ABSTRACT
According to T.B.Pugh, the ‘gentry’ of fifteenth-century England comprised ‘all the landowners between the baronage and the yeomanry’, whose number ‘has been variously estimated at between 6,000 and 9,000 families’.1 Estimates for later centuries, based naturally on more abundant sources, are rather more precise. In the early eighteenth century, for example, there seem to have been three reasonably clearly defined groups within the English gentry. Firstly, the ‘greater gentry’, consisting of about 1,000 families each with an income in excess of £1,000 per annum, holding between them about 15 per cent of the land of England; secondly, the ‘lesser gentry’ of about 2,000 families, with incomes ranging between £250 and £1,000, holding in total about 12 1/2 per cent of England; and thirdly, the ‘country gentlemen’, with incomes around the £250 mark, numbering about 10,000 families, and holding about a quarter of England.2 By this time, therefore, the whole ‘gentry class’ included about 13,000 families and held roughly half of the land in England. Comparable ‘national’ sources are simply not available for the fourteenth century. Any attempt to work out a similar set of figures must be based on a number of separate regional studies, and inevitably therefore they remain somewhat tentative. Nevertheless, regional studies are now beginning to point to the existence of quite clearly defined strata within the fourteenth-and fifteenth-century gentry.
