Fw: "Knightly" class

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Leo van de Pas

Fw: "Knightly" class

Legg inn av Leo van de Pas » 23 jan 2006 23:26:02

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To: Leo van de Pas
Sent: Thursday, January 26, 2006 8:31 AM
Subject: "Knightly" class


Dear Leo

The post from Matt Tomkins (or whatever his name is) draws from a retrospective view that didn't occur to historians until Karl Marx had reinterpreted society into distinct (and antagonistic) classes.

The statement:

"It isn't relevant to the existence of a knightly class that its social superiors were also knights. Kings, dukes, earls etc are all gentlemen - but that doesn't make them members of the gentry, nor does it prevent the gentry existing as a class. The knightly class, like the gentry, was a residual category - it was all the knights and those like them who did not belong to a higher social level."

is clearly just making it up as he goes along. In many counties the backbone of the "knightly" group over generations was identifiably from the "lordly" class if families are to be stratified in this way, since they were younger sons of lords or earls, and cadet lines descended from them. At what point can their families be said to have fallen from the noble to the knightly "class"? And what if the head of a cadet line was elevated to peerage by inheriting an earldom from a distant relative, for instance? Did his own relatives out to some arbitrary degree become elevated from the "knightly" to the "lordly" class from association with him?

Knights were knights because of the need to fill out local power structures _apart_ from the ownership of land, that would continue with or without people available to take up this particular rank, for example where unmarried heiresses held manors.

Anyway, as to vindicating Richardson, the quotation Matt provided talked of _one_ manor to qualify a man for knighthood, not 3 to 5.

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