‘Gentry were always rising; it is their habit.’ So wrote Sir James Holt, in a chapter entitled ‘The Northern Knights’, in his seminal work The Northerners. But why did the gentry ‘rise’? And why, contrary to Holt's dictum, did some of them ‘fall’? And – as in the case of the Strother family – why did some of them ‘rise’, and then stop ‘rising’? The driving forces and mechanisms of social mobility have proved a subject of abiding interest to historians of the political society of late medieval England. Social mobility, whether upwards or downwards, reveals much about the structure and functioning of that society, providing a measure of its permeability and flexibility.

The Strothers offer an intriguing case study of social mobility in the northern-most county of England. The family was strikingly prominent in the administration and political society of Northumberland in the mid fourteenth century – though they had first established themselves as landowners only in the reign of Edward II. Certainly, the family surname (a northern English word meaning ‘marsh’) hardly suggests an elevated origin, yet in just two generations the Strothers rose to the highest ranks of the county gentry, establishing two landed lineages. Conversely, however, the Strothers also provide an example of, if not quite downward social mobility, then social stagnation. Although both lineages retained their lands more or less intact, neither preserved the social eminence enjoyed by their founding fathers.

The first of the family to leave a trace in the records was William del Strother. A William de Strother served as a man-at-arms in the English garrison of Kirkintilloch castle, near Glasgow, in 1302–4, and was at the siege of Stirling castle in the summer of 1304. There is no reason to doubt that this was the same man as the William del Strother who, in about 1316, jointly with his wife acquired from Walter Corbet a life grant of the manor of Lanton in Glendale, Northumberland, some ten miles to the south-east of Coldstream. Whoever this William was, he does appear to have had his own armorial seal, which, along with his service as a man-at-arms, suggests a degree of wealth and status.

IN 1297, the twenty-fifth year of the reign of Edward I, England teetered on the cliff-edge of civil war. Or such is the modern historiographical consensus. Typical are the comments of Michael Prestwich (1988), who refers to ‘near civil war’; Marc Morris (2005): ‘civil war seemed imminent and inevitable’; Paul Brand (2005), who posits ‘the real danger of civil war’; and Andrew M. Spencer (2013) who alludes to ‘a movement that brought England close to civil war’. And this is not a recent development in the historiography of Edward I's reign; in 1875, for instance, William Stubbs, that nonpareil of Whig historians, opined that military forces raised to support the barons ‘gave to the whole proceeding the appearance of a civil war’. But has the danger of civil war in England in 1297 been over-stated?

Such arguments are certainly not implausible: all previous kings of England had faced armed resistance from within the realm at some point during their reign. During the preceding century, the reigns of John (Edward's grandfather) and Henry III (Edward's father) had seen political crises which had ended in full-scale war between the king and his English opponents – with Edward himself a major player in the latter conflict. Similar hostilities would occur in the reign of his son, Edward II. And while royal attitudes to rebellion and treason were hardening in England (and across Western Christendom generally), the notion that a king's subjects had the right to resort to armed force to oppose him, if he proved incorrigibly ill-counselled or tyrannical, was still widely accepted among the English political classes. So why, then, in 1297, did acute political crisis not escalate to armed conflict?

The course of events is well known, having been clearly elucidated by a number of historians. In broad outline, political controversy began in January, with the refusal of the clergy to pay the subsidy of a fifth demanded from them at parliament in the previous November, on the grounds of the recently issued papal bull Clericis laicos, prohibiting the payment of taxes by the Church to secular authorities. Lay opposition erupted in February, at the parliament at Salisbury, where Edward's demands for military service in Gascony met with refusal, led by Roger Bigod, earl of Norfolk, the hereditary marshal of the king's army.

WHILE Edward's place among the more successful of England's medieval monarchs has remained secure since the above lines were penned in the aftermath of his death in 1307, his reputation among scholars of medieval England has to some extent waxed and waned. Bishop Stubbs, the leading English medieval historian of the late nineteenth century, had no doubt of Edward's greatness; and for the ‘Whig’ school of history, his reign represented the pinnacle of English constitutional achievement in the Middle Ages (a characterisation accurately skewered by Sellar and Yeatman's chapter on Edward, headed ‘A Strong King’). Edward's work, Stubbs argued:

Edward's reputation remained high in the early twentieth century, though Frederick Tout was less forgiving of the king's autocratic tendencies than was Stubbs.5 His standing reached its zenith, however, under the admiring gaze of Maurice Powicke, who had been taught by Tout in Manchester before working alongside him there in the 1920s, though it was during his time in Oxford that he began to write extensively on the thirteenth century. Both Henry III and the Lord Edward (1947) and The Thirteenth Century (1953) saw Powicke describe Edward in glowing terms:

On 10 March 1322 Edward II stood at the head of an army at Burton, by the river Trent. Confronting him were forces led by Thomas, earl of Lancaster, and Humphrey de Bohun, earl of Hereford, whose hostile intent was signified by the flying of their banners. According to the lively account of the Gesta Edwardi de Carnarvan, Edward wanted to raise his own royal banner, as battle was imminent. However, Hugh Despenser the younger dismounted from his warhorse and prostrated himself before his king, begging him:

As this speech put into Despenser's mouth suggests, the decision as to whether or not to unfurl the king's banners was of great import, for, in medieval law, the raising of banners signified the legal existence of a state of war – and so, for a leader to unfurl his banners at the head of an army amounted to a declaration of war. Conversely, Edward's decision not to unfurl the royal banner indicated that – as far as the Crown was concerned – the fighting against Lancaster did not legally constitute a state of war.

This scene marked the final escalation of an acute political crisis occasioned by the rapid rise to overweening prominence of the new royal favourite, Hugh Despenser the younger, alongside his like-named father, a longstanding supporter of the king. In May 1321, incensed by the predatory acquisitiveness of the younger Despenser, which was aided and abetted by the king, a number of English magnates had mounted a series of co-ordinated armed attacks on the Despensers’ lands, centring on the Welsh Marches.

The Durham Liber Vitae is a manuscript listing the names of those admitted to the confraternity of the Cathedral Priory of Durham, and its predecessors at Lindisfarne and Chester le Street. The first entries are from the ninth century, and few date from after 1300. Among those few is a group of eighteen names, in a fourteenth-century hand, headed by that of Sir Henry de Beaumont. Comparison with other evidence suggests the names are those of part of his military retinue, probably dating to 1314; if so, it is likely that the names commemorate a pilgrimage made by Beaumont and some of his retainers to the cathedral, and its relics of St Cuthbert, on their way to serve under arms in Scotland. Any spiritual benison they might have gained from the exercise does not, however, appear to have translated into worldly advantage, for at least four of those named were subsequently captured at the catastrophic English defeat at Bannockburn.

Sir Henry de Beaumont had an eventful and often contentious career. A foreign adventurer, who made good through a career of continuous military service, in the face of repeated political controversy, he provides an interesting case-study for the investigation of military retinues. A great deal of work has been done on the recruitment and composition of such retinues and their stability, or lack thereof (notably, of course, by Andrew Ayton). However, while the dynamics of a military retinue were, at least in part, the dynamics of lordship, it is has rarely been possible to trace the personal relationships which underpin them. In Sir Henry de Beaumont's case, however, we are unusually well informed, because one of his retainers was the Northumbrian Sir Thomas Gray. And Gray's like-named son was the author of a chronicle, the Scalacronica, composed in the late 1350s, which includes some fascinating details of the elder Gray's relationship with Beaumont, presumably derived from Gray's own testimony.

Born circa 1280, Beaumont was a Frenchman, the younger son of Louis de Brienne, Vicomte de Beaumont-au-Maine, and a relative of both Edward I's queen, Eleanor of Castile, and Edward II's queen, Isabella of France. Beaumont's sister, Isabella, married the English baron John de Vescy, one of Edward I's close associates; and Beaumont himself became a knight of Edward's household in 1297.