268 History of the English Landed Interest. 



partly of a few copyholders and largely of labourers; and lastl}"", 

 the burgesses, apprentices, and inferior occupants of the towns. 

 There were, too, the professional classes, such as lawyers, 

 leeches, scriveners, etc., but, with the exception of the first 

 named, their numbers were insignificant.^ The knights 

 bannerets, bachelors, and squires, which composed the class of 

 landed commoners, followed the example of their betters, and 

 displayed a splendid hospitality out of all proportion to their 

 incomes. The lesser public honours fell to their share, and in 

 much the same worthy fashion as their nineteenth-century 

 representatives, they ably filled the dignified offices of sheriff, 

 justice, and knight of the shire. Those of the class not desirous 

 of following a soldier's profession had the same rooted dislike to 

 knighthood as our modern landed gentry. Perhaps too, like the 

 squires of the Victorian era, they felt absolutely secure, without 

 the ceremony of the accolade and prefix of "Sir," that no one 

 would dispute their simple but cherished title to the term 

 " Gentleman." ^ Setting aside this consideration, there was a 

 natural dislike to being mulcted by the heavy dues imposed 

 by the State on all recipients of this barren honour. 



The household of the knight included among its servitors his 

 younger sons, who, with the yeomen, passed under the generic 

 term of valetti or varlets. Their parliamentary representatives 

 were the knights of the shire, and until the act of 1445 not 

 necessarily gentlemen born. 



^ Compare Stubbs, Constlt. Hist., ch. xxi., Paragraph 92. I cannot 

 think that the bishop is correct in under-estimating the professional 

 classes. The doctors ma^r have been few, but the lawyers were a numer- 

 ous class, in fact so superabundant, that a statute passed in 1455 called 

 attention to the trouble and vexation occasioned by their large at- 

 tendance in the Eastern Counties at the king's courts, and hence- 

 forth restricted their number to six in Norfolk, six in Sullolk, and two 

 in Norwich. 33 Hen. VI., c. 7. 



^ From the year 1278 the tenant in free soccage whose land yielded £20 

 annual profits was liable for knightliood; but since the statute De Mili- 

 tibus in 1307, though still eligible, he could commute his liability to sei*- 

 vice. Thence up to 1353 there was no term like " homo gentilis" to dis- 

 tinguish the social grade of the fi-eeholder. He was a rich yeoman or 

 a poor yeoman, as the case might be, but unless as " miles," ho had no 

 distinguisliing name to testify to his gentle birth until that created 

 by the word '"gentleman." 



