Identity is a construct forged by people and in polities through a two-way interaction between pressures from above or outside and appreciation of ties established more locally. It is a subject essential to understanding the actions and lives of individuals and groups. Yet, paradoxically, identity emerges as intangible, ever-changing and ‘hardly ever totally knowable’. While historians can employ a variety of sources, including wills and manuals outlining proper behaviour, to tease out self- and group perceptions, assessing the way in which these influenced identities is no simple task. For those who study the later medieval gentry, the absence of personal correspondence and diaries, which perhaps contain the most eloquent statements of self-perceptions and communal loyalties, renders this difficult subject all the more challenging. As bloodless administrative documents provide scant evidence for such a multifaceted phenomenon, so gentry identity remains a vexing and highly contested subject.

Until the 1990s the prevailing orthodoxy among those working in medieval and early-modern local studies maintained that there was such a thing as the ‘county community’. Although there is no pithy definition of this entity, it assumes a range of solidarities across the county shaped by networks of kin, local government, parliamentary representation and so on. With each revolving around the county, interactions of this sort contributed to a marriage of gentry and county identity. In 1994, however, Christine Carpenter offered a substantial critique of this concept, instead suggesting a model based on ‘social network theory’: an analysis of the relative strength and density of links between different members of the gentry, nobility and agents, such as lawyers. Inviting us to believe that for hundreds of years the shire stood unchallenged, all but unchanging and largely self-contained, the county model undoubtedly needed nuancing. Since it was through the shire structure that the Crown governed England, it was naturally the case that shires figured prominently in all royal administrative documents. Yet despite this, the county did not merit total destruction. It seems that Christine Carpenter's reasoning for utterly abandoning the idea of the county rested upon her work on Warwickshire, a fissiparous shire with no defined natural borders and a powerful resident magnate. It needs to be stressed that Warwickshire constituted a by no means typical county, if such a thing existed.