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.
Learning and a Liberal Education: The Study of Modern History in the Universities of Oxford, Cambridge, and Manchester, 1800–1914
In recent years, interest in the professional development of history has marked a new self-consciousness on the part of historians. Peter Slee's contribution to this growing field of study, though limited in scope, provides an interesting assessment of the elite institutional context of the British historical profession. Dr. Slee has correctly identified the ancient universities of Oxford and Cambridge, and latterly the newer civic university established in industrial Manchester, as the focal centres for the debates out of which university history emerged. His is an institutional far more than an intellectual study, concerned primarily with the effects on the discipline of some of the central educational debates of the period. The tensions between the provision of a liberal education and a vocational training were acute for the proponents of historical education and mirrored, as Dr. Slee shows, the similar tensions within the nascent profession between the sometimes conflicting claims of teaching and of research. Tracing the somewhat undignified path which the discipline trod before winning acceptance as a study worthy of separate and serious consideration, the author plots meticulously the slow organizational growth of confidence amongst its practitioners. Their attempts to demonstrate the conformity of the subject to the ruling and limited dictates of tertiary education at this time as a means of courting acceptance has long been acknowledged by historians. Dr. Slee's understanding of the changing dynamics of the accompanying push to professionalism are, however, unusual and challenging. In essence, the originality of his thesis - and he might perhaps have stated this more explicitly -lies in its identification of two distinct phases within the process of professionalization. In the first instance, he argues that the initial agent of change was provided not by stressing the importance of historical research but through the development, particularly at the university of Oxford, of a corporate historical teaching identity. Slee effectively argues that it was only after the discipline's establishment in this context that the champions of history as a research field were influential and successful in the subject's bid for professional recognition. In identifying Oxford as the home of the tutorial system, Slee thus lays emphasis on the centrality of institutional catalysts in determining the reception of a subject, in much the same vein as Janet Howarth has
Nation, Duty, Character and Confidence: History at Oxford, 1850–1914
Modern history, introduced to Oxford in the 1850s, was a subject that was hardly ‘modern’. The governing bodies of the university, as well as its teachers, intended history to strengthen and perpetuate the traditional values of liberal education. Beginning with the fall of Rome and concluding in the eighteenth century, history was not an innovative or experimental study of recent, let alone contemporary, issues and events. Instead, the study of history began and continued as an epic illustration of the qualities required of England's governing elite. Within a rapidly changing society that found the future more compelling than the past, modern history organized history, politics, economics and law as testaments to the enduring qualities of individual character and national institutions. All the liberal disciplines at Oxford, as well as those at Cambridge and subsequently at the new civic universities, reflected a national consensus about moral progress and social order which was reinforced by the content of those disciplines. The general frame of mind and expectations could not be attributed uniquely to Oxford. But there can be little doubt about the powerful influence Oxford exercized upon those graduates who left the university to assume careers of considerable national importance. It may be argued that among the various disciplines, none made so earnest and sustained an attempt to produce the right kind of men, fit for any undertaking, as did the Honours School in Modern History.