Knights and Esquires: The Gloucestershire Gentry in the Fourteenth Century

by Nigel Saul

Series jacket A/W needed.

Hardcover

First published October 8, 1981

About the author

Professor Nigel Saul (born 1952) is a British academic who was formerly the Head of the Department of History at Royal Holloway, University of London (RHUL). He is recognised as one of the leading experts in the history of medieval England.

Professor Saul has written numerous books including Knights and Esquires, The Gloucestershire Gentry in the Fourteenth Century (Oxford, 1981), and The Oxford Illustrated History of Medieval England (Oxford, 1997). His major biography Richard II (Yale, 1997) was the product of ten years' work and was acclaimed by P. D. James as "unlikely to be surpassed in scholarship, comprehensiveness, or in the biographer's insight into his subject's character".

Within Royal Holloway, Professor Saul is known for his somewhat right-wing political views. He has served as Honorary President of the college's Conservative Future Society.

Reviews

[Michael Smith · Rating 4 out of 5]

The emergence of what came to be called the "gentry" as a social order in the 1300s was a function of the development of the parliamentary peerage. Below the barons-by-writ was a layer of slightly lesser landowners with the rank of knight, and below them a still less substantial, undifferentiated group (called gentil hommes) who were not knights but still were greatly superior in status to the yeoman farmers. The nobles and the gentles became the greater and lesser nobility. The author notes that most medievalists have naturally focused their researches on the monarchy but in so doing they have missed the opportunity to investigate the network of connections that bound the king to the magnates and the gentry on whose goodwill he depended. Saul has chosen Gloucestershire for his study because of the diversity of geography and land use, leading to what he hopes is a typicality that can stand in for England as a whole during that period. There were also more religious houses in Gloucestershire than in any other part of the country, nearly all of whose manors were held by absentee lords. The Clares, Despensers, Berkeleys, Maltravers, and Giffards were major landowners here, with large quantities of surviving records. In those days of very slow communications, a great landowner whose estates were spread over many counties could only ensure their proper management by decentralization. Frequently, this meant hiring a nearby member of the gentry — often, but not always, a knight — to look after a local bailiwick. And this meant the preservation of information about the manager and his family in the surviving records. And by close association with higher-status aristocratic families, of course, a member of the gentry also gained in status. Quite a few gentle families of Gloucestershire who later acquired titles themselves are included in this study, and an increased understanding of their place in the scheme of things will repay a close study of this work.