Knight service and noblemen's estates in Denmark

Abstract

The debate about the English gentry began in the 1940s in an attempt to explain the puritan revolution, the Civil Wars and the tumultuous course of the 1640s. The debate increasingly focused on the social and economic rise or decline of different sections of the aristocracy, with arguments concentrating at first upon the distribution of manorial ownership. R. H. Tawney relied upon the ‘counting of manors’, a method much criticised subsequently.