Gentry and Community in Medieval England

Abstract

There is now a strong case for banning the word “community” from all academic writing and an even stronger one for banning it from the vocabulary of politics. As one early modern historian has put it, the word is becoming a “shibboleth.” It is employed where “group” or “society,” for example, would be more appropriate, and, worst of all, its use is often not just a matter of slack thought but expresses an implicit hankering for some mythical past when there were “communities.” The increasing overworking of the word by politicians and other public figures can be related to an uneasy feeling that the sense of belonging and of mutual obligation implicit in the idea of “community” are disappearing. Accordingly, if they call things “communities” often enough, that will somehow create them. This prelapsarian attitude to communities is, as we shall see, quite as fundamental to historical use of the term. It is the purpose of this article to examine critically how the word has been applied in relation to the medieval English gentry, to ask whether there can be any legitimate use in this context, and to look at the types of identity, whether communitarian or not, that may have obtained among this important group within medieval society.Historiographically, the “gentry community,” as is well-known, first appeared in the seventeenth century, specifically in the work of Alan Everitt.

Introduction: communities, courts and Scottish towns

“…Through all this effort, the precision and utility of the concept of 'community' has been called into question by some, and defended by others. 10 Yet it has been subject to far less thorough interrogation among historians of Scotland. It has played a role in approaches to Scottish urban society, but it has tended to be treated either as a real group of people there to be identified in source materials, or as a constructed representation.…”

The South Oxfordshire Project: perceptions of landscape, settlement and society,c. 500–1650

“…For the more prosperous and better connected was it wider, at the level of the hundred, county or region (cf. Carpenter 1994)? Did the pattern vary between vale and Chilterns because of differences in settlement layout, topography and ease of movement?…”