The fact still remains — and Louis XI and Diego de Valera were not the only ones to be aware of it — that every European society had a distinct nobility with specific characteristics. The Polish nobility was not that of Germany, nor was that of France Italian. One might even question the very existence of a single, uniform nobility within the Empire or on the Italian peninsula.
The matter of actual numbers of nobles is fundamental, and must be considered first. It does not seem possible to suggest percentages, even approximate ones, for all the countries of Europe; available figures are incomplete and too imprecise to enable one to discern possible trends in this area in the fifteenth century. In France, at the end of the Middle Ages, the noble class, the ‘peuple des nobles’ as one contemporary termed it, from the princes of the blood to the most unpretentious squires and mere gentlemen, accounted for between 1.5 per cent and 2 per cent of the total population, although this masked considerable regional differences: Brittany, in particular, numbered some 9,000 noble families which, at a reckoning of five individuals per family, gives 45,000 souls, or some 3 per cent of a population of about 1,500,000. Proportions of 4 per cent cannot be discounted in Dauphine and Savoy, for example, whereas elsewhere, in the region around Chartres, numbers would scarcely reach 1 per cent.
In England, a rather different picture emerges. About 1500, the nobility in the strict sense of the word (‘peers of the realm’ summoned to sit in parliament as ‘lords temporal’), formed a group of sixty peers, in effect sixty families. Immediately below them were found the gentry (generosi) who, although claiming to belong both culturally and socially to the noble class in its broadest sense, by statutory definition were no longer deemed noble at the end of the fifteenth century. At a rough estimate this group comprised some 500 knights, about 800 esquires (constituting the squirearchy) and 5 ,000 gentlemen. Next in order descending the social scale were the yeomen, who cannot be included in the noble class, however loosely defined. Accordingly, it can be proposed that the noble class, in the broadest sense of the term, would have amounted to 30,000 individuals, which, assuming a total population of 2,500,000, is a proportion of only 1.2 per cent.
Castile, about the year 1500, had an estimated population of 5,000,000 people. According to contemporary sources nobles of all ranks (grandes and titulos, caballeros, hidalgos, donzellos and escuderos) would account for one sixth (16.6 per cent) of this total. Most historians consider this figure far too high: some suggest lowering it to 4 per cent; others, probably nearer the mark, to at least 10 per cent, that is 500,000 individuals or 100,000 families, with, as in France, strong regional variations, the Asturias, Leon and the region of Burgos providing more than half the hidalgos, who were uncommon in the dioceses of Cordova and Seville where, by contrast, town-dwelling caballeros were established. The proportion for the kingdom of Navarre may have risen to 15 per cent, while, somewhat unexpectedly, the proportion in Aragon may have been as low as 1.5 or 2 per cent.
In Scandinavia we have an example of a region where the nobility took a long time to become established, although, as it happens, the fifteenth century was an important phase in its evolution. Around 1500, in a country with a population of 300,000, there were some 300 noble families in Norway; making the noble families 0.5 per cent of the total population. In neighbouring Denmark, where such families numbered between 250 and 300 — of which a score or so belonged to the higher nobility — they constituted 0.25 per cent of a population of about 500,000. In short, these societies clearly were not essentially feudal in character; the well-to-do peasantry was more important.
Conversely in Poland, Hungary and Bohemia nobles were numerous: 2,000 noble families, it is claimed, in Bohemia; a population 5 per cent noble in Hungary; in Poland, not, as has been long accepted, 10—15 per cent noble, but rather between 3 and 5 per cent, yet a still far from negligible proportion of the population.
Finally, some 2,000 noble families have been identified in Scotland, constituting, at 10,000 individuals, some 5 per cent of the population, a significantly high proportion for a poor country, which would explain, among other things, the importance and persistence of emigration to France for military service.
The matter of percentages is of prime historical importance. A very small noble class may have meant a measure of affluence for the ‘happy few’, and less of a drain on production, particularly agricultural production, but more certainly it meant that noble dominance of society as a whole was weak, that noble brilliance was toned down. Conversely, a superfluity of nobles inevitably brought poverty in its wake. For, fundamental to the very concept of nobility, was the idea that it demanded, at the very least, a comfortable way of life.
The existence of noble classes of varying importance within different European societies is explained, first and foremost, by the long-term history of these societies, and, vitally, by its outcome. Being a noble in a parish of a hundred hearths with ten to fifteen other noble families was not the same as being the sole person with a claim to this status. In the latter case the noble was usually the lord (hence the use of ‘de’, ‘von’, or, in Poland, the suffix -ski or -cki), for whom a manorial pew might be reserved in the church whose stained-glass windows portrayed his armorial bearings.