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Peter Coss, Hilton, Lordship and the Culture of the Gentry, Past & Present, Volume 195, Issue suppl_2, 2007, Pages 34–52, https://doi.org/10.1093/pastj/gtm020
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The history of the gentry was not one of Rodney Hilton's central concerns. In much of what he wrote—on the structure of society, on the constitution of estates, on lord–peasant relations, on towns in feudal society—the gentry tended to be subsumed within the broader, secular landowning class. This was so, partly because lesser families have left comparatively little in terms of private records compared to great landowners, both secular and ecclesiastical, but also because the structure and role of the gentry per se were not his prime interests. He was very much aware, however, of problems surrounding status: of the changing nature of knighthood, for example, of the issue of gentility, and of the question of social gradation, and he had things to say on the blurring of distinctions in the decades after the Black Death and on the specific problem of the franklin. On one occasion he spoke of ‘an old problem in English social history—the identification of the “gentry” ’.1
