This is the first scholarly history of the rise of the Townshends, who were to become the most famous landowning family in Norfolk. C. E. Moreton exploits to the full the rich family archives in order to tell the story of individuals such as Roger Townshend I, a prominent lawyer of the late fifteenth century, and his son, also Roger, a leading country gentleman. Dr Moreton traces the growth in the Townshends' wealth and power in the late Middle Ages, and sets them in their context as a major gentry family. Their lawsuits, their estates policy, and their sheep-farming activities reveal much about the nature of the gentry's relationship to land and its role in local society in late medieval and early Tudor England.