This is more than a family study, despite its title. Peter Coss's The Origins of the English Gentry has provided a new agenda for the study of the roots of a class that has dominated the rural life – and much else – of England for much of its post-Conquest history. In large measure the present volume is a development from that earlier book, tracing similar themes within a more localized context. Such a context is entirely appropriate to a central point of the book, that the gentry, while increasingly making their presence felt nationally, lived most usually, most profoundly, within the parishes and counties.

Coss takes the Multons of Frampton, in south Lincolnshire, as the focus of his study. They are chosen because their archive is relatively full, allowing us to glimpse most of those facets that characterized the activities of their class. However, while they are unusually well recorded, their story alone is inadequate to Coss's task, and so a wide range of evidence is drawn in from other comparable families. This, then, does not aspire to be a ‘micro-study’, employing ‘thick description’ to take us into the inner lives of its subjects – such a thing in any case being impossible for the medieval gentry – but nor is it a general study of the gentry across the realm as a whole: this, Coss has already done, of course. Instead, we have a family study that uses reasonable supposition based on evidence from elsewhere where the Multon archive falters, to develop a multi-faceted study of a lineage and its interests over a crucial hundred years. This period saw the ‘re-militarization’ of the gentry. This is strongly reflected in gentry culture, another central theme of this book. Chivalry provided many of the gentry's core values, and merged imperceptibly with devotional practice and the discourses of lordship and service. Coss adopts what he calls a ‘social and sociocultural’ approach, meaning that structures and processes provide a context for the analysis of an anthropologist's understanding of ‘culture’, ‘a way of life in its entirety’. This is pursued through the various arena of gentry life: from household, to estates, tenantry, to church and parish. The gentry's commercial, urban and literary interests are also addressed. Here, Coss demonstrates how important the written word was becoming to them. The gentry are shown to have been not an impervious caste, but a fluid class, open to recruitment from below and above, and prone to losses as members fell into the ranks of the ungentle or found promotion into the titled nobility. This is an imaginative, perceptive and sensitive study by a master in the field.