The great households of the nobility remained basic units of economic and political power in the late fourteenth century; the Royal household was also still to a large extent synonymous with the state. Social status was grounded firmly in the ideology of the household, and as this study sets out to prove this political economy and its ideology is reflected absolutely in the literary culture of the period. Using Gower's Confessio Amantis as a case study Elliot Kendall shows how this ideology of power based on the household is a dominant theme throughout, albeit displaying something of a siege mentality in the wake of the upheavals of the Black Death and Peasants Revolt.