Thegns and Knights in Eleventh-Century England: Who was Then the Gentleman?

Abstract

I Shall be considering England during the long eleventh century—from the 990s, the Battle of Maldon and Byrhtferth of Ramsey's ‘life of Oswald’, to the 1130s, die world of Geoffrey Gaimar. I shall do so in the light of a situation where, on the one hand, historians of Anglo-Saxon England commonly refer to gentlemen and gentry in their period but do so casually, as though their presence there is something to be taken for granted, and, on the other, where scholars who regard themselves as historians of the gentry seem reluctant to admit that the phenomenon they study can have existed much before 1200, if then. In the first part of this paper I shall argue that there was a gentry in eleventh-century England, that below the great lords there were many layers of society whose members shared the interests and pursuits of the great, i.e. we should accept the terminology of historians of Anglo-Saxon England from Sir Frank Stenton onwards. I shall also argue that in all probability many vigorous members of die Anglo-Saxon gentry were knights, using the word ‘knight’ to mean the kind of person whom, in the late twelfth century, Richard FitzNigel described as an active knight (strenuus miles), i.e. someone whose characteristic and indispensable possessions were his body armour and the requisite horses