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The gentry were acutely law-minded. This was as true in the late 13th and early 14th centuries as ever it was to be later. At the heart of this law-mindedness was the need and the determination to protect their estates; perhaps one should say to protect their family and their estates, for in their thinking the two were essentially interchangeable. Protection has, of course, a purely physical dimension, and there can hardly have been a secular lord who would not have subscribed to the ethic of the strong, sword-bearing right arm in defence of one's rights. However, as historians have come to recognize, the real knee-jerk reaction if one's property was threatened was to the law, principally and increasingly throughout the 13th century and beyond to the courts of the English common law. It is a truism that this was a litigious age and that the gentry were litigious by predilection. Their law-mindedness, however, became so much a part of gentry behaviour as to be more than just a propensity to seek out writs and legal remedies. Rather it became deeply rooted in gentry culture itself. This aspect of gentry culture has a series of interlocking dimensions and an examination of these will be the subject of this chapter.

This chapter examines the literature that was available to be read in the gentry household. It shows that the impact of widening literacy upon gentry culture was central: in keeping household and estate records, in religious observance, and in giving access to a variety of practical remedies. A good deal is known about some aspects of this culture because legal manuscripts, for example, and illuminated prayer-books have been deliberately preserved for posterity. Recreational manuscripts, on the other hand, were probably less often kept. What is certain is that for some gentry families, at least, literacy was also valued for entertainment purposes.

This chapter examines the military dimension to gentry life. Although there had always been a military component to the lives of the English nobility, the period from the middle years of Edward I through the reigns of Edward II and Edward III saw what has been described as the ‘re-militarisation’ of the ‘gentle-born’. The result was a very powerful and wide-ranging military dimension to English culture that deeply permeated the counties. Not surprisingly heads of gentry houses and many other male members of the gentry families tended to see themselves in military terms.