Knightly Class

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Robert Forrest

Knightly Class

Legg inn av Robert Forrest » 31 jan 2006 17:36:02

In a 1975 article, "Sir Geoffrey de Langley and the Crisis of the Knightly
Class in 13th-Century England," (Past and Present 68 (1975), pp. 3-37), P.
R. Coss covers some of the same ground mentioned earlier in this thread, and
proves to also be somewhat equivocal about a knightly "class". He is writing
about the effects of inflation in the 1200s, which decreased the true value
of land holdings, squeezing some of the less well enfeoffed knights of the
time. To work their way out of financial difficulties, some of these smaller
land owners borrowed from Jewish moneylenders. Coss makes several references
to H. G. Richardson's, "The English Jewry under Angevin Kings", 1960.
Several families of the growing administrative class of the time greatly
improved their family land holdings by buying bonds held by the Jews, then
acquiring the indebted lands from the hard-pressed debtors at a great
discount from their true value.

Coss' comments on "knightly class" include this:

"...The second part of the article will review the evidence for a crisis of
the knightly class (11) and explore the links between this and the political
troubles of the reign of Henry III."

Coss's footnote (11): "The term 'knightly' is used here to include all who
held by military tenure and were manorial landlords. To limit the term to
families who were producing knights at any one time would tend to hinder
examination of the fortunes of the class over a long period. Knighthood, by
this time, denoted membership of a prestigious social stratum, but not of a
class. Others may prefer to speak of "the smaller landowners" or of "the
gentry", but neither is wholly satisfactory."



The last paragraph of the article has this:

"...Moneylending helped to facilitate the transfer of land; it also
created a reservoir of bitter resentment. Sooner or later this was bound to
be translated into political action. Mr. Richardson believes that in many
cases the borrower may have had little idea of what would happen if he
failed to pay his capital debt promptly, and even if he did "no matter what
was written in the bond, the outcome was unexpected and dangerous".
Financial strain and the horrors of debt take us a long way towards
explaining why the reformist earls received such widespread support from the
knightly class in thirteenth-century England..."

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