MIDDLE CLASSES

When Henry VIII’s councillor Richard Rich and two other intensely able bureaucrats were compiling the regulations for the King’s School Canterbury in 1540, they proposed that only the sons of gentlemen should be admitted. Archbishop Thomas Cranmer disagreed: “God had given talents to all kinds of people indifferently”, and anyway: “None of us were gentlemen born but had our beginning from a low and base parentage and, through the benefit of learning and other civil knowledge for the most part, all gentle ascend to their estate”. Here we already see meritocracy rearing her pretty head, but we see something else too. For only by stretching it could Cranmer call his parentage low and base. His father was an esquire, proud of his aristocratic ancestors, and Thomas himself was fast-tracked for upward mobility, being crammed in hawking, hunting and classical learning and sent to Jesus College, Cambridge, at the age of fourteen. This is in fact an early example of the Hurd Instinct, in which the speaker exaggerates the lowliness of his origins, in order to gain a political advantage (“my father was a tenant farmer” – the Rt Hon. Douglas Hurd, 1990). Perhaps only in England can this pastime develop into a competitive sport (cf. Monty Python), suggesting the fluidity, sensitivity and endless fascination of the topic in this country.
The Middle Class: A history by Lawrence James is an enchanting compendium of the games the English play, and the anxieties, frictions and resentments engendered in the pursuit of status. Chaucer’s Wife of Bath insists on precedence over her neighbours as she walks up the aisle to receive Communion. James does not make quite enough of Chaucer’s own social ascent, remarking merely that “he was the son of a London vintner who had been attached to the household of a royal duchess”; but Chaucer’s wife’s sister became John of Gaunt’s third wife, which must have helped Chaucer’s son Thomas on his way to becoming Speaker of the House of Commons and to a splendid tomb in Ewelme Church, next to the alabaster effigy of Thomas’s daughter, Alice Duchess of Suffolk. Indeed, it is hard to think of any surviving documents or life stories of the late medieval and early modern period which do not bear witness to the porosity of English society. The Paston Letters, for example, show how the Pastons became judges and substantial landowners by the late fifteenth century, but William Paston’s father, Clement, was still remembered in Norfolk as “a good plain husbandman who rode to the mill on the bare horseback with his corn under him”, and who might even have been a serf. Despite this, Clement’s grandson John managed to persuade Edward IV’s Council that the Pastons were “descended lineally of worshipful blood since the Conquest”.
Nor was there ever a time when the already-arrived didn’t resent the parvenus, those merchants and moneyed men who accounted themselves the equals of nobility, and, worse still, the rich yeoman’s son who “must skip into his velvet breeches and silken doublet and, getting to be admitted into some Inn of Court, must ever scorn to be called other than gentleman”. The fifteenth century, like the late twentieth century, suffered an explosion of lawyers and financial advisers which blasted a path for the lad of parts into the upper echelons – and provoked the usual complaints of vulgarity and arrogance. Dr Johnson complained, of City men who had retired to Twickenham, that “they had lost the civility of tradesmen without acquiring the manners of gentlemen”. Johnson’s Dictionary claimed, rather prematurely I fancy, that the definition of “gentleman” as meaning “man of birth” was “out of use”, the term now indicating “a man raised above the vulgar by his character and post”. Those aspiring to this rank needed to acquire habits which were “genteel”, that is, polished and refined. Surtees’s Mr Jorrocks, a retired grocer taking to hunting, was adjured by his wife to abandon his “low-life stable conversation in the home”, but there were some sacrifices he would not make. He spurned iced champagne, saying, “I haven’t got so advanced in gentility to like my wine froze”. But even the most painstakingly acquired skills of equitation and elocution could not appease the gratin, who felt the hot breath of the middle classes on their necks. As Bacon pointed out: “Men of noble birth are noted to be envious towards new men when they rise. For the distance is altered; and it is like a deceit of eye, that when others come on, they think themselves go back”. The heraldic pretensions and the conspicuous expenditure of the nouveaux have never ceased to be a staple of English comedy. James I remarked, when told that the Lumleys of Co. Durham traced their ancestors back to Adam, “I didna ken Adam’s name was Lumley”.