Suchergebnisse
Suchergebnisse:
The present reviewer discerned changes in nomenclature rather than in numbers and in composition between the magnates, barons, and knights of the Norman era and the parliamentary peerage, knights, esquires and gentlemen of the fifteenth to nineteenth centuries.
The Origins of the English Gentry stems directly from an essay published in Past and Present 147 (May 1995), entitled ‘The Formation of the English Gentry’. In this essay I lamented the lack of conceptual rigour in the use of the term ‘gentry’ and offered a six-point definition. I argued, further, that the gentry was formed in ‘an ...
The gentry played a central role in medieval England, and this study is a sustained attempt to explore the origins of the gentry and to account for its contours and peculiarities between the mid-thirteenth and the mid-fourteenth century. The book deals with the deep roots of the gentry, but argues against views which see the gentry as formed or ...
- Peter Roderick Coss
- 2003
The book offers definition and conceptual vigour, and argues that the gentry, a kind of lesser nobility, was formed between the mid-thirteenth and the mid-fourteenth century. The book deals with the deep roots of the gentry, but argues against views which see the gentry as formed or created earlier.
What distinguishes the gentry are four facets of its 'collective territoriality': 'collective identity'; status gradations; public office-holding; and collective authority over the people. The gentry, Coss asserts, have always expressed themselves collectively through national and/ or local organs.
As far as later medieval England is concerned, to look no further, it was not in fact a living social term, at least not in any way which resembles modern usage. The word gentry stems. 3 G.E. Mingay, The Gentry: The Rise and Fall of a Ruling Class (London, 1976), p. 1.
studies of the medieval gentry of specific counties at specific points in time im-mediately makes clear. Most often scholars begin with the disarmingly simple question: Who were the gentry? One basic approach is simply to equate gentry with gentility; the gentry are all those who are accepted as, or who lay claim to being, gentle. Often this ...
