A Gentry Community: Leicestershire in the Fifteenth Century, c. 1422-c. 1485.

A Gentry Community: Leicestershire in the Fifteenth Century, c.1422-c.1485. By Eric Acheson (New York, Cambridge University Press, 1993) 290 pp. $59.95

This book is a fine piece of historical research that addresses important questions in late-medieval English history. Acheson demonstrates that the Leicestershire gentry was a flexible, independent group that responded creatively to the challenges of political upheaval and economic change. At the same time, however, the book is limited in scope and makes no claims to interdisciplinary significance or methodological innovation. Indeed, the author invokes McFarlane's half-century old call for research on the gentry to …