It might be expected that, as the English colony in Ireland shared the same institutions of government and the same social organisation – at least in its origins – as the mother society, that it would also have had a class of landholder recognisably analogous to the English gentry. But historians of the lordship of Ireland have been notably reluctant to use the term. When Robin Frame speaks of Louth and Dublin being a ‘society of lesser noble, or “gentry”, families’, he is careful to ring the word around with inverted commas. Elsewhere he remarks that whether the lordship may be said to have had a gentry was one of the many unposed questions of Irish medieval historiography. Brendan Smith, who has produced two monographs on the sub-magnate landowning families of the medieval colony, studiously avoids using the term ‘gentry’ to describe the leading families of county Louth, preferring instead such constructions as ‘prominent Louth families’, ‘the political elite of late medieval Louth’, ‘the most important settlers in Louth’ and ‘families below the level of magnate’. In contrast, Steven Ellis, writing on Meath in the last decades of the fifteenth and the beginning of the sixteenth century, uses the term ‘gentry’ without any caveat. He is followed in this by Gerald Power, whose focus, however, is primarily on the sixteenth century. The essential ‘Englishness’ of Ireland under English rule is of course a central theme of Ellis’ work, so his application of English terminology to this English society is unsurprising. This paper seeks to determine whether the distinction implied by the term ‘gentry’ is significant and if so whether we can reasonably apply the term to the ‘settler elite’ of fifteenth-century English Ireland.

In 1984 a colloquium was held in Nottingham which discussed the lesser nobility of late medieval Europe. The contributors considered the distinctive features of the gentry landholders of England as a social class and whether this class formed a distinct type of lesser nobility; and if so whether other examples of this type could be identified elsewhere in Europe. The consensus reached was that, for a variety of reasons, none of the lesser nobilities of Europe outside England merited the title of ‘gentry’. The disqualifying factors varied in each polity, but they can be roughly summarised as follows.