The Gentry Read online

  This distinction became a cliché and by the nineteenth century antiquaries had begun to establish just how much better the English system was. Sir James Lawrence, writing his paper On the Nobility of the British Gentry Compared with Those on the Continent in 1824,9 told his appreciative audience that in Germany, Hungary, Russia, Sweden and Denmark the children of all members of the nobility had titles. In France, Spain and Portugal only the eldest male heir was officially titled but all descendants were nevertheless considered noble. In England, the gentry were, as everyone knew, ‘the nursery garden from which the peers are usually transplanted’10 but they were not nobles themselves. Hence the nature of English society. Lawrence computed that in 1798 9,458 families in England were entitled to bear arms, adding the aristocracy and the gentry together, compared with Russia where there were 580,000 nobles, Austria 290,000 (men only), Spain 479,000 and France (in 1789) 365,000 noble families.

  The English gentry, in this light, were the great exchange medium of the culture, where high ideals could interact with the harder and more demanding pressures of a fierce and competitive world. And this turns another easy assumption on its head. The gentry are largely associated with land and landed estates, which is where they invested most of their wealth. In fact, at the gentry’s late medieval origins, it was the growing dominance of London that was the key engine in their creation. Between 1420 and 1470, it was a version of London English that became the language of cultivated people. The connectivity which London provided – a market in marriageable girls, among many other commodities – was the means of getting on. London and Westminster were the centres of power, the law and money, in whose combined gravitational fields all future wellbeing lay. Every family in this book gravitated there in the end and gentry that could not thrive in London were unlikely to thrive at all.

  The American historian Ellis Wasson has analysed the source of wealth of new entrants to the English gentry, defining that elite as those families which had three members or more elected as MPs, or went on to gain a peerage.11 The pattern he has uncovered reveals that those entering the governing class from a background of land represented about 50 per cent of the new entrants in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, but they were on a dropping trend, declining to less than a fifth in Georgian and Victorian England. Very few indeed at any time entered on the proceeds of office, on money picked up around the skirts of government. A steady supply of lawyers always fed the gentry, varying between about a fifth and a quarter. Business was there from the beginning, and remained on a nearly consistent upward trend, from a quarter of all new entrants in the late Middle Ages and rising to nearly 70 per cent in Victorian England. This was a confirmation of both the original and the growing openness of the English gentry. It was never a closed landowners’ club. As Wasson says, ‘founders of parliamentary families came from almost every conceivable type of background’.

  Grocers, fishmongers, merchant tailors, privateers, shipbuilders, tanners, wine merchants, drapers, goldsmiths, coal fitters, ironmasters, army victuallers, mercers, silk merchants and gunpowder manufacturers all succeeded in entering the elite.12

  But there are paradoxes, arguments and irresolutions here because, despite all this talk of openness, it was also a class obsessed with blood, honour and lineage. In large parts of its mind, but not consistently, the gentry was anxious about the respectability of trade. For the early eighteenth-century etiquette specialist Geoffrey Hickes, the key distinction gentry had to learn was the ‘Difference between Prudence and Trading’.13 One was all right – gentry should attend to the management of their estates – the other certainly was not. Three hundred years earlier, in July 1433, William Packington Esquire – esquire being a gentry title, the rank just below knight, significant at least until the end of the nineteenth century – who was then Controller of the English garrison at Bayeux, was having a drink in a Bayeux pub with another Englishman he knew called Thomas Souderne. After plenty of wine, and quite a lot of chat, Souderne told Packington that he ‘was no sort of gentleman’ but had been a haberdasher in England where he had ‘porté le pennier’. Packington murdered him on the spot, lunging across the pub table with his dagger and killing Souderne with ‘un seul cop’ in the chest.14 There were limits to what one could put up with.

  So was gentrydom a question of blood or of qualities? There was an everlasting blurring of these categories and the anonymous author of The Institucon of a Gentleman, published in 1555, saw around him examples of both ‘Ungentle Gentles’ – people who had the qualifications to be gentry but did not come from a gentry background – and ‘Gentle Ungentles’, the bad sons of old families. How to categorize them? The ungentle gentle of 1555 was

  he which is born of a low degree, [but] by his virtue, wyt, pollicie, industry, knowledge in lawes, valiancy in armes, or such like honest meanes becometh a welbeloved and high esteemed manne, preferred then to a great office … euersomuch as he becommeth a post or stay of the commune wealth and so growing rich, doth thereby auance the rest of his poore line of kindred: then are the children of suche one commonly called gentleman, of which sorts of gentlemen we have nowe in Inglande very many, wherby it should appeare that vertue florisheth among us. These gentlemen are now called upstarters, a term lately invented by such as pondered not the groundes of honest meanes of rising or coming to promocion.15

  Acreages of the gentry story are contained within that paragraph. No one should deny a hardworking person of ‘virtue and wit’ the chance to rise in the esteem of the world. But plenty of people looked down on them and despised them for the poverty of their origins. Teams of novelists were still mining this theme in the twentieth century. But the sixteenth-century author was no democrat before his time. His understanding of the gentry world was fuelled by a powerful vision of it as a moral community. There were people who had risen into the gentry of whose means of ascent he did not approve:

  The new sorte of menne which are runne oute of theyre order and from the sonnes of handycraftmen have obteigned the name of gentlemen, the degree of Esquiers, or title of Knightes, [who] get landes neyther by their lerning nor worthines achiued, but purchased by certeyn dark augmentacion practices, by menes whereof, they be called gentlemen … These be the right upstartes.16

  Just as constantly, though, over the passing centuries, other warnings were doled out by the old to the young. Lineage was not enough: you had to earn your place in the class. The superbly obnoxious Lord Chesterfield, in his advice to his nephew, maintained that line. ‘Never be proud of your rank or birth’, he told Philip Stanhope, the nephew, ‘but be as proud as you please of your character.’17 Education was all, ‘a smattering constitutes a coxcomb’,18 and ‘A drayman is probably born with as good organs as Milton, Locke or Newton; but, by culture, they are much more above him than he is above his horse.’19

  For Geoffrey Hickes in the early eighteenth century ‘Peasantry [was] a Disease (like the Plague) easily caught by Conversation’,20 but he nevertheless thought it vulgar to talk of your family or to ‘fling the Register of your Genealogy on the Table before all Company’.21 ‘Whoever rakes in the Ashes of the Dead, may fall upon the Stench instead of Perfumes.’22

  This radical uncertainty at the core of English class consciousness was its principal virtue. As a result, this book is in part about money and struggle, and also about blood and family, but essentially about the fusion of those categories, the blood-and-money struggle for survival. The gentry depended above all on the coherence and efficiency of the family, the genetic corporation, as the most reliable form of keeping going in a rival-thick world. The varying power-relationships of father, mother, siblings, step and half siblings, stepmothers, mothers-in-law, brothers-in-law, uncles, nephews, cousins and nieces take up many of these chapters. This was where the questions of enterprise and lineage, inherited virtue and self-generated virtue all intersected. There is much more here than a simple picture of the patriarchal family, in which the father ordained and the family obeyed. Even at the
medieval beginning, or at the height of Victorian patriarchalism, the children did not always do what they were told. In several of these families, the father failed and the mother sustained the business. Women are ever-present in the archives, as writers and recipients of the letters, as managers and entrepreneurs, plotters and shapers, signing themselves ‘your bedfellow’, ‘your owne lover’ and ‘deare hart’. When looking at these connections between individuals, so alive in the manuscripts they left, and the subtle power-balances they represent, it is difficult to think that much has changed in 600 years. Family histories cannot be generalized but almost any one of them could be transferred without difficulty to another point in time. That is one of the purposes of this book: to make the experience of individual moments, with all their contingencies, the substance of the story.

  PART I

  The Inherited World

  1410–1520

  The high Middle Ages, from about 1100 until about 1300, had been blessed with golden summers and mild winters.1 That beautiful warmth in the northern hemisphere had created both the great cathedrals of Europe and the contemporary surge far to the east in the population of the Mongol steppes. By the early fifteenth century, though, bleaker conditions prevailed, so that the growing season was at least three weeks shorter than it had been 150 years before. Winters were sharper and summers wretched. One winter in the 1430s a frost lay over London unbroken from the middle of November until the middle of February. The Thames froze solid and the French and Gascon wines usually delivered by ship to the Vintners’ wharves in the centre of the city had to be brought in by wagon through Kent. Frost in May, when flowers on vines are at their most vulnerable, had been unheard of in England in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. By 1400 it was common, even usual, and the vineyards disappeared from England. The Norwegians and Icelanders were finding ever more summer icebergs on their route to Vinland, while the English and other northern Europeans suffered from wetter summers, low productivity in their difficult and heavy lands, a shortage in seed corn, a deficit in calories, a dimming in the spark of life and a shrinkage in rents.

  Walk over the Plumpton lands in Yorkshire and Nottinghamshire now in the early spring and the clay thickens around your boots: England was never the easiest of land to work. Even though the fourteenth-century epidemics of plague had savagely reduced the number of Europeans, a century later villages, particularly those on north-facing slopes or at some altitude, were still being deserted. The continent was short of money and the general crisis of authority which spread across the whole of Europe, the bitter squabbling over lands and lordships which marked the end of Middle Ages, may have been simply the reaction of a human population to the most difficult of planetary changes: global cooling. The story of William Plumpton and his family may be a private reflection of a world in bio-climatic decline.

  The governors were still for the time being the crown, the church and the great lords. Between them they owned over half the country. Gentry like the Plumptons were dependent on them, feudally attached, and owning no more than 20 per cent of the land themselves, the same as the yeomen farmers in the social stratum below.

  It was a legalized and commercial world – lawyers appear at every turn – but at the same time one heavily dependent on personal prestige and power. Law, for all its complexity and expense, was chronically vulnerable to the corruptions and distortions of big men’s threats. A glowing Arthurian vision of nobility and gentleness may have floated over these people but more as a longed-for world than a reflection of their own reality. Members of the medieval gentry can seem at times like little more than armed businessmen, gangsters on horseback, cannily in tune with the ways of the law but usually prepared to assert their will through their own and their gangs’ physical violence.

  Of all the great medieval letter collections that survive, those of the Plumptons reveal these desperate conditions, a frontier existence in which personal extinction and the possibility of an entire family being extinguished did not seem like a distant prospect. As the authority of the English crown, weakened by the personal unworldliness of Henry VI, collapsed around them, and the great magnates fought themselves to a standstill, gentry families were caught in the backwash of chaos. Different branches of the Plumptons ended up facing each other in a pair of long, growling and destructive court cases, which is why most of these documents survive, gathered in evidence by the teams of opposing lawyers. That is also why little of the sweetness and elegance of life is apparent here. Not all of England was like this – typicality cannot be read from any of these families – and there are alternative visions. Englishmen, according to the Tuscan historian Polydore Vergil, writing at the very beginning of the next century, were

  tall, with handsome open faces, grey-eyed for the most part. Their women are snow-white and handsome, and graced with the most decent apparel. And just as they are very similar to the Italians in the sound of their language, so the build of their bodies and their manners do not greatly differ from theirs. They have fine manners, they take counsel with deliberation (since they know that nothing is as inimical to counsel as haste), they are gentle and inclined by nature to every act of kindness.2

  That is not what it seemed like in the world of the Plumptons.

  1410s–1520s

  Survival

  The Plumptons

  Plumpton, Yorkshire

  In early May, under the narrow footbridge at Brafferton, a few miles north of York, the river Swale flows over the shallow bed of what was once Brafferton Ford. The water is dirty, a thick, chocolatey brown, its silty fertility drawn from the rich country of the Vale of York through which it has run. A giant fresh-leaved beech tree shades the churchyard of St Peter. Pollarded ashes and grey-green willows stand on the river banks. It doesn’t take much to imagine these broad wet acres in the Middle Ages: the oxen from the plough teams grazing on the spring fallow, the boys with their goads, the open fields with the new wheat up and growing, the crows scattered across the ridge-and-furrow and beside the river the long meadows thick with the first of the summer grass, the corncrakes hidden there and the skylarks above them.

  Here, just at this crossing, deep in the middle of comfortable, unremarkable England, one morning in May 1441, this first story of a gentry family and its own particular catastrophe begins.1 Sir William Plumpton was thirty-seven years old. He was a strong man, a soldier, knighted in the French wars, energetic, violent and assertive but also canny, a manipulator and deceiver, endlessly weaving webs of connection and influence, knowing how to court the great and suppress the weak, consciously looking to sustain the fortunes of his ancient and dignified name, happy to receive the hatred and contempt of those he had crossed or betrayed, confident that in the turmoil of this chaotic and desperate century he would emerge a winner.

  He was approaching the peak of his powers and had come here this morning, Friday 5 May, with his tenants and followers, the twenty-four men of his own household and many others, perhaps a hundred or more, with the idea of having a fight. His men were armed with bows, swords and pole arms, the semi-agricultural instruments with which a man could slash at an enemy as he would at a hedge.2

  Plumpton had seen chivalry and heroism in action and had heard of it from his father and grandfather. That grandfather, in defence of ancient honour, had rebelled against the usurper Henry IV and been executed, his boiled head displayed for months on York’s Micklegate Bar.3 His father, Sir Robert Plumpton, had been a knight at Agincourt, a retainer of Henry V’s brother, the beautiful and cultivated 25-year-old Duke of Bedford. Robert went to France, with his squire, two valets and eight Yorkshire archers, each paid five shillings a month, horsed, clothed and fed by him on condition that they ‘pay unto him halfe the gude that they win by war’.4 Money was never far from these chivalric arrangements. But this Robert was to die in the war, at the mud-drenched siege of Meaux on 8 December 1421, at which an English army, debilitated and made squalid by dysentery, subsided in its flooded trenches outside that city o
n the banks of the Marne.5

  William was eighteen when his father died. Within five years he too had gone to France, as a squire, also with the great Duke of Bedford, and William was knighted there as his father had been. But English fortunes were on the wane. The siege of Meaux had been an early portent of English failure abroad. Joan of Arc soon swept them out of the country and the Plantagenet empire was reduced to the stump of the Pas de Calais. The Hundred Years War ended in English failure, and as it ended the English turned their appetite and genius for violence on themselves. The English civil wars, known since the sixteenth century as the Wars of the Roses, were, at least in part, the behaviour of a military class with no one left to fight.

  The plague had become endemic in England since its first devastating eruptions a century before, and it struck again in the West Riding of Yorkshire in 1438 and again in 1439.6 Harvests had failed, people were starving, their immune systems weakened. By the spring of 1441, something desperate was in the air. Since 1438 William Plumpton had been steward of the big royal forest of Knaresborough, 4,500 acres, much of it the wild and moory waste stretching up into the Pennines to the west of where Harrogate now stands. This royal appointment made him lord over hundreds of tenants, who were under no obligation to pay tolls levied by other authorities – on bridges, fairs, roads, quays and markets. In 1440, William and 700 of these Knaresborough men had ridden over in a frightening posse ‘arrayed in manner of war, and in ryotous wise assembled’ to the market town at Otley, where the Cardinal Archbishop of York had been trying to enforce the payment of his market dues.7

  He was no innocent in this and from the mid-1430s onwards had been aggressively attempting to widen his influence and enlarge his income.8 He hired mercenaries from the Scottish border, battle-hardened and well-armed men from the valley of the Tyne and near Hexham on the Northumberland moors, and on Thursday 4 May, decided to send them on a raid out into the Knaresborough country, south-east of Ripon towards York. In the twin villages of Brafferton and Helperby, Plumpton’s men put up a road block to meet them, ‘with stoks, thorns, and otherwise, to thintent that when the said officers, tenants and servants came thither, they should be stopped their and incumbred’.9