Knights and Merchants: Trade, Politics and the Gentry in Late Medieval England

Nightingale, Pamela. "Knights and Merchants: Trade, Politics and the Gentry in Late Medieval England," Past and Present 169. Nov. 2000. 36-62.

This article was pretty dry to read and had a lot of really in-depth examples that weren't particularly helpful. It did give me a new way of thinking about social class during the medieval period though. Generally, I think of medieval era social classes as being pretty stratified, but this article argues that there was some mixing within the social classes of knight/gentry and merchants for tax and other money purposes. When I think about this in terms of Chaucer, I find this extremely interesting, since this aspect of society doesn't seem to appear in The Canterbury Tales at all, especially when looking at the pilgrims of the knight and the merchant. They seem like two completely different social classes who don't mix at all, which is why I found this article so interesting. Here are some of the main points:

-Trade and gentility in Chaucer don’t mix and there is a long tradition in English society that they don’t mix.

-Historically, the king generally didn’t seem to consider the fact that merchants and landowners had interests in common since it treated them as separate political groups.

-New evidence is coming to light that show that knights at the end of the 13^th century were taking an active part in trade, starting small and then growing over the course of the century although there is a possibility that the knights were only acting as agents of professional urban merchants.

-In the 1330s many knights and gentry began describing themselves as merchants, regardless of the effects that this might have on their social standing. We should be careful about assuming that these knightly merchants were actually involved in trade though… many times it was done for tax purposes or property purposes

-Many knights had other positions in society besides just knight – they often held prominent local offices or represented established families that had traditionally held these offices