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The Gentry: The Rise and Fall of a Ruling Class (1976) online; O'Hart, John. The Irish And Anglo-Irish Landed Gentry, When Cromwell Came to Ireland: or, a Supplement to Irish Pedigrees (2 vols) (reprinted 2007) Sayer, M. J. English Nobility: The Gentry, the Heralds and the Continental Context (Norwich, 1979) Wallis, Patrick, and Cliff Webb.
The landed gentry, or the gentry (sometimes collectively known as the squirearchy), is a largely historical Irish and British social class of landowners who could live entirely from rental income, or at least had a country estate. It is the British element of the wider European class of gentry.
The distinction between the ranks of the major nobility (listed above) and the minor nobility, listed here, was not always a sharp one in all nations. But the precedence of the ranks of a baronet or a knight is quite generally accepted for where this distinction exists for most nations.
The notion of landed gentry in the United Kingdom and Ireland varied over time. [1] In Russian Empire landed nobles were called pomeshchiks, with the term literally translated as "estate owner". Junkers were the landed nobility of Prussia and eastern Germany. Landadel were the landed nobility of the Holy Roman Empire.
The British nobility is made up of the peerage and the gentry of the British Isles. Though the UK is today a constitutional monarchy with strong democratic elements, historically the British Isles were more predisposed towards aristocratic governance in which power was largely inherited and shared amongst a noble class.
There are often a variety of ranks within the noble class. Legal recognition of nobility has been much more common in monarchies, but nobility also existed in such regimes as the Dutch Republic (1581–1795), the Republic of Genoa (1005–1815), the Republic of Venice (697–1797), and the Old Swiss Confederacy (1300–1798), and remains part ...
The aristocracy [1] is historically associated with a "hereditary" or a "ruling" social class. In many states, the aristocracy included the upper class of people (aristocrats) with hereditary rank and titles. [2] In some, such as ancient Greece, ancient Rome, or India, aristocratic status came from belonging to a military class. It has also ...
(However, this is merely a matter of semantics; the gentry of England were roughly equivalent to lower nobility of other countries.) With the Partitions these restrictions were loosened and finally any commoner could buy or inherit land. This made the 20th-century Polish landed gentry consist mostly of hereditary nobles, but also of others.