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Further Reading

Gentry

The English aristocracy is advantageously distinguished from the aristocracy of other countries. Macaulay says of it : "It was constantly receiving members from the people, and constantly sending down members to mingle with the people. Any gentleman might become a peer. The younger son of a peer was but a gentleman. . . . Pedigrees as long, and escutcheons as old, were to be found out of the House of Lords as in it. There were new men who bore the highest titles. There were untitled men well known to be descended from knights who had broken the Saxon ranks at Hastings and scaled the walls of Jerusalem. ... The knight of the shire was the connecting link between the baron and the shopkeeper. On the same benches (in parliament) on which sat goldsmiths, drapers, and grocers ... sat also members, who, in any other country, would have been called noblemen, hereditary lords of manors, entitled to hold courts and to bear coat armor, and able to trace back an honorable descent through many generations. Some of them were younger sons and brothers of lords, and others could boast of even royal blood."

At an early period the leading families of England began to wane, not merely out of power but out of existence. Great baronial houses continually ended in heiresses and co-heiresses who often divided estates and carried them to meaner men. The great struggle between the Houses of York and Lancaster, known as the Wars of the Roses, swept whole families of both the greater and lesser nobility off the face of the earth. Of the twenty- five barons appointed to enforce the observance of Magna Charta, who must have been chief among the magnates of England, there is not a male descendant surviving in its present peerage.

The Wars of the Roses exercised a remarkable influence in the extinction of many noble and gentle houses in England. Rut the same process went on among the smaller gentry, as a result alike of the Civil War of the Commonwealth, and of the more peaceful agrarian changes which took place at the close of the seventeenth, and in the early part of the eighteenth century. With the unsettled state of English society in the time of Oliver Cromwell, with conflict between the Puritan, the Quaker, parliament, the king, and the uprising commoner, law and order, especially as they applied to the records of armigerous families, were brought to the verge of chaos. As a consequence many of those who might have been entitled to bear arms neglected to record the right, others assumed them without proper authority, and still others for political or religious reasons renounced them altogether. Besides these there were a very large number of persons whom Oliver Cromwell actually dispossessed. The truth is, the heralds of that period could not perform their duties with any considerable degree of completeness, and, as a result, the records of the College of Arms were so defective that the less one attempts a defense of them in status quo the better.

Without a direct investigation one can scarcely realise how wholesale has been the disappearance of the smaller gentry ; but both Parish Registers, and the Heralds' Visitations, as well as other heraldic records, give us most valuable materials for appreciating it. In his interesting work on Old Country Life, Mr Baring-gould takes as an example the Parish of Ugborough in his own county (South Devon). He found in its Parish Registers of the sixteenth century the names of eleven families, all of gentle blood, all armigeri, and occupying good houses on small estates. In the seventeenth century he found twenty-two, of whom, however, there are only six whose names appear in the former list. But in the eighteenth century only two remained whose names are to be found in either list, and by the middle of the nineteenth century all were gone ; not a single family of resident gentle folk remained in the parish ; their lands had been swallowed up by larger estates, and their mansions are now at best farm houses. This is only one out of thousands of examples of a change which was universal in England.

The crumbling away of small estates seems to have taken place mostly at the close of the seventeenth century, and at the commencement of the following one. The Civil War was directly responsible for the extinction of many families of the smaller gentry ; and, indirectly, for the impoverishment and agrarian difficulties which brought about the degradation, if not the extinction, of many more. At the close of the war the Land Tax was twenty percent of its gross value ; and mortgage interest stood at seven and eight percent. The smaller gentry had, indeed, nothing of the modern pseudo-gentility which professes an aversion to trade, and the younger sons of armigerous families continually found in it,to a very much greater extent than is commonly believed, the means of a more comfortable and useful existence than if the supposed requirements of their gentility had kept them ud scripti glebae. As years went on and the low price of corn (especially in 1666-1671) brought harder times still to the small proprietors, one after another went under. The wealthier squires extended their estates and influence by the purchase of the heavily burdened lands of the small proprietors, who, compelled by lack of means to a stay-at-home existence little above vegetation, found themselves year by year further out of touch with their wealthier and more influential neighbours, who were better educated, or at least had the means of seeing more of the world, and taking some part in public affairs.

A deplorable change took place in the relations formerly existing betwixt the classes ; and such was the rapidity of it, that, in 1815, properties which forty years before had pertained to 250,000 families were concentrated in the hands of 32,000 proprietors, and even in the latter fell to be computed the lands of 6000 incorporations, and as many belonging to the Church. So sudden an overturn of the former order of things was no trifling event.

Some, indeed, by thrift, judicious marriages, or by purchases of land from embarrassed neighbors, gradually added field to field, and so rose into the rank of the squirearchy ; but many dropped into the condition of yeomen, and others lower still. As the colonies increased, and fortunes were made in commerce, or in the slave-tilled plantations of sugar or tobacco ; and as the mineral wealth, and manufactures of the mother country were exploited, the wealth that thus accrued was naturally expended in the purchase of land. The small proprietors often had to give place to those who had thus acquired wealth which they wished to invest, and who were sometimes desiring to found a family ; but who quite as frequently descended from families which had suffered a temporary eclipse, and which a very few generations back had been as "gentle and armigerous" as those whom they now displaced. And this process still goes on, and must in the nature of things go on increasingly.