ABSTRACT
Like the gentry, the rank immediately above them, the middling sort, consisted of a varied group of individuals with very different levels of disposable income and of literacy. Many would have been actively involved in husbandry. In 1523 Sir Anthony Fitzherbert’s publication, The Boke of Husbandry, focused on sheep rearing because ‘sheep … is the most profitable cattle that any man can have’.1 While it described the activities than many yeomen and husbandmen were engaged in, it is likely that its readership was restricted to the better educated members of the yeomanry, gentlemen and members of the elite. Some yeomen were in service, both of the crown and of families drawn from the nobility and gentry. As such they were vulnerable to fluctuations in their master’s solvency. In the late 1520s Henry Sadler recorded how Thomas Grey, marquess of Dorset, ‘hath putt awaie hys yeomen at thys tyme and dothe intende after Christmas to putt awaie more’.2 Even so, education, hard work and taking the opportunities that might present themselves meant that individuals from this group could rise socially. one well known example is Hugh Latimer, bishop of Worcester, whose father had been a yeoman with no land of his own.
