The Gentry
Page 42
Underlying the gracefulness of those moral qualities was a harsh reality. As Walter Benjamin, the great Jewish cultural critic in Nazi Germany, wrote in Illuminations, ‘There is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism.’7 Power, ownership, dominance and exploitation lie at the centre of these beautiful landscapes and elegant forms of behaviour. The relationship of the English gentry to those they employed, those they owned – as slaves in America and the Caribbean – and those who rented their land was not a love structure. None of the self-enhancing virtues apparent in these families would have been possible without an underpinning of money, derived from the gentry’s enormous landholding and the rents it produced. Between the 1530s and the First World War, the gentry owned at least half the acreage of England.8 Only rarely did individual families last that long but as one or other fell, through bad luck or bad management, another very similar took its place. That cloud-like economic constancy – rarely the same but always the same – was combined with a control of the political and judicial systems which placed them on little local summits all over the English counties. In those raw terms, this is a story of the political and economic dominance of a self-sustaining and cannily self-renewing class.
But the gentry’s story is also about deep political, economic and social change, and the way in which they responded to it. Reduced to essentials, that gentry relationship to power pursued a simple arc: emergence in the late Middle Ages as supporters of the great feudal magnates; maturing into the natural governors of England under the shade of the increasingly potent state in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries; outmanoeuvred by the aristocrats and merchants in England but thriving abroad in the eighteenth century; living a strange, half-real afterlife in the nineteenth century, when industrial and commercial money sustained a make-believe version of gentry style; poleaxed in the late nineteenth century by modern globalizing markets and a deep, democratizing shift in political culture; and finally in the twentieth century, carefully and at times desperately, attempting to manage decline. That is the whole story: the rise and fall of a ruling class. Gentry life became a quirky corner of England, not its soul. Of course the new rich, bankers and media stars, bought up estates and their houses, but they could make no claim on power as a result. That was the deepest of changes: gentrydom and government lost touch with each other.
It is difficult to tell who owns England now. The government’s Land Registry is incomplete (40 per cent of land is unregistered) and no other source of information makes up the lack. Very roughly, though, it is possible to make out a picture of the revolutionary change that occurred in the pattern of English landholding in the twentieth century. The crown (now including large estates held by the Ministry of Defence, the Forestry Commission and other public bodies) has doubled its acreage from about 10 per cent to 20 per cent. The great landowners, now also taken to include large charitable bodies such as the National Trust, which play the socially prominent role of the ancient aristocracy, have also done well out of a century of cheap finance and plenty of land on the market, particularly in the unfarmed uplands. They now own about a quarter of England and Wales. The yeomen, now classified as owner-occupier farmers, have roared into prominence, buying up the land they used to rent. There are now 135,000 owner-occupiers, settled on about 35 per cent of the land. Urban land has increased a little and the church has effectively disappeared from the picture. The huge change is in the gentry, that is non-farming, non-noble, non-government landowners. Until 1914, they owned half of England. They now own less than 1 per cent of it.9
Through the twentieth century, the state, a cluster of ancient and well-funded aristocratic families and a few public bodies came to sit alongside the mass of farmers as owners of the country. The gentry, as any more than a few families hanging on to their plots, or some new men coming in from the City and buying up the plots which fading families have vacated, became a statistical irrelevance.
As a result, for much of the 1900s and because of the change in the relationship of government and society, the gent was a faintly ridiculous figure. In Bryan Forbes’s script for The League of Gentlemen, written and filmed in 1959, the ex-officers who gather to rob a bank are all pitiable or absurd. Major Rupert Buckland Smith DSO ‘wears only pyjama bottoms and still has a good figure, fleshy but still firm. The face is one we might see in The Tatler, smiling over a glass of bubbly at the Regimental Ball.’ Captain Mycroft has been cashiered for gross indecency in a public place and is now masquerading as a vicar. All the others have failed and fallen on wrong or hard times. Their lives and values have become futile and irrelevant in a country dominated by the Welfare State and the needs of democracy. They are left over from a previous age and as a result Colonel Hyde, played by Jack Hawkins, is able to blackmail them into joining his gang. ‘Where do I fit in?’ he asks his new recruits rhetorically, dragging on a cigarette.
Well, I’m afraid I have the advantage over you gentlemen. My criminal career is just beginning. You won’t find anything on me – not a blemish. I served my country well and was suitably rewarded … by being declared redundant.10
If the gentry were redundant in the statism of 1960s and ’70s Britain, they were equally irrelevant to the Thatcherite experiment. For an enterprise culture whose heroes were the cutters and thrusters of an unregulated market and a booming, credit-based economy, the honour-conscious gentry were always going to look more out of date than ever. In the macho world of Thatcher’s revisionist anti-socialism, those one-nation conservatives who were interested in the wellbeing of society were dismissed as ‘wet’.11 It looked for a while as if the species was dying out entirely.
In the early twenty-first century, though, the inadequacies of both the dirigiste and the free-market models created, quite unexpectedly, the appetite for a return to something that looked suspiciously like gentry-style government. The novelist Howard Jacobson reflected on the change in the summer of 2010, just as the new Conservative– Liberal coalition was being formed, led by gentry-style politicians of a style, ideology and manner which had not been seen in Britain for four or five decades.
We are thinking about this in England at the moment, where class has returned to politics and the men of the hour are suddenly the men we supposed we had dispensed with. We had thought history had rendered them redundant, but it would seem that in our disillusionment with the self-made millionaires and bonus-driven bankers who have ruined us we have turned again to men of property and family and privileged education.12
True to their backgrounds, these politicians embraced the traditional gentry point of view. The whole of society was what mattered. They were prepared to lead it. The powerful and central state, of which they were now in control, was bad for the sense of general wellbeing. Power and authority should descend again to the localities, to the very county communities with which the stories in this book have been involved. The word ‘gentry’ was never mentioned – it still carried the baggage of its twentieth-century failure – but nothing that either David Cameron, the Conservative Prime Minister, or his deputy, the Liberal Nick Clegg, described in their first formative days of government was hostile to a longstanding gentry ideology.
‘Frankly, for decades’, Cameron told a meeting in the Cabinet Room at Downing Street on 18 May 2010, ‘you’ve had politicians sitting round this table, making decisions, telling us all what to do, issuing orders and instructions and passing laws and regulations.’ That had to go and ‘step one is transferring power from the centre to the local’.13
We want to give citizens, communities and local government the power and information they need to come together, solve the problems they face and build the Britain they want. We want society – the families, networks, neighbourhoods and communities that form the fabric of so much of our everyday lives – to be bigger and stronger than ever before.14
Communities, localism, families, networks and neighbourhoods, all bound together in the metaphor of the fabric, one, single, wov
en social structure: what else had the gentry ever dedicated their existence to? But this modern version of the gentry vision has a flaw: it is sentimentalized. It doesn’t grasp the fact, or perhaps even want to admit the fact, that competition, unkindness, rivalry and dominance always lay behind the beautiful sense of community which the gentry world embodied. The gentry owned their worlds, dispensed justice within them, punished wrongdoers, told people what to do and issued orders and instructions. They did, in fact, exactly what politicians do. Any idea that society could dispense with politics, at whatever level, is a futile dream, a soggy sock of wish-fulfilment. Life is a struggle and community is political.
If anyone wants to see a version of the gentry community in full and florid, modern action, they could do no better than tune in to Prime Minister’s Question Time. The energy and anger of the chamber of the House of Commons have always been the truest model of who the gentry were: deeply competitive, hungry to gain advantage over the other, reliant on fierce, articulate and sometimes witty speech, ready to abandon allies in difficulty, but somehow out of that tussle and rage able to summon the warmth, charm, love, care and beauty which is evident in many of these pages.
NOTES
INTRODUCTION: Ungentle Gentles
1 See J. P. Cooper, ‘Ideas of Gentility in Early Modern England’, in Land, Men and Beliefs, ed. G. E. Aylmer and J. S. Morrill, London, 1983
2 G. E. Mingay, The Gentry, Longman, 1976, 77–8
3 James Harrington, Oceana, London, 1737, I, 243–4
4 Except, sadly, those in South Carolina, Antigua and Barbados
5 Felicity Heal and Clive Holmes, The Gentry in England and Wales, Basingstoke, 1994, 381
6 N. Upton, De Studio Militari, ed. F. P. Barnard, 48, quoted in Cooper, ‘Ideas of Gentility in Early Modern England’, in Land, Men and Beliefs, 48
7 Cooper, ‘Ideas of Gentility in Early Modern England’, in Land, Men and Beliefs
8 Thomas Fuller, The Holy State and the Profane State, 1841, 106
9 The Pamphleteer, vol. xxiii, 1824, 159–74
10 Sir James Lawrence, ‘On the Nobility of the British Gentry compared with those on the Continent’ , The Pamphleteer, vol. xxiii, 1824, 160
11 E. A. Wasson, ‘The Penetration of New Wealth into the English Governing Class from the Middle Ages to the First World War’, Economic History Review, LI, 1, 1998, 25–48
12 E. A. Wasson, ‘The Penetration of New Wealth into the English Governing Class from the Middle Ages to the First World War’, Economic History Review, 40
13 Geoffrey Hickes, A Gentleman Instructed in the Conduct of a Virtuous and Happy Life, Written for the Instruction of a Young Nobleman, London, 1709, 29
14 Paul le Cacheuz, ed., Actes de Chancellerie d’Henri VI, concernant la Normandie sous la domination anglaise (1422–1435), vol. 2, Rouen, 1908, ccxxxvii
15 Anon., Institucon of a Gentleman, 1555, Sig. B, vii
16 Anon., Institucon of a Gentleman, 1555, Sig. D, ii
17 Lord Mahon, ed., The Letters of Philip Dormer Stanhope, Earl of Chesterfield, London, 1845, vol. I, xiv
18 Mahon, Letters of Chesterfield, 42
19 Mahon, Letters of Chesterfield, 74
20 Hickes, A Gentleman, 28
21 Hickes, A Gentleman, 14
22 Hickes, A Gentleman, 15
PART I The Inherited World 1410–1520
1 H. H. Lamb, Climate, History and the Modern World, London, 1995, 177–86
2 Polydore Vergil, Anglica Historia, Basel, 1534, 17
Survival
1 The Plumptons of Plumpton (or Plompton) near Knaresborough in the West Riding of Yorkshire – ‘plump’ was the word for a clump of trees in Yorkshire – are one of the few medieval families whose letter collections have survived. The originals have disappeared but a rather battered manuscript book of transcripts, made between 1612 and 1626, is now held by the West Yorkshire Archive Service. It is in the Leeds Record Office, where you can find it under ‘Acc. 1731’. The letters were partly classified in social order – those from sovereigns first, then dukes, earls, barons and so on, sinking to ordinary gents and lawyers. The book and other Plumpton manuscripts were bought by a Nottinghamshire antiquarian, J. E. F. Chambers, at a Sotheby’s sale in 1883 and given to West Yorkshire Archive Service by one of his descendants in 1972. The letters were first published by the brilliant Victorian scholar Thomas Stapleton as Plumpton Correspondence, Camden Society, 4, 1839, from here on referred to in these notes as ‘Stapleton’. Joan Kirby has also published a modern edition: The Plumpton Letters and Papers, Camden Society, 5th series, 8, 1996, referred to here as ‘Kirby’. For Brafferton Ford, see Stapleton, Introduction, lx ff: ‘The artikles of the Cardinall of Yorke of the offences and occasion done by Sir William of Plompton, Thomas Beckwith and other misdoers and rioters of the forest of Knaresboroughe’, 1441.
2 Kirby, 2
3 Stapleton, xxiv
4 Stapleton, xlii, xlvi (note o), xlix
5 Stapleton, xlix
6 Ruth Wilcock, ‘The Life and Career of Sir William Plumpton’, Northern History, XLIV, September 2007, 36
7 Stapleton, lvii
8 Ruth Wilcock, ‘Local Disorder in the Honour of Knaresborough, c .1438–1461 and the National Context’, Northern History, XLI, March 2004, 47–51
9 Stapleton, lix
10 Stapleton, lix
11 Stapleton, lx
12 Stapleton, lx
13 Stapleton, lx–lxi
14 Stapleton, lxi–lxii
15 Wilcock, ‘The Life and Career of Sir William Plumpton’, Northern History, 37
16 Wilcock, ‘The Life and Career of Sir William Plumpton’, Northern History, 34
17 Family tree, Kirby, prelims
18 Stapleton, lxiv
19 Stapleton, lxiv
20 Stapleton, lxiv
21 Kirby, 322
22 Stapleton, xxxiv
23 Brian Rocliffe to Sir William Plumpton, December 1463; Kirby, 30; Stapleton, 155
24 Godfrey Grene to Sir William Plumpton, 5 December 1469, about various individuals stealing his fish; Kirby, 42–3; Stapleton, 172
25 Stapleton, lxxxvi
26 Henry VI to Sir William Plumpton, 13 March 1461; Kirby, 26; Stapleton, 151
27 A sailor’s term, used of ships pitching up and down in a heavy sea; R. Holinshed, Chronicles, London, 1808, vol. III, 278
28 Holinshed, Chronicles, 278
29 V. Fiorato, A. Boylston and C. Knusel, Blood Red Roses: The Archaeology of a Mass Grave from the Battle of Towton A.D. 1461, Oxford, 2007
30 A. Boylston et al., www.brad.ac.uk/acad/archsci/depart/resgrp/towton/
31 G. Müldner and M. P. Richards, ‘Fast or Feast: Reconstructing Diet in Later Medieval England by Stable Isotope Analysis’, Journal of Archaeological Science, vol. 32, issue 1, January 2005, 39–48
32 Edward Hall, Hall’s Chonicle, New York, 1965, 256
33 P. J. C. Field (ed.), Sir Thomas Malory, Le Morte Darthur: The Seventh and Eighth Tales, London, 2008, 80
34 Wilcock, ‘The Life and Career of Sir William Plumpton’, Northern History, 39; Stapleton, lxvii–lxx
35 William Shakespeare, Henry VI, Part III, Act III, Scene iii, line 157
36 M. Hicks, Warwick the Kingmaker, Oxford, 1998, 255–6
37 Stapleton, lxix
38 Stapleton, lxix
39 Stapleton, lxix
40 John Neville, Earl of Northumberland, to Sir John Mauleverer, 7 December 1464–9; Kirby, 44; Stapleton, 152
41 John Neville, Earl of Northumberland, to Sir John Mauleverer, 7 December 1464–9; Kirby, 44; Stapleton, 152
42 Brian Rocliffe to Sir William Plumpton, 5 November 1461; Kirby, 27; Stapleton, 155
43 John Felton and John Warde to Sir William Plumpton, 14 September 1464–69; Kirby, 45; Stapleton, 165
44 Stapleton, lxxx
45 Brian Rocliffe to Sir William Plumpton, December 1463; Kirby, 30; Stapleton, 155
46 Indenture, 15 November 1463; Kirby, 258<
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47 Stapleton, lxxx
48 Stapleton, lxxvii
49 Stapleton, lxxvii
50 Stapleton, lxxvii
51 Stapleton, lxxvii
52 Wilcock, ‘The Life and Career of Sir William Plumpton’, Northern History, 49
53 Stapleton, lxxxix
54 Judgement, 16 September 1483; Stapleton, xci
55 Robert Grene to Sir Robert Plumpton, ?1486; Kirby, 68; Stapleton, 66
56 Sir Richard Tunstall to Sir Robert Plumpton, ?1487; Kirby, 73; Stapleton, 71
57 Edward Plumpton to Sir Robert Plumpton, 3 February 1597; Kirby, 116; Stapleton, 140
58 John Pullein to Sir Robert Plumpton, 18 May 1501; Kirby, 143; Stapleton, 95
59 Francis Bacon, Works, vol. 5, London, 1803, 166, 167
60 John Pullein to Sir Robert Plumpton, 18 May 1501; Kirby, 143; Stapleton, 95
61 Sir Robert Plumpton to Henry VIII, after April 1509; Kirby, 186
62 Stapleton, cvii
63 Sir Robert Plumpton to Henry VIII, after April 1509; Kirby, 186
64 Sir Robert Plumpton to Henry VIII, after April 1509; Kirby, 186
65 Sir Robert Plumpton to Agnes Plumpton, 9 September 1502; Kirby, 152; Stapleton, cxi
66 Sir Robert Plumpton to Agnes Plumpton, 9 September 1502; Kirby, 152; Stapleton, cx–cxi
67 15 January 1505; Kirby, 283
68 Stapleton, cviii
69 Stapleton, cxii
70 Kirby, 153, note 2
71 Sir John Towneley to Sir Robert Plumpton, 2 November 1502; Kirby, 152; Stapleton, 43
72 Henry Ardern to Sir Robert Plumpton, 1504; Kirby, 179; Stapleton, 83
73 Agnes Plumpton to Sir Robert Plumpton, 26 April 1504; Kirby, 174; Stapleton, 45
74 Stapleton, cxii