In recent years the study of local office-holding – and specifically, local office-holders – has acquired a particular currency among historians of the late medieval English gentry. Why does the identity of local office-holders matter? The subject has been seen as integral to the wider understanding of gentry society for a variety of reasons. First, and perhaps most pragmatically, historians seeking to identify the gentry within their particular shire have used participation in the administration of a county as one of the key qualifications for membership of the gentry along with other criteria such as wealth and landholding. In short, the meaning of gentility has been explored in both an administrative as well as tenurial context. Secondly, and more conceptually, office-holding has been viewed as central not only to the identification of individual members of the gentry, but to the evolution and definition of the gentry as a social class. In Peter Coss's groundbreaking study, The Origins of the English Gentry, pivotal to the formation of the gentry, a social phenomenon which he dates to the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries, was the arrival in the localities of an ‘explosion’ of royal commissions, relating to finance, politics, justice and war. These new local offices, of tax collector, knight of the shire, keeper of the peace and commissioner of array, were rapidly filled by knightly and, later, sub-knightly landholders.