It is with social and political networks that the artificiality of the division between the structural and the chronological becomes most apparent. Social networks could well have been dealt with in the first section of this study, since they are likely to owe much to prevailing mores and social habits. They have however been placed deliberately in the part of the work that deals with more volatile aspects of the county's history because they were inseparable from political affiliations and therefore subject to the same kind of influences and responsive in the same way to changes in the political climate. Whether there were permanent networks amongst the gentry which outlived or even helped to mould particular power structures is a particularly important question, but it cannot be answered except within a chronological context; to presuppose the existence of such relationships is to evade the question all together.

The statement that social and political relationships were inseparable perhaps requires some justification. In trying to understand what ties of this kind meant to fifteenth-century landowners and therefore what governed their choice of associates, the work of sociologists and anthropologists can afford considerable help, not because it offers convenient reach-me-down rules but because it encourages the historian to stand back and consider the role of relationships of this sort within any society. The informal, non-institutional relationships found in all societies - relationships which may indeed coalesce around a formal institution, like a government department or a university - perform rather different functions at different times and within different contexts. In what has been termed a ‘primitive government’ they assume a very large role in both public and private life, to the point where trying to separate the public from the private is not only impossible but unreal.