War and society in medieval Norfolk : the warrior gentry, c. 1350-c. 1430
This thesis seeks to investigate - through a regional case study of Norfolk 
county society between 1350 and 1430 - the dual role played by the warrior gentry as 
soldiers fighting regularly in the king's wars and as shire landowners and office 
holders, who stood at the forefront of their county community. Chapter One describes 
the methodology employed in this thesis and places this study in its historiographical 
context, highlighting the ways in which the majority of county histories have adopted 
a predominantly political approach to their subject matter, which rarely seeks to 
reconcile the military and civilian duties of the warrior gentry within and beyond shire 
borders. Chapter Two outlines the character of Norfolk society between 1350 and 
1430, revealing it to be a comparatively wealthy and cohesive county community. 
Chapter Three homes in directly upon the warrior gentry of the shire, demonstrating 
the dual role played by the military elite firstly as landlords, politicians and local 
office holders, and secondly as soldiers with chivalric reputations to maintain. 
Chapter Four reveals the influence of lordship over Norfolk gentry society - not in a 
political sense - but chiefly in terms of the widespread contacts, offices, patronage and 
rewards accrued by the knightly elite in the service of the numerous magnates who 
held estates in the county. Chapter Four ends by showing the nobility's important role 
as the major military recruiters in the region. Chapter Five focuses specifically upon 
the military records of the region's gentry, demonstrating that war was a gamble, but 
that most of Norfolk's knightly elite, as well as considerable numbers of sub-knightly 
men-at-arms, were prepared to participate at least occasionally. Chapter Six pulls 
together the strands from each of the preceding chapters to argue that the cultural 
values of chivalry - stressing personal and family honour - engendered amongst 
Norfolk's warrior elite a sense of cultural community and accounts for their desire to 
serve their sovereign in his overseas military enterprises. It suggests that it was the 
common ideology of chivalry that cut across the social and economic boundaries of 
the county community and allowed the East Anglian warrior gentry to form a vibrant, 
though ill-defined, regional military community, in which social rank played second 
fiddle to military prowess. Finally, Chapter Seven rounds off this study by 
demonstrating the ways in which the above solidarities were undermined after c. 
1430, in an era when the tide of the Hundred Years War turned against the English, 
when the military participation of Norfolk's gentry declined, and when, simultaneously, the county became wracked by political instability in what has 
popularly become known as the `Paston Age'. 
This thesis has found that Norfolk's warrior gentry were highly active 
participants in the wars of the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries. They 
served extensively on royal and ducal campaigns in France, Scotland, Ireland and 
Spain, and some even fought in the German states and the Holy Land on their own 
account. Several of the shire's most militarily-active soldiers were full-time 
professionals, seeking to live from the wages and profits of warfare. The majority of 
the knightly elite, however, were regular, though intermittent, participants in these 
conflicts. Such men possessed significant personal wealth and interspersed their bouts 
of military service abroad with their daily duties as landlords and shire officials back 
at home. For men of this ilk, their military service was less a matter of financial gain 
and more a necessary fillip to their personal and family honour. Although some of 
these experienced warriors served under numerous commanders over the course of 
their long careers in arms, many others saw much of their military service under the 
banner of one or two magnates. These magnates looked to Norfolk's populous gentry 
warrior class as a source of military support, and a number of the county's knights 
and esquires carved out long and profitable careers for themselves serving a particular 
lord in war and peace over an extended time period. Pecuniary advantage aside, it was 
the influence of the chivalric ethos over the East Anglian gentry - especially marked 
between 1350 and 1430 in light of England's numerous battlefield triumphs - that 
provided Norfolk's warrior gentry with a common ideology that cut across social 
boundaries, heightened their martial inclinations, and connected them culturally with 
their fellow warriors across the eastern counties. The vibrant military community that 
evolved between the reigns of Edward III and Henry V, however, was rapidly 
undermined after 1430 as Norfolk county society increasingly became politically 
unstable, and as the English simultaneously lost almost all of their French territory. 
War had always been a gamble, but after 1430 it looked increasingly unlikely to pay 
off. Moreover, from 1453 there were no more opportunities for Norfolk's young 
warrior gentry to see military service, except in the civil conflicts of the Wars of the 
Roses, or by undertaking garrison duty at Calais, England's last remaining French 
outpost. As such, the knightly elite increasingly became detached from the harsh 
reality of chivalrous warfare and focused instead upon the spectacle and pageantry of 
chivalric culture, celebrated in literature, architecture, feasts, parades and 
tournaments. Military service was the raison d'etre of the warrior gentry and without 
it East Anglia's military community could not maintain its former cohesion.
Making the Most of Memories: The Empirical and Subjective Value of Oral History
Oral history, defined by Ronald Grele as ‘the interviewing of eyewitness participants in the events of the past for the purposes of historical reconstruction’, is an invaluable and compelling research method for twentieth-century history. It provides access to undocumented experience, including the life of civic leaders who have not yet written their autobiographies and, more significantly, the ‘hidden histories’ of people on the margins: workers, women, indigenous peoples, ethnic minorities and members of other oppressed or marginalised groups. Oral history interviews also provide opportunities to explore particular aspects of historical experience that are rarely recorded, such as personal relationships, domestic life, and the nature of clandestine organisations. They offer rich evidence about the subjective or personal meanings of past events: what it felt like to get married, to be under fire, to face death in a concentration camp. Oral historians are unique in being able to question their informants, to ask the questions that might not have been imagined in the past and to evoke recollections and understandings that were previously silenced or ignored. We enjoy the pleasures – as well as the considerable challenges – of engaging in active, human relationships in the course of our research.
Fifty years on: An international perspective on oral history
According to the recorded tradition of the North American Oral History Association, "oral history was established in 1948 as a modern technique for historical documentation when Columbia University historian Allan Nevins began recording the memoirs of persons significant in American life." This essay explores significant issues in oral history, fifty years on. It focuses on four developments that are central to the current concerns of oral historians, drawing on lessons from oral history projects around the world. First, scholars now recognize that interviewing operates within culturally specific systems of communication, so that there is not necessarily a single or universal "right way" to do oral history. Second, new thinking about memory and history has posed new opportunities and dilemmas in the interpretation of oral testimony. Third, an increasing emphasis on the value that remembering has for the narrator has broadened the practice of oral history so that it can be more than a research methodology. Finally, as new technologies expand ways of generating interviews and presenting oral history, they spotlight concerns about how people's memories are used or abused in public representation. This survey offers no definitive conclusions or recommendations; it is instead intended to suggest pointers for continuing debate.