Welsh Journals

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THE GENTRY IN ENGLAND AND WALES, 1500-1700. By Felicity Heal and Clive Holmes. Macmillan, 1994. Pp. xvi, 473. £ 14.99 paperback. This is a very substantial work, encyclopaedic in its coverage. It is also representative of the prevailing historical climate, 'about the experience of being a gentleman or gentlewoman', and therefore 'concerned with mental worlds and expressive gestures, with authority and claims to rulership, and with the ways in which power was employed in this culture'; in brief, with attitudes, rather than with what old-fashioned historians might have regarded as the 'facts' of the case. The book begins with 'lineage' and goes on to 'family', before tackling 'wealth' (income and expenditure), administration, politics, and education. 'Civility, Sociability, and the Maintenance of Hegemony' precede 'The Gentry and the Church' and 'Piety and Belief (an interesting distinction in its own right). All in all this makes for a fruitful comparison with Lawrence Stone's Crisis of the Aristocracy to which the authors pay tribute as the pioneer of modem group-studies of the upper classes. It is a fascinating reflection of changed priorities that in 1965 Stone relegated 'marriage and the family' to the third part of his mammoth book, and was pretty brusque with 'religion'. 'Piety' that vogue word of the moment, would be impossible, I hazard, to find in Stone at all; though he has played a major part since in advancing the claims of'family'. Heal and Holmes will become indispensable to historians, both in its own right, and, through its massive footnoting and bibliography, as the starting-point for particular research. It is also, it is fair to say, a fascinating compendium for the curious reader. It is handsomely produced (although the publishers saw fit only to send a paperback for review) with profuse illustrations; the majority of them funerary monuments, aptly making the point about the dominance of the gentry in rural life. Wales is treated inclusively, with little attempt to depict its gentry as in any sense special. The Wynns of Gwydir naturally bulk large; the Maurices of Clenennau crop up entertainingly. Inclusiveness does seem the keynote to the book. The authors seem concerned to explain what is held in common, rather than to explore regional differences. And while it would be wrong to say that they are indifferent to development, there is an impression, to adopt the examiner's cliche, of continuity rather than change. This is another indication of change in historical scholarship since the days of the 'gentry controversy', rightly singled out by the authors as the beginning of modern study of the subject yet now curiously antique, at least in the eyes of students. The piling up of family and regional studies has undermined the 'sense of