The Gentry: Stories of the English
Описание книги
Prize-winning author Adam Nicolson tells the story he was born to write – the real story of England. It is the gentry that has made England what it was and, to a degree, still is. In this vivid, lively book, history has never been more readable.We may well be ‘a nation of shopkeepers’, but for generations England was a country dominated by its middling families, rooted on their land, in their locality, with a healthy interest in turning a profit from their property and a deep distrust of the centralised state. The virtues we may all believe to be part of the English culture – honesty, affability, courtesy, liberality – each of these has their source in gentry life cultivated over five hundred years. These folk were the backbone of England.Adam Nicolson’s riveting book concentrates on fourteen families with a time-span from 1400 to the present day. From the medieval gung-ho of the Plumpton family to the high-seas adventures of the Lascelles in the 18th-century, to more modern examples, the book provides a chronological picture of the English, seen through these intimate, passionate, powerful stories of family saga. The families have been selected from all over the country and range from the famous to the unknown. Some families are divided by politics , such as the one who took different sides in the Reformation; others destroy their inheritance through reckless gambling or investments . All of them are vivid depictions of the life and code of the gentry, and have left deep archives of family papers which the author has been able to use, often for the very first time.THE GENTRY is first and foremost a wonderful sweep of English history. It presents a convincing argument on what has created the distinctive English character but with the sheer readability of an epic novel.
Оглавление
Adam Nicolson. The Gentry: Stories of the English
Adam Nicolson. The Gentry
Contents
INTRODUCTION
PART I. The Inherited World
1410s–1520s
PART II. In the Renaissance State
1520s–1580s
1580s–1610s
PART III. The Great Century
1610s–1650s
1630s–1660s
1660s–1710s
PART IV. Atlantic Domains
1710s–1750s
1730s–1790s
PART V. The Failing Vision
1790s–1810s
1780s–1910s
PART VI. The After-Life
1890s–1950s
1950s–2010s
CONCLUSION
NOTES
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
SEARCHABLE TERMS
By the same author
Copyright
About the Publisher
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Stories of the English
Title Page
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On Sir William’s death, the legal wheels were already turning but Robert’s tenure began well enough. His mother, Joan, had been maltreated by his father, kept as a secret wife for sixteen years while the old man pursued his schemes. Robert did better, immediately giving her the proceeds of the manor of Idle in Airedale, on top of those from Grassington and Steeton, which his father had left her in his will.53 But this sense of ownership was not to last. In 1483, after a dogged pursuit by the two granddaughters and their lawyers, a decision and a division were made. Margaret and Elizabeth were to get Nesfield, Grassington and Steeton and everything in Derbyshire. Robert was to get only Plumpton, Idle and the Nottinghamshire manors. They were the best lands but out of them he was to pay £40 a year to old Elizabeth Clifford, the granddaughter’s mother. His own mother was deprived of those very lands which Robert had designated for her maintenance.54
This might have been the final arrangement. Even as the Wars of the Roses came to an end, and Henry Tudor claimed the throne as Henry VII, this distribution of lands amongst the Plumptons lasted for the next fourteen years, relatively untroubled. Robert, half the man his father was, both in property and resolution, nevertheless pursued the ideal of the knightly squire. He was short of money but he did his best to look after his people. He took on the local government of Knaresborough and its forest. He was a little dilatory, but he kept his correspondence carefully (which is how we know any of this), he served the new Percy Earls of Northumberland in battle against the Scots and was knighted. Tenants and land agents wrote to him, thanking him for the ‘tender mastership shewed me in all causes’.55 He did his best to address his declining financial position, claiming the fees due from the release of bondmen – there were still bound serfs in late fifteenth-century England and their release provided a steady income for landlords feeling short.56 Like his father, Robert was embroiled in long, expensive cases in Chancery, but going to the courts was not cheap and the threat of impoverishment was never far away.
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