A possible hazard facing the historian who studies the gentry within the boundaries of a single shire is that the county itself may assume a greater significance in his thinking than it in fact possessed for the knights and esquires of the time. To express the problem another way, we may be tempted to assume that beyond the confines of their households and manors, the gentry saw themselves as part of a wider shire community. Yielding to such temptation is not entirely a self-indulgence, for the concept of a shire community was by no means foreign to contemporaries in the fifteenth century. From the point of view of the central government, the county was an administrative unit.

In most cases, each of these units had its own sheriff. Admittedly, the sheriff was appointed by the king and accountable at the Exchequer but he was also drawn from the local community and, therefore, was sensitive to its needs. Even in those instances where two counties shared a sheriff, each had its own shire court to which members of the community owed suit. As the shire court's judicial function waned, local men still retained control over the administration of justice in their counties by being appointed to commissions of the peace. But the shire court continued to have a political rôle. Here, the county came together to receive information about government policy and to elect their representatives who would sit in parliament pro communitate comitatus.