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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 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.
(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.
The landed nobility show noblesse oblige, they have duty to fulfill their social responsibility. Their character depends on the country. 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".
Župan, noble and administrative title used in several states in Central and Southeastern Europe between the 7th century and the 21st century. Ispán, leader of a castle district (a fortress and the royal lands attached to it) in the Kingdom of Hungary from the early 11th century.
From the ancient Greeks, the term passed to the European Middle Ages for a similar hereditary class of military leaders, often referred to as the nobility. As in Greece, this was a class of privileged men and women whose familial connections to the regional armies allowed them to present themselves as the most "noble" or "best" of society.
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.
Nobility came to be associated with social rather than legal privilege, expressed in a general expectation of deference from those of lower rank. By the 21st century even that deference had become increasingly minimized. In general, the present nobility present in the European monarchies has no more privileges than the citizens decorated in ...