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After many years at the margins of historical investigation, the late medieval English gentry are widely regarded as an important and worthy subject for academic research. This book aims to explore the culture of the wide range of people whom we might include within the late medieval gentry, taking in all of landed society below the peerage, from knights down to gentlemen, and including those aspirants to gentility who might under traditional socio-economic terms be excluded from the group. It begins by exploring the origins of, and influences on, the culture of the late medieval gentry, thus contributing to the ongoing debate on defining the membership of this group. The book considers the gentry's emergence as a group distinct from the nobility, and looks at the various available routes to gentility. Through surveys of the gentry's military background, administrative and political roles, social behaviour, and education, it seeks to provide an overview of how the group's culture evolved, and how it was disseminated. The book offers a broad view of late medieval gentry culture, which explores, reassesses and indeed sometimes even challenges the idea that members of the gentry cultivated their own distinctive cultural identity. The evolution of the gentleman as a peer-assessed phenomenon, gentlemanly behaviour within the chivalric tradition, the education received by gentle children, and the surviving gentry correspondence are also discussed. Although the Church had an ambivalent attitude toward artistic expression, much of the gentry's involvement with the visual arts was religious in focus.
susceptible to moral decline and physical disease. Different writers address this in different ways. For Samuel Smiles, for example, the loss of a masculine middle-class mode of gentlemanly behaviour would lead to economic, political, and national decline. However, Wilde embraced the possibility of an alternative type of gender politics with some enthusiasm. This is really another way of acknowledging that
Malory’s story, with the authorship of ‘all the good termys of venery and of huntynge’, which ‘all maner jantylmen’ should be grateful for. 31 Time and again Malory’s original passages on gentlemanly topics have been regarded by critics as examples of an inflexible view of social distinctions. 32 Recent analyses of Malory’s Morte show, however, that he chose to describe gentlemanly behaviour in terms
those who were unmarried, and which within the journey context were elaborately detailed by etiquette writers, but also partly because of women’s powerful personal beliefs j 194 J conclusion about what was appropriate and suitable in these encounters. Women would leave or rebuke, as Margaret Roberts did, men who they felt had transgressed the limits of decent, gentlemanly behaviour. Women were also acutely aware of the damaging and destructive effect an inappropriate involvement with a man would have on their standing amongst their fellow journeyers, which also
available to the gentry for demonstrating their gentle status, and shows the considerable effort necessary to maintain that status. In Chapter 2 , Keen locates gentlemanly behaviour within the chivalric tradition, concentrating on exploring the routes to gentility through service. He emphasises how military activity gradually gave way to civilian service, with law and
example is Thomas Hughes’s Rugby novel Tom Brown’s School Days (1857), where several of the genre characteristics are laid down, such as camaraderie, bullying endured and defeated, excelling in sports, and the importance of gentlemanly behaviour. The purpose of education is represented as identity formation and socialisation, especially in terms of class and gender as in the school depicted in Kipling’s Stalky & Co (1899) where future colonial administrators are fostered. Book learning is a minor theme, but a recurrent topic is children’s resistance to the repressive
of the two countries. Fashoda itself was an insignificant place, and following the Entente Cordiale the British were eager to bury any historical echo by discreetly renaming it ‘Kodok’. However, the two heroes who had met there, each after an epic but under-publicised odyssey, and whose gentlemanly behaviour made it possible to avert open conflict, established themselves as household
passions, . . . supersede[d] the judgement and annihilate[d] the understanding’ of an audience who could not • 136 • BARCLAY PRINT.indd 136 11/10/2018 10:05 speech, sympathy and eloquence employ reason.78 Barristers’ descriptions of their fellow bar were thus at pains to highlight that they operated within a wider code of gentlemanly behaviour. Doherty was not cruelly sarcastic or dismissive, but used ‘gentleman-like irony’ with a ‘kindliness of tone’, reinforcing that he remained within the acceptable boundaries for courtroom conduct.79 Men were expected to
population is lacking in the primary instincts necessary for the creation and maintenance of agreeable surroundings to a greater extent than any other nation in western civilisation.64 In 1927, Stanley Baldwin, in his speech at the opening of the Kingston Bypass, had expressed the hope that appealing to gentlemanly behaviour might prevent drivers despoiling the roads: ‘There ought to be an unwritten code that to defile any of these great roads, either by ugly surroundings, by hoggish behaviour along them, or by upsetting or spilling litter on them, should be a bar to a
Peter May, of Charterhouse and Cambridge, who was ‘something in the City’, with sporting idols of the 1960s such as George Best. Cricket, a game that had been so closely attached to the ideals of empire, fair play and gentlemanly behaviour, became deeply unfashionable. This shift in public sentiment, which was most apparent in the young, made the long-standing privileges and