Neat compact boxes

Higher rents and lower taxes, foreign travel and a new consumerism, the regulation of hospitality and the control of plague all contributed at different times and in separate ways to the long-term ascent of the English gentleman. From less than half the lands of England in the Late Middle Ages, the gentry’s share had risen to more than two-thirds by 1700, and was still increasing. ¹ But while no single explanation prevails today, the view of most contemporaries was more robust. “When one puts to them”, writes Joan Thirsk, “the question how and at whose expense the gentry rose in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, their answer is unambiguous. They rose at the expense of their younger brothers”. ²