Gentry

Gentry (from Old French genterie, from gentil, “high-born, noble”) are “well-born, genteel and well-bred people” of high social class, especially in the past.[1][2] In the United Kingdom, the term gentry refers to the landed gentry, the majority of the land-owning social class who were typically armigerous (having a coat of arms), but did not have titles of nobility. Gentry, in its widest connotation, refers to people of good social position connected to landed estates (see manorialism), upper levels of the clergy, and “gentle” families of long descent who never obtained the official right to bear a coat of arms. The historical term gentry by itself, so Peter Coss argues, is a construct that historians have applied loosely to rather different societies. Any particular model may not fit a specific society, yet a single definition nevertheless remains desirable.[3][4] Linguistically, the word gentry arose to identify the social stratum created by the very small number, by the standards of Continental Europe, of the Peerage of England, and of the parts of Britain, where nobility and titles are inherited by a single person, rather than the family, as usual in Europe.

Before creation of the gentry, there were analogous traditional social elites. The adjective patrician (“of or like a person of high social rank”)[5] describes the governing elites in a medieval metropolis, such as those of the free cities of Italy (Venice and Genoa), and the free imperial cities of Germany and Switzerland, and the Hanseatic League, which were different from the gentry.[a]