenter’s elegant contribution examines religious devotion more generally, offering a welcome return to the topic of gentry piety. She assesses the nature and scale of gentry’s charitable donations, demonstrating that although the parish church was often the recipient of patronage, monastic foundations...