Gentry
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Gentry is a term meaning one thing in the UK: landed gentry. In Europe and the United States, gentry has a wide meaning, ranging from those of noble background to those of good family (i.e. "gentle" birth). Before the Industrial Revolution, the gentry were located between the yeomanry and the Peerage, and were traditionally considered lesser aristocracy if they did not bear arms, or as the lesser nobility if the family was armigerous. Unlike yeomen, the gentry did not work the land themselves; instead, they hired tenant farmers.
In English history, landed gentry were the smaller landowners, and generally had no titles apart from Knighthoods and Baronetcies. Baronets are something of an exception, since they had hereditary titles but, not being members of the Peerage, were also considered of the gentry or lesser nobility. The landed gentry played an important role in the English Civil War of the seventeenth century. The term is still occasionally employed, for example, by the publishers of Burke's Landed Gentry, [1] though they explain that their continued use of that term is elastic and stems, in part, from the adoption of that short title for a series first entitled "Burke's Commoners" (as opposed to Burke's Peerage and Baronetage). The term county family is commonly deemed to be co-terminous with the terms gentry and landed gentry. See Walford's County Families and gentleman.
In some European countries such as Poland, a tenth of the population corresponded to the gentry; in Portugal the local gentry, the fidalgos, were also numerous.
The Chinese gentry has a specific meaning and refers to the shen-shi or the class of landowners that had passed the bureaucratic examinations. They rose to power during the Tang dynasty when meritocracy triumphed over the nine-rank system which favored the Chinese nobility. The gentry were retired scholar-officials and their descendents who lived in large landed estates due to Confucianism's affinity to agriculture and hostility to commerce.
In American society, gentry is sometimes taken to refer loosely to a highly educated professional upper-middle class, though this is inaccurate sociological terminology as this group usually lacks the aristocratic roots and values of true gentry. This inaccurate sense of the term is what is often perjoratively referred to in the use of the term gentrification, a term that would more accurately be called bourgeoisification. The Antebellum Southern planters were often younger sons of landed British families and continued the high culture of the British gentry in rural Virginia and in such cities as Charleston, South Carolina, where, in addition to tenant farmers and indentured servants, they also employed chattel slavery. In the north, the gentry included those offshoots of British gentry families that provided the leadership for the establishment of such cities as Boston, Massachusetts, and such institutions as Harvard and Yale Universities. Attitudes stemming from the phenomenon of this historic American gentry inform the current use of the term in U.S. society, and it is still loosely applied to people from old-monied and landed families in the U.S. The epitome of this type of family in the United States is the Bush family, which is highly educated, well connected, with a high degree of wealth, and arguably the most powerful family in the United States. They are directly descended from British Gentry and are even direct distant relations of many of the British Peerage.
[edit] Notes
- ^ "The History of Burke's Landed Gentry" (genealogy book), Burke's Peerage & Gentry, 2005, Scotland, United Kingdom, webpage: Burkes-Peerage-Scot15.
[edit] References
- Burke's Landed Gentry (genealogy book), John Burke family et al., 1826, 1898, United Kingdom.
