The Gentry: Stories of the English. Adam Nicolson

in his advice to his nephew, maintained that line. ‘Never be proud of your rank or birth’, he told Philip Stanhope, the nephew, ‘but be as proud as you please of your character.’¹⁷ Education was all, ‘a smattering constitutes a coxcomb’,¹⁸ and ‘A drayman is probably born with as good organs as Milton, Locke or Newton; but, by culture, they are much more above him than he is above his horse.’¹⁹

      For Geoffrey Hickes in the early eighteenth century ‘Peasantry [was] a Disease (like the Plague) easily caught by Conversation’,²⁰ but he nevertheless thought it vulgar to talk of your family or to ‘fling the Register of your Genealogy on the Table before all Company’.²¹ ‘Whoever rakes in the Ashes of the Dead, may fall upon the Stench instead of Perfumes.’²²

      This radical uncertainty at the core of English class consciousness was its principal virtue. As a result, this book is in part about money and struggle, and also about blood and family, but essentially about the fusion of those categories, the blood-and-money struggle for survival. The gentry depended above all on the coherence and efficiency of the family, the genetic corporation, as the most reliable form of keeping going in a rival-thick world. The varying power-relationships of father, mother, siblings, step and half siblings, stepmothers, mothers-in-law, brothers-in-law, uncles, nephews, cousins and nieces take up many of these chapters. This was where the questions of enterprise and lineage, inherited virtue and self-generated virtue all intersected. There is much more here than a simple picture of the patriarchal family, in which the father ordained and the family obeyed. Even at the medieval beginning, or at the height of Victorian patriarchalism, the children did not always do what they were told. In several of these families, the father failed and the mother sustained the business. Women are ever-present in the archives, as writers and recipients of the letters, as managers and entrepreneurs, plotters and shapers, signing themselves ‘your bedfellow’, ‘your owne lover’ and ‘deare hart’. When looking at these connections between individuals, so alive in the manuscripts they left, and the subtle power-balances they represent, it is difficult to think that much has changed in 600 years. Family histories cannot be generalized but almost any one of them could be transferred without difficulty to another point in time. That is one of the purposes of this book: to make the experience of individual moments, with all their contingencies, the substance of the story.

      PART I

      The Inherited World

      1410–1520

      The high Middle Ages, from about 1100 until about 1300, had been blessed with golden summers and mild winters.¹ That beautiful warmth in the northern hemisphere had created both the great cathedrals of Europe and the contemporary surge far to the east in the population of the Mongol steppes. By the early fifteenth century, though, bleaker conditions prevailed, so that the growing season was at least three weeks shorter than it had been 150 years before. Winters were sharper and summers wretched. One winter in the 1430s a frost lay over London unbroken from the middle of November until the middle of February. The Thames froze solid and the French and Gascon wines usually delivered by ship to the Vintners’ wharves in the centre of the city had to be brought in by wagon through Kent. Frost in May, when flowers on vines are at their most vulnerable, had been unheard of in England in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. By 1400 it was common, even usual, and the vineyards disappeared from England. The Norwegians and Icelanders were finding ever more summer icebergs on their route to Vinland, while the English and other northern Europeans suffered from wetter summers, low productivity in their difficult and heavy lands, a shortage in seed corn, a deficit in calories, a dimming in the spark of life and a shrinkage in rents.

      Walk over the Plumpton lands in Yorkshire and Nottinghamshire now in the early spring and the clay thickens around your boots: England was never the easiest of land to work. Even though the fourteenth-century epidemics of plague had savagely reduced the number of Europeans, a century later villages, particularly those on north-facing slopes or at some altitude, were still being deserted. The continent was short of money and the general crisis of authority which spread across the whole of Europe, the bitter squabbling over lands and lordships which marked the end of Middle Ages, may have been simply the reaction of a human population to the most difficult of planetary changes: global cooling. The story of William Plumpton and his family may be a private reflection of a world in bio-climatic decline.

      The governors were still for the time being the crown, the church and the great lords. Between them they owned over half the country. Gentry like the Plumptons were dependent on them, feudally attached, and owning no more than 20 per cent of the land themselves, the same as the yeomen farmers in the social stratum below.

      It was a legalized and commercial world – lawyers appear at every turn – but at the same time one heavily dependent on personal prestige and power. Law, for all its complexity and expense, was chronically vulnerable to the corruptions and distortions of big men’s threats. A glowing Arthurian vision of nobility and gentleness may have floated over these people but more as a longed-for world than a reflection of their own reality. Members of the medieval gentry can seem at times like little more than armed businessmen, gangsters on horseback, cannily in tune with the ways of the law but usually prepared to assert their will through their own and their gangs’ physical violence.

      Of all the great medieval letter collections that survive, those of the Plumptons reveal these desperate conditions, a frontier existence in which personal extinction and the possibility of an entire family being extinguished did not seem like a distant prospect. As the authority of the English crown, weakened by the personal unworldliness of Henry VI, collapsed around them, and the great magnates fought themselves to a standstill, gentry families were caught in the backwash of chaos. Different branches of the Plumptons ended up facing each other in a pair of long, growling and destructive court cases, which is why most of these documents survive, gathered in evidence by the teams of opposing lawyers. That is also why little of the sweetness and elegance of life is apparent here. Not all of England was like this – typicality cannot be read from any of these families – and there are alternative visions. Englishmen, according to the Tuscan historian Polydore Vergil, writing at the very beginning of the next century, were

      tall, with handsome open faces, grey-eyed for the most part. Their women are snow-white and handsome, and graced with the most decent apparel. And just as they are very similar to the Italians in the sound of their language, so the build of their bodies and their manners do not greatly differ from theirs. They have fine manners, they take counsel with deliberation (since they know that nothing is as inimical to counsel as haste), they are gentle and inclined by nature to every act of kindness.²

      That is not what it seemed like in the world of the Plumptons.

      1410s–1520s

      Survival

      The Plumptons

       Plumpton, Yorkshire

      In early May, under the narrow footbridge at Brafferton, a few miles north of York, the river Swale flows over the shallow bed of what was once Brafferton Ford. The water is dirty, a thick, chocolatey brown, its silty fertility drawn from the rich country of the Vale of York through which it has run. A giant fresh-leaved beech tree shades the churchyard of St Peter. Pollarded ashes and grey-green willows stand on the river banks. It doesn’t take much to imagine these broad wet acres in the Middle Ages: the oxen from the plough teams grazing on the spring fallow, the boys with their goads, the open fields with the new wheat up and growing, the crows scattered across the ridge-and-furrow and beside the river the long meadows thick with the first of the summer grass, the corncrakes hidden there and the skylarks above them.

      Here, just at this crossing, deep in the middle of comfortable, unremarkable England, one morning in May 1441, this first story of a gentry family and its own particular catastrophe begins.¹ Sir William Plumpton was thirty-seven years old. He was a strong man, a soldier, knighted in the French wars, energetic, violent and assertive but also canny, a manipulator and deceiver, endlessly weaving webs of connection and influence, knowing how to