National and Local Awareness in the County Communities

Fletcher, Anthony

doi:10.1007/978-1-349-17308-2_8

Search citation statements

Order By: Relevance

Paper Sections

Select...

Citation Types

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Year Published

1994

1997

Publication Types

Select...

Book1

Article1

Relationship

Self Cite0

Independent2

Authors

Journals

Cited by 2 publications

References 9 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

Introduction

Young¹

1997

Charles I

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Introduction

Young¹

1997

Charles I

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Gentry and Community in Medieval England

Carpenter¹

1994

J. Br. Stud.

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

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.

show abstract

National and Local Awareness in the County Communities

Cited by 2 publications

References 9 publications

Introduction

Introduction

Gentry and Community in Medieval England

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About