The most direct and least complicated introduction to the rural will-writing community of the late fourteenth and fifteenth centuries is through the gentry, the lesser land-owning class which consisted of knights, esquires and gentlemen. In the Deanery, many gentry names become familiar quickly and easily, for their wills are among the earliest to have survived, and, in the parish churches, visual and identifiable evidence of their investment in remembrance often remains. Despite the intervening Black Death, at the end of the fourteenth century there were still many families owning land or living in the Deanery parishes which had appeared in the Nomina Villarum,a document certifying how many hundreds there were, how many boroughs, cities, counties, and who the lords were in 1316; and, during the 1380s, the gentry class expanded to embrace those with the new appellation of ‘gentleman'. During the fifteenth century, it becomes apparent that some families were steadily diluted as heiresses married and moved away from the area, taking their land holdings to be melded into larger units elsewhere. Deanery families whose names are lost to us in this period include the Cravens of Henham, the Micklefields of Blyford, the Argenteins of Halesworth, the Norwiches from Yoxford and the Banyards of Spexhall, all well known names; but just as wills and general documentation became more prolific around 1450, these families petered out.