ABSTRACT
By the eve of the civil war over two-thirds of them could boast military experience. Roger Manning goes so far as to write of a 'remilitarization' and 'rechivalrization of English aristocratic and gentry's culture' during these decades: Roger B. Manning, Swordsmen: The Martial Ethos in the Three Kingdoms. This corrects Lawrence Stone's estimate that only one peer in five had experienced battle: Lawrence Stone, The Crisis of the Aristocracy. It is not true that fristocracy no longer knew how to fight. At the same time both the nobility and the monarchy had been left behind by the military revolution, which had multiplied both the scale and the cost of warfare. Geoffrey Parker, The Military Revolution. Although they may have been tamed by the Tudors, individual noblemen such as the earls of Northumberland, Warwick, Essex, Worcester and Hertford continued to occupy estates that dwarfed those of any gentleman. Their political influence correspondingly overshadowed that of individual gentry.
