Page:The Ancestor Number 1.djvu/101

 THE ANCESTOR 6i manieres de gentils gentz desouth Vestat de chivaler} In 1376, a method is laid down for dealing with the tattered hordes of beggars, who infested the highways and pretended to be Gentils et Hommes d'^armes ou Archers^ fallen to decay in the wars.^ In 138 1, a pardon is granted to the Seigneurs^ Gentils et autres^ who had compromised themselves during the insurrection of villeins, and had slain divers persons without process of law.^ In 1405-6 and again in 1429, we meet with the phrase les gentils et autres gents du roiaume} Nothing then would appear to be more clearly established than the existence, from the twelfth century onwards, of a class of country gentlemen which included knights and esquires, and held an intermediate position between the barons and the yeomanry. This is the accepted theory of medieval classes, stated for us in the first instance by the great writers whom I have already named, and received without question by the new school of historians as well as by the old ; for Denton explains the word ' gentleman ' as indicating in the fourteenth century 'one who lived on the rental of his lands,' ^ and Trevelyan in his Age of Wycliffe ^ deals at some length with the ' social position and political policy of the gentry,' and with the which has always held the field in English literature. Shake- speare in one of his plays ^ introduces a ' gentleman ' of the reign of King John ; Scott has much to say in Ivanhoe con- cerning the yeomanry of the twelfth century ; and indeed there is hardly a modern poem or romance dealing with Plantagenet or Norman times in which country gentlemen or yeomen do not play a prominent part. How presumptuous therefore must the reader think me, when, in view of the facts and authorities already cited, I ask him to consider the possibility that our poets, our novelists, and our historians one and all have been at fault ! I can only protest that I yield to no man in respect and admiration for Stubbs and Freeman, Hallam and Macaulay, but even Homer sometimes nods. How often in the light of modern research have the most familiar facts of history proved to be fictions ; how largely error still lingers in pages which aim at nothing but 1 ^tat. i. 380. 2 ^(^{^ ^^2. 3 Ibid. iii. 103 a. * ^tat. ii. 157, 243. ^ England in the Fifteenth Centuty, p. 110, note. ^ p. 66. King John, Act i, Scene i : * Your faithful servant I, a gentleman born in Northamptonshire, and eldest son, as I suppose, to Robert Falconbridge.'
 * relation of the country gentlemen to the nobles.' It is a theory