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.
A Gentry Community: Leicestershire in the Fifteenth Century, c.1422-c.1485
List of maps Acknowledgments Abbreviations Introduction 1. Leicestershire: the county, the Church, the crown and the nobility 2. The gentry in the fifteenth century 3. Land and income 4. A county community and the politics of the shire 5. The gentry and local government, 1422-1485 6. Household, family and marriage 7. Life and death Conclusion Appendices Bibliography Index.
The Provincial Centre at Camulodunum: Towards an Historical Context
Present assessment of the provincial enclosure at Camulodunum, more particularly how far it can be compared to the standard picture of similar centres elsewhere, is inevitably constrained by the limited evidence at our disposal. With no numismatic sources to draw on and in the absence of a single record of the provincial priesthood — a striking void that calls for comment — documentary testimony is restricted to what can be made of two passages in the literary authorities. The first, a notorious sneer in Seneca's Apocolocyntosis (VIII.3), tells only that a temple of some sort was associated somehow with the emperor Claudius. The second text, an obscure allusion in Tacitus, is at first sight no more enlightening but, on closer analysis, the phrase templum Divo Claudio constitutum (Ann. xiv.31) yields the invaluable inference that the temple was to the deified, not the living Claudius; in which case construction must have been begun in a.d. 54 or later. Archaeological data throw no light on the origins of the temple or of the precinct in which it stood but exploration has steadily enlarged our knowledge of the site itself, and understanding of the remains has now reached the stage at which, for all its puzzling lacunae, the centre is as well known in some ways as the triple-tiered complex at Tarraco, the provincial enclave of Hispania Citerior. We have arrived at the point where the British sanctuary and its counterparts on the Continent can be mutually illuminating.