15 Facts About Landed gentry

Landed gentry, or the gentry, is a largely historical British social class of landowners who could live entirely from rental income, or at least had a country estate.

Many Landed gentry were close relatives of peers, and it was not uncommon for Landed gentry to marry into peerage.

Typically the Landed gentry farmed some of their land, as well as exploiting timber, minerals such as coal, and owning mills and other sources of income, but leased most of the land to tenant farmers.

Many heads of families had careers in politics or the military, and the younger sons of the Landed gentry provided a high proportion of the clergy, military officers, and lawyers.

Decline of the Landed gentry largely stemmed from the 1870s agricultural depression; however, there are still many hereditary Landed gentry in the UK to this day.

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Designation landed gentry originally referred exclusively to members of the upper class who were landlords but commoners in the British sense—that is, they did not hold peerages—but usage became more fluid over time.

Once identical, eventually nobility and landed gentry became complementary, in the sense that their definitions began to fill in parts of what the other lacked.

The historical term Landed gentry by itself, so Peter Coss argues, is a construct that historians have applied loosely to rather different societies.

The phrase landed gentry referred in particular to the untitled members of the landowning upper class.

Primary meaning of landed gentry encompasses those members of the land-owning classes who are not members of the peerage.

Landed gentry is sometimes described as a small landowner, a farmer of the middle classes.

David Cannadine wrote that the gentry's lack of titles "did not matter, for it was obvious to contemporaries that the landed gentry were all for practical purposes the equivalent of continental nobles, with their hereditary estates, their leisured lifestyle, their social pre-eminence, and their armorial bearings".

Novelist Jane Austen, whose family were not quite members of the landed gentry class, summarised the appeal of these works, particularly for those included in them:.

Burke's Landed Gentry has appeared at regular intervals throughout the 19th and 20th centuries, driven, in the 19th century, principally by the energy and readable style of the founder's son and successor as editor, Sir John Bernard Burke .

Popularity of Burke's Landed Gentry gave currency to the expression Landed Gentry as a description of the untitled upper classes in England .