350 The Period of Constitution Making
which carried with it the social privilege of wearing coat-
armour, a practice which arose in the twelfth century.1
The characteristic member of the class of gentry was
the knight. But the younger sons of a knight might
never attain to knighthood either in tenure or title.
Title is mentioned, for there were knights—often those
knighted on the field of battle—who were not holders of
the knight's fee; on the other hand, there were those
who possessed knight's fees who had never been dubbed
knights. The divorce between tenure and status2 showed
Itself everywhere, and intermarriage might easily occur
between gentle and simple; notwithstanding the use of
coat-armour the line between the gentry and the non-
noble freemen was often blurred, and there was a sharper
line of demarcation between the greater and lesser nobles.
Upon the continent, there was a great gulf between the
pettiest noble and the class below; in England, there was
a narrower chasm at this point with many means of
crossing.
The sources of a substantial middle class in England
(without taking into account the borough population)
may now be summarised: a non-noble, free class survived
the Anglo-Saxon period; the Conquest resulted in making
the status of a portion of that class more distinctly free;
there were many small nobles after the Conquest; the
masterful post-Conquest sovereigns deprived these nobles
of their important feudal traits, made them landlords in
close touch with their localities and the class below;
royalty also allowed no legal advantages to the nobles
as a whole, but made a small class of hereditary coun-
sellors a nobility in a special sense, and finally the only
nobility; the gentry, thus lacking the name and dis-
tinguishing marks of a nobility, more readily approached
1 It must not be supposed, of course, that the kings contributed to this
change with the conscious intent of fashioning a unique nobility in Eng-
land; they acted merely as it suited their purposes to deal from time to
time with this important part of their population. The thing was done
before it was understood what was done.
* See above, p. 95.