 The Historian Margaret Hastings described FitzWalter as being of "good family and great possessions, but nonetheless a familiar racketeer type".Starr suggests that for many men of his generation, experience on the Scottish and then French fronts exacerbated a "natural appetite for aggression and intimidation".Essex gentry and their affinities had been at the forefront of Edward I's Gascon campaigns of the late-13th century, and by the early 14th century Essex society was a highly militarized one.