The gentry: story of the English. By Adam Nicolson.

Adam Nicolson has written many books on history and the countryside, including two about his family's properties at opposite ends of the British Isles, Sissinghurst Castle in Kent and the Shiant Isles in the Outer Hebrides. Now he has turned his attention to the class to which his family can be said to belong. His grandmother, Vita Sackville-West, was unashamedly a member of the aristocracy but Mr Nicolson states that the gentry has always been composed of “Gentle Ungentles”, younger sons and daughters of old families who have declined into the gentry, and “Ungentle Gentles”, people of more humble origin who through their ability and achievements have advanced up the social ladder.

Today the term “gentry” in Britain evokes “the introductory chat at an upper-middle-class dinner party—how did you get here, who do you know, how is Aletheia?” It suggests a cosy, genteel, exclusive and somewhat smug world in which background and family are deemed more important than individual qualities. It is also often preceded by the word “landed”. The launch of “Burke's Landed Gentry”, an encyclopedic tome first published in 1826, is partly responsible for this (though the ownership of land ceased to be a requirement for a family to appear in the book as long ago as the 1920s). But the principal reason is that the story of the gentry is all “about Land”.

Mr Nicolson has taken 12 families who are scattered all over England (strictly speaking, one is in Wales), and, using letters, diaries and legal documents, told their stories at a particular date and crisis in their existence. He has produced a wonderful portrait of England and the families that were its bedrock. The tale begins 600 years ago with the Plumptons, caught up in the Wars of the Roses, and concludes with the Cliffords, who have owned and farmed the same corner of Gloucestershire for almost 1,000 years. Whereas the core values of grace, enterprise and chivalry were crucial to the gentry's idea of themselves, Mr Nicolson makes it clear that money and conflict were as important as blood and family. The gentry were a flexible class and lived a life of struggle and competition. There was no certainty. Survival was what mattered and there was much hedging of bets.

At its best the gentry's idea of goodness and civilisation was attached to a particular place and an “interfolding of people, land, animals, food, housing and hospitality”. A sense of order, sociability and well-being was expressed through landscape. Everything depended on an underpinning of money and a connection with London and Westminster was generally essential to prosperity. Many of the gentry were members of the House of Commons. Survival was often contingent on being on the “right” side during the Wars of the Roses, at the time of the Reformation, through the upheavals of the 17th century. In the 1940s Sir Richard Acland, a Christian socialist, made over the bulk of his large estate in Devon to the National Trust, but he was an exception. Not everyone was as ruthless as Henry Lascelles, who in the 1700s amassed a fortune through sugar plantations in Barbados and the exploitation of African slaves; but in general the story is of “the political and economic dominance of a…cannily self-renewing class”.

In tracing the rise and fall of this ruling class, Mr Nicolson has some fascinating stories to tell, and he tells them well, not least that of the Capels, who were forced by penury to live abroad and found themselves in Brussels on the eve of the battle of Waterloo. He concludes that competition, unkindness and dominance always underlay the beautiful sense of community which the gentry world embodied. But that is life: it is “a struggle and community is political”.