The purpose of this chapter is to discover the composition of the political classes in the localities: those who mattered, whose interests, however indirectly expressed, had to be taken into account by local nobility and ultimately by the king. There are immediate problems of definition in deciding which landowners were not members of the nobility, and indeed in the use of the word ‘nobility’ itself. As far as the first is concerned, the development of the concept of parliamentary peerage during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries provides firmer dividing lines than existed before. Even so, there were men like Ralph Boteller, later Lord Sudeley, and the Ferrers of Chartley, who came of a lineage that could be claimed to qualify them for the peerage, or had married into one, who were not reckoned to be peers unless specially created. For the purposes of this study they have nevertheless been counted as nobility, since family history, lands, lifestyles and connections clearly put them with the peerage. Whether there were in fact real differences in these respects between nobility and gentry is an important question, and one to which an answer will be attempted at the end of the first section of this study. Whether ‘nobility’ should be used as a synonym for the peerage is another matter. McFarlane, following contemporary practice, quite rightly referred to the entire ruling class as the ‘noblesse', although in effect his book on the nobility was almost exclusively about the peerage. The terms used in this study, although mildly anachronistic, are designed primarily to avoid confusion.